On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

All quotes from Jeff's book

The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence is defined by intelligent behavior.

When you don't know how to proceed, often the best strategy is to make no changes

until your options become clear. 

All your brain knows is patterns.  Your perceptions and knowledge about the world are built from

these patterns. There's no light inside your head. It's dark in there.  There's no sound entering

your brain either.  It's quiet inside.  In fact, the brain is the only part of your body that has no senses

itself.  A surgeon could stick a finger into your brain and you wouldn't feel it.  All the information

that enters your mind comes in as spatial and temporal patterns on the axons.

Patterns are the fundamental currency of intelligence.

All our knowledge of the world is a model based on patterns.... There is no such thing as direct

perception.... The brain is in a dark quiet box with no knowledge of anything other than the

time-flowing patterns on its input fibers.  Your perception of the world is created from these

patterns, nothing else.

The brain does not "compute" the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory.

Thoughts and memories are associatively linked, and random thoughts never really occur.  Inputs

to the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in the present, and auto-associatively link

to what normally follows next.  We call this chain of memories thought.

Our brains use stored memories to constantly make predictions about everything we see, feel

and hear.

Your brain makes low-level sensory predictions about what it expects to see, hear, and feel at

every given moment, and it does so in parallel.  All regions of your neocortex are simultaneously

trying to predict what their next experience will be.

We like to say seeing is believing.  Yet we see what we expect to see as often as we see

what we really see.

If you spend some time observing yourself, you can begin to understand that your perception

of the world, your understanding of the world, is intimately tied to prediction.  Your brain has

made a model of the world and is constantly checking that model against reality. 

Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott

All quotes from Anne's book

There’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple.  Help. Thanks. Wow. 

Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy – all at the same time.  It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves.

Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. 

Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little. 

The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Often when we do not get our way, which I hate, hate, hate.  But in my saner moments I remember that if we did, usually we would shortchange ourselves.

Revelation is not for the faint at heart.

Without revelation and reframing, life can seem like an endless desert of danger with scratchy sand in your shoes, and yet if we remember or are reminded to pay attention, we find so many sources of hidden water, so many bits and chips and washes of color, in a weed or the gravel or a sunrise.  There are so many ways to sweep the sand off our feet.

God’s idea of a good time is to see us picking up litter.

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. 

If you want to know only what you already know, you’re dying.

When nothing new can get in, that’s death.

Life is motion, change, stagnation, bloom.

When all else fails, follow instructions.

The Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani

All quotes from Vishen's book

Have big goals but don’t tie your happiness to your goals.  You must be happy before you attain them.

In the present moment, you’re in the field of possibility.  How you engage with the present moment will direct your life.

We shouldn’t do things so we can be happy.  We should be happy so we can do things.

Good attitudes yield better results.

Holding onto grudges and anger is the single biggest factor suppressing alpha waves.

Everyone who has ever entered our lives, even those who have hurt us, are nothing more than messengers to teach us an important lesson.

Giving is a powerful system for bringing bliss into your life.

Be merciless with your kindness.

Create a new model of reality and think of family as those whom you truly love and want to spend time with.

Extraordinary minds create a vision for their future that is decidedly their own and free from expectations of the culturescape.  Their vision is focused on end goals that strike a direct chord with their happiness.

Some people think that being “spiritual” means having to be content with one’s current life.  Rubbish.  You should be happy no matter where you are.  But that shouldn’t stop you from dreaming, growing, and contributing.

Knowing what you want your life to look like three years from now, what do you need to do today to make this happen?

Happiness is hackable, and Blissipline is a beautiful discipline for leveling up your happiness every day and feeling limitless.

Can you see something if you don’t have a word for it?

Our beliefs about the world and our systems for functioning in the world are all embedded in us through the flow and progression of culture from the minds of the people around us into our baby brains.  But there’s just one problem.  Many of these beliefs and systems are dysfunctional, and while the intention is that these ideas should guide us, in reality they keep us locked into lives far more limited than what we’re truly capable of.

The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based.

Life has a way of taking care of you no matter how dark it can sometimes feel.

Place your happiness first, only when you’re happy can you truly give your best to others.

While your beliefs make you, your beliefs are not you.

When a belief no longer serves you, you have every right to swap it out.

Nobody taught us optimal ways to exercise, love, parent, eat, or ever to speed read or improve longevity.

What we see as our culture is really nothing more than a quirk of history.  It’s not necessarily right or wrong…. Our culture is the result of thousands of years of ideas emerging, clashing, and dissolving, battling for dominance.

