Main Points / Scattered Thoughts / Quotes I liked:
-A discoverer not only discovers things. As hw goes on discovering more and more unknown worlds, he goes on discovering himself also, simultaneously.
-Think of doubt and trust as complementary... Always think of those pairs in terms of inevitable complementariness, never think in terms of opposition.
-Only one thing matters: right this moment, you are.
-Trust yourself. Experiment with meditation. Doubt means thinking. The more you doubt, the more you can think.
-I don't think, therefore I am.
-Go on cleaning your mind continuously; go on dying to the past so you remain in the present.
-"Trust can never be destroyed. Once it is there, nothing can destroy it, absolutely nothing can destroy it." If you supposedly trust in God and ask for something and you don't get it and now your trust is diminished, the that trust was probably not that strong to begin with. I want to have the same attitude or trust in God/Buddha/the Universe/life regardless of whether I do or don't get the things I want in life, regardless of whether things are in my favor or not.
-"Trust is not conditional. Trust is personal; belief is social. It should not be dependent on the trustworthiness of others. It should be intrinsic; it should not be dependent on the other." This will probably be the hardest to practice - trusting everyone.
-"Five persons have cheated you, and five billion people on the Earth lose your trust? You should just try to understand a little arithmetic." This made me laugh but I also love these lines. I know people who will make a generalization over a whole group of people based off a few people that they met. It's a shame because they're missing out on so much. I wish people gave others the benefit of the doubt more and approach them on a case by case basis.
-"Knowledge is borrowed, knowing is one's one. Knowing is existential: you have lived it. It is an experience... When you know, you can forget knowledge." When people have opinions on things they haven't experienced they don't really know, they can't relate. If you really want to know about something, try to see how you can make it an experience for yourself. Learn by doing and then you'll know. I wish I could tell my friend to stop overthinking and just do what he needs to do. He's so paralyzed by his analysis of jow things should be, not willing to take action and make mistakes. Basically, you only really know things from experiencing life, not hearing or reading about it from others.
-"All your knowledge is nothing but labeling, naming." I don't need to know your name to know you, you know? I know what you look like, I've talked to you, I know who you are.
-"If somebody says, 'I have seen God'... How to prove or disprove it?" It's his experience. I find it ignorant when someone claims to follow them because they have found the way of life, they know the truth. I feel like they should be more hesitant about making such a bold claim (even if it is true to them). I mean in the end do any of us really know anything?? My ex did this and it was truly irritating
-"Belief is a deep need in people... Without belief you don't know why you exist... One feels simply without any meaning, an accident in existence." This part reminded me of that song A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left by Andrew Bird.
-"Whatsoever you believe, you project." This reminds me of people who claim they see different things when they have a near death experience.
-"How can you trust me if you don't trust yourself?" This reminds me of that Switchfoot song Do You Love Me Enough to Let Me Go and if you replaced the word love with trust instead it changes the whole meaning of the song
-Planning is death-oriented. Planning means you have no trust. Whatever I say won't be true and authentic if I plan out what to say beforehand (I find myself doing this a lot, I'll think of cool or interesting things to say and it feels rehearsed). To always be planning means to always be afraid. When you plan everything, you leave no room for spontaneity. It's a shame because the best moments on life are the ones you don't plan for. I felt my entire being called out in this part lol
-"Marriage is a cage, love is the open sky. We have destroyed love and created the illusion of marriage. It is ugly. Two persons out of love is one thing, and two persons together because of the law is totally different." I find myself conflicted with this because I'm in a relationship yet I have doubts on whether I should get married or not. Is there freedom in limitation? There's also the paradox of choice that can leave you paralyzed.
'"Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first."
-In the West, we can't let things happen. We're always constantly doing everything and that's why we can't sleep; sleep needs to be allowed. We're uptight and need to breathe and slow down.
-In the East, people let go too much. They are relaxed but lazy, they're languid. They trust in existence and leave it up to the universe so much that they don't take it upon themselves to change their fate. This is detrimental to making any progress.
-The Sufi Approach is to be the third type of person that we should strive for: Do what you can. Do everything in your power you can possibly do and then if nothing else can be done, trust existence. Trust the universe that it'll work out. It always does.
-I have to do, and yet I have to learn not to expect.
-Lastly, he talked about how the Buddha cannot give you truth and that it's already within you, you have to discover it for yourself. This reminded me of Self-Reliance by Emerson. Distance in terms of emotions leads to objectivity. Distance in terms of physicality provides scale and context. Both physical and emotional distance lead to perspective, context, and reveals truth.
The main message I got from this book is to trust in yourself, in others, and in the universe. After finishing this book I find myself even further drawn towards the Buddhist way of life. The more passages read, the more I was able to connect it to other experiences in my life and other books I've read. Osho makes some references in here like Dostoyevsky's the Idiot and Friedrick Nietzsche which I will have to check out sometime. He also makes references to the river connecting the past present and future and how it's all connected, which I remembered reading about in Siddhartha, only this time he emphasized that the past and future are nonexistent and only you are the present.
I loved reading this, and I will definitely be checking out more of his other works in the future! :)