Live in this world, because this world gives a ripening, maturity, integrity. The challenges of this world give you a centering, an awareness. And that awareness becomes the ladder. Then you can move from Zorba to Buddha.

When a monk goes away from the world, he goes fighting with it. it is not a relaxed going. His whole being is pulled towards the world. He struggles against it. He becomes divided. Half of his being is for the world and half has become greedy for the other. He is torn apart. A monk is basically a schizophrenic, a split person, divided into the lower and the higher. And the lower goes on pulling him, and the lower becomes more and more attractive the more it is repressed. And because he has not lived the lower, he cannot get into the higher.

Change the emphasis, turn your attention around. If you become concerned with death, your life comes to be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you become at ease with death you have gained a life that cannot die. The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal.

Every child is born sane, and then, slowly slowly, we civilize him - we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then HE becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics means nothing but ambition, naked ambition - ambition for power. And only the lowest kind of people become interested in power.

If you go on condemning, your condemnation shows that somewhere there is a wound, and you are feeling jealous - because without jealousy there can be no condemnation. You condemn people because somehow, somewhere, unconsciously you feel they are enjoying themselves and you have missed.

My meditation is a method of being aware - of whatever you are doing, thinking, feeling.

Sometimes happiness comes, sometimes sadness, anger, jealousy - you need not make them your problems