Thanks to intuition, when you set end goals, you don’t necessarily need to know how to attain them.

When you know what you want to bring forth in the world and why you want it, choose it.  Then take whatever action intuition guides you toward taking.

With the right force, even entrenched childhood models of reality can be completely disrupted.

Extraordinary minds do not need to seek validation from outside opinion or through the attainment of goals.  Instead, they are truly at peace with themselves and the world around them.  They live fearlessly – immune to criticism or praise and fueled by their own inner happiness and self-love.

Failure is often nothing more than good luck in disguise.

You don’t have to save the world. Just don’t mess it up for the next generation.

When you create meaning around others’ actions or judge others who don’t provide what you need, chances are you’re really just compensating for a hole within yourself that they reminded you of.

We add meanings to every situation we see and then carry their meanings around as simplistic and often distorted and dangerous models of reality about our world.  We then act as if these models are laws.

There is nothing more attractive than a person who loves himself or herself so deeply that their energy and love spill over to others and to the world. 

Every time you give someone the power to build you up with praise, you’re also unknowingly giving the person the power to destroy you with criticism.

Why has to do with meaning, and meaning is always made up – a mental construct from the world of relative truth.

The problem with most people is that their problems aren’t big enough.

All of us have a child within who never received all the love and appreciation we deserved.  We can’t go back and fix the past.  But we can take responsibility to heal ourselves now by giving ourselves the love and appreciate we once craved.

Human beings can function as logical beings and as intuitive beings.  When we use both capabilities, we’re priming ourselves for extraordinary results.

Creative visualization is a practice of shifting beliefs by meditating and then visualizing your life as you want it to evolve.

Most of us are told to work hard.  Few of us are encouraged to work happy.

The best advice is often to listen to your heart and intuition.  Remember that our models of reality all have expiration dates.  Even what we take to be absolute truth today may not always be a truth in the future.

Stop adding meaning to events.  You will become less reactive to stress and less upset with others in your life.

A system for living is a repeated, optimized pattern for getting things done.  How we dress in the morning is a system.  How we get through our email is often a system.  Our work, our parenting, our exercise routine, how we make love and handle relationships, our methods for creativity – all often fall into specific systems for living.

I compare systems of living to the software the computers use to perform specific operations. They’re the things you do to function in the world, from the moment you wake up to your night time rituals.

Extraordinary people don’t just have extraordinary models of reality.  They strive to ensure that their systems for living – that is, doing what they do in the world – are well defined, structured, and continuously optimized.

Too many of us are so busy doing that we never step back and think about how we’re doing.  Or why we’re doing it.

Awareness is the essence of discovery. Every now and then, stop doing and gather some research.

Step back from what you’re doing and seek to discover new ways to do it better.

Things slip when we don’t have a detection method for knowing when it’s happening.

We’ve created a society where it’s considered normal to wake up with feelings of stress, anxiety, fear, and worry.  But it isn’t. These feelings aren’t meant to be constant states.  They’re alarm systems, evolved to alert us to things we need to deal with.

Stop postponing your happiness.   Be happy now:  your thoughts and beliefs do create your reality, but only when your present state is joyful. 

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

All quotes from T. Harv's book

Money is a result, wealth is a result, health is a result, illness is a result, your weight is a result.  We live in a world of cause and effect. 

Your programming leads to your thoughts; your thoughts lead to your feelings, your feelings lead to your actions, your actions lead to your results. 

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B Rosenberg

All quotes from Marshall's book

When we simply express our feelings, it may not be clear to the listener what we want them to do.

Respond to the needs of others out of compassion, never out of fear, guilt, or shame.

Taking responsibility for the feelings of others can be very detrimental to intimate relationships.  

The more directly we can connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond to us compassionately. 

Judgments of others are alienated expressions of our own unmet needs. 

Connect your feeling with your need:  “I feel… because I need…” 

What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause. 

The Gift of Yoga by Gena Kenny

All quotes from Gena's book

Yoga is a mindful approach to the body, breath, and mind. 

Yoga is about connection, receptivity, vulnerability and being present.

The goal of yoga is to join, balance and harmonize the body, mind and emotions. 

A Thousand Names for Joy by Byron Katie

All quotes from Byron's book

If a criticism hurts you, that means you’re defending against it. 

When you don’t believe your own thinking, life becomes effortless.

When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

You are the storyteller.  You have become the stories you told yourself.

Don’t be spiritual; be honest instead. 

To respect the way of it is to follow simple directions. 

If Our Bodies Could Talk by Dr. James Hamblin

All quotes from James' book

Ignorance is the product of active cultivation.  It spreads through marketing and through rumor. 

