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⭕️ TMWT
- Reality, seen and unseen, is one unified field of loving aliveness.
- The three transcendentals: what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.
- If you don't accept both sides, you may end with the opposite of what you wanted.
- "To have seen it from one side only, is not to have seen it."
- The whole truth is the reconciliation and holding together of opposites.
- Absolute control of our environment is not a desirable or possible goal. We are in, of, and acted on by, the world.
- Some truths are more complete, some are more partial.
- Knowledge can be articulated, but understanding is inhabiting in nondual space with the question.
- The more important something is, the more difficult it is to grasp in language.
- Sometimes falsifying is difficult. Instead test against ongoing lived experience.
- Reality is processes and fields that collapse into things.
- Our mechanisms for simplifying the world so that we can control it prevent us from understanding it.
- The smaller the dismembered part, the less it comprehends itself, the whole.
- The all-time of the whole becomes the no-time of the center.
- We learn, grow, in hierarchical spirals.
- Reality in all domains in composed of holons: wholes that are parts of other wholes.
- And/or. We need both.
- There aren't values because there's life, there's life because there are values.
- The process is the fulfilment.
- The cosmos is constantly speeding things up that are important to it.
- Some important things can only be expressed implicitly, through experience (not knowledge).
- Negative Capability: remain in doubt and uncertainty.
- Intuition can take in more, and more subtle, inputs.
- Consciousness is a verb. Beauty, truth, goodness are aspects of it, adverbs.
- Each part is in the whole, the whole is in each part.
- Patterns create probabilities, not certainties.
- See the bigger picture, the wider view, all the complex factors involved.
- Science is the history of perpetual mistakes.
- Simplicity in one area allows for detail in another.
- Not "What is true?" but "When is this true? In what contexts?"
- Dialogue is essential. Especially when things get worse.
- Many of the opposites we set up are false. There's distinction, but not division.
- Read widely and from people you disagree with.
- Deep truths can't be spoken or written, only experienced.
- The world is processes and fields that collapse into things.
- Poetry is using language to subvert language.
- The taut string of a bow gives rise to the power to fire an arrow.
- The cosmos, reality, is a continuous, restless, swarm of happenings.
- See the hidden opposite that's always there.
- Look for the imprint of the left hemisphere.
- Life adds more, faster, more intense, responsiveness to the cosmos.
- Experience is an encounter. Music is not just the sounds, a poem is not just the words.
- Distinction is not the same as division.
- Change is ubiquitous, but isn't successive instants.
- Beauty is the unity of sameness and difference.
- Be able to argue both sides of an argument.
- Asymmetry is more important than symmetry. It can contain symmetry.
- History repeats itself, but not in quite the same way.
- Progress towards truth is a circular motion of revisiting things.
- We construct our reality. Perception is active participation.
- We are the cosmos becoming more itself, becoming aware of itself.
- Things can’t exist without their opposite.
- The self is causes, conditions, patterns.
- The map is not the territory.
- Subject and object are distinct, but not separate.
- There’s lots we don’t understand. It can feel spooky. It should inspire awe.
- Simplicity is a feature of our models, not reality.
- Right Hemisphere → Left Hemisphere → Right Hemisphere.
- Resistance to the flow brings beauty, complexity.
- Reality is one indivisible whole, in constant motion.
- Qualities change with scale.
- Prefer the bigger, more integrated picture.
- Opposites reveal, create, support, define each other.
- Opposites co-exist, making something new and taut and harmonious.
- All things are in process, rising and returning.
- Important truths must be approached gently, indirectly, in a looping spiral.
- Everything is connected.
- Complementary forces, interacting to form a dynamic system.
🙆 Acceptance
- Favour epistemological humility over certainty. Find profound freedom in not knowing and not needing to know.
- We do bad behaviours so we can continue to hate ourselves, not the other way around.
- No me, no problem. Just this!
- Simply be awake as the unvarnished bare actuality of just this, exactly as it is, rough edges and all.
- Suffering is struggling with things as they are.
- Sit still and feel the discomfort.
- Ask yourself: "what would be enough?"
- This is the way things are right now.
- Life can't be other than it is.
- It's not a quiet mind that matters but non-attachment to the activities of the mind.
- Notice how giving experience a warm welcome makes you feel about yourself.
- Become viscerally intimate with the truth.
- Self-forgiveness mitigates negative affect, turns avoid into approach.
- Alternate three chair exercise: the (Inner) Critic, the Coach, the Compassionate Observer.
- What we resist, persists.
- Your search for happiness is what makes you feel miserable.
- Not a heroic quest, but a silent attunement.
- Meditation merely needs to be allowed, not created.
- Everything is perfect as it is, even the ego that insists it's not.
- Be as aware of your faults as your angriest opponent.
- Acknowledge how difficult you are, in some ways.
- You are partly right (whether it's praise or criticism).
- Develop a healthy relationship with your imperfections.
- In awareness there is no resistance.
- Find peace by resting in the wider whole, of this and not-this.
- Rest in the wider space of awareness.
- The thought that life shouldn't be a struggle is painful, so we try to escape it.
- Slowly, painfully, reconcile to life.
- Recognise unhappiness, without trying to change it or fix it.
- Practice is not having a problem with the endless stream of problems.
- Let problems support your practice, enhance your ability to respond appropriately.
- Experience emotions fully, without separation or rejection, without adding anything.
- When we resist impermanence, the feeling of self intensifies.
- Work patiently, steadily, calmly. Allow ample time.
- Wait in, instead of wait for.
- The intensity of the pain is equal to the intensity of the grasping.
- Not quite feeling yourself is the normal human condition.
- Live a good enough ordinary life.
- Judging yourself doesn't work. Check!
- In this moment, is there really a problem?
- "If only" mind sets us up to be miserable now.
- Zazen is enacting stillness, non-reactivity.
- Let go. Don't push, don't pull. Make space.
- Trust and desire for control are inversely correlated.
- Suffering comes from aversion.
- Right fit. Consider the stage and the season you're in.
- Accept failure as inevitable. But/and learn from it.
- Relinquish your reaction to experience, and simply notice it.
- Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
- This too shall pass.
- Have a strong back and a soft front.
- Memento mori. Remember that you will die.
- Wu wei. Avoid assertion, practice inaction.
- The three chair exercise: The Criticizer, the Criticized, and the Compassionate Observer.
- The obstacle is the way.
- See setbacks as challenges to reduce the emotional cost and increase your chances of finding a workaround.
- See and enjoy the unknown.
- Retain what comes in.
- RAIN. Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.
- Open up.
- Nothing's worse than attacking what yields.
- Meet your edge and soften.
- Imperfections are normal, natural, human.
- I see you, Mara. Let’s have tea.
- The greater the resistance to (inevitable) changes, the greater the pain.
- Give everything a warm welcome.
- Everything is allowed, even resistance.
- Be the loving witness.
- Accept whatever arises.
- Accept that flux and insecurity are the norm. It brings peace.
- Work with, not work against.
🦢 Antifragile
- Resist the urge to suppress randomness.
- Have skin in the game.
- Focus more on avoiding negatives than attaining positives.
- Read widely and from people you disagree with.
- To figure things out, Do > Think.
- Stick to simple rules.
- Respect the old habits and rules.
- Keep your options open.
- Experiment, take tiny risks.
- Build in redundancy and layers. Don't have a single point of failure.
💖 Brave
- Ask "How did we get here?"
- Admit ignorance, give power.
- Take measured doses of discomfort to expand your comfort zone.
- Have a strong back and a soft front.
- Try new things.
- To figure things out, Do > Think.
- Speak up.
- Rush in on loss of contact.
- Open up.
- Only forward.
- Have a Growth Mindset. See that setbacks are a chance to learn, that success comes from effort not innate skill.
- Experiment, take tiny risks.
- Be vulnerable.
☸️ Buddhism
- The witness is just a thought too.
- The self is just one of our many constructed models of reality.
- Not 'get rid of the self', but transcend and include it.
- You lack for nothing; your task is to recognise this.
- The koan of everyday life.
- No me, no problem. Just this!
- Desire and Aversion are just disturbances of the senses.
- It is difficult to find awareness because it is too close, too accessible, too present, and too simple.
- Being is always bright, whatever the contents of consciousness.
- We practice for the benefit of all beings.
- To address your shortcomings, embody the opposite.
- We are puppets of the movement of our judgements.
- "I" is an empty signifier. We can fill it with what we like. That is why is useful.
- There's no need to be so antagonistic towards the costume you're wearing.
- Simply be awake as the unvarnished bare actuality of just this, exactly as it is, rough edges and all.
- The darkness behind your closed eyes arises in the transparency, the emptiness, of consciousness.
- Completeness can be accessed more easily through incompleteness.
- Our deepest nature is the unity that includes diversity.
- The illusion of duality is the primary source of human suffering.
- The six senses are burning with craving.
- The harmony that includes our differences is deeper and more durable than the one that doesn’t.
- Say "no thanks" (to the self). And mean it!
- The wholeness of life is all there is.
- More "Is this a helpful strategy?" and less "Is this a final, fundamental, truth?"
- Life is something we are, not something we're trying to negotiate.
- Cause and effect is an infinite regression.
- Stop and realise you are the freedom you're searching for.
- Pay more attention to how much of your actions feel mysterious.
- Absolute intimacy with the 10,000 things.
- Who are you, once you've let everything go?
- See what's happening in this moment as exactly right.
- Recognise the matrix of (constructed) narratives you live in.
- Reality, seen and unseen, is one unified field of loving aliveness.
- Our true nature is deep, still, harmonious without the polarities of opinion and belief.
- Empty as in absence, the possibility of appearance.
- Effortless action as in: no sense of self taking action
- By holding fast to our likes and dislikes, we continually recreate the sense of self.
- Tend patiently to your mind, like a gardener to their garden.
- Take the cushion everywhere.
- Suffering is struggling with things as they are.
- Simply to be alive presents us with tension and mystery.
- Be friendly to yourself and merciful to others.
- Uncertainty is just a story you tell yourself. (Inaction is in fact an action)
- Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
- Orient towards stillness.
