Getting Rid of What You Haven't Got by Swami Muktananda

The most important question raised in Vedantic philosophy is this: Can you attain what you haven't attained, or do you attain what you already have? If you are going to get something which you didn't have before, what good is it?  Since you didn't have it before and get it now, there is every possibility that you'll lose it some time.  And the question of getting what you already have is ridiculous, isn't it?  The truth is that we get what we have already got, not what we haven't got.  We get rid of what is not -- what we don't have -- not what we have.  This is Vedantic philosophy in its subtle and highest form.

In Vedantic philosophy there is nothing to be done; the only important thing is understanding.  Through understanding comes liberation.

Mantra is maheshwara.  Maheshwara is the great Lord, the supreme Lord, the inner self, the all-pervasive being.

If you are on the spiritual path, you must keep your eyes open.  You must be very careful, very alert, about where you are going and what you are doing.

You should remember that it is not easy to be born in human form.

One should suffer the past consequences of his past actions cheerfully.  You are where you are because of certain actions of yours, and you should bear the consequences cheerfully, by devoting your time to chanting the divine name and meditating.

Departure from the body is an extremely subtle phenomena which is very difficult to see.

Eight Movements to Make the Tendons and Muscles Supple, Strengthen the Bones: Shu Jin Zhuang Gu Gong, 1st Form by Professor Zhang Guangde

In the legends of China, the dragon is an immortal animal with a sweet and benevolent nature.  The four most wonderful animals are considered to be the dragon, the phoenix, the turtle and the unicorn. 

Consciousness comes, then Qi arrives; Qi arrives, then the blood circulates.

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock

Your prefrontal cortex is the biological seat of your consciousness interactions with the world. It’s the part of your brain central to thinking things through, instead of being on “autopilot” as you go about your life.

Five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought. These functions are recombined for plan, problem-solve, communicate, and other tasks.

Prioritize prioritizing, as its an energy-intensive activity.

Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.

It’s hard to think about new ideas unless they connect to existing ideas.

If accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.

Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep.

Each time you inhibit something, your ability to inhibit again is reduced.

Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while in creating anxiety decrease the likelihood of insight. This relates to your ability to perceive subtle signals. When you are anxious, there is greater baseline activation and more overall electrical activity, which makes it harder for you to perceive subtle signals. There’s too much noise for you to hear well.

An insight is a moment when things change.

It’s astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem.

Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind.

Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are.

Becoming self-aware, having a meta-perspective on ourselves, is really like interacting with another person. Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult.

Without [self-awareness] you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.

Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world.  You also become less imprisoned by your past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.

The more you notice your own experience, whether it’s the small capacity of the stage, the dopamine high of novelty, or the way you need a moment to gather an insight, the more opportunities you have to become mindful, stop, and observe.

Your ability to regulate your emotions instead of being at the mercy of them is central to being effective in a chaotic world.

Emotions such as curiosity, happiness, and contentment are toward responses. Anxiety, sadness, and fear, on the other hand, are away responses.

Power, to me, is first and foremost the capacity to make things happen. It is the active form of love, the quality which shapes forms out of formlessness.

Responsibility means an ability to respond.

One of the reasons why change is so hard: doing things differently can bring about a negative spiral that can feel overwhelming. 

Watch for a feeling of reduced autonomy creating a sense of threat; practice knowing this.

An expectation is an unusual construct, as its not an actual reward, but rather a feeling of a possible reward.

Expectations alter the data your brain perceives.

Fairness is a big driver of behavior, more than most people expect.

Giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change. While there are many "techniques" to improve the performance of feedback, people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong threat for people in most situations.

Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new.

A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust And Denial In The Americas 1492 To The Present by Ward Churchill

The Third Reich was, after all, never so much a deviation from as it was a crystallization of the dominant themes – racial supremacism, conquest, and genocide --- of the European culture Columbus so ably exemplifies.  Nazism was never unique; it was instead only one of an endless succession of “New World Orders” set in motion by “The Discovery”.

In the United States, the native population bottomed out during the 1890s at slightly over 237,000 --- a 98% reduction from its original size.

As long as there appeared to be an unending supply of brute labor it was cheaper to work an Indian to death, and replace him or her with another native, than it was to feed and care for either of them properly.

When the Indians grew exhausted, they cut off their heads without untying them from their chains, leaving the roads full of bodies.

