dharma

During our meditative session, we need to give all our anxieties a chance to understand themselves, for three-quarters of our agitation is not that there are things to worry about, but that we haven’t given our worries the time they require to be understood and defused.

The walnut is extremely bad at understanding why it is having certain thoughts and ideas. It tends to attribute them to objective conditions out in the world, rather than seeing that they might be stemming from the impact of the body upon the mind. It doesn’t typically notice the role that levels of sleep, sugar, hormones and other physiological

We need to grip our anxieties head on and force ourselves to imagine what might happen if their vague catastrophic forebodings truly came to pass: what would happen to us if everything we are dimly worried about really came to pass? What are the real dangers? How might we still be OK, even if it all fell apart? Entertaining the most extreme

The outcome of any concerted attempt at self-knowledge could be presumed to be a deep understanding of ourselves. But strangely, the real outcome is rather different. It appears that the more closely we explore our minds, the more we start to see how many tricks these organs can play on us – and therefore the more we will appreciate how often we

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.

There are two types of cells in your eyes. The ones in the center are called cones, and the ones on the outside, which are more sensitive than the cones, are called rods. Peripheral perception comes from the rods. The rods are colorblind, but they can pick up the etheric.

So, one of the ideas to remember is that the need to feel secure is only a bad habit. You can feel secure even when you don’t know what will happen next. It’s only a custom of ego that requires you to “need to know.” You don’t! When you become more infinite in your perception, you become more open, and knowing what will happen next becomes less

Of course, the key to serenity is not necessarily in satisfying your ego’s preferences. Rather, it’s in reducing your preferences and absolutes.