3 The Problem of Self
You are who you are regardless of whether it is recognised or not.
Appearance is only important to the self which requires continual confirmation and support, but you still remain who you are despite appearances.
What are you interested in: being virtuous or being seen to be virtuous? which is the opposite of virtue obviously.
If you put appearances aside, then who are you?
The less self there is, the less tension there is.
When you have a self you must protect it – at any cost.
He who is who he is regardless of what is thought or said, why should he worry?
Virtue that is not based on understanding is not virtuous.
To obey out of fear is the very denial of virtue.
Virtue need not be cultivated, and if it is, it is not virtue.
Understanding the self, one lets go of the self, and then there is virtue.
There is virtue when resistance to reality comes to an end.
There cannot be virtue as long as life is one long struggle, or long war.
Virtue is not about having an ideal that you are trying to approach, but being who you are when ideation of any sort stops distorting reality.
The question is: do you want to incarnate somebody else’s thought, or do you want to find out how to be yourself?
To become what others want you to be is not easy, of course, but it saves you from having to think things through for yourself, doesn’t it?
To find out how to think clearly you must be critical towards all thought.
The problem is not what to think, but how to think.
If what to think could solve our problems, they would now be solved.
What to think refers the problem to the past thereby setting up a duality; how to think refers to the problem itself.
If someone says what is right should you not listen to him? But if someone says what is wrong you should just listen.
Is it necessary to contradict someone when he is wrong? or is it not better to simply be a mirror in which he can see for himself?
Does what is true need to be defended? or is it not that defence is always born out of a lack of understanding?
Once you know how your mind works, you will know how all minds work.
Superficially minds appear different, but at a deeper level they are all seeking the same things.
When you understand yourself there will be compassion, and you will than understand all others.
Thought is a cloud that stands between you and the world.
Thought it is that moulds – and distorts – all our perceptions and experience of the world.
Thought it is that shields you from the reality of who you are.
When you are aware of the movement of thought it loses its power of illusion.
As long as you have a self you must have self-contradiction.
That which divides you against yourself and against another – that is what I call self.
Why are you divided if not because you fear reality? where fear ends there reality begins.
Self cannot be overcome by self.
The self battling against the self, that is the nature of self obviously.
Fire cannot put out fire, you must find out why you’re burning.
What people fear most of all is themselves.
All fear is self-generated and self-directed.
Most of anybody’s pain is self-inflicted.
When you have put the self aside than you will be en-light-ened.
Whatever you have accumulated, that is the burden you must carry.
To be enlightened is to tread gently on this earth once more.
Pleasure is self-centred and comes to an end; joy is self-less and knows no end.
Joy is the natural outcome when self is not.
Joy knows no end, because only the self knows, and only the self ends.