. . . I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? (233)
Interpretation
Life itself offers lessons that can be as profound as any scripture.
In this quote, Swami Satchidananda emphasizes the importance of learning from everyday activities rather than relying solely on spiritual texts. He suggests that our daily experiences provide valuable lessons and insights that can lead to deeper understanding and wisdom if we are open to recognizing and reflecting on them.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won’t find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99)
Begin with little things daily and one day you will be doing things that months back you would have thought impossible.
Anything that you throw comes back. All your actions are echoes.
When you win and the other fellow loses, what do you see? A losing face. There is great joy in losing and making the other person win and have a happy face. Who will be the happiest person? The one who brings happiness to others.
Yoga is not only learning to stand on your head but also learning to stand on your feet.
Our own true nature is Infinite Joy! _x000D_ Always happy, Always peaceful, Always free.
But don’t forget that memory is like salt: the right amount brings out _x000D_ the flavour in food, too much ruins it. If you live in the past all the _x000D_ time, you’ll find yourself with no present to remember.
What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.
I used to work very long hours. Then I started to realize that the stuff that I was writing in the late afternoons, I was generally throwing out. So I quit earlier than I used to.
Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.
It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
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