- Zen uses contradiction and paradox to loosen our grip on concepts.
- Zen demonstrates reality rather than talking about it.
- You are the principle victim of your delusions.
- You are the principal beneficiary of your practice.
- Totally embrace all ordinary opposites in harmony.
- The separation of subject and object is only conceptual.
- Soak in the silence and vastness of existence.
- Plant good seeds. Day by day. Year after year.
- Live with full attention and clear awarness.
- Labels divide and isolate.
- Just rest. Don't meddle with thinking.
- Drop a koan into your mind like a pebble into a still pond.
- Clarity is accepting what's clear and what's not clear.
- Choosing obscures the way.
- Respond to discomfort from a place of stillness.
- Recognise your self as overlapping, malleable, stories.
- No part of a person is unchanging, permanent.
- Life is defined by growth and transformation, aliveness.
- Craving something makes it feel farther away.
- Solitary confinement is (the sense of self is) a prison.
- Notice the freshness of unfolding reality.
- Naked awareness: thoughts and the mind are like clothes and the body.
- Attend to the dynamic nature of emergent life.
- Your identity is a narrow slice of your potential.
- Grasping and aversion both reinforce things.
- Don't take it so seriously: be more playful.
- Don't adopt the stupidity of not investigating.
- Trying to escape our own suffering creates a separate self.
- The effort to be a different person increases the tension, the suffering.
- Practice is something we do for the rest of our lives.
- Practice grows the amount of life you can hold with becoming upset, without it dominating you.
- No separation between you and the circumstances of your life.
- Let action emerge from experience.
- It's not a quiet mind that matters but non-attachment to the activities of the mind.
- Decisions seems like problems from a self-centred point of view.
- Notice how giving experience a warm welcome makes you feel about yourself.
- Don't let the content of awareness veil your true nature of happiness and peace.
- Become viscerally intimate with the truth.
- The story includes the feeling tone includes the raw data of experience.
- Have patient determination: just commit to the next step on the path.
- The Six Perfections: Generosity; Morality; Patience; Effort; Meditation; Wisdom.
- The Five Hindrances: Sensual Desire; Ill Will; Sloth; Restlessness; Doubt.
- Right Mindfulness (including Right Action (including Right Speech)).
- Pay close attention to the consequences of your behaviour.
- In between any two opposites lies emptiness, creative potential.
- "Not knowing is most intimate.
- Manifestation, performance, function, but no centre.
- An empty signifier with no fixed referent.
- The "I am" prior to all.
- Everything is perfect as it is, even the ego that insists it's not.
- Just noticing that we were distracted, again and again: that is the practice, that is meditation.
- Seek, without wanting to change to a (transitory) state.
- Everything that exists is contingent.
- When meditating, be very gentle with your concentration.
- Meditation is about resting. Not-doing, relaxing, refreshing, recharging.
- The sense of self is just another thought.
- Nothing to gain, no results. Just the process.
- We (subsconsciously, contextually) edit out the qualities that don't match what we want to see, good or bad.
- You are partly right (whether it's praise or criticism).
- Develop a healthy relationship with your imperfections.
- To be able to provide help we need a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion.
- The task of the meditator is to care for bad feelings, like an older sibling.
- The self is like a constellation. It exists only be convention.
- The self is just a concept, coming from identifying with what's arising.
- The problem is the reactivity, triggered by the underlying feeling tone, creating a compelling narrative.
- The knowing and the object arise as a pair, distinct but not separate.
- The freedom is in the not-(becoming).
- Not analysis, but unthinking absorption.
- Making yourself an attractive object doesn't help you be happy as a subject.
- Love takes us out towards the world, opening to what's in front of us.
- Listen to others' needs, know your limitations, then act compassionately.
- Learn to sense the feeling tone (vedana) before you become entangled and start to spiral.
- Emptiness means not independent, not separate, not unchanging.
- Don't recall, don't imagine, don't think, don't examine, don't control. Rest.
- Being distracted is not a problem but staying distracted is.
- Become less attached to your pains and pleasures.
- Joy and delight are better encouragement to learning than criticism.
- Celebrate your good qualities to acknowledge and improve them.
- Anger, anxiety, aren't the right states from which to best respond.
- The effort to meditate creates the meditator, separateness, duality.
- Short moments, many times.
- Reaction to thought is also another thought.
- Feel the profound relief of recognising no-self.
- Equalise self and others, as human beings.
- Our reaction to ordinary, everyday, events show us our true colours.
- The Fourfold Task: Embrace life; Let go of (instinctive) reactivity; See the ceasing of reactivity; Act from a place of clarity.
- The Four Noble Truths: there is suffering; the cause of suffering is craving; there is an end to suffering; the way is the eightfold path.
- The Eightfold Path; (Ethics) Right Speech, Action, Livelihood; (Meditation) Effort, Mindfulness, Concentration; (Wisdom) View, Intention.
- Find peace, humility in our smallness, our luck to be alive.
- Find peace by resting in the wider whole, of this and not-this.
- Your deeper identity is that relaxed, alive, stillness.
- What happens when you bring compassion to the feeling?
- The movement of thoughts in your mind creates a narrative, a self.
- Quiet the mind, open the heart.
- More important than what's happening is how you meet it.
- Mindful presence, mindful response.
- Don't reduce a person to their temporary function.
- The Middle Way. Both indulgence and deprivation are equally useless for liberation.
- The consequences of our choices extend far and wide, in many directions.
- No things are truly independently existing.
- Do everything with two hands.
- Beware escapism, it accrues interest.
- Beware desire, it destroys peace.
- What's real doesn't disappear when we look carefully.
- We can't think our way out of thinking, only observe it, from outside it.
- We can't think in a nondual way, only notice when we're not doing it.
- We can't expect the thinking mind to (break the illusion of the self) by not-thinking.
- The thought that life shouldn't be a struggle is painful, so we try to escape it.
- Slowly, painfully, reconcile to life.
- "Selfing" has interacting existential, psychological, and social layers.
- Recognise unhappiness, without trying to change it or fix it.
- Practice is not having a problem with the endless stream of problems.
- Practice is about moving from experiences to experiencing.
- Our emotions transform preferences into demands.
- Non-forgiveness comes from feeling separate, being self-centered.
- Let problems support your practice, enhance your ability to respond appropriately.
- Experience emotions fully, without separation or rejection, without adding anything.
- Do fewer (and fewer) things that make people (including you) miserable.
- Beyond thought and self, not thinking-about-not-self.
- A good life is rich and interesting, but not always happy.
- Our conventional sense of self is an illusion.
- Only the absence of the thinker of thoughts can be found.
- Buddhism's central teachings are entirely empirical.
- We set the threshold (for gratitude, for example)
- Even a "bad session" of meditation interrupts the non-stop flow of thoughts.
- Renunciation, not action, is the path to liberation.
- Treat waiting as unexpected extra time to practice.
- Notice the space around objects, connecting objects.
- It's so close we overlook it.
- Gradually break the bad habits of bad feelings, bad intentions.
- Awareness brings choice. Choice brings freedom.
- We practice to (have the strength to) confront problems effectively.
- Seeing clearly is difficult because of the (imaginary) obstacles we put up.
- Mindfulness brings concentration, concentration brings insight.
- Impermanence is what makes transformation possible.
- Enlightenment is non-interference.
- The Triple Gem: the Buddha; the Dharma (teachings); the Sangha (community).
- The Three Poisons: grasping (greed); aversion (anger); ignorance (delusion).
- The Three Marks Of Existence: Impermanence (Anicca); Suffering (Dukkha); No-self (Anatta).
- The Four Heavenly Abodes: metta (loving-kindness); karuna (compassion); mudita (empathetic joy); upekkha (equanimity).
- When we resist impermanence, the feeling of self intensifies.
- Find calm by suspending the why.
- Work patiently, steadily, calmly. Allow ample time.
- Use whatever happens as opportunity to wake up, to soften.
- The intensity of the pain is equal to the intensity of the grasping.
- Refrain, not repress.
- Pay attention, no matter what.
- We tend to assume that we can only be happy if things go the way we want.
- Everything, every thing, causes some problems.
- "If only" mind sets us up to be miserable now.
- How we show up in our daily life is probably the truest metric of the efficacy of our practice.
- Zazen is enacting stillness, non-reactivity.
- Let go. Don't push, don't pull. Make space.
- Experiental reality is much deeper, richer, than what can be named.
- Awakening is an ongoing process, a ripening, cultivation.
- Trust and desire for control are inversely correlated.
- The self is a stream of dependently arising processes interacting.
- Suffering comes from aversion.
- See the balanced view of yourself: your patterns and human imperfections; your basic innate goodness.
- Integrate insights by being present and open to changes.
- Experience is renewing itself in every moment.
- Free will is an illusion. Can you decide to decide?
- Bringing attention to things gives us choice.
- We maintain our sense of self by editing of, selecting from, experience.
- The richness of life is unedited, unjudged, aesthetic, experience.
- Human decisions are cause and effect, like all natural phenomena.
- Get past the conceptual overlay and just notice the raw data, direct experience.
- You can't use concepts to get beyond concepts.
- You don't have to fulfil a desire for it to pass away.
- You can't get there from here.
- Withhold judgement.
- This moment, as it is, is good enough.
- Things only exist by convention, in aggregates.
- The sky, not the clouds.
- The self is causes, conditions, patterns.
- The Second Arrow. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
- The ocean, not the waves.
- Follow The Middle Way.
- The big boulder is only heavy if you pick it up.
- Tend the garden.
- Take the backward step.
- Subject and object are distinct, but not separate.
- See more clearly. See things as they are, see ourselves as we are.
- Respond rather than react. Intensity and reactivity breed more of the same.
- Recognise the suffering.
- Reality is nondual.
- RAIN. Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.
- People's reactions are the result of their pain.
- Pay more attention.
- Pay lively attention to your own experience.
- Nothing really forms long enough to be an impermanent thing.
- Movement masks dukkha.
- Meet your edge and soften.
- Look for the center of experience. It's not there.
