There is but one indisputably certain truth, and that is the truth that skepticism itself leaves standing: The truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge -- the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is.
In regard to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted on the authority of tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power.
I do not make any distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. Atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.
One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own; that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers; that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.
There is a phrase: "Man is the master of his own destiny." So the destiny of every man doesn’t depend on the existence of a Maharishi or his absence. Man is the master of his own destiny. A Maharishi is showing a way. Who comes on the lighted way will get to the target, will get to the goal of the way; those who don’t, they won’t, that’s all. Man has a choice. Education is so very limited today, but a Maharishi’s message does not remain limited to his physical body. This is the message that was there before the body of a Maharishi, and it will remain there when the body of a Maharishi will not come up.
"Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."
Every great work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.
Nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it, so that it doesn't need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what's left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.
