You need awareness and you need nourishment.
You need good,
Healthy nourishment.
Learn to enjoy the solid food of life.
Good food,
That too.
Good water.
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
That's good,
Healthy nourishment.
The pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the mind.
Good reading.
Enjoy a good book or a real good discussion.
Thinking,
Marvelous.
See,
Unfortunately,
People have gone crazy and they're getting more and more addicted because they do not know how to enjoy the lovely things of life.
So they're going in for greater and greater artificial stimulants.
Some years ago,
President Carter,
During the oil crisis,
Made an appeal to Americans everywhere to go in for austerity.
I thought to myself,
He shouldn't tell them to be austere.
He should tell them to really enjoy things.
Most of them have lost their capacity for enjoyment.
I really do believe that most people have in affluent countries.
They got to have more and more expensive gadgets.
They can't enjoy the simple things of life.
And then I walk into all kinds of places where they have all the most marvelous music.
You know,
Get these records at a discount or whatever,
They're all stacked.
I never hear anybody listening to them.
No time,
No time,
No time,
No time.
They're guilty.
No time to enjoy life.
They're overworked.
Go,
Go,
Go,
Go,
Go.
If you really enjoyed life and the simple pleasures of the senses,
You would be amazed.
You develop that extraordinary discipline of the animals.
An animal will never overeat.
Left in its natural habitat,
It will never be overweight.
It will never drink or eat anything that is not good for its health.
Never.
Never touch it.
You'll never find an animal smoking.
It always exercises as much as it needs.
Look at your cat after it's had its little breakfast.
Look how it relaxes and see how it springs into action.
Look at the suppleness of its limbs and the aliveness of its body.
We've lost that.
We got lost in our minds and our ideas and our ideals and so on.
And it's always go,
Go,
Go.
And we've got an inner self-conflict which the animals don't have.
And we're always condemning ourselves and making ourselves guilty.
You know what I'm talking about because I could have said it myself,
What one Jesuit friend said to me some years ago.
He said,
Take that plate of sweets away because in front of a plate of sweets,
I lose my freedom.
And that was true of me too.
I lost my freedom in front of all kinds of things.
No more.
No more.
I'm satisfied with very little and I enjoy it intensely.
When you've enjoyed it intensely,
You need very little.
But you've lost your capacity for enjoyment.
You're never there.
It's like people who are busy planning their vacation and they spend months planning it.
They get to the spot and then they're all anxious about their reservations for flying back.
But they're taking pictures all right.
And later they'll show you pictures in an album of places that they never saw.
But that they photograph.
That's a symbol of modern life.
So I cannot insist enough on this kind of asceticism.
Slow down and taste and smell and hear and let your senses come alive.
You want a royal road to mysticism?
Sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you.
So that as far as possible,
No sound is excluded.
You do not necessarily focus on any sound but you hear them all.
Oh,
You will see the miracles that happen to you if you are able to do this.
When your senses come unclogged.
So that is extremely important for the process of change.