- Listen more closely, attentively, and actively. Really hear what’s being said.
- Leave everything as it is, in its place.
- In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
- In seeing, only the seen. There's no you.
- Impermanence. Everything and everyone changes, regardless of what we might think or want.
- Imperfections are normal, natural, human.
- I see you, Mara. Let’s have tea.
- The greater the resistance to (inevitable) changes, the greater the pain.
- Give everything a warm welcome.
- Expand your window of tolerance.
- Everything is connected.
- Everything is allowed, even resistance.
- Everything arises and passes away, all on its own.
- Everyone's good qualities are partly luck and partly effort.
- Don't try. Don't try not to try. Relax. Let go.
- Don’t add a story.
- Consciousness is the prior condition of everything you experience.
- Concepts put imaginary fences around things.
- Come home to the present.
- Begin Again, with with a fresh, open-hearted, perspective.
- Be the loving witness.
- Be "happy for no reason."
- Be comfortable with ambiguity.
- Appreciate the sights you see from the train.
- Accept whatever arises.
- Accept that flux and insecurity are the norm. It brings peace.
☯️ Daoism
- The Sage doesn't cling to their own comfort, thus problems are no problems for them.
- That which has no substance enters where there is no space.
- What is certain is future difficulty. Attempt to embrace it.
- Galling though it is at first, we need to stay in close contact with what we'd like to reject.
- The silence we feel we want, that will give us ease and relaxation, is external. The true silence we seek is within.
- Spontaneous action, like laughing at a joke.
- Pay more attention to how much of your actions feel mysterious.
- Effortless action as in: no sense of self taking action
- Three jewels of Daoism: humility, compassion, simplicity.
- Our life is a gift from everyone. None of us have earned our keep.
- New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.
- Choosing obscures the way.
- By focusing attention on a concept we create its opposite.
- The world doesn't happen to you, it happens through you.
- Seek action with softness, ease, suppleness.
- Recognise when you're on the Hedonic Treadmill.
- For the Sage, cravings happen in slow motion.
- "The Tao is like muddy water" is a precise description of things as they are.
- Reality has a profound adaptability, flux, mutability.
- Actions are changes made by a self-conscious agent, a manifestation of purpose. So the Tao has no actions.
- Let action emerge from experience.
- If you don't accept both sides, you may end with the opposite of what you wanted.
- Things are often diminished by seeking to increase them, and increasing by seeking to diminish them.
- True contentment is when desires have been diminished, not when they have been fulfilled.
- The Sage puts themself behind, to be on top without crushing, to guide without leading into harm.
- Opposites complete, test, determine, harmonise, give sequence to one another.
- Language has evolved to describe purposive action, making it hard to describe spontaneous, actionless, activity.
- Conquer by quiescence, by getting underneath.
- Be kind to the kind. Be kind to the unkind.
- The "I am" prior to all.
- To be noticed / perceived, something has to be different. We filter our sameness.
- The Tao precedes difference, is prior to everything with form or fixedness.
- The Tao is the source, the unconditioned prior to conditioning.
- The potential infinite collapsing into the actual finite.
- Take problems seriously, but handle them calmly.
- Put effort into the fundamentals, not the frills.
- Nature's pattern-forming processes come from being off equilibrium.
- Growth instability: the feedback process of (bumps) self-amplifying.
- Form becomes a frozen memory of growth.
- Don't do anything except be open to the possibility of being more relaxed.
- Life is the dancer, you are the dance. Notice that you can’t tell the dancer from the dance.
- Take the lower position, the root, the base.
- Have little thought of self, and as few desires as possible.
- Be as careful at the end as at the beginning.
- Avoid excess, extravagance, arrogance.
- Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand.
- Don't reduce a person to their temporary function.
- Polarities have rewards of focusing and risks of neglecting either pole.
- Pay attention to interior and exterior, individual and collective.
- Polarities create friction when they feel like opposites, contradictions.
- Notice, harmonise, and integrate patterns in polarities.
- Read and reread until you have an intuitive sense of what's behind the words.
- If right differed from not-right clearly, there'd be no need for argument.
- Have a mind like a mirror: chase nothing; welcome nothing; respond but don't store.
- Don't draw forced, unnatural, distinctions.
- The rivers all flow to the sea because it's beneath them.
- Quietly, discreetly, serve the common good.
- Flow without forcing or coercing.
- Excess invites disaster.
- Each part is in the whole, the whole is in each part.
- Act without acting on, work without working at.
- See the bigger picture, the wider view, all the complex factors involved.
- Respond in ways that open up choices.
- (Re)connection, seeing interdependence, is more effective than strength or dominance.
- Bring out the best in yourself and others.
- The harmony past knowing or saying (re)sounds more deeply.
- All things change and flow, continuously becoming their opposite.
- Navigating life is about proportion and balance.
- Accept the wider view of everything and its opposite.
- When getting there is the goal, the journey becomes a chore.
- Have wise ignorance. Stop frantically conceptualising.
- Simplicity in one area allows for detail in another.
- Form is employed to make things clever. Emptiness is employed to make things useful.
- Distinction is not the same as division.
- Wu wei. Avoid assertion, practice inaction.
- Withhold judgement.
- Why can’t it be both? Some things that look like a dichotomy, aren't.
- Where the pot's not is where it's useful.
- Things can’t exist without their opposite.
- Slow your tempo.
- Send out what retreats.
- Retain what comes in.
- Reality is nondual.
- Opposites reveal, create, support, define each other.
- Opposites co-exist, making something new and taut and harmonious.
- Nothing's worse than attacking what yields.
- More sensitive to pleasure means more sensitive to pain.
- Navigating and use the tides and currents, the growth and decay, of life. Don't fight against them.
- All things are in process, rising and returning.
- Expert consciousness is nondual. The (constructed) boundary between doer and doing vanishes.
- Curb your ambition.
- Complementary forces, interacting to form a dynamic system.
- A person can't be reduced to their usefulness.
- Work with, not work against.
📍 Experience
- Try not naming things.
- Favour epistemological humility over certainty. Find profound freedom in not knowing and not needing to know.
- Being is always bright, whatever the contents of consciousness.
- The six senses are burning with craving.
- Pay more attention to how much of your actions feel mysterious.
- Transcend difficulties through deep surrender.
- Transcend difficulties through deep surrender.
- Absolute intimacy with the 10,000 things.
- See what's happening in this moment as exactly right.
- Recognise the matrix of (constructed) narratives you live in.
- Empty as in absence, the possibility of appearance.
- We habitually resist unpleasant experiences, which sustains and prolongs them.
- This current feeling is not solid or permanent.
- Simply to be alive presents us with tension and mystery.
- Zen uses contradiction and paradox to loosen our grip on concepts.
- Zen demonstrates reality rather than talking about it.
- The separation of subject and object is only conceptual.
- Soak in the silence and vastness of existence.
- Live with full attention and clear awarness.
- Labels divide and isolate.
- Just rest. Don't meddle with thinking.
- Clarity is accepting what's clear and what's not clear.
- Choosing obscures the way.
- Liveliness can only be felt, not measured by statistics.
- Intellectual maps and verbal interpretations are necessarily inaccurate and incomplete.
- The world doesn't happen to you, it happens through you.
- Like holding water in your hands: gently, lightly.
- Collaborate with the shape of the world.
- Notice the freshness of unfolding reality.
- Naked awareness: thoughts and the mind are like clothes and the body.
- Attend to the dynamic nature of emergent life.
- "The Tao is like muddy water" is a precise description of things as they are.
- Reality has a profound adaptability, flux, mutability.
- Reality exists in essentially infinite resolution.
- Look more closely and resist the urge to summarise.
- Don't adopt the stupidity of not investigating.
- We tend to think problems, complications, are anomalies.
- Thoughts arise without your permission.
- The mind interprets every experience almost instantly.
- The new requires manifestation and the eternal requires remaining hidden.
- The movement of existence is the movement of love for the sake of the revelation of beauty.
- Look for your head.
- "Not knowing is most intimate.
- The mind is awareness in motion, an activity of awareness.
- Use the body as a visual path to your headless nature.
- Your search for happiness is what makes you feel miserable.
- Meditation merely needs to be allowed, not created.
- Everything is perfect as it is, even the ego that insists it's not.
- Just noticing that we were distracted, again and again: that is the practice, that is meditation.
- To be noticed / perceived, something has to be different. We filter our sameness.
- Seek, without wanting to change to a (transitory) state.
- Notice how the thought of other's people opinions creates a self.
- The witness and the object are two sides of the same experience.
- Reality is not given to you twice.
- Nothing to gain, no results. Just the process.
- We (subsconsciously, contextually) edit out the qualities that don't match what we want to see, good or bad.
- Wait for a better question to arise from loose and open attention.
- Watch for the change from river (flow of impermanence) to eddy (contraction, resistance).
- The knowing and the object arise as a pair, distinct but not separate.
- The experience of choice: we hear the question; we choose; we think "I chose".
- Four Ps of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory.
- Don't recall, don't imagine, don't think, don't examine, don't control. Rest.
- Choice is just an interpretation of an experience.
- Become less attached to your pains and pleasures.
- Ask questions to sustain wonder and curiosity, not to uncover facts or answers.
- The feeling of self is a (diffuse) contraction. Just relax, allow it to soften.
- Following the breath will always bring you back to the stillness within.
- When we're absorbed, time and embodiment are backgrounded.
- Reality is processes and fields that collapse into things.
- Doing collapses all possible futures into a single concrete present.
- The first instant is before before classification, measuring, labelling.
- Sense fields: What shape is it? What size it? Where are the edges?
- No approaching, no becoming. Just let everything fall away.
- Any given duality or division is conceptual only.
- The past, the future, the present moment are projections of the mind.
- The "I am" before adding anything, before looking backwards or forwards.
- Challenge your assumptions using your direct experience.
- Anything that can be named or located can't be you: it's an object in awareness.
- Nondual practice is nondoing, relaxing.
- Nature shows us concrete versions of impermanence and interdependence.
- Being outdoors, in nature, wakes up our physical senses.
- The separate self arises in resisting and seeking.
