If you want to understand your own mind – face it. The mind causes experience, then suffers. This is the first trick. The second trick the mind plays is to find someone to blame – a scapegoat.

“I love you – if” … “I love you – because”. This is not love. Please call it something else.

When the inner eye is opened you become an angel, but while it is still closed you are a demon. Your life is full of “my”. My wife, my children, my husband, my religion – there is such a lot of mischief in that “my”.

“My wife/my children threw me out, but I still have compassion for them. I still think of them.” You are an idiot. Why ask for trouble? Instead of crying over spilt milk, why can you not think: “If they can live without me, I can live without them.” The mind longs for something in its absence. This is craving and a sign of total immaturity. If the mango is there, then eat it or not, but if it is not there, do not go on dreaming about it.

You have heard of the torture wheel. That is what we subject ourselves to, when we are thinking of something or someone we want and which is not there. Our minds are full of “mine” and “mines” are explosives. The mind rotates the problem but cannot solve the problem, because it has already exalted the problem. We are doing this all the time. Only when we see the pattern can we correct it.

The first thing on the spiritual life which we have to have is the willingness, the ability and the daring to face oneself.