Mischief is yours.
Sorrow is yours.
But virtue also is yours,
and purity.

You are the source
of all purity and all impurity.

No one purifies another.

Never neglect your work
for another’s,
however great his need.

Your work is to discover your work
and then with all your heart
to give yourself to it.

Man can either be in hell or in heaven – it is his choice. Hell and heaven are not geographical; they are not places outside you but spaces within you – and both alternatives exist in each individual. Man is like a ladder: you can go up, you can go down; it is the same ladder. Just change the direction and you start moving upwards. It is the same energy that becomes hell and that becomes heaven. Just a deep understanding is needed of your energies, of your possibilities, of your potential.

Heaven or hell are not when you die: they are possibilities right now. In this very moment one can be in hell or heaven – and you may be in hell and your neighbor may be in heaven. And one moment you will be in hell and another moment you will be in heaven. Just observe closely: the climate goes on changing around you. Sometimes it is very cloudy and everything looks dark and dismal, and sometimes it is so sunny, and so beautiful, so joyous. But the mistake, the greatest mistake a man can commit, is to think that the climate is created by outside forces. It is not created by outside forces; it is your inner decision, your inner will. It is your choice. It happens on the outside, but it arises from the deepest core of your being. It needs very alert watchfulness to see this point. Once you have seen it you need not live in hell at all. Why should you choose hell once it is understood that it is your choice?

For centuries man has been trying to find excuses, rationalizations, pseudo causes outside himself, for a certain reason: it feels very bad that you are the creator of all your miseries. First the miseries are there, and second, the very idea “I am the creator of all these miseries” hurts even more than the miseries themselves. Man has been finding a thousand and one ways to avoid this hurt, to avoid this wound, to avoid this great responsibility..