Twenty Special Secrets

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1. When two people meet, the prize always goes to the one with the

most self-insight. He will be calmer, more confident, more at ease

with the other.

 

2. Never permit the behavior of other people to tell you how to feel.

 

3. Pay little attention to what people say or do. Instead, try to

see their innermost motive for speaking and acting.

(Now, apply this very same rule to yourself and you become an

enlightened person!)

 

4. Any friendship requiring the submission of your original nature

and dignity to another person is all wrong.

 

5. Mystically speaking, there is no difference between you and

another person. This is why we cannot hurt another without hurting

ourselves, nor help another without helping ourselves.

 

6. When we are free of all unnecessary desires toward other people,

we can never be deceived or hurt.

 

7. You take a giant step toward psychological maturity when you

refuse to angrily defend yourself against unjust slander.

For one thing, resistance disturbs your own peace of mind.

 

8. You understand others to the exact degree that you really

understand yourself. Work for more self-knowledge.

 

9. Do not be afraid to fully experience everything that happens to

you in your human relations, especially the pains and

disappointments. Do this, and everything becomes clear at last.

 

10. The individual who really knows what it means to love has no

anxiety when his love is unseen and rejected.

 

11. If you painfully lose a valuable friend, do not rush out at once

for a replacement. Such action prevents you from examining your

heartache and breaking free of it.

 

12. Do not be afraid to be a nobody in the social world. This is a

deeper and richer truth than appears on the surface.

 

13. Every unpleasant experience with another person is an

opportunity to see people as they are, not as we mistakenly idealize

them. The more unpleasant the other person is, the more he can teach

you.

 

14. You can be so wonderfully free from a sense of injury and

injustice that you are surprised when you hear others complain of

them.

 

15. We cannot recognize a virtue in another person that we do not

possess in ourselves. It takes a truly loving and patient person to

recognize those virtues in another.

 

16. Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic

search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with

itself.

 

17. There are parts of you that want the loving life and parts that

do not. Place yourself on the side of your positive forces; do all

you can to aid and encourage them.

 

18. You must stop living so timidly, from fixed fears of what others

will think of you and of what you will think of yourself.

 

19. Do not contrive to be a loving person; work to be a real person.

Being real is being loving.

 

20. The greatest love you could ever offer to another is to so

transform your inner life that others are attracted to your genuine

example of goodness.