Wisdom Journal
Awareness
"The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state …The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things …It’s an out-of-control madperson. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation …Awareness alone calms you down."
- Naval Ravikant
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From The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer:
"You think that if you change things outside, you'll be Ok. But nobody has ever become truly Ok by changing things outside. There's always the next problem. The only real solution is to take the seat of witness consciousness and completely change your frame of reference. To attain true inner freedom you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them.”
On freedom from the neurotic mind:
"The key is to be quiet. It’s not that your mind has to be quiet. You be quiet. You, the one inside watching the neurotic mind, just relax. You will then naturally fall behind the mind because you have always been there. You are not the thinking mind; you are aware of the thinking mind. You are the consciousness that is behind the mind and is aware of the thoughts ...Eventually, you will be able to just sit in there quietly, and consciously watch the mind.
Once you reach that state, your problems with the mind are over."
On the comfort zone:
"So there are two ways you can live: you can devote your life to staying in your comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom. In other words, you can devote your whole life to the process of making sure everything fits within your limited model, or you can devote your life to freeing yourself from the limits of your model."
"Would you like to go beyond? Would you like to feel no edges? Imagine a comfort zone that is so expanded that it can easily fit the entire day, no matter what happens. The day unfolds and the mind doesn’t say anything. You simply interact with the day with a peaceful, fully inspired heart. If your edges happen to get hit, the mind doesn’t complain. It all just passes through. This is how great beings live. When you are trained, like a great athlete, to immediately relax through your edges when they get hit, then it’s all over. You realize that you will always be fine. Nothing can ever bother you except your edges, and now you know what to do with them. You end up loving your edges because they point your way to freedom. All you have to do is constantly relax and lean into them."
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Anthony de Mello:
The path to happiness, love, and freedom is through awareness and non judgemental observation of all the comes up as we go through life - and letting go of attachments.
“Attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.”
“An attachment isn’t a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy in your head, acquired through [society] programming. If that fantasy did not exist inside your head, you would not be attached. You would love things and persons and you would enjoy them thoroughly but, lacking the belief, you would enjoy them on a nonattachment basis.”
“Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way.”
“Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.”
“You falsely think that your fears protect you, your beliefs have made you what you are and your attachments make your life exciting and secure. You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life’s symphony.“
“The problem lies not with reality outside of you but with you, in your programming.”
On truth:
"...it really doesn’t matter whether you agree with what I’m saying or you don’t. Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude. So you could be disagreeing with me and still sight the truth. But there has to be an attitude of openness, of willingness to discover something new. That’s important, not your agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. After all, most of what I’m giving you is really theories. No theory adequately covers reality. So I can speak to you, not of the truth, but of obstacles to the truth. Those I can describe. I cannot describe the truth. No one can.
All I can do is give you a description of your falsehoods, so that you can drop them. All I can do for you is challenge your beliefs and the belief system that makes you unhappy. All I can do for you is help you to unlearn.”