Look at love
how it tangles
with the one fallen in love

Look at spirit
how it fuses with earth
giving it new life

I have come so that, tugging your ear, I may draw you to me,
unheart and unself you, plant you in my heart and soul.

A very wealthy man asked a Zen master for a text which would always remind him how happy he was with his family.

The Zen master took some parchment and, in beautiful calligraphy, wrote:

“The father dies. The son dies. The grandson dies.”

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going,
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
The know not well the subtle ways,
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
and one to me are shame and fame.

Chapter I

Janaka:

1 How is knowledge to be acquired? How is liberation to be attained? And how is dispassion to be reached? Tell me this, sir.

One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.
On their return from the trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”
“It was great, Dad”.

“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.

“Oh yes”, said the son.
“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.

”At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

Terrible as it was, Viktor Frankl’s experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

A merchant sent his son to learn the Secret of Happiness from the wisest of men. The young man wandered through the desert for forty days until he reached a beautiful castle at the top of a mountain. There lived the sage that the young man was looking for.

However, instead of finding a holy man, our hero entered a room and saw a great deal of activity; merchants coming and going, people chatting in the corners, a small orchestra playing sweet melodies, and there was a table laden with the most delectable dishes of that part of the world.

When you thought I wasn’t looking
You hung my first painting on the refrigerator
And I wanted to paint another.