The answer to the oft-posed question as to why, given their preponderant military advantage in the early years of Jamestown and Plymouth, that native peoples in each area didn’t simply annihilate the invaders, is thus rather straight forward: it didn’t and couldn’t occur to them.  Put simply, neither the Tsenacommacahs nor the Pequots, the Narragansetts, the Wampanoags nor any other known pre-invasion Indigenous people pursued warfare by way of killing their opponents’ women, children, and elders.  Indeed, the terms of native warfare didn’t emphasize killing at all.

John Underhill wrote of the Pequots that wars were more for pastime than to conquer and subdue their enemies, and Henry Spelman, who lived among the Powhatans, said that “they might fight 7 yeares and not kill 7 men”.

Contrary to Hollywood’s history book, it was the white man who created the tradition of scalping as we know it today. … The English purpose in taking heads was not only to terrorize the populace. It also served to confirm the count of enemy killed, first in Ireland, then in New England.

Overwhelmed by the sheer viciousness of the European/Euroamerican drive to extermination, and thus confronted with what Tzvetan Todorov has called “facing the extreme”, many – but not all—of North America’s indigenous peoples internalized much of their exterminators’ bloodlust, engaging in large scale killing, scalping, and mutilating in a bitterly desperate effort to forestall their own looming eradication.  The dynamic of death imposed upon them left no viable alternative in most cases.

By 1894, virtually the entire range of indigenous spiritual practise had been outlawed, a measure expressly intended to eradicate all vestiges of the traditions which afforded cohesion and continuity to native cultures.  Meanwhile, the bulk of all American Indian children were forcibly removed from their communities at the earliest possible age and sent to remote boarding schools where they were systematically decultured.

Alcohol, consciously used by Europeans/Euroamericans since colonial times as a sort of “chemical weapon” to dissipate indigenous societies.

The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, both in terms of its magnitude and the degree to which its goals were met, and in terms of the extent to which its ferocity was sustained over time by not one but several participating groups.

All told, it is probable that more than 100 million native people were “eliminated” in the course of Europe’s ongoing “civilization” of the western hemisphere.

Las Casas’ Brevisima relación, among other contemporaneous sources, is also replete with accounts of Spanish colonists (hidalgo) hanging [Haiti and Dominican Republic] Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and so forth, all of it to instill in the natives a “proper attitude of respect” toward their Spanish “superiors”. 

We hear only of “Indian wars”, never of “settlers’ wars”.  It is as if the natives, always “warlike” and “aggressive”, had invaded and laid waste to London or Castile, rather than engaging in desperate and always futile efforts to repel the hordes of “pioneers” and “peaceful settlers” overrunning their homelands.

The Heart of the Buddha by Chӧgyam Rinpoche Trungpa

Egolessness means less "maniac-ness", in some sense --- free form being an egomaniac.

Real peace is nonaction; that is the source of all action.  We have to learn how to be a rock in order to be a tree or a flower or wind or lightning or a typhoon.  We have to be still, then we go beyond that.  Therefore sitting practice is very important.

Vipashyana begins once we have developed substantial shamatha discipline of being precise and mindful, on the spot, all the time.  In shamatha, sound, smell, feeling, thought process, and everything else are looked at, but with such precision that they are nothing other than stillness.

Usually, memory is predominant in everything you experience…. Through shamatha you are capable of looking at these experiences as individual entities, without referring to the past and without thinking about where they are going, or what they are going to do to you.  Everything is without beginning and without end, just on the spot. 

People have difficulty beginning a spiritual practice because they put a lot of energy into looking for the best and easiest way to get into it.

The survival struggle is regarded as a steppingstone in the practice of meditation.  Whenever you have the sense of the survival instinct functioning, that can be transmuted into a sense of being, a sense of having already survived.

When we encounter anything, the first flash that takes place is the bare sense of duality, of separateness.  On that basis, we begin to evaluate, pick and choose, and make decisions, execute our will.  The abstract watcher is just the basic sense of separateness -- the plain cognition of being there before any of the rest develops.

Mindfulness of body creates the general setting; it brings meditation into the psychosomatic setup of one's life.  Mindfulness of life makes meditation practice personal and intimate. Mindfulness of effort makes meditation workable; it connects the foundations of mindfulness to the path, to the spiritual journey. 

Real bare attention is being there all at once.

Mindfulness is the act as well as the experience, happening at the same time.

Mind only functions in relation to a reference point.

Mind is very simple perception:  it can only survive on "other".

Mind cannot exist without the projection of a relative reference point; on the other hand, mind also cannot exist if it is too crowded with projections.  That way it also loses its reference point.

There is another level of experience which still has a reference point, but it is a reference point without demand, a reference point that does not need further reference points.  This is called nonduality.  This does not mean to say that you dissolve into the world or the world becomes you.  It's not a question of oneness but rather a question of zeroness. 

