May your sleep be your death, and your wakefulness be your heaven.
You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find remarkable change taking place in you _ a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything _ not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying; to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus gong by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen _ it is only then that there is a struggle.
The Book of Life
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You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find remarkable change taking place in you _ a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything _ not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying; to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus gong by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen _ it is only then that there is a struggle.
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You must be a light unto yourself.
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.