Born in 1698 in Poland, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer known as the Baal Shem Tov or as the Besht, was a Jewish mystic and healer who is regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism. “Besht” is the acronym for Baal Shem Tov, which means “One with the Good Name” or “one with a good reputation”. The little biographical information about the Besht comes from oral traditions handed […]
ARE ALL DESIRES INSANE? Yes, all desires are insane. Desire as such is insane because desire means living in the future, and the future does not exist at all. What exists is the present. Objects of desire are not significant; desiring is significant. You can desire wealth, you can desire God– desiring remains the same,
MY PARENTS KEEP ON SAYING THEY WANT ME TO LEAD A ’USEFUL’ LIFE AND DO SOMETHING ’USEFUL FOR SOCIETY’. AM I? The society wants you to be reduced to a commodity. To say it politely they say, ”Do something useful.’ They are saying, ”Be useful. Function as a commodity so that people can USE YOU.
THE CONCEPT OF ZERO WAS BORN IN INDIA. In fact, the nine digits and zero were invented by Indians. But zero in itself is meaningless. It has meaning only when you join it together with some digit. If you put it behind one, it becomes meaningful – one becomes ten; zero carries the meaning of
What is the difference between reaction and response? There is much, a lot of difference, not only in quantity but quality. A reaction is out of the past, a response is out of the present. You react out of the past old patterns. Somebody insults you: suddenly the old mechanism starts functioning. In the past people have insulted
Once it happened that a man was very ill. The illness was that he continually felt that his eyes were popping out and his ears were ringing – continually. By and by, he became crazy because it went on twenty-four hours a day. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t do his work. So he consulted doctors.
There are three steps in the spiritual growth– steps or stages. They can differ with each individual but there are always three. One is independence. That is an egoistic state: you want to be independent of all which is false, which is not possible because you are not independent, you cannot be. You are a
SHOULD WE BE SELFISH? There is no other way. Nobody can be unselfish– except hypocrites. The word ‘selfish’ has taken a very condemnatory association, because all the religions have condemned it. They want you to be unselfish. But why? To help others…. I am reminded: a small child was talking to his mother, and the
It is a known fact that great poets cannot explain why they are writing certain poetry. When Coleridge died, he left near about forty thousand poems incomplete. His whole life his friends were saying, ”These poems are so beautiful, why don’t you complete them? And it is not much work! Some poem is missing only
A religion is to be sought. A religion has to be chosen consciously. Nobody should be made a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jain by birth. Birth has nothing to do with religion. Because of this association with birth, the whole world seems to be religious, and nobody is religious. Everybody