To allow ourselves to be challenged – to welcome it, and to seek it out – is to guard against the purposeful cultivation of ignorance. 

Sometimes the most interesting thing is knowing why we don’t know, and the point is in the considering, and being comfortable in not knowing. 

Health is a balance between acceptance and control. 

Preventable illness influences and is influenced by education, employment, the environment, and the economy. 

We rely too heavily on a mind-set where our system fixes problems, and not heavily enough on creating systems where these problems do not arise. 

Around 8% of our genes are not even human, but viral. We are born with viruses woven into our DNA, and we contain trillions of bacteria that are responsible for, among other things, the appearances of our faces, our body weights, and our state of mind. 

Our bodies are dynamic networks of genetic information shaped by experience, and microbes that change who we are in every moment. 

We weren’t made to do anything. Our bodies are collections of processes that exist as responses to other processes. 

Living Beautifully with Uncertainty & Change by Pema Chodron

All quotes from Pema's book

Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we're part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

We grab at pleasure and try to avoid pain.... Under the illusion that experiencing constant security and well-being is the ideal state, we do all sorts of things to try to achieve it. 

Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness.

To be in denial: you can't hear anything that doesn't fit into your fixed identity.  Even something positive -- you're kind or you did a great job or you have a wonderful sense of humor -- is filtered through this fixed identity.

The purpose of the spiritual path is to unmask, to take off our armor.  When that happens, it feels like a crisis because it is a crisis -- a fixed-identity crisis.

The real cause of suffering is not being able to tolerate uncertainty.

The fixed identity is our false security.  We maintain it by filtering all of our experience through this perspective. 

When we don't like someone -- they're not on our wavelength, so we don't want to hang out with them -- it's generally because they challenge our fixed identity.  We're uncomfortable in their presence because they don't confirm us in the ways we want to be confirmed, so we can't function in the ways we want to function.

The discomfort associated with groundlessness, with the fundamental ambiguity of being human, comes from our attachment to wanting things to be a certain way.

The suffering we experience with physical pain is entirely conceptual. It comes not from the sensation itself but from how we view it.

In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as kleshas -- conflicting emotions that cloud the mind.  The kleshas are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced.

We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation.

When you practice staying present, one thing you'll quickly discover is how persistent the story line is.

It isn't the content of our movie that needs our attention, it's the projector.  It isn't the current story line that's the root of our pain; it's our propensity to be bothered in the first place.

In not taking the old escape routes, we're predisposing ourselves to a new way of seeing ourselves.

You build your inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. 

It's a tricky business-- not rejecting any part of your self at the same time that you're becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are.

Lovingkindness for yourself does not mean making sure you're feeling good all the time-- trying to set up your life so that you're comfortable every moment.  Rather, it means setting up your life so that you have time for meditation and self-reflection for kindhearted, compassionate self-honesty.

If we don't act on our craving for pleasure or our fear of pain, we're left in the wide-open, unpredictable middle.  The instruction is to rest in that vulnerable place.

At some point, you'll hit a wall of truth and wonder what you've been doing with your life.

Each of us lives in a reality we take to be the real one. This is how it is, we insist.  End of story.

Tonglen is a practice for thinking bigger, for touching into our sameness with all beings. 

The path to unshakable well-being lies in being completely present and open to all sights, all sounds, all thoughts -- never withdrawing, never hiding, never needing to jazz them up or tone them down.

Each person's life is like a mandala -- a vast, limitless circle.  We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear, and think forms the mandala of our life.... Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening.  From this point of view, awakening is right at your fingertips continually.... It's up to you whether your life is a mandala of neurosis or a mandala of sanity.

Splendidness provides vision, and wretchedness grounds us.

If you can stay present in even the most challenging circumstances, the intensity of the situation will transform you.

Cultivating a Daily Meditation by The 14th Dalai Lama

All quotes from The 14thDalai Lama's book

The dreams that are important are not the ones we have just after falling asleep, but rather those experienced during the time of dawn. 

Ordinary people cannot remember past lives because the level of consciousness during the time of death, the interval state between the previous life and the next life, is most subtle.  The subtle level of mind on which those memories are based cannot communicate to our gross conscious mind.  A person who has some experience of utilizing deeper consciousness has a better chance to have clearer memories of past lives.

As the root cause of suffering can be purged or eliminated, suffering itself can be eliminated.  Basically the root cause is the delusions.  All these delusions are rooted in the self-grasping attitude. 

This table is devoid of elephant.  The mere absence of that thing, the elephant, is the same as the way in which reality is empty of inherent existence and also devoid of delusion. 

