Find Yourself in the Words of Howard Salzman
It is difficult to determine
The motive of one who speaks ill of another,
Perhaps the inner pain
Produces a poison that is unleashed without discretion.
We are subject to the sound bites of vulgarity
And no matter how much we try to elude it,
The media wins and we lose a part of us
That delights in elegance.
When you consider yourself wise
You can be sure in a short time
You will realize that you are a fool.
The distinction between a fool and an intellectual snob
A fool has some notion of his foolishness
But the intellectual snob is blinded by his own pride.
Wisdom and vanity cannot co-exist.
There are losses that are never lost
But linger in your mind for a lifetime;
Love has the longest lifespan.
Those who try to impress others
Spend a good deal of time
Trying to impress themselves.
Peace of mind is a paradox
For it is the mind that disrupts our inner peace.
Loneliness and anger are not strangers to each other.
Internal dialogue creates a ghost
A second person to protect the ego.
What we know
And what we do not know about each other
Is bridged by the intuitive jump.
In an ideal learning environment
The teacher often becomes the student
And the student becomes the teacher
This is called the joy of learning.
Do not bother to look at the clock
When you are in a creative mode
For creativity has its own time table,
And if you stop the clock of creativity
Your inner clock will be shattered.
Inertia is often mistaken for endurance.
Anger distorts rational thinking
And from irrational thinking
Comes fury
And from fury comes self-destruction.
In the center is emptiness
And from this emptiness
Comes creation.
The eyes can see a sunset
If you put the sunset into words
The words are not the sunset.
The deeper you see within yourself
The deeper you will see the world around you.
Often, listening to a boring person
Satisfies a need to hear the sound
Of a human voice.
Thinking about exercise expends a good deal of energy,
If we would use this energy in physical exercise
We would be much healthier.
When your friends are reduced to one,
The hermit’s life is sure to come
When the one is reduced to none.
One cannot define beauty with words
For words are not beauty
Beauty is beauty.
We fill our heads with words
And suffer excrutiating pain
Never realizing
That the pain is in the words.
Friendship often becomes estranged
By a third party
Who poisons the relationship with jealousy.
Those who rally around the banners of excellence
Often fail to see the fallout: failures.
Beware of those who teach
Mysticism
And have never experienced it.
If you wonder who you are,
Or what you are,
Let the sound of thunder
And the slash of lightening
Awaken you
To your own significance.
A toast to all that is unsaid,
For more is said in the absence of words
Than all the words
That hide more than is revealed.
Life is like a jigsaw puzzle,
Some pieces fit together
And others do not.
Too often we struggle
With the wrong pieces
Forcing them to fit.
There are those who speak about tolerance
But you can hear contempt in their heart.
In order to have world peace
We must first develop inner peace.
One ounce of love
Can defuse a hundred pounds of hate.
Do not look for a map to paradise
For he who makes the divine journey
Is his own mapmaker.
The truth will not always set you free
But can entrap you and subject you to untold misery,
For to know the truth and be impotent before it
Is to be immersed in the fires of hell.
There is a similarity between sexual passion and celibacy.
One is untamed, physical and fleeting,
The other sustained and spiritual;
In one you become one with another,
The other you become one with the All.
When knowledge of God precedes faith,
Faith is sure to follow.
As the soul ascends,
Arrogance descends.
Immanence and transcendence
Theological terminology
That can obscure
Rather than clarify
The presence of the Divine.
Beware of spiritual systems
And techniques
That can carry you away
From the divine.
The spiritual path
Is a journey to your true identity
Do not let another’s profile
Be superimposed on you
He who beholds a single leaf in the sunlight
For its sacredness
Will behold the inner light
In the darkness
God loves me
But sometimes
He is not happy with me.
Do not clutter the passageway to the Divine
With intellectual debris.
When we fail to have mercy on ourselves
We cry out in anguish
“God have mercy on me.”
Thinking can take you into a thousand different directions
But prayer can take you into only one
When you become one with the Lord.
God’s will
Is a mystery that unfolds in time
WHen all the pieces assemble
To fulfill the divine design.
A journey not for self-glory
But for the glory of God.
The devil wants to dance in your soul
So invite him in
With your anger and your hate
And prepare a table
Of greed, envy and prid
And God will hide from your presence.
We fabricate fictions in our head
Quite certain they are true,
Only to watch them destroyed
In the fire of reality.
The great lessons of life
Do not come out of a book
But out of life
Learning is directly proportionate
To your ability to change.
He who concentrates on the flaws of another
Is a stranger to his own flaws.
When you speak and others do not understand you
Perhaps you do not understand
The words you speak.
What is hidden from the human eye
Is revealed by the intuitive eye.
The distinction between joy and pain
Is determined by the heart.
One brings joy,
The other pain.
If your mind has lost its way
Let your heart speak.
Lonely and alone
Are brothers to each other.
If you desire to rid your mind of negative emotions
Then build a wall of resistance
The moment it appears.
People seek to understand themselves
And spend a good deal of time
Wandering through the endless corridors of the mind.
If only they would spend a little time in the heart
The heart would reveal
What the mind has concealed.
The mind is a battleground for unfinished business.
Silence opens the universe.
And words close it.
If you put all your thoughts
End to end
Would you give a penny for them?
The heart remembers
What the mind forgets.
Emotional cripples
Keep you an emotional prisoner.
Ideologies have an inherent flaw:
Human beings.
If you pride yourself with how much you know,
Then lift the pride from your mind
And you will find how little you know.
If human beings have anything in common with each other,
It is their flaws, failures and weaknesses.
When you recognize humility in others
You become aware of its absence in yourself.
We fabricate fiction in our mind
Quite certain it is true
Only to watch it destroyed
In the fires of reality.
If your heart is heavy
Then let the smile of a child
Lighten your heart.
If you feel deprived of beauty and joy
Then watch a child at play.
A book has a beginning, a middle and an end.
You are not required to begin at the beginning,
But you may find a page, line or word at random
When meditated on, will have a greater impact on you
Then reading the entire book.
The more you fabricate
The future in your mind
The more the present
Will elude you.
Obsessions do not begin with a problem
But in the perception of a problem.
The more you look for secrets
On the spiritual path
The more you will lose your way.
If you must look for secrets
Then look for secrets
That you have hidden from yourself.
Follow the finger of blame
And it will take it back to you.
The words of a well written essay
Are like stepping stones in a steam
You step on each one carefully
And it will carry you safely to the other side.
Copyright Howard Salzman Estate 2010 - 2022 Produced by Courage Group - Log in