- In awareness there is no resistance.
- Notice and orient towards the underlying unity and wholeness.
- Gently let go of the idea, the feeling, of there being a meditator.
- Experiencing before understanding, defining, or remembering.
- Recognize, once again, that life is bigger than we are.
- Find peace, humility in our smallness, our luck to be alive.
- Find peace by resting in the wider whole, of this and not-this.
- We're not, and have never been, separate from our experience.
- Simply rest as that which is aware.
- Rest in the wider space of awareness.
- Relax into stillness. Light and easy, not rigid.
- Find just enough space to notice what's going on.
- And not-this: notice how sounds happen in silence.
- Be interested in what's happening, not caught up in it and identified with it.
- Be, accept, the whole of your experience, not just some of it.
- 4E cognition. Cognition can can be embodied, embedded, enacted, extended.
- We don't experience the world directly.
- The brain's simulation of the world needs a phenomenal self. But it's only a model.
- No things are truly independently existing.
- The thinking mind interprets, not experiences.
- Cognitive science knows that thoughts are transformed interpretations, not a perfect rendition of reality.
- Beyond thought and self, not thinking-about-not-self.
- The world has many problems. But we don't need to be miserable while we work on them.
- Our conventional sense of self is an illusion.
- Only the absence of the thinker of thoughts can be found.
- Experience more clearly. Not think about experience more clearly.
- Negative Capability: remain in doubt and uncertainty.
- Intuition can take in more, and more subtle, inputs.
- Seeing clearly is difficult because of the (imaginary) obstacles we put up.
- Today, algophobia rules. Pain is cast as personal, private, a failure, an attack.
- Pain initiates and carries narrative.
- The harmony past knowing or saying (re)sounds more deeply.
- How far away from the object are your thoughts about the object?
- What's there when there's no problem to solve?
- Almost every experience in life can be categorised as a good time or a good story.
- Zazen is enacting stillness, non-reactivity.
- Experiental reality is much deeper, richer, than what can be named.
- Have wise ignorance. Stop frantically conceptualising.
- Drop all your frames of reference.
- Look for the center of experience.
- Choices open up when you notice your thoughts.
- Relinquish your reaction to experience, and simply notice it.
- We need silence and stillness to let things sink in, below the conceptual realm.
- Deep truths can't be spoken or written, only experienced.
- Experience is renewing itself in every moment.
- Consciousness is "What it is like to be something".
- We maintain our sense of self by editing of, selecting from, experience.
- The richness of life is unedited, unjudged, aesthetic, experience.
- Human decisions are cause and effect, like all natural phenomena.
- Get past the conceptual overlay and just notice the raw data, direct experience.
- Experience is an encounter. Music is not just the sounds, a poem is not just the words.
- We construct our reality. Perception is active participation.
- This moment, as it is, is good enough.
- Thinking, fast and slow. The brain puts things into a fast / unconscious category or a slow / conscious category.
- The map is not the territory.
- The contents of consciousness are a modification of consciousness.
- Remove your self.
- Our true nature is always and already present.
- Open up.
- More sensitive to pleasure means more sensitive to pain.
- Look for what’s looking.
- Look for the edges.
- Look for the center of experience. It's not there.
- Leave everything as it is, in its place.
- In terms of experience, there is only consciousness and its contents.
- In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
- In seeing, only the seen. There's no you.
- The greater the resistance to (inevitable) changes, the greater the pain.
- Give everything a warm welcome.
- Everything is allowed, even resistance.
- Everything arises and passes away, all on its own.
- Consciousness is the prior condition of everything you experience.
- Concepts put imaginary fences around things.
- Concepts create reality, not describe it.
- Accept whatever arises.
👤 Human
- It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found. – Donald Winnicott
- You lack for nothing; your task is to recognise this.
- We do bad behaviours so we can continue to hate ourselves, not the other way around.
- Everything you have is an unearned blessing.
- Pessimism, the belief of certain doom, is an expression of the arrogance of certainty.
- We practice for the benefit of all beings.
- Nonduality reduces self-related thoughts, leaving more room for everything else.
- How you treat yourself is how you treat others, and vice versa.
- More "Is this a helpful strategy?" and less "Is this a final, fundamental, truth?"
- Spontaneous action, like laughing at a joke.
- Simply to be alive presents us with tension and mystery.
- Be friendly to yourself and merciful to others.
- The self is like a net made to catch suffering.
- It's only when you think about it that it hurts.
- Uncertainty is just a story you tell yourself. (Inaction is in fact an action)
- Three jewels of Daoism: humility, compassion, simplicity.
- The three transcendentals: what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.
- Plant good seeds. Day by day. Year after year.
- Our life is a gift from everyone. None of us have earned our keep.
- New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.
- Live with full attention and clear awarness.
- Break the mind to body to mind negative loop.
- Ask yourself: "what would be enough?"
- Liveliness can only be felt, not measured by statistics.
- Intellectual maps and verbal interpretations are necessarily inaccurate and incomplete.
- Turn towards feelings, especially uncomfortable ones.
- Inspiration without action is not useful.
- Collaborate with the shape of the world.
- Big changes happen through sufficient suffering or inspiration.
- Look more closely and resist the urge to summarise.
- Don't take it so seriously: be more playful.
- We tend to think problems, complications, are anomalies.
- Your self is an individual expression of many collectives.
- Rest is not for being able to be more productive.
- Your identity can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- When you feel like a bad person, you're more likely to do bad things.
- Take in the good of feeling cared about.
- No separation between you and the circumstances of your life.
- Feelings of worthlessness are acquired over time, so they can be released or replaced.
- When we avoid a (negative) task, we avoid the (negative) emotions associated with it.
- Self-forgiveness mitigates negative affect, turns avoid into approach.
- Recognise your shame triggers.
- Notice how often you default to the (modern, convenient) comfort.
- No-one can always be their best self.
- Language has evolved to describe purposive action, making it hard to describe spontaneous, actionless, activity.
- Humans have evolved to do "the next most comfortable thing."
- Forgive yourself for the barriers you put up.
- Right Mindfulness (including Right Action (including Right Speech)).
- Pay close attention to the consequences of your behaviour.
- My Practice / Path: meditation, study, action.
- What we resist, persists.
- Your search for happiness is what makes you feel miserable.
- To be noticed / perceived, something has to be different. We filter our sameness.
- Take problems seriously, but handle them calmly.
- Put effort into the fundamentals, not the frills.
- Be as aware of your faults as your angriest opponent.
- Acknowledge how difficult you are, in some ways.
- Notice how the thought of other's people opinions creates a self.
- What will you say no to, even thought it's worth doing?
- There's no need to tie your self-worth to your To Do list.
- There's no need to start the day with productivity debt.
- We (subsconsciously, contextually) edit out the qualities that don't match what we want to see, good or bad.
- You are partly right (whether it's praise or criticism).
- Would you ever treat a friend like this?
- Develop a healthy relationship with your imperfections.
- To be able to provide help we need a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion.
- Making yourself an attractive object doesn't help you be happy as a subject.
- Love takes us out towards the world, opening to what's in front of us.
- Listen to others' needs, know your limitations, then act compassionately.
- Become less attached to your pains and pleasures.
- We are in and of the world, not separate from it.
- The feeling of self is a (diffuse) contraction. Just relax, allow it to soften.
- When we're absorbed, time and embodiment are backgrounded.
- The more important something is, the more difficult it is to grasp in language.
- Sometimes falsifying is difficult. Instead test against ongoing lived experience.
- Our mechanisms for simplifying the world so that we can control it prevent us from understanding it.
- Orient towards unity, wholeness, the peace therein.
- Joy and delight are better encouragement to learning than criticism.
- Celebrate your good qualities to acknowledge and improve them.
- Anger, anxiety, aren't the right states from which to best respond.
- Being outdoors, in nature, wakes up our physical senses.
- Equalise self and others, as human beings.
- "To learn without thinking is fatal, but to think without learning is just as bad."
- The Silver Rule: Don't do to others what you don't want done to you.
- Our reaction to ordinary, everyday, events show us our true colours.
- The Fourfold Task: Embrace life; Let go of (instinctive) reactivity; See the ceasing of reactivity; Act from a place of clarity.
- The Four Noble Truths: there is suffering; the cause of suffering is craving; there is an end to suffering; the way is the eightfold path.
- The Eightfold Path; (Ethics) Right Speech, Action, Livelihood; (Meditation) Effort, Mindfulness, Concentration; (Wisdom) View, Intention.
- We interpret states according to our stage.
- Problems start when you dismiss or deny a perspective.
- Don't dismiss what you find just because it doesn't match your existing model.
- All development is envelopment: transcend and include.
- Take the lower position, the root, the base.
- Avoid excess, extravagance, arrogance.
- What happens when you bring compassion to the feeling?
- What connects us is more powerful than what divides us.
- Mindful presence, mindful response.
- Every person is the protagonist in their own story.
- Dissolve conflict (not avoid it) by bringing non-reactivity.
- Beneath our uniqueness is commonality.
- The Middle Way. Both indulgence and deprivation are equally useless for liberation.
- The consequences of our choices extend far and wide, in many directions.
- 4E cognition. Cognition can can be embodied, embedded, enacted, extended.
- We don't experience the world directly.
- The brain's simulation of the world needs a phenomenal self. But it's only a model.
- Polarities have rewards of focusing and risks of neglecting either pole.
- Pay attention to interior and exterior, individual and collective.
- It depends. (On the context)
- The thinking mind works to save energy and avoid the discomfort of being wrong.
- The thinking mind interprets, not experiences.
- Practice is not having a problem with the endless stream of problems.
- Our emotions transform preferences into demands.
- Non-forgiveness comes from feeling separate, being self-centered.
- Do fewer (and fewer) things that make people (including you) miserable.
- All models are wrong, but some are useful.
- We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
- The world has many problems. But we don't need to be miserable while we work on them.
- Spend time and attention in large bills.
- We set the threshold (for gratitude, for example)
- Negative Capability: remain in doubt and uncertainty.
- Quietly, discreetly, serve the common good.
