Tag Archives: Wisdom

10 Great Quotes from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran

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10.) “But let there be spaces in your togetherness.

“And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”

-on Marriage

 

9.) “He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.”

-on Religion

 

8.) “And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.”
-on Pain

 

7.) “What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things?

“What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin and calls all others naked and shameless?”

-on Laws

 

6.) “If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

-on Teaching

 

5.) “For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive.”

-on Prayer

 

4.) “And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.”

-on Freedom

 

3.) “For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?”

-on Giving

 

2.) “Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in the twilight between the night of his pygmy self and the day of his god self.”

-on Crime and Punishment

 

1.) “Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.”

-on Houses

POEM: Little Wisdom

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There’s so little that I know.
Banal advice: “Don’t tell, show!”

But I’ve learned a thing or two worth learning.
Enough to feel the warmth of a dream burning.

Feel grateful more often than superior.
Feel contented more often than inferior.

Mother nature offers no free rides.
You won’t find your line by riding tides.

I’m not the best. I’m not the worst.
Though I’ve been loved, loathed, cradled, and cursed.
And known hunger, and burned with thirst.

Foot to fire, you’ll find fear a liar.
It steals will as life’s great briar.

Creature comfort is overrated.
It casts away the moment sated.

Feeling you have the right to live as me.
Is not a laudable love of the free.
It’s just personal pan tyranny.

5 Insightful Sentences from Literature

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It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. 

Philip K. Dick in VALIS

 

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

John Steinbeck in East of Eden

 

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.

Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms

 

There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.

Wallace Stegner in All the Little Live Things

 

There are some things that are so unforgivable they make other things easily forgivable. 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half a Yellow Sun

5 Bits of Wisdom from The Matrix Movies

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5.) Wisdom: Choice is not as it seems.

Quote: No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.
Said by the Oracle to Neo in “The Matrix Reloaded” as they discuss a dream in which he sees Trinity falling.

Interpretation: Studies in neuroscience have repeatedly validated the notion that by the time we think we’re making a decision at a conscious level, we’ve already made it on a subconscious level. While many suggest this means that the verdict is in and free will is completely illusory, another way of looking at it is that one must understand one’s decisions in order to begin to regain the rudder on one’s life.



4.) Wisdom: Courage elevates: or, if you don’t run, he won’t chase you.

Quote: He’s beginning to believe.
Said by Morpheus to Trinity in explanation of why Neo isn’t running from Agent Smith in the subway.

Interpretation: My mother used to say, “If you don’t run, he won’t chase you” with respect to being chased by my older brother. It seemed like insane advice at the time; the alternative to being chased being beaten down. However, now I can see that even taking a butt-whooping elevates one’s spirit over engaging in prey behavior.



3.) Wisdom: Rationality is a thin veneer.

Quotes: Beneath our poised appearance we are completely out of control. & It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity.
Said by the Merovingian to Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo.

Interpretation: While one might like to dismiss the Merovingian’s comments as the cynicism of a hedonist, the undeniable fact is that we have animal biology and it influences us more than we pretend.



2.) Wisdom: The world contains more Cyphers than not.

Quote: Ignorance is bliss.
Said by Cypher to Agent Smith as he plots his subversion in order to be put back into the Matrix.

Interpretation: Most people are happy with their illusions, rely on them as coping mechanisms, and will respond unfavorably to attempts to strip them way. The illusion in question may not be so much that the world is completely fake as much as biases such as the self-serving bias (i.e. people attribute successes to their inherent awesomeness but blame failures on external sources.)




1.) Wisdom: There are limits to being cerebral.

Quotes: Don’t think you are, know you are. & There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
Both are said by Morpheus to Neo. The former quote is delivered in the sparring program when Neo isn’t performing up to his potential. The latter is said after Neo & Trinity rescue Morpheus and Neo tries to tell Morpheus what the Oracle revealed, but Morpheus quiets him with said words.

Interpretation: I hope I haven’t muddled this bit of wisdom by choosing quotes in which Morpheus uses the word “know” in two different ways. In the first quote, Morpheus contrasts knowing with thinking, and he means that Neo must not treat it as an intellectual exercise, but rather feel its inherent truth deep down. In the second quote, he contrasts knowing with doing, and in this case “knowing” is the cerebral / thinking activity in comparison to doing (i.e. “walking the path.”) However, the gist is the same, you must approach some things–to use the Oracle’s words–balls to bones.