All phenomena exist in the condition called dependent arising.  When we try to discover their essence, we find only labels posited by conceptual thought, giving them their designations such as "book". Further, the consciousness which thus labels is dependent upon earlier and succeeding moments of consciousness, the beginning of which is nowhere to be found. 

All negative states of mind have their root in the self-grasping attitude, a mistaken consciousness which can be shown to be distorted. 

One can say that this table is non-inherently existent because it is existent, since it exists depending on other factors. The very fact of its existence proves its non-inherent existence. 

Bodhisattva practitioners should deliberately and actively live in situations where there is trouble, because they are chiefly working for the welfare of other sentient beings. 

We need a purpose in this life to give it meaning beyond feeding this suffering body. 

The only actual enemy is the self-grasping attitude and consequent distorted mind.  

When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

All quotes from Sue's book

It's always difficult and risky to try to put soulmaking into words. 

Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping -- they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. 

The fullness of one's soul evolves slowly.  We're asked to go within to gestate the newness God is trying to form; we're asked to collaborate with grace. 

Spirit needs a container to pour itself into.  Grace needs an arena in which to incarnate. Waiting can be such a place, if we allow it. 

Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work.  It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely.  It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and holding the courage to live that vision. 

Transformations come only as we go the long way round, only as we're willing to walk a different, longer, more arduous, more inward, more prayerful route. 

We think that the "real thing" is concentrated in the next moment, the next month, the next year.  We can go on and on, waiting for the next "happening" of life, hurrying toward it, trying to make it happen.  We live from peak event, from brightness to brightness, resisting the flat terrain of ordinary time -- the in-between time.  Waiting is the in-between time.  It calls us to be in this moment, this season, without leaning so far into the future that we tear our roots from the present. 

To create newness you have to cover the soul and let grace rise.  You must come to the place where there's nothing to do but brood, as God brooded over the deep, and pray and be still and trust that the holiness that ferments the galaxies is working in you too. 

Waiting is the yeasting of the human soul. 

The door of entry to the soul is prayer and reflection. 

Change begins with the recognition that we're not so much an "I" as a "they".  We may like to think that we're individuals living out our own unique truth, but more often we're scripts written collectively by society, family, church, job, friends, and traditions. 

The waiting process actually has three distinct phases that need to be maneuvered: separation, transformation, and emergence.  

Understand the source of the crisis.  There are three basics sources: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings.  

Developmental transitions are like the tapered neck of an hourglass -- difficult but necessary passages that we have to navigate in order to emerge into the next era of life.  

Intrusive events...impinge on us from without.  These crisis come in many forms and usually take us by surprise.  A death, an illness, an accident, a lost job, a broken relationship, an unwelcome move, a dashed dream, an empty rest, a betrayal. 

An internal uprising could be as simple as a vague sense of restlessness, some floating disenchantment, a whispering but relentless voice that says, There has to be more than this. ... Or the uprising may take the form of stress, burnout, a chronic sense of exhaustion, inner voices desperately trying to tell us something. 

While soulmaking can be fraught with tears, it doesn't require the abandonment of joy. 

Letting go isn't one step but many.  It's a winding, spiralling process that happens on deep levels and we must begin at the beginning: by confronting our ambivalence. 

There has to be a phase of active praying, hanging on, turning loose, sweating, trying, and trying again. 

The opposite of courage isn't only fear but security. 

Where there's no risk, there's no becoming; and where there's no becoming, there's no real life. 

In ways large and small we must cooperate with the inevitability of change. 

Aligning ourselves -- heart, body, mind, and spirit -- into unique positions of stillness creates the special environment we need. 

Everything incubates in darkness. 

We're containers filled with an ego elixir we've brewed ourselves. 

Our wounds become the womb. 

When we enter the crucible of darkness and bring the painful tensions of our lives together to simmer creatively, a threshold level is eventually reached in which healing, "knowing", strength -- a new synthesis of being -- takes place. 

Spiritual experiences aren't meant to be homogeneous, only harmonious -- not in unison, but in unity.

Religion is not to be believed, but danced. 

The words nowhere and now here have the same arrangement of letters; the letters are merely separated by a small space in the latter.  Likewise, a fine space separates us from experiencing life as nowhere or now here. 

Time isn't a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell. 

Many times we starve our souls, although we wouldn't dream of starving our bodies. 

When I fail to feed my soul, I soon notice that I have less strength for living authentically.  At time  my energy becomes depleted.  Weakened, I'm more apt to revert to old patterns.