The truth has never come from the sky; it has always come from the human condition. 

Working with the world requires some kind of practical intelligence.  We cannot just be "love-and-light" bodhisattvas.  If we do not work intelligently with sentient beings, quite possibly our help will become addictive rather than beneficial.

Compassion is the heart of the practice of meditation-in-action, or bodhisattva activity.  It happens as a sudden glimpse -- simultaneous awareness and warmth.  Looking at it fully, it is a threefold process: a sense of warmth in oneself, a sense of seeing through confusion, and a sense of openness.  But this process happens very abruptly.

Kalpa means "a historical era".  The "kalpa-ending fire" in Indian mythology is an explosion of the sun, which burns up the solar system and brings an end to the kalpa.

The "charnel ground" refers to the basic space in which birth and death, confusion and wakefulness arise -- the ground of coemergence.

To experience mahamudra is to realize that the literal truth, the symbolic truth, and the absolute truth are actually one thing, that they take place on one dot, one spot.

The bliss of mahamudra is not so much great pleasure, but it is the experience of tremendous spaciousness, freedom from imprisonment, which come from seeing through the duality of existence and realizing that the essence of space, is available on this very spot… This type of joy is not conditioned by even the experience of freedom itself; it is self-born, innate.

Any real healing has to come out of some kind of psychological openness.  There are constant opportunities for such openness -- constant gaps in our conceptual and physical structures.

Openness seems to be the only key to healing.  And openness means we are willing to acknowledge that we are worthy; we have some kind of ground to relate with whatever is happening to us.

The role of the healer is not just to cure the disease; it is to cut through the tendency to see disease as an external threat.

It is not the sickness that is the big problem, but the psychological state behind it.  We could not have gotten sick in the first place without some kind of loss of interest and attention.  Whether we were run down by a car or we caught a cold, there was some gap in which we did not take care of ourselves -- an empty moment in which we ceased to relate to things properly.

It seems that we generally avoid our psychological responsibility, as though diseases were external events imposing themselves upon us…. Our bodies demand our attention; our bodies demand that we actually pay attention to what is going on with our lives.  Illness brings us down to earth, making things seem much more direct and immediate.

Disease is a direct message to develop a proper attitude of mindfulness.

Human essence is compassion and wisdom…. You have it already.  It has nothing to do with mystical experience or any kind of higher spiritual ecstasy; it is just the basic working situation.

To be healed, ironically, means that a person is no longer embarrassed by life; she is able to face death without resentment or expectation.

Fearless willingness to be intelligent about what is happening in the face of the unknown is the very energy of transmutation.

You should sit more.  That is the whole idea.  Particularly when you feel depressed or when you are too excited, you should sit more, because then you have something to work with. 

Joy means that our perception of the world can be clarified. 

Woman Code: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive, and Become a Power Source by Alisa Vitti

Your lymphatic system is a super highway for clearing away any cellular waste from your bloodstream.

More women die from heart disease than the next four causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer.

How does a person become more sensitive? Self-awareness is 90 percent of the battle.

Living in the Face of Death: Advice from the Tibetan Masters by Glenn Mullin

The content of one’s mind at the moment of death is said to be of extreme importance in determining one’s next rebirth. 

Awakening from a dream is like rebirth.  Our dream body dies and we arise in a different form than we had conceived of only moments before in our dream.

Our life has no fixed or specific limit in the sense that we are not preordained from birth to die at some destined moment.  Rather, it is more a case of having certain danger points in our lives.

At every moment we have the choice of action, and as such have the ability to mold our future. The principles of karma are negative when we do not apply self-control, and when we live cruel, harmful lives.

The Little Book of Letting Go: A Revolutionary 30-Day Program to Cleanse Your Mind, Lift Your Spirit, and Replenish Your Soul by Hugh Prather

A mind that learns to let go gradually returns to its inherent wholeness, happiness, and simplicity.

Our lives are filled with useless battles because our minds are filled with useless thoughts.  We never finish thinking about anything.

If it were possible to summarize all mystical teachings in a single sentence, this one would come close: Make your state of mind more important than what you are doing.

Whenever our desire is for people to change or circumstances to go our way, we are not taking responsibility for our state of mind.  Because now all we can do is be a victim and wait to be saved.

Problems assault us to the degree they preoccupy us.  The key to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of external difficulties.  It is letting go of our pattern of reactions to those difficulties.

We only need to be as we were created -- effortless, present, and free.

Anxiety produces chemical changes that the body grows used to, and addiction to anxiety in its various manifestations is perhaps the most common of all addictions.