Aaaannd Buddha’d

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“This is going on your permanent record, young man!”

“All is impermanent.”


“I want you to get up there and clean your room.”

“Desire is the root of all suffering.”


“There’s a big spider in the corner, kill it!”

“Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts.”


“My left sock has static cling.”

“You only lose what you cling to.”


“HELP! My sleeve got caught in this threshing machine.”

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and…[cringes]”


“I wonder where the Professor is, he’s usually not late.”

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”


“I’m feeling like a jelly doughnut.”

“What we feel, we attract.”


“I’m thinking a jelly doughnut would be good, too.”

“What we think, we become.”


“I’m furious with you.”

“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”


“Well, speak up. Explain yourself!”

“He who doesn’t understand one’s silence will probably not understand one’s words.”


“HELP! My sleeve got caught in this threshing machine.”

“Be patient. Everything comes to you in the… [cringes]”


“It’s time to take the trash out.”

“If anything is worth doing, do it with all YOUR heart.”


“No. I’m sorry, I can’t go to your Solar eclipse gala bash. I have to take my grandmother to chemotherapy.”

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

5 Ways to Fake It til You Make It

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5.) Adopt a power posture: There’s been a lot of research in recent years suggesting that posture isn’t a one-way street–i.e. body doesn’t necessarily have to follow our mental state. One can reverse the flow, improving one’s mental state by adopting a strong  and confident posture.

One of the most thorough discussions of this phenomena is in Amy Cuddy’s book Presence, which famously mentions the “Wonder Woman” pose. However, another widespread example is using the up-and-outward fist pumping posture that is widely seen among humans and even other primates (i.e. with arms outstretched as Usain Bolt is seen above.)

 

I got my eye on you

4.) Master eye contact: This is dreadfully difficult for an introverts such as myself. We tend to look anywhere but the eyes.

If one is traveling in risky places, it’s important to have a grasp of the fine art of eye contact. If one doesn’t make any eye contact, then one risks looking zoned out–potentially inviting aggression. If one rapidly  looks away, offering too short an eye contact period, one appears intimidated–potentially inviting aggression. However, if one’s eye contact is too long, it may trigger some primal fight impulse, or–at a minimum–suggest you have taken more interest in the individual–which may invite aggression. This means one has to balance a fine line that says, “I see you, you know I saw you. Now I’m going to do me and let you do you.”

 

3.) Adopt the opposing viewpoint:  Say you find yourself obsessing about some perceived slight or wrong.  While you want to address this issue, you want to be calm enough to avoid saying or doing something you’ll regret. You want to be seen as a sensible individual while being persuasive. The key is seeing both sides, and taking a moment to realize that your opposition is probably not the black-hearted villain of his own story. He likely has some reason for his behavior. Maybe it’s even a reason you can empathize with, given your own experience–i.e. being overworked and distracted, facing a decision that only allows for a best worst option, etc.

 

2.) Visualize it: It may seem as though anything that occurs solely in the mind can’t have that much force, but–in fact–it can. Visualizing can help one get over one’s anxieties. By systematically considering how events will unfold, one can break the cycle of worst-case scenario creation that the brain readily falls into. This will make an activity seem less intimidating and more manageable.

 

1.) Start small: Often when a person would like to be more kind or compassionate, she’s flummoxed or overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. She sees problems that she can’t make a dent in. So schedule one small act of kindness in a week or maybe a bigger one monthly, or as is possible. Do it, see its value, and be content.

One also sees a need for starting small with advanced physical practices. If you can’t do a yogasana or martial arts move, figure out what capacity building or modifications one needs to get to the end goal. Then take it on bit-by-bit. There are many videos on how to systematically build up to challenging maneuvers like the press handstand or planche, moves that almost no one can do with out a great deal of prep work.

POEM: Not All Journeys Have Routes; Not All Journeys Are Mapped

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Struggling to give birth to bliss,

the proud parent fears it’ll flee

–never to return.

He heard his guru chanted the

the mantra one thousand times

–pow, Enlightenment.

Chanting the mantra 999 times

he waits expectantly for his gift

–pow, Nothing.

They told him that it was a path.

A guru told him he had the map.

 False analogy.

Teacher’s destination is not yours.

Don’t buy a map to the unknown.

