Water, Meditiating, Strength, Truth and Happiness

"Be gentle with yourself. You are the truth unfolding."
- Joseph Goldstein

In this world there is nothing softer or thinner than water.
But to compel the hard and unyielding it has no equal.
That the weak overcomes the strong,
That the hard gives way to the gentle –
This everyone knows, yet no one acts accordingly.
- Lao-Tse

"The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is look under foot. You are always nearer the divine and true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world." ~ John Burroughs

He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger
~ Japanese wisdom

1. Just watch everything happen. This is the same thing as surrendering.

2. The reason you can't do it is because you're afraid of your own mind.

3. To do it, you have to stop the continuous squinching that makes you you.

4. The self that gets lost in thoughts is also a thought.

5. Everything of which you can be aware is a mental event, including the "me" who thinks it's aware.

6. That "me" is the thought that Ramana Maharshi says is last to go, his "I-thought." His method aims at suffocating that thought by placing all attention on it.

7. One of thinking's main purposes is to say "this really exists" and "that does not," but this distinction isn't useful for meditation.

8. Forget about the nature of reality. This is about phenomenology.

9. Watching takes the fun out of thoughts. The pain, too.

10. All thinking is motivated by an intention (intention is not quite the right word, but the proper word does not exist) to excite a feeling.

11. Nothing you think can make you happy for very long.

12. Being lost in thoughts is a form of masturbation.

13. This instruction sums it up: don't daydream. Or does it?

14. And this one too: be aware. But it makes a difference whether you are aware of something or of anything.

15. You can play a lot of games with meditation that are pure wastes of time.

16. Gurdjieff's self-remembering is the same thing as Theravada's mindfulness.

17. Minds are incredibly prone to travel in ruts.

18. The reason we have to do this stuff -- seek relief from unhappiness, meditate, get enlightened -- is that nature designed our minds for brains that were much less intelligent than the ones we have.

19. Small children hum like cats when they eat. The memory is worth recovering.

~Freddie Yam - What I've Learned from Meditating

He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger

-Japanese wisdom

The greatest revelation is stillness.
~ Lao-Tse