Playing with Perspectives

[UnbornTao]

Don't blame your condition on newly invented causes. This is done to offload personal responsibility. The one experiencing your experience is you. Better not to wait around for someone else to resolve it for you.

There's a tendency of coming up with novel and fancy crises as of late. Many of them are not real but are narratives.

Edited March 10, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Is love a function of accepting what is?

When it comes to others, is it about accepting what they are wholesale?

[UnbornTao]

Social constructs.

Edited 6 hours ago by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

We’ve been addicted to pursuing both pleasure and distraction throughout our lives. Being by yourself, with no entertainment, tends to produce strong emotional reactions, as you’re confronted with your bare, mundane experience. We dislike the mundane.

As a culture, we tend to move in the opposite direction--acquiring new things, whether a possession, entertainment, relationship, and so on. We completely overlook our own experience, hoping to find something external that will improve it. Tacitly, we believe that a joyful experience can’t be gained from within, but must come from external factors. Why is there such a strong urge to avoid confronting one’s experience stripped of artifice? Why, for example, is meditation difficult to practice, or even resisted? Could it boil down to disliking one’s life and self as they are?

You might feel existentially lonely or uncover ignored pain, among other disagreeable things. Have a look.

Edited 13 hours ago by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Etymology of Cruel.

from Latin crudelis, from crudus:

1. marked by the primitive, gross, or elemental or by uncultivated simplicity or vulgarity
2. existing in a natural state and unaltered by cooking or processing
3. rough or inexpert in plan or execution
4. lacking a covering, glossing, or concealing element : OBVIOUS
5. tabulated without being broken down into classes
6. archaic : UNRIPE, IMMATURE

crude

noun

• a substance in its natural unprocessed state

---

Definitions number one, two and four are eye-opening, as well as the definition of crude.

Edited November 17, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Presuming that listening has occurred when it hasn't is a trap.

Edited March 10, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Your actions aren't caused by your way of being. Your way of being and your actions arise together. 

Edited December 19, 2023 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Quote

The masses have never thirsted after the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

— Gustave Le Bon

 

Quote

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

 

Edited 6 hours ago by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

What is shame?

[UnbornTao]

Whenever you are fully engaged in something, there's no resistance. This increases vitality.

[UnbornTao]

 

Edited 6 hours ago by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

While contemplating, answers are irrelevant; what we're after is insight.

People confuse similar expressions with shared experience – with the expression being sourced by the same experience or insight. However, parroting hearsay is in reality the popular approach.

I may share some profound axiom or truism such as "form is emptiness, emptiness is form", however, without the direct consciousness that sourced the creation of such communication in the first place, I might as well jerk off.

Are you communicating something real or passing down hearsay while trying to convince yourself of its validity? This is a subtle form of self-deception.

Make the work yours, that is, be the one in the driver's seat, generating insights independent of study, opinion and belief. This is the only way it's going to work.

Edited April 2, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

As a practice to start developing integrity, commit yourself to doing a relatively simple act habitually, something you'd ashamed not to do. For example, meditate everyday for 10 seconds.

With time, as you keep your word, your self-esteem is going to increase. As a result of you acting with integrity, your word will begin to have power, and you'll get to know yourself as a person that can be trusted. At that point, you'll have to be careful about what to commit yourself to, as whatever you give your word to, you are going to get it done.

Notice, too, the consequences of being out of integrity. You don't need to give your word; you can remain bound to your impulses, going after gratification and running away from pain and discomfort, although this will create a disempowering experience. Being out of integrity is "evidence" that you are someone that can't be trusted since everytime you give your word, you fail to be loyal to it, and you know it in your experience. Therefore, you don't trust yourself.

Whenever you give your word, even if casually, keep it. Otherwise, don't give it.

Edited March 20, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

A lot of intellectual content is likely conflated with genuine comprehension, especially when it comes to the nature of things themselves -- self, mind, emotions, existence, relationship, communication, perception -- whatever.

When you set aside the crap (everything that isn’t direct apprehension), what do you actually know -- within your experience or beyond it? What are you deeply conscious of -- truly and directly?

So, it is useful to be honest about that. 

Edited March 15 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

shit, this was heartbreaking. Watch the whole episode.

 

Edited May 12, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Deal with problems before they originate.

Where are your actions headed? What results are they creating for you? What results do you extrapolate your actions will produce in the long term?

Pay attention to where your actions are headed and change course immediately if necessary. Don't wait for potential issues to gain momentum. The stronger the inertia, the more discipline it'll take to shift direction.

Edited April 7, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Cultivate something consciously:

a skill, a hobby, a business, a relationship, a creative project, understanding some field, an optimist disposition, a contemplative attitude.

Edited March 19, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Is happiness circumstantially-derived?

Edited March 25, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Quote

To discover something for oneself is not a matter of stepping back to think about it, or figuring it out, or conceptualizing it, theorizing about it, or the like – it’s a matter of direct engagement with something. As we would say, "being out here" with it.

Getting clear about what something is may be a required step toward discovering it for oneself, but is not the state change that is discovering it for oneself.

It’s not a matter of stepping back to think about, figure out, conceptualize, theorize – it’s a matter of direct engagement with.

 

Quote

... among the worst things we can do is to give [students] the impression that they understand something they do not really understand, that something has been explained when it has not been explained, and that a problem has been solved when it has not been solved.

– John Searle

Edited March 6, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Quote

But now I realize that apart from a few special days now and then, life mostly does consist of one dull, insignificant day after another. Human beings are attracted to drama and variety. The humdrum we hold in disdain. Wrapped up in the routines of our daily lives, we let them slide by unnoticed. But I believe that hidden in these ordinary, unremarkable routines of life is a great truth that requires our attention.

The business of living is not in the least special. In a sense it all comes down to two things: eating and excreting. These activities are common to all life forms. Every creature on earth is born, through eating and excreting helps maintain the balance of the great chain of being, and dies. In the realm of nature, these activities are essential to the continuity of life, and they give value to each being’s life. People are no different. If human life has meaning, it lies above all in the essential fact of our physical existence in this world. This is what I strongly believe.

By contemplating life as it is, stripped of all extraneous added value, I found I could let go of a myriad of things that had been gnawing at my mind. Through the prosaic repetition of Eiheiji’s exacting daily routines for washing the face, eating, defecating, and sleeping, this is the answer that I felt in my bones: accept unconditionally the fact of your life and treasure each moment of each day.

— Kaoru Nonomura, Eat Sleep Sit.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by UnbornTao