Three Oddest Words

Poem by wislawa_szymborska Polish poet, essayist and translator. Awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

Simplicity of character

Internet technology is amazing these day eh? Never in the history of mankind was so much valuable information at the fingertips of so many! My orkut daily fortune popped up this message "Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought" naturally I was intrigued. I Googled that entire sentence and found this was part of an essay called Characteristics by William Hazlitt

Apart from the gem above, I found more gems as under from this essay :-) What luck! I already feel like a school kid accidentally finding precious stones on the river bed one after another after another...

1. What makes it so difficult to do justice to others is that we are hardly sensible of merit, unless it falls in with our own views and line of pursuit, and where this is the case, it interferes with our pretensions.
2. To be forward to praise others, implies either
   

• Great eminence, that can afford to part with applause
• Great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments
• Great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.

1. The greatest talents do not generally attain to the highest stations
2. For though high, the ascent to them is narrow, beaten, and crooked
3. The path of genius is free, and its own
4. Success in business is therefore seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power, which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of common-place capacity.

Osho on Love

Love walks on earth but it doesn't belong to us, it belongs to the sky. And it is starry;

all else is darkness
except love.
Only love has light in it,
only love is luminous.
When you are in love
there is light and life:
when love disappears
there is darkness,

utter darkness. Hell is the space where love does not exist; heaven is the space where only love exists and nothing else. These are the names of spaces within our being. Love opens doors to the whole Milky Way. Love is the bridge between earth and heaven, between man and god. Let love be your only law; there is no higher truth. If a man can love, then nothing else is needed; that will transform. But a few things to be kept in mind about love.
Love should not be a demanding love; otherwise it loses wings, it cannot fly. It becomes rooted in the earth, becomes very earthly; then it is lust and it brings great misery and great suffering. Love should not be conditional, one should not expect anything out of it.

It should be for its own sake
not for any reward,
not for any result.
If there is some motive in it,
again, your love cannot become the sky.
It is confined to the motive;
the motive becomes its definition,
its boundary.

Unmotivated love has no boundary: it is pure elation, exuberance, it is the fragrance of the heart.
And because there is no desire for any result, it does not mean that results do not happen; they do, they happen a thousandfold more, because whatsoever we give to the world, it comes back, it rebounds. The world is an echoing place: if we throw anger, anger comes back; if we give love, love comes back. But that is a natural phenomenon, one need not think about it. One can trust: it happens on its own. This is the law of karma: whatsoever you sow, you reap; whatsoever you give, you get. So there is no need to think about it, it is automatic. Hate, and you will be hated. Love, and you will be loved.
And the third thing: let love become more and more conscious. When it is unconscious it remains entangled with sexuality. Nothing is wrong in sexuality but that is the lowest form of love, the first rung of the ladder. It is good in itself but to remain confined to it is not to grow: there are higher rungs in the ladder. The ladder reaches to the ultimate and sex is the first rung. Use it to go beyond it. Love should be more conscious. When it is conscious it is less sexual. I am not saying that there will be no sex: sex will be there but it will not be sexual. It will be pure sensuality; that is a totally different phenomenon. It will be sheer joy, sensitivity, but there will be no sexual mind behind it.