Emotions don't arrive from nowhere.  They fall and rise on the waves of our thoughts.

As a general rule, humans become more inflexible, fearful, and irritable the older they get.

If nothing else, age brings experience.  So why does it also bring increased stubbornness, ill humor, impatience, and misery?  Because we totally neglect our minds.  We start out with sparkling new minds, and we do absolutely nothing to keep them that way.

"Do no more harm" is always the first step.

Question the practicality of indulging in thoughts of guilt, remorse, and regret over the mistakes you have made.  These thoughts are a form of self-indulgence.  You are failing to take responsibility for your state of mind, because your state of mind is still not being used to heal damage.  Look carefully at your thoughts, and you will see that they are all about you and not actually about the one you think you mistreated.

Guilty and remorseful thoughts do not help, heal, or comfort the person you think you have hurt.

Emotions have become our new inner self, taking the place once occupied by the soul, the spirit, or the conscience…. Look at the dilemma we have gotten ourselves into by deciding that our emotions are our truest self.  How can we be ourself if our self if changing ever few minutes, as emotions invariably do?

Awakening is not dying, or going somewhere else, or attaining an exalted spiritual state. When the presence of the Divine is more dominant in our experience than the presence of chaos, we are awake.  For most of us, this is a gradual process.  As we increasingly think and act from the part of us that is still, gentle, and deeply connected to all things, it is as if this part expands.  Our thoughts are more natural, our perceptions more comforting, our actions less jolting to ourselves and others, and we feel and become increasingly real. 

Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett

Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.

We create transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient people.

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet.

People who have turned the world on its axis across history have called humanity to love.

Love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private good.

We are made by what would break us.

Human beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into being.

Tolerance doesn’t welcome.  It allows, endures, indulges.

Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control.  It doesn’t ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other.

What you see in the past is dependent on what you are able to see now.

Convenience is an illusion, merely shifting the burden of process and consequences.

We need our bodies to claim our souls.

Whether we know it or not, we’re spending our whole lives preparing for our death.

If God is God--- and that in itself is a crazy shorthand, begging volumes of unfolding of the question – he/she does not need us craven.  He/she desires us, needs us, grateful and attentive and courageous in the everyday.

Spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit.  It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure.  But it is in the end about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included.

We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color or hometown. But the very fluidity of this – the possibility of choice that arises, the ability to craft and discern one’s own spiritual bearings – is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but its revival.  It is changing us, collectively.

Fear comes out in public looking like anger, when it comes to nations as well as individuals.

The human participant is always a participant, never merely an observer.  Somehow our subjectivity, our presence, our wills matter cosmically, whether we want them to or not.

Love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover – adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential.

The idea that God is love has nothing to do with beliefs or transcendence and everything to do with actions and people.

Spirituality is water, and religion is the cup which carries it forward in time.

In science, light can be a particle or a wave, depending on what question you ask of it.  Its kind of a way of demonstrating something we all experience, that contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory.  It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope.

Reality is a both/and.

The internet is in its infancy.  It is at a fundamental level a new canvas for the old human condition, salvation and sin, at digital speed and with viral replication.  It is a magnifying glass on every human inclination, beautiful and terrible, trivial and mean, generous and curious.

Our world is abundant with quiet, hidden lives in beauty and courage and goodness.  There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all.  To take such goodness in and let it matter – to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence – is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness.

Dodging Energy Vampires: An Empath's Guide to Evading Relationships that Drain You and Restoring Your Health and Power by Dr Christiane Northrup

Pain comes to the surface when you have a strong enough ego and enough maturity to handle it.

The natural tendency of an empath is to want to uplift situations.

We give what we desperately want to receive.

Mistletoe grows within the vascular system of a tree and extracts nutrients and water from that tree for survival.

Women in their 70s who consistently try new things -- like dancing or taking up new physical activities or learning a language -- have brains that are nearly as sharp as the brain of a 20-year-old.

Love is toxic to a toxic person.

Anger is simply a sign that a need isn't being fulfilled.

In order to heal your heart and shed the illusion that you're not worthy, you need to tap into your emotions.

We keep repeating patterns from our childhood until we've brought love and understanding to that child.

Anxiety, painful sensitivity, and even addictions come from denying the truth of who we are in order to feel loved and safe.

Emotions -- such as righteous anger -- are not just pesky problems to overcome; they are signals from your body regarding your needs.  If these emotions are not heeded -- both in their expression and in action taken because of them -- then they will change the course of your life.