- Function melts form, perpetually. Form follows failure.
- The Three Poisons: grasping (greed); aversion (anger); ignorance (delusion).
- The Three Marks Of Existence: Impermanence (Anicca); Suffering (Dukkha); No-self (Anatta).
- The Four Heavenly Abodes: metta (loving-kindness); karuna (compassion); mudita (empathetic joy); upekkha (equanimity).
- (Re)connection, seeing interdependence, is more effective than strength or dominance.
- Proportionality is a longstanding, important, part of justice.
- Bring out the best in yourself and others.
- Address the underlying dynamic, not the surface issue.
- Today, algophobia rules. Pain is cast as personal, private, a failure, an attack.
- Pain initiates and carries narrative.
- Modern society is in permanent anaethesia.
- Modern society has: little space for conflict, difference, negativity; more pressure to conform, be the same, be positive.
- Constantly "scratching the itch" conditions the mind to keep looking for more stimulation.
- Sometimes we need to turn towards positivity to combat our inherent negativity bias.
- We tend to assume that we can only be happy if things go the way we want.
- We need perspective: we exaggerate what's close to us.
- Not quite feeling yourself is the normal human condition.
- Worry postponement: set aside a time and place to worry instead of worrying right now
- Our To-do lists are post-modern rosaries, keeping a larger, avalanching, reality away.
- Our habituation to our scales of time and space make them seem objectively real.
- Treat people like trees: appreciate them the way they are.
- Our negative expectations of others has a strong negative impact.
- Almost every experience in life can be categorised as a good time or a good story.
- We grow by doing what excites and scares us.
- Change your tone from critic to coach.
- Your understanding is flawed. Seek to improve it. Adopt a learning stance, be tentative.
- We all want to be heard, understood.
- Three realms of disagreement: what is true, what is meaningful, what is useful?
- The three conversations: what happened; feelings; identity
- See the balanced view of yourself: your patterns and human imperfections; your basic innate goodness.
- Open your mind, don't try and change theirs.
- Make the most generous assumption, choose the most respectful interpretation.
- Ask questions about, and focus on, what connects not what divides.
- Ask "How did we get here?"
- Admit ignorance, give power.
- It can be about understanding, not agreeing, or even having common ground.
- Dialogue is essential. Especially when things get worse.
- Practice to get speedy, flexible, innovative responses to tricky situations.
- We need silence and stillness to let things sink in, below the conceptual realm.
- Read widely and from people you disagree with.
- We think "acts like us" mean conscious.
- We all have four heads: universal (shared human things), individual (personality, character, talents), chance (where and when we're born), choice (to act, or not to act).
- Poetry is using language to subvert language.
- Free will is an illusion. Can you decide to decide?
- Have a strong back and a soft front.
- Be able to argue both sides of an argument.
- Memento mori. Remember that you will die.
- Thinking, fast and slow. The brain puts things into a fast / unconscious category or a slow / conscious category.
- Think in bets. Decisions are bets on the future. The outcome of every decision is a mix of the quality of your decision and luck.
- Speak up.
- Seek to understand.
- See Paths of Least Resistance.
- Right Hemisphere → Left Hemisphere → Right Hemisphere.
- Reframe. In time, in space.
- Recommit to valued action.
- Recognise the suffering.
- Prefer the bigger, more integrated picture.
- Piggyblocking. Establish a new habit more easily by putting it between two existing habits.
- People's reactions are the result of their pain.
- Use nonviolent communication. Speek to needs, nonjudgementally.
- More sensitive to pleasure means more sensitive to pain.
- Listen more closely, attentively, and actively. Really hear what’s being said.
- Imperfections are normal, natural, human.
- I have done this too.
- Give Benefits, freely and easily.
- Everyone's good qualities are partly luck and partly effort.
- Tough and trying times don't stop you from being a good person.
- Deface the currency.
- A person can't be reduced to their usefulness.
- Be vulnerable.
- Be "happy for no reason."
- Be comfortable with ambiguity.
- A person is different in different situations. A person changes over time.
❤️ Love
- Everything you have is an unearned blessing.
- We practice for the benefit of all beings.
- The three transcendentals: what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.
- See more clearly that things are (actually) fuzzy.
- No-one can always be their best self.
- Forgive yourself for the barriers you put up.
- What connects us is more powerful than what divides us.
- Beneath our uniqueness is commonality.
- Bring out the best in yourself and others.
- Address the underlying dynamic, not the surface issue.
- Change your tone from critic to coach.
- We all want to be heard, understood.
- See more clearly. See things as they are, see ourselves as we are.
- Respond rather than react. Intensity and reactivity breed more of the same.
- Reframe. In time, in space.
- I have done this too.
- Give Benefits, freely and easily.
🧘 Mindfulness
- The evidence of your unenlightment is always in the past.
- Galling though it is at first, we need to stay in close contact with what we'd like to reject.
- Stay present, let go of the story, focus on the body, breathe.
- Stop rehashing. Stop rehearsing. Just relax.
- How you treat yourself is how you treat others, and vice versa.
- Instead of "don't think about pink elephants", try "only think about pink elephants forever!"
- Stop and realise you are the freedom you're searching for.
- Transcend difficulties through deep surrender.
- Transcend difficulties through deep surrender.
- We habitually resist unpleasant experiences, which sustains and prolongs them.
- This current feeling is not solid or permanent.
- Tend patiently to your mind, like a gardener to their garden.
- Take the cushion everywhere.
- It's only when you think about it that it hurts.
- Sit still and feel the discomfort.
- Break the mind to body to mind negative loop.
- Ask yourself: "what would be enough?"
- Desires only appear to contain imperatives.
- A willingness to begin again is the key to freedom.
- See more clearly that things are (actually) fuzzy.
- Respond to discomfort from a place of stillness.
- Thoughts arise without your permission.
- The mind interprets every experience almost instantly.
- Your identity can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Practice grows the amount of life you can hold with becoming upset, without it dominating you.
- Investigate the snake to see the reality of the rope.
- Notice how giving experience a warm welcome makes you feel about yourself.
- Become viscerally intimate with the truth.
- The story includes the feeling tone includes the raw data of experience.
- Self-forgiveness mitigates negative affect, turns avoid into approach.
- Recognise your shame triggers.
- Notice how often you default to the (modern, convenient) comfort.
- Take three long slow breaths.
- Alternate three chair exercise: the (Inner) Critic, the Coach, the Compassionate Observer.
- Just noticing that we were distracted, again and again: that is the practice, that is meditation.
- Don't do anything except be open to the possibility of being more relaxed.
- When meditating, be very gentle with your concentration.
- Meditation is about resting. Not-doing, relaxing, refreshing, recharging.
- What will you say no to, even thought it's worth doing?
- There's no need to tie your self-worth to your To Do list.
- There's no need to start the day with productivity debt.
- Watch for the change from river (flow of impermanence) to eddy (contraction, resistance).
- The task of the meditator is to care for bad feelings, like an older sibling.
- The problem is the reactivity, triggered by the underlying feeling tone, creating a compelling narrative.
- Listen to others' needs, know your limitations, then act compassionately.
- Learn to sense the feeling tone (vedana) before you become entangled and start to spiral.
- Don't recall, don't imagine, don't think, don't examine, don't control. Rest.
- Being distracted is not a problem but staying distracted is.
- Short moments, many times.
- Nature shows us concrete versions of impermanence and interdependence.
- Being outdoors, in nature, wakes up our physical senses.
- Reaction to thought is also another thought.
- Notice what you map to your sense of self. For example: anxiety vs indigestion.
- Emotions and feelings like anger and anxiety are information, “salience signals”.
- Gently let go of the idea, the feeling, of there being a meditator.
- We interpret states according to our stage.
- Don't dismiss what you find just because it doesn't match your existing model.
- Take the lower position, the root, the base.
- Simply rest as that which is aware.
- Relax into stillness. Light and easy, not rigid.
- Find just enough space to notice what's going on.
- Be as careful at the end as at the beginning.
- And not-this: notice how sounds happen in silence.
- Be interested in what's happening, not caught up in it and identified with it.
- Be, accept, the whole of your experience, not just some of it.
- What happens when you bring compassion to the feeling?
- Quiet the mind, open the heart.
- More important than what's happening is how you meet it.
- Mindful presence, mindful response.
- Dissolve conflict (not avoid it) by bringing non-reactivity.
- Let problems support your practice, enhance your ability to respond appropriately.
- Experience emotions fully, without separation or rejection, without adding anything.
- The Path is a river.
- Spend time and attention in large bills.
- Even a "bad session" of meditation interrupts the non-stop flow of thoughts.
- Renunciation, not action, is the path to liberation.
- Read and reread until you have an intuitive sense of what's behind the words.
- Have a mind like a mirror: chase nothing; welcome nothing; respond but don't store.
- Treat waiting as unexpected extra time to practice.
- There's a lot going on there...
- Notice the space around objects, connecting objects.
- Awareness brings choice. Choice brings freedom.
- We practice to (have the strength to) confront problems effectively.
- Proceeding slowly means mistakes instruct.
- Mindfulness brings concentration, concentration brings insight.
- Excess invites disaster.
- Enlightenment is non-interference.
- Use whatever happens as opportunity to wake up, to soften.
- To do things carefully, do them quietly.
- Refrain, not repress.
- Constantly "scratching the itch" conditions the mind to keep looking for more stimulation.
- Sometimes we need to turn towards positivity to combat our inherent negativity bias.
- Practice reduces the lag time, lets us catch it more quickly.
- Pay attention, no matter what.
- Leave space for things to untangle themselves.
- We tend to assume that we can only be happy if things go the way we want.
- How far away from the object are your thoughts about the object?
- What's there when there's no problem to solve?
- Seen in the first instant, or not at all. Before concepts, not beyond them.
- It's right on the surface. Like a window as mirror instead of a window.
- In this moment, is there really a problem?
- You can't become happy, you can only be happy.
- Break the illusion of separateness of anything you can notice.
- The cramp of self-consciousness is the opposite of nondual feeling.
- "If only" mind sets us up to be miserable now.