Dead reckon it.

Be a scientist, leaving the detritus

of failed experiments in one’s wake.

Inching closer.

The rules of space do not apply here.

No seekers have the same beginning.

& destinations vary.

Seekers must make their own path.

Chasing footprints is a fool’s errand.

Step forward.

BOOK REVIEW: The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti

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The First and Last FreedomThe First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

The edition of the book I’m reviewing is the Harper Collins e-book with a Forward by Aldous Huxley and in which more than half of the page count consists of appendices of Krishnamurti’s answers to various broad-ranging questions (i.e. What is the meaning of life, and such?) Jiddu Krishnamurti was a philosopher of Indian origin who passed away in 1986. This was one of his early books (first published 1954, though this is a 2010 edition) and it covers quite a bit of philosophical ground.

Krishnamurti’s teaching attracted a unique audience and existed in a unique space—at least back in his time. The topics he addressed were traditionally in the domain of spiritual philosophy, theology, or theosophy, but Krishnamurti downplayed belief and spiritualism. His teachings were attractive to those who were interested in developing their minds and selves, but who were dismayed by religiosity and all that such proclivities brought with it. Like mysticism, his ideas are about turning inward, but sans the notion that there’s a deity residing inside. In Krishnamurti’s writings, one hears echoes of Emerson’s suggestion that one must trust oneself and not get tangled up in the ideas of others—though, again, Emerson was clearly a believer. There’s also overlap with the ideas of some secular humanists, though they tend to be more scientists and less interested in meditations of the sort that have usually been relegated to spirituality in the past. (This has, of course, changed considerably in the decades since Krishnamurti’s death. Now this is a thriving space.)

The book itself consists of 21 chapters, and then there are 38 question-appendices. The chapters are 140+ pages and the appendices are cumulatively the same length. The appendices may be offered to attract readers who read the original book in a different edition. (It’s not so much a padding situation, because the 21 chapter book is long enough to stand as a book in print edition in and of itself.) The question section offers past readers a substantial amount of new material while providing an opportunity to reread the book.

There’s too much material covered by this book to make it worth accounting for it all. The overall theme of looking within to find one’s answers plays out across topics like fear, desire, the tension between individual and society, etc.

There’s good and bad news about readability. The good news is that, as one might expect of a book with almost 60 chapters (or chapter-like appendices) in a book of less than 300 pages, the information is delivered in bit-sized chunks. The bad news is that Krishnamurti was a thinking-man’s thinker. He’s not troubled to employ story-telling, humor, or the spinning of interesting language. This is raw philosophizing, and so it reads incredibly dryly unless one is a philosophy-lover to the core.

I would recommend this book for philosophy lovers.

View all my reviews

5 Bits of Ancient Eastern Wisdom to Make Your Modern Western Life Happier

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img_12811.) The Dispassionate Witness:  A person’s default setting is to repress emotions and pretend they don’t exist. On the one hand, this seems to work because others rarely notice one’s clenched jaw or downing of Prozac, and it’s true that fist-fights rarely break out in workplaces and classrooms. On the other hand, this approach leads to a lot of passive-aggressive behavior and stress-related illness. I just read in some material on Flow and business that 2/3rds of performance issues in businesses result from strained relationships.

The alternative is to take time to observe one’s emotional state, but to watch it without dumping fuel onto the fire. This process puts one’s feelings in perspective so that one can respond in a careful, but not repressed, manner. It doesn’t mean one won’t still be mad, sad, or scared, but one will be in a position to act in a manner that is neither petty and knee-jerk, nor one that consists of gobbling antacids. This brings us to #2.

 

2.) The Second Dart: [Siddhartha Gotama] Buddha talked about the mind’s response to an event as the second dart, suggesting that the second dart produces much more prolonged misery than the first. Imagine one is walking along and gets hit by a dart. Ow!  It hurts. But what makes it agonizing is when one’s mind becomes obsessed with the injury. It’s unfair that someone threw a dart at me. What if the wound doesn’t heal right? What if the wound heals up too well, and I don’t have a cool scar at story time?

This point is closely related to #1. One has to observe, but not let mind run wild. The first dart is real. The second dart is immaterial, a figment of the mind.

 

3.) Relaxation is Part of the Process: Anyone who’s attended a yoga class is familiar with closing in savasana (corpse pose