90 percent of our thoughts stem from our subconscious mind and childhood or past-life programming.  And the vast majority of those thoughts are negative.

Expanding the lower ribcage is associated with stimulating the vagus nerve as it runs through your diaphragm.  This is the main nerve of the parasympathetic "rest and restore" or "rest and digest" part of the nervous system.

The Teaching of Buddha by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai

One must remove resentment when he is feeling resentful; one must remove sorrow while he is in the midst of sorrow; one must remove greediness while he is steeped in greed.  To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.

Buddha has a three-fold body. There is an aspect of essence or dharma-kaya; there is an aspect of potentiality or sambhoga-kaya; and there is an aspect of manifestation or nirmana-kaya.

New Aging: Live Smarter Now to Live Better Forever by Matthias Hollwich

Live smarter now to live better forever.

The 5th Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz and Janet Mills

Do you still blame your parents for your troubles? Remember, they did the best they could.  If your parents abused you, it wasn’t personal.  It was due to their own fears, it was due to what they believed. If they abused it, it’s because they were also abused.  If they hurt you, it’s because they were also hurt.  It’s an ongoing chain of action-reaction.  Are you going to continue being a part of that chain, or is it over with you?

From the moment you are born, you deliver a message to the world … the message is you, the child. It’s the presence of an angel, a messenger from the infinite in a human body.

Every cell in your body is a universe on its own.  It’s intelligent, it’s complete, and it’s programmed to be whatever it is.  You are programmed to be you, whatever you are, and it makes no difference to the program what your mind thinks you are.

In human domestication, all the rules and values of our family and society are imposed on us.  We don’t have the opportunity to choose our beliefs…. The people we live with tell us their opinions.

 The truth is that all of the knowledge, 100% of it, is nothing more than symbolism or words that we invent for the need to understand and express what we perceive.

Humans are born with awareness; we are born to perceive the truth, but we accumulate knowledge, and learn to deny what we perceive.  We practice not being aware, and we master not being aware.  The word is pure magic, and we learn to use our magic against ourselves, against creation, against our own kind.  To be aware means to open our eyes to see the truth.  When we see the truth, we see everything just as it is, not the way we believe it is, not the way we wish it to be.  Awareness opens the door to millions of possibilities, and if we know that we are the artist of our own life, we can make a choice from all those possibilities.

When we master love, intent, or faith, we master the dream of our life, and when all three masteries are accomplished, we reclaim our divinity.

The mastery of the human mind requires complete control of the attention --- the way we interpret and react to info we perceive from inside of us and outside of us.

Don’t believe everything you learned! Not believing yourself is a huge advantage, because most of what you learned is not the truth.

Self-mastery is all about awareness, and it begins with self-awareness.  First is to be aware of what is real, and then to be aware of what is virtual, which means what we believe about what is real.  With this awareness, we know that we can change what is virtual by changing what we believe.  What is real we cannot change, and it doesn’t matter what we believe.

Nobody judges you more than you judge yourself.

Humans are born with the power of creation, and we are constantly creating stories.

 How can we talk about injustice in the rest of the world when there is no justice in the world inside our own head?

You were programmed to deliver a message, and the creation of the message is your greatest art.  What is the message?  Your life.  With the message, you create mainly the story of you, and then a story about everything you perceive.  You create an entire virtual reality in your mind, and you live out that reality.

The action is self-judgment, the reaction is self-punishment in the form of guilt and shame.

Be skeptical, but learn to listen.  Be skeptical because most of what you hear isn’t true.

Whenever you hear a message from yourself, or from another artist, simply ask: is it truth, or is it not truth? Is it reality or is it virtual reality?

The complete acceptance of whatever you are is what makes the difference.

When all of your attention is not on your story, you can see what is real; you can feel what is real.

If you don’t see God everywhere, its because your attention is focused on all those Gods you really believe in.

Being has nothing to do with knowledge.

You’ll know that you are totally free when you no longer have to be the you that you pretend to be.

When you accept your own divinity, you become a better reflection of life.  You are here to enjoy life.  You aren’t here to suffer over your drama or your personal importance.

Just because you have awareness, it doesn’t mean that you are better than anyone else.  Being aware doesn’t make you superior, and it doesn’t make you more intelligent.

The process of unlearning takes you to a place where there’s no longer a judge and a victim in your story.  It’s just a story, and you know that it’s your creation, but it’s just as if it’s happening to somebody else.

Respect is about the complete acceptance of everything that exists just the way it is, not the way we want it to be.

In every moment, you make the choice of what you want to keep, and what you want to let go of.  But not with words.  You don’t need to make a story, but you can if you want to.