Mindfulness & Wisdom

humans are able to arbitrarily relate objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings, behavioral predispositions, actions (basically anything) to other objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings (basically anything else) in virtually any possible way (e.g., same as, similar to, better than, opposite of, part of, cause of, and so on).

If as a child you were unable to internalize a deep sense of love and security, you might now carry a persistent feeling of being not good enough – that you are somehow disgusting, ugly, stupid or flawed. This may involve internal thoughts such as, ‘Nothing I do is good enough’, ‘There is something fundamentally wrong with me’, or even ‘I am bad

When you turn away from feeling bad emotions, you turn away from feeling good emotions too. You may become an observer of life, watching it go by without being ‘in’ it. Some people may even experience memory loss, as they do not remember much of their life – even looking at old pictures of themselves can seem surreal. Life’s pain may seem dampened,

David Foster Wallace: "there's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred"

We pay the high price of our own emotional freedom when we allow ourselves to be stranded by others’ temperaments and actions.

Peter Cundill on the power of perspective:

“I think it may be easier to see solutions if you can distinguish between context and content. If you can place a problem within the framework of the larger universe its dimensions are put into perspective and automatically diminished.”

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,—under all