- An open hand, not a closed fist.
- Use departures from your authentic self as mindfulness alarms.
- Treat people like trees: appreciate them the way they are.
- Become somatically familiar with different states.
- Awakening is an ongoing process, a ripening, cultivation.
- Your understanding is flawed. Seek to improve it. Adopt a learning stance, be tentative.
- Not perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning actions with values.
- Make the most generous assumption, choose the most respectful interpretation.
- Drop all your frames of reference.
- Take measured doses of discomfort to expand your comfort zone.
- Right fit. Consider the stage and the season you're in.
- Choices open up when you notice your thoughts.
- Practice to get speedy, flexible, innovative responses to tricky situations.
- Relinquish your reaction to experience, and simply notice it.
- Watch the first step.
- The richness of life is unedited, unjudged, aesthetic, experience.
- Get past the conceptual overlay and just notice the raw data, direct experience.
- You don't have to fulfil a desire for it to pass away.
- The three chair exercise: The Criticizer, the Criticized, and the Compassionate Observer.
- This moment, as it is, is good enough.
- The sky, not the clouds.
- The Second Arrow. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
- The ocean, not the waves.
- Follow The Middle Way.
- The feeling of self is what it feels like to be thinking without realising you're thinking.
- The big boulder is only heavy if you pick it up.
- Tend the garden.
- Take the backward step.
- Slow your tempo.
- See more clearly. See things as they are, see ourselves as we are.
- Rush in on loss of contact.
- Reframe. In time, in space.
- Recognise the suffering.
- RAIN. Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.
- People's reactions are the result of their pain.
- Pay more attention.
- Pay lively attention to your own experience.
- Our true nature is always and already present.
- Use nonviolent communication. Speek to needs, nonjudgementally.
- Movement masks dukkha.
- Make time to reflect. Reflection is where we cement learning.
- Listen more closely, attentively, and actively. Really hear what’s being said.
- Leave everything as it is, in its place.
- Have a Growth Mindset. See that setbacks are a chance to learn, that success comes from effort not innate skill.
- Expand your window of tolerance.
- Everything is allowed, even resistance.
- Don't try. Don't try not to try. Relax. Let go.
- Don’t add a story.
- Contemplate the sage.
- Come home to the present.
- Begin Again, with with a fresh, open-hearted, perspective.
- Be the loving witness.
- Be "happy for no reason."
- Be comfortable with ambiguity.
- Appreciate the sights you see from the train.
🌊 Motion
- Recognise your self as overlapping, malleable, stories.
- Life is defined by growth and transformation, aliveness.
- Big changes happen through sufficient suffering or inspiration.
- Notice the freshness of unfolding reality.
- Attend to the dynamic nature of emergent life.
- We learn, grow, in hierarchical spirals.
- Practice is about moving from experiences to experiencing.
- The Path is a river.
- The rivers all flow to the sea because it's beneath them.
- Impermanence is what makes transformation possible.
- Harmony comes from continuous, small, feedback loops.
- Function melts form, perpetually. Form follows failure.
- All things change and flow, continuously becoming their opposite.
- Awakening is an ongoing process, a ripening, cultivation.
- This too shall pass.
- Experience is renewing itself in every moment.
- The cosmos, reality, is a continuous, restless, swarm of happenings.
- Change is ubiquitous, but isn't successive instants.
- History repeats itself, but not in quite the same way.
- Progress towards truth is a circular motion of revisiting things.
- Resistance to the flow brings beauty, complexity.
- Nothing really forms long enough to be an impermanent thing.
- All things are in process, rising and returning.
- Impermanence. Everything and everyone changes, regardless of what we might think or want.
- Everything arises and passes away, all on its own.
- Complementary forces, interacting to form a dynamic system.
🌘 Nondual
- The evidence of your unenlightment is always in the past.
- Try not naming things.
- Favour epistemological humility over certainty. Find profound freedom in not knowing and not needing to know.
- The witness is just a thought too.
- The self is just one of our many constructed models of reality.
- Not 'get rid of the self', but transcend and include it.
- No me, no problem. Just this!
- Seer, seeing, and seen are just three words for the same happening.
- It is difficult to find awareness because it is too close, too accessible, too present, and too simple.
- Being is always bright, whatever the contents of consciousness.
- Mental agitation drops away when it drops away, and it returns when it returns. All of it is really nothing personal.
- Everything is real, but nothing is true.
- There's no need to be so antagonistic towards the costume you're wearing.
- Feeling the underlying oneness by noticing that being is the fundamental nature of everything. Stop at the "I am" or the "It is".
- The darkness behind your closed eyes arises in the transparency, the emptiness, of consciousness.
- Completeness can be accessed more easily through incompleteness.
- Our deepest nature is the unity that includes diversity.
- The illusion of duality is the primary source of human suffering.
- Nonduality reduces self-related thoughts, leaving more room for everything else.
- The harmony that includes our differences is deeper and more durable than the one that doesn’t.
- When we're stressed, we tend to think in binaries.
- Notice how the boundaries move when you to try to fix them, grasp them.
- Nonduality is an experiential truth, not an intellectual one.
- Say "no thanks" (to the self). And mean it!
- Who will be the knower once the self is know? The knower must be the self.
- We should say "it thinks" like we say "it rains".
- Understand yourself as a facet of the whole. Identify with all the other facets.
- There's only one reality, but it can be experienced in different ways.
- The subject appears later and lays claim to the action.
- The mind creates the fiction of duality by superimposing interpretations on perceptions.
- The knower is consciousness delimited by the mind; the known is consciousness delimited by the objective form.
- The conceptual mind is surmounted by exhausting it, negating all conceptual possiblities.
- Something can't arise from nothing. Either there is still nothing or there was always something.
- Pushing againt yourself creates a division.
- Intentionality is the hinge between dual and nondual action.
- Expand who you consider yourself to be.
- Each thought is nondual. We obscure this by linking thoughts in a chain.
- Craving is how we divide up the world through language.
- The wholeness of life is all there is.
- Life is something we are, not something we're trying to negotiate.
- If you believe that you are in control of your thoughts, that you create them: trying stopping thinking!
- Play in nonduality: enjoying the activity for its own sake.
- Our true nature is deep, still, harmonious without the polarities of opinion and belief.
- Empty as in absence, the possibility of appearance.
- Effortless action as in: no sense of self taking action
- By holding fast to our likes and dislikes, we continually recreate the sense of self.
- It's only when you think about it that it hurts.
- Zen uses contradiction and paradox to loosen our grip on concepts.
- Totally embrace all ordinary opposites in harmony.
- The separation of subject and object is only conceptual.
- Labels divide and isolate.
- Things that seems separate are manifestations of the underlying unity.
- Reality is fundamentally interconnected, interdependent, inseparable.
- By focusing attention on a concept we create its opposite.
- All things and events can only be truly understood as integrated parts of the whole.
- Craving something makes it feel farther away.
- Your identity is a narrow slice of your potential.
- "The Tao is like muddy water" is a precise description of things as they are.
- Look more closely and resist the urge to summarise.
- Grasping and aversion both reinforce things.
- No separation between you and the circumstances of your life.
- Union is only possible between two things. If there is only one there can be neither union nor separation.
- There is no difference between the sender, that which is sent and the one to whom it is sent.
- The knower is the attribute and the known is the essence, and they are one.
- The sense of self is inferred from things arising, on their own.
- Don't let the content of awareness veil your true nature of happiness and peace.
- Look for your head.
- The mind is awareness in motion, an activity of awareness.
- Happiness can't be acquired, only revealed.
- Manifestation, performance, function, but no centre.
- An empty signifier with no fixed referent.
- The space in which reality reveals itself.
- The self is a public event and a private experience.
- The self is a modality of action, not the seat of our identity.
- The more true the identity is, the less defined, until it finally drops away.
- Sense the indefinite, flexible, indeterminate boundaries.
- Not a heroic quest, but a silent attunement.
- Knowledge is intrinsically relational. We can't access reality independent of the observer.
- "I don't know." Remind yourself of the fact, not try to make it know.
- "ego-reframe" more than "ego death": revealing the interconnected relationships of self and reality, rather than a process of erasure and reconstruction.
- All of reality has interdeterminacy, granularity, relativity.
- "We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains."
- Absolute control of our environment is not a desirable or possible goal. We are in, of, and acted on by, the world.
- Everything that exists is contingent.
- Consciousness is already at ease. No effort, no push or pull. No doer, no one.
- The witness and the object are two sides of the same experience.
- The sense of self is just another thought.
- Reality is not given to you twice.
- Look for the dividing line between contents and context.
- Knowledge can be articulated, but understanding is inhabiting in nondual space with the question.
- A mirror only gives not-mirror. But it also only gives it in the mirror!
- Binaries are an essential quality of reality.
- The knowing and the object arise as a pair, distinct but not separate.
- The experience of choice: we hear the question; we choose; we think "I chose".
- Making yourself an attractive object doesn't help you be happy as a subject.
- Emptiness means not independent, not separate, not unchanging.
- Choice is just an interpretation of an experience.
- We are in and of the world, not separate from it.
- When we're absorbed, time and embodiment are backgrounded.
- You are not anything you can think about yourself.
- The first instant is before before classification, measuring, labelling.
- Sense fields: What shape is it? What size it? Where are the edges?
- Orient towards unity, wholeness, the peace therein.
- No approaching, no becoming. Just let everything fall away.
- Any given duality or division is conceptual only.
- When you think "I've found it!", that's not it. "It" is before thought.
- The "I am" before adding anything, before looking backwards or forwards.
- Not an injunction to do, but an invitation to rest.
- Distraction from discomfort is the separate self expressing itself.
- Challenge your assumptions using your direct experience.
- Big insights have to be available now, not just as impermanent, peak, states.
- Anything that can be named or located can't be you: it's an object in awareness.
- The effort to meditate creates the meditator, separateness, duality.
- Nondual practice is nondoing, relaxing.
- Nature shows us concrete versions of impermanence and interdependence.
- When you notice someone looking your way: what are they looking at?
