actions

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them?

What matters is not to apply a definition but to observe the characteristic signs of a disposition allotted by destiny or achieved by effort.  Among such symptoms are the tendency to sympathize with the sufferings of others, not in a sense of pity, but by opening the heart so that its radiation, without selection or discrimination, acts by itself as a balm of impersonal healing.  Other signs are material and spiritual generosity, as opposed to avarice and envy; the feeling of awareness of solidarity; an effective sense of responsibility; and the acceptance of all that makes for simplicity of thought and feeling, looking at all times for the essential point and rejecting perfunctory opinions and fashionable prejudices.

With love, words are not enough; it must be followed by loving actions.

As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person.

What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.

When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention — instead of using it as a means to an end — you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them — your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past — and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.

How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

Public opinion... requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think.

You'll never get what you really want. All you can do is give what you really want!

If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of whom your actions affect.