It’s not reality that

matters, but what you’re saying to yourself about it.Words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if they’re not used properly.

If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people.When I die to the need for people, then I’m right in the desert. In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, you’ll suddenly discover that it isn’t lonely at all. It is solitude, it is aloneness, and the desert begins to flower. Then at last you’ll know what love is, what God is, what reality is.

Break out of this prison, this programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; break out into reality. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all. We’re too distracted with attachment. Temporarily, the world rearranges itself to suit our attachment. But hang on; it’ll change; you’ll be depressed tomorrow. Why do we keep doing this

An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy. Once you get convinced of that—and it gets into our subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being—you are finished.

Some words correspond to nothing. They were put there by the human mind. There are thousands of words in our

vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all but they trigger emotions, so we begin to see things that are not there.

We never argue about reality; we argue about opinions, and concepts, and judgments. Drop your concepts, drop your opinions, drop your prejudices, drop your judgments, and you will see.

Concepts point, but are never entirely accurate; they miss uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal. The concept always misses or omits something important, something that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness.

In order to get awareness, you’ve got to see, and you can’t see if you’re prejudiced. Almost everything and every person we look at, we look at in a prejudiced way.

When you hold on to anything, you cease to live.

Understand that happiness is not the same as excitement or thrills. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered enough, then you are ready to see. You’re living off of thrills.

It’s not that you have to suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless. You’d be without energy and that would be terrible. Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better. But don’t suppress desire, understand it.