- Have no preference. Change the cognitive frame.
- Feel the profound relief of recognising no-self.
- Being seen creates the “I”, we become self-conscious.
- Life is the dancer, you are the dance. Notice that you can’t tell the dancer from the dance.
- The smaller the dismembered part, the less it comprehends itself, the whole.
- The all-time of the whole becomes the no-time of the center.
- Notice and orient towards the underlying unity and wholeness.
- Experiencing before understanding, defining, or remembering.
- Recognize, once again, that life is bigger than we are.
- What things are depends on the range of the observer.
- We're not, and have never been, separate from our experience.
- And not-this: notice how sounds happen in silence.
- Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand.
- Polarities have rewards of focusing and risks of neglecting either pole.
- Pay attention to interior and exterior, individual and collective.
- No things are truly independently existing.
- Polarities create friction when they feel like opposites, contradictions.
- Notice, harmonise, and integrate patterns in polarities.
- We can't think our way out of thinking, only observe it, from outside it.
- We can't think in a nondual way, only notice when we're not doing it.
- Practice is about moving from experiences to experiencing.
- Non-forgiveness comes from feeling separate, being self-centered.
- Imbalance is purely perceptual.
- But/and. Continuation and negation. The turn, The twist.
- And/or. We need both.
- The person appears in awareness, not the other way around.
- It's only when "I" arises that "You", "They", arise.
- Don't draw forced, unnatural, distinctions.
- All things change and flow, continuously becoming their opposite.
- Recognise what's already there, not acquire something that's missing.
- Knowing, not the knower and the known.
- Focus on the space, not the objects in the space.
- Break the illusion of separateness of anything you can notice.
- The cramp of self-consciousness is the opposite of nondual feeling.
- The edges are fuzzy. The boundaries are overlapping.
- If "I" am separate and free from my environment, how can I influence it and act on it?
- The taut string of a bow gives rise to the power to fire an arrow.
- Distinction is not the same as division.
- Why can’t it be both? Some things that look like a dichotomy, aren't.
- Where the pot's not is where it's useful.
- We construct our reality. Perception is active participation.
- We are the cosmos becoming more itself, becoming aware of itself.
- Think non-binary. Most things aren’t binary. They exist on a spectrum.
- Things only exist by convention, in aggregates.
- Subject and object are distinct, but not separate.
- Reality is one indivisible whole, in constant motion.
- Reality is nondual.
- Expert consciousness is nondual. The (constructed) boundary between doer and doing vanishes.
- Everything is connected.
↔️ Opposites
- To address your shortcomings, embody the opposite.
- We habitually resist unpleasant experiences, which sustains and prolongs them.
- Reality is fundamentally interconnected, interdependent, inseparable.
- By focusing attention on a concept we create its opposite.
- Craving something makes it feel farther away.
- Things are often diminished by seeking to increase them, and increasing by seeking to diminish them.
- "To have seen it from one side only, is not to have seen it."
- The whole truth is the reconciliation and holding together of opposites.
- The Sage puts themself behind, to be on top without crushing, to guide without leading into harm.
- Opposites complete, test, determine, harmonise, give sequence to one another.
- In between any two opposites lies emptiness, creative potential.
- Binaries are an essential quality of reality.
- Any given duality or division is conceptual only.
- Polarities create friction when they feel like opposites, contradictions.
- Notice, harmonise, and integrate patterns in polarities.
- It depends. (On the context)
- Imbalance is purely perceptual.
- But/and. Continuation and negation. The turn, The twist.
- And/or. We need both.
- If right differed from not-right clearly, there'd be no need for argument.
- All things change and flow, continuously becoming their opposite.
- Many of the opposites we set up are false. There's distinction, but not division.
- Form is employed to make things clever. Emptiness is employed to make things useful.
- The taut string of a bow gives rise to the power to fire an arrow.
- Asymmetry is more important than symmetry. It can contain symmetry.
- Why can’t it be both? Some things that look like a dichotomy, aren't.
- Where the pot's not is where it's useful.
- Things can’t exist without their opposite.
- Opposites reveal, create, support, define each other.
- Opposites co-exist, making something new and taut and harmonious.
- Complementary forces, interacting to form a dynamic system.
💪 Resilience
- Resist the urge to suppress randomness.
- Have skin in the game.
- Focus more on avoiding negatives than attaining positives.
- Pessimism, the belief of certain doom, is an expression of the arrogance of certainty.
- What is certain is future difficulty. Attempt to embrace it.
- Uncertainty is just a story you tell yourself. (Inaction is in fact an action)
- This is the way things are right now.
- Inspiration without action is not useful.
- When you feel like a bad person, you're more likely to do bad things.
- Trying to escape our own suffering creates a separate self.
- Take in the good of feeling cared about.
- Feelings of worthlessness are acquired over time, so they can be released or replaced.
- No-one can always be their best self.
- Would you ever treat a friend like this?
- Orient towards unity, wholeness, the peace therein.
- Beware escapism, it accrues interest.
- Beware desire, it destroys peace.
- It depends. (On the context)
- A good life is rich and interesting, but not always happy.
- We practice to (have the strength to) confront problems effectively.
- Walk until the heat goes out of it.
- Redundancy is more reliable than attempts at perfection.
- Longevity is determind by flexibility.
- Institutionalise stability, suffer chaos. Institutionalise chaos, enjoy stability.
- Modern society is in permanent anaethesia.
- Leave space for things to untangle themselves.
- The more we're willing to feel uncomfortable, the easier it gets.
- See difficulties as doorways to understanding.
- Everything, every thing, causes some problems.
- Bear the truth, work with it, despite your fears.
- Worry postponement: set aside a time and place to worry instead of worrying right now
- Almost every experience in life can be categorised as a good time or a good story.
- We grow by doing what excites and scares us.
- Trust and desire for control are inversely correlated.
- Suffering comes from aversion.
- Change your tone from critic to coach.
- The three conversations: what happened; feelings; identity
- It can be about understanding, not agreeing, or even having common ground.
- Aim for excellence over perfection.
- Dialogue is essential. Especially when things get worse.
- Aim to make fewer mistakes.
- Think in bets. Decisions are bets on the future. The outcome of every decision is a mix of the quality of your decision and luck.
- The trichotomy of control. Somethings are in your control, some aren't, and some you have influence over.
- The Second Arrow. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
- The ocean, not the waves.
- The obstacle is the way.
- The big boulder is only heavy if you pick it up.
- Stick to simple rules.
- See setbacks as challenges to reduce the emotional cost and increase your chances of finding a workaround.
- See and enjoy the unknown.
- Retain what comes in.
- Respect the old habits and rules.
- Recommit to valued action.
- Recognise the suffering.
- Only forward.
- Nothing's worse than attacking what yields.
- Meet your edge and soften.
- Navigating and use the tides and currents, the growth and decay, of life. Don't fight against them.
- Keep your options open.
- Give everything a warm welcome.
- Events don't harm you, your judgement and reaction to them does.
- Tough and trying times don't stop you from being a good person.
- Don’t add a story.
- Daily Reflections. Look back and reflect to see where you want to do better.
- Build in redundancy and layers. Don't have a single point of failure.
- Begin Again, with with a fresh, open-hearted, perspective.
- Accept that flux and insecurity are the norm. It brings peace.
🙋 Self
- The witness is just a thought too.
- The self is just one of our many constructed models of reality.
- Not 'get rid of the self', but transcend and include it.
- To address your shortcomings, embody the opposite.
- Who will be the knower once the self is know? The knower must be the self.
- We should say "it thinks" like we say "it rains".
- Understand yourself as a facet of the whole. Identify with all the other facets.
- The subject appears later and lays claim to the action.
- The mind creates the fiction of duality by superimposing interpretations on perceptions.
- The knower is consciousness delimited by the mind; the known is consciousness delimited by the objective form.
- The conceptual mind is surmounted by exhausting it, negating all conceptual possiblities.
- Something can't arise from nothing. Either there is still nothing or there was always something.
- Pushing againt yourself creates a division.
- Intentionality is the hinge between dual and nondual action.
- Each thought is nondual. We obscure this by linking thoughts in a chain.
- Craving is how we divide up the world through language.
- Instead of "don't think about pink elephants", try "only think about pink elephants forever!"
- If you believe that you are in control of your thoughts, that you create them: trying stopping thinking!
- Stop and realise you are the freedom you're searching for.
- Who are you, once you've let everything go?
- Recognise the matrix of (constructed) narratives you live in.
- Our true nature is deep, still, harmonious without the polarities of opinion and belief.
- By holding fast to our likes and dislikes, we continually recreate the sense of self.
- The self is like a net made to catch suffering.
- No part of a person is unchanging, permanent.
- Solitary confinement is (the sense of self is) a prison.
- Thoughts arise without your permission.
- Your self is an individual expression of many collectives.
- The effort to be a different person increases the tension, the suffering.
- Decisions seems like problems from a self-centred point of view.
- Look for your head.
- Alternate three chair exercise: the (Inner) Critic, the Coach, the Compassionate Observer.
- Who were you before that (part of your identity) existed?
- The mind is awareness in motion, an activity of awareness.
- Happiness can't be acquired, only revealed.
- Use the body as a visual path to your headless nature.
- Manifestation, performance, function, but no centre.
- An empty signifier with no fixed referent.
- The space in which reality reveals itself.
- The self is a public event and a private experience.
- The self is a modality of action, not the seat of our identity.
- The more true the identity is, the less defined, until it finally drops away.
- The "I am" prior to all.
- Sense the indefinite, flexible, indeterminate boundaries.
- Not a heroic quest, but a silent attunement.
- "ego-reframe" more than "ego death": revealing the interconnected relationships of self and reality, rather than a process of erasure and reconstruction.
- "We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains."
- Seek, without wanting to change to a (transitory) state.
- Notice how the thought of other's people opinions creates a self.
- The witness and the object are two sides of the same experience.
- The sense of self is just another thought.
- Reality is not given to you twice.
- Look for the dividing line between contents and context.
- A mirror only gives not-mirror. But it also only gives it in the mirror!
