A Good Life

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get... See more

As J. Jennifer Matthews puts it, in her book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “we cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” to which you could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.” Spending your days trying to get... See more

Our tendency to try to escape from the universe to find a nirvana that’s sort of quiet and peaceful and apart from all this hullabaloo is undermined completely by the realization of the nature of reality. You realize that the wisdom of the nature of reality leads you into compassion for the beings who are here, and the little bit of bliss that you... See more

For over 99 percent of our species’ history we lived amidst scarcity. Thus you, dear reader, like me and everyone else, evolved to seek out high-reward, low-energy-needed-to-acquire goods. This strategy worked well for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, in modern times of abundance, it is backfiring. Like so many things, what works,... See more

I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched. I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation:

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Clichés are just a cynic's characterisation of timeless and essential wisdom.