A Quote by Allen W. Wood
It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.
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Concentration is not thinking of one thing. On the contrary, it is excluding all thoughts, since all thoughts obstruct the sense of one's true being. All efforts are to be directed simply to removing the veil of ignorance. Concentrating the mind solely on the Self will lead to happiness or bliss. Drawing in the thoughts, restraining them and preventing them from straying outwards is called detachment (vairagya). Fixing them in the Self is spiritual practice (sadhana). Concentrating on the heart is the same as concentrating on the Self. Heart is another name for Self.
If you love people you criticize them, and if you don't love them you don't criticize them, you let them go to hell, don't you? To help any kind of friendship, your marriage, your children, you criticize because you love.
A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable.
It seems self-evident that we should want people to be free, to be able to play an active part in making decisions about matters of concern to them, to the largest possible extent.
I never let anyone lose their self-respect and make them wait in my office, or hurt them with my words, thoughts or actions. I give my e-mail address to anyone who seeks me out. I ask them to send me their work, and if I like it, I give them an opportunity.
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there .
I think many people believe the best way they can help others is to criticize them, to give them the benefit of their 'wisdom.' I disagree. The best way to help people is to see the best in them.
Religion is something people do together to face urgent problems and to resolve them by appealing to truths that seem self-evident to them.
They want to criticize you, let them criticize and do not worry. Just be transparent with your people and tell them this is the reality.
I think you save things from your past that you don't quite understand, and you put them in a box, and you save them for later until you can unwrap them and try to understand what they meant.
The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
So, in every case if you really love someone there is an element of submission to them because you want what's best for them, and at times they're going to tell you what's best for them. Even if you have second thoughts about it, you'll probably still do it because you love them.
Complex things, if you don't understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
For 35 years I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.
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