- The self is like a constellation. It exists only be convention.
- The self is just a concept, coming from identifying with what's arising.
- The feeling of self is a (diffuse) contraction. Just relax, allow it to soften.
- You are not anything you can think about yourself.
- No approaching, no becoming. Just let everything fall away.
- The "I am" before adding anything, before looking backwards or forwards.
- Not an injunction to do, but an invitation to rest.
- Distraction from discomfort is the separate self expressing itself.
- Big insights have to be available now, not just as impermanent, peak, states.
- Anything that can be named or located can't be you: it's an object in awareness.
- The effort to meditate creates the meditator, separateness, duality.
- The separate self arises in resisting and seeking.
- In awareness there is no resistance.
- When you notice someone looking your way: what are they looking at?
- The feeling of self is like clenching a fist. But the inside is still empty.
- Notice what you map to your sense of self. For example: anxiety vs indigestion.
- Have no preference. Change the cognitive frame.
- Feel the profound relief of recognising no-self.
- Emotions and feelings like anger and anxiety are information, “salience signals”.
- Being seen creates the “I”, we become self-conscious.
- Our reaction to ordinary, everyday, events show us our true colours.
- All development is envelopment: transcend and include.
- We're not, and have never been, separate from our experience.
- Simply rest as that which is aware.
- Have little thought of self, and as few desires as possible.
- Your deeper identity is that relaxed, alive, stillness.
- The movement of thoughts in your mind creates a narrative, a self.
- Every person is the protagonist in their own story.
- What's real doesn't disappear when we look carefully.
- We can't expect the thinking mind to (break the illusion of the self) by not-thinking.
- The thinking mind works to save energy and avoid the discomfort of being wrong.
- "Selfing" has interacting existential, psychological, and social layers.
- Our conventional sense of self is an illusion.
- Only the absence of the thinker of thoughts can be found.
- Transcend without denying.
- It's only when "I" arises that "You", "They", arise.
- Look for yourself, at zero distance.
- Seen in the first instant, or not at all. Before concepts, not beyond them.
- It's right on the surface. Like a window as mirror instead of a window.
- The cramp of self-consciousness is the opposite of nondual feeling.
- The self is a stream of dependently arising processes interacting.
- See the balanced view of yourself: your patterns and human imperfections; your basic innate goodness.
- Integrate insights by being present and open to changes.
- How can you get the (informative and motivating) value from fear?
- We all have four heads: universal (shared human things), individual (personality, character, talents), chance (where and when we're born), choice (to act, or not to act).
- If "I" am separate and free from my environment, how can I influence it and act on it?
- Free will is an illusion. Can you decide to decide?
- Bringing attention to things gives us choice.
- We maintain our sense of self by editing of, selecting from, experience.
- You can't get there from here.
- The three chair exercise: The Criticizer, the Criticized, and the Compassionate Observer.
- The sky, not the clouds.
- The self is causes, conditions, patterns.
- The ocean, not the waves.
- The feeling of self is what it feels like to be thinking without realising you're thinking.
- Remove your self.
- Piggyblocking. Establish a new habit more easily by putting it between two existing habits.
- Look for what’s looking.
- Look for the edges.
- Everyone's good qualities are partly luck and partly effort.
- A person is different in different situations. A person changes over time.
🐌 Slowness
- Desires only appear to contain imperatives.
- For the Sage, cravings happen in slow motion.
- Rest is not for being able to be more productive.
- Practice is something we do for the rest of our lives.
- Practice grows the amount of life you can hold with becoming upset, without it dominating you.
- Let action emerge from experience.
- When we avoid a (negative) task, we avoid the (negative) emotions associated with it.
- True contentment is when desires have been diminished, not when they have been fulfilled.
- Have patient determination: just commit to the next step on the path.
- Conquer by quiescence, by getting underneath.
- "I don't know." Remind yourself of the fact, not try to make it know.
- Meditation is about resting. Not-doing, relaxing, refreshing, recharging.
- Nothing to gain, no results. Just the process.
- Wait for a better question to arise from loose and open attention.
- The problem is the reactivity, triggered by the underlying feeling tone, creating a compelling narrative.
- The freedom is in the not-(becoming).
- Not analysis, but unthinking absorption.
- Learn to sense the feeling tone (vedana) before you become entangled and start to spiral.
- Ask questions to sustain wonder and curiosity, not to uncover facts or answers.
- Following the breath will always bring you back to the stillness within.
- The Middle Way. Both indulgence and deprivation are equally useless for liberation.
- Do everything with two hands.
- Walk until the heat goes out of it.
- Some ideas are too big to take in once and completely.
- Proceeding slowly means mistakes instruct.
- Excess invites disaster.
- Find calm by suspending the why.
- Work patiently, steadily, calmly. Allow ample time.
- Wait in, instead of wait for.
- To do things carefully, do them quietly.
- Constantly "scratching the itch" conditions the mind to keep looking for more stimulation.
- Leave space for things to untangle themselves.
- We need perspective: we exaggerate what's close to us.
- Let go. Don't push, don't pull. Make space.
- Have wise ignorance. Stop frantically conceptualising.
- Be patient in understanding the complexity of a predicament. Don't rush to a solution.
- Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
- Treat the events of life like trays of snacks at a party.
- Wu wei. Avoid assertion, practice inaction.
- Withhold judgement.
- Slow your tempo.
- Respond rather than react. Intensity and reactivity breed more of the same.
- Movement masks dukkha.
- Make time to reflect. Reflection is where we cement learning.
- Curb your ambition.
🏛️ Stoicism
- Turn towards feelings, especially uncomfortable ones.
- Recognise when you're on the Hedonic Treadmill.
- See the truth and act on it.
- Know well your own faults: "they're stating the obvious".
- If you want to make progress, don't mind appearing foolish.
- The consequences of our choices extend far and wide, in many directions.
- Beware escapism, it accrues interest.
- Beware desire, it destroys peace.
- Our emotions transform preferences into demands.
- It doesn't matter how many grips a wrestler knows, as long as they win.
- See difficulties as doorways to understanding.
- Not perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning actions with values.
- Take measured doses of discomfort to expand your comfort zone.
- Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
- Treat the events of life like trays of snacks at a party.
- We all have four heads: universal (shared human things), individual (personality, character, talents), chance (where and when we're born), choice (to act, or not to act).
- Memento mori. Remember that you will die.
- The unexamined life is not worth living.
- The trichotomy of control. Somethings are in your control, some aren't, and some you have influence over.
- The obstacle is the way.
- See setbacks as challenges to reduce the emotional cost and increase your chances of finding a workaround.
- Respond rather than react. Intensity and reactivity breed more of the same.
- Reframe. In time, in space.
- Recommit to valued action.
- Make time to reflect. Reflection is where we cement learning.
- Navigating and use the tides and currents, the growth and decay, of life. Don't fight against them.
- I have done this too.
- Have a Growth Mindset. See that setbacks are a chance to learn, that success comes from effort not innate skill.
- Give Benefits, freely and easily.
- Events don't harm you, your judgement and reaction to them does.
- Tough and trying times don't stop you from being a good person.
- Don’t add a story.
- Deface the currency.
- Daily Reflections. Look back and reflect to see where you want to do better.
- Contemplate the sage.
⏰ Waking-up
- There's no need to be so antagonistic towards the costume you're wearing.
- The wholeness of life is all there is.
- More "Is this a helpful strategy?" and less "Is this a final, fundamental, truth?"
- Life is something we are, not something we're trying to negotiate.
- Cause and effect is an infinite regression.
- Instead of "don't think about pink elephants", try "only think about pink elephants forever!"
- If you believe that you are in control of your thoughts, that you create them: trying stopping thinking!
- You are the principle victim of your delusions.
- You are the principal beneficiary of your practice.
- Desires only appear to contain imperatives.
- A willingness to begin again is the key to freedom.
- Life can't be other than it is.
- Consciousness is already at ease. No effort, no push or pull. No doer, no one.
- What will you say no to, even thought it's worth doing?
- There's no need to tie your self-worth to your To Do list.
- There's no need to start the day with productivity debt.
- Look for the dividing line between contents and context.
- A mirror only gives not-mirror. But it also only gives it in the mirror!
- Doing collapses all possible futures into a single concrete present.
- Renunciation, not action, is the path to liberation.
- Look for yourself, at zero distance.
- Respond in ways that open up choices.
- Recognise what's already there, not acquire something that's missing.
- Knowing, not the knower and the known.
- Focus on the space, not the objects in the space.
- Break the illusion of separateness of anything you can notice.
- The cramp of self-consciousness is the opposite of nondual feeling.
- The self is a stream of dependently arising processes interacting.
- Drop all your frames of reference.
- Look for the center of experience.
- Relinquish your reaction to experience, and simply notice it.
- Experience is renewing itself in every moment.
- If "I" am separate and free from my environment, how can I influence it and act on it?
- Free will is an illusion. Can you decide to decide?
- Consciousness is "What it is like to be something".
- Get past the conceptual overlay and just notice the raw data, direct experience.
- You can't use concepts to get beyond concepts.
- You don't have to fulfil a desire for it to pass away.
- You can't get there from here.
- This moment, as it is, is good enough.
- The self is causes, conditions, patterns.
- The feeling of self is what it feels like to be thinking without realising you're thinking.
- The contents of consciousness are a modification of consciousness.
- Subject and object are distinct, but not separate.
- Pay more attention.
- Look for what’s looking.
- Look for the edges.
- Look for the center of experience. It's not there.
- Leave everything as it is, in its place.
- Judging thoughts is just another thought.
- In terms of experience, there is only consciousness and its contents.
- In seeing, only the seen. There's no you.
- Impermanence. Everything and everyone changes, regardless of what we might think or want.
- Everything arises and passes away, all on its own.
- Consciousness is the prior condition of everything you experience.
- Concepts put imaginary fences around things.
- Begin Again, with with a fresh, open-hearted, perspective.
- Appreciate the sights you see from the train.
- Accept whatever arises.
- A person is different in different situations. A person changes over time.
Zen
- Play in nonduality: enjoying the activity for its own sake.