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January 8 - January 12, 2019
You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
He decided to be a good person, and then did the impossible things required to live that way.
pay it forward.
Then he asked himself the most difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? If so, how?
He took himself apart, piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself.
Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you?
Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.
So, simply stop, when you apprehend, however dimly, that you should stop.
Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility.
Life is suffering.
And the first of the 4 Noble Truths
What in the world should be done about that?
Or is there an alternative, more powerful and more compelling?
We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing.
After much contemplation, struggling humanity learns that God’s favour could be gained, and his wrath averted, through proper sacrifice—and, also, that bloody murder might be motivated among those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner.
Long ago, in the dim mists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. We learned that behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist.
the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract—the
Here’s a productive symbolic idea: the future is a judgmental father.
The realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned on us with great difficulty.
And, at this point of abstraction, we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions reliable, honest and generous has been laid.
productive, truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen, and the good man.
We thought it over, and drew a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.
internal spirit,
his absolute willingness to listen to its warnings—to stop speaking and cease acting when it objected.
If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short-sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death.
Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.
We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t.
An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now.
This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present.
“If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.”
Like Descartes, I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that led me to it.
What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments.
The good is whatever stops such things from happening.
Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t
to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.
Actively or just not consciously?
Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term
gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way.
Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world.
Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.
once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy,
Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.
To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.
Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment. What
is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being.
soon divided myself into two parts: one that spoke, and one, more detached, that paid attention and judged.
I soon came to realize that almost everything I said was untrue.
Realizing this, I started to practise only saying things that the internal voice would not object to.
What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
It’s what everyone does when they want something, and decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter. It’s scheming and sloganeering and propaganda. To conduct life like this is to become possessed by some ill-formed desire, and then to craft speech and action in a manner that appears likely, rationally, to bring about that end.
