Once someone asked me, "What do you want to be your epitaph?" So I said, "Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.
Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.
When we walk slowly, the world can fully appear. Not only are the creatures not frightened away by our haste or aggression, but the fine detail of fern and flower, or devastation and disruption, becomes visible. Many of us hurry along because we do not want to see what is really going on in and around us. We are afraid to let our senses touch the body of suffering or the body of beauty
Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us.
The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.
Death can come at any moment. You could die this afternoon; you could die tomorrow morning; you could die on your way to work; you could die in your sleep. Most of us try to avoid the sense that death can come at any time, but its timing is unknown to us. Can we live each day as if it were our last? Can we relate to one another as if there were no tomorrow?
We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.
If it was just the potatoes that were affected, at the end of the day you will pay the price if you're a fussy eater.
I write songs like "The Sweetest Love. " Of course I'm a little cheesy. Love is cheesy. Love is corny. But it's also the greatest feeling in the whole world.
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.
I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself. . . That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.