"When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experienced and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion, then only is there pure observation, which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind."

Unkown source


"Ignorance exists only when you don't know yourself. Self-knowing is wisdom. You may be ignorant of all the books in the world (and I hope you are), of all the latest theories, but that is not ignorance. Not knowing oneself deeply, profoundly, is ignorance; and you cannot know yourself if you cannot look at yourself, see yourself actually as you are, without any distortion, without any wish to change. Then what you see is transformed because the distance between the observer and the observed is removed and hence there is no conflict."

Talks in Europe, April 16, 1968, p.56


"So long as the thinker exists apart from his thought, which he is trying to dominate, there can be no fundamental transformation. So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought - but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort.

When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me,' when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality - when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind."

The First and Last Freedom, p.140-141


"The phenomenon of the observer and the observed is not a dual process, but a single one; and only in experiencing the fact of this unitary process is there freedom from desire, from conflict."

Commentaries on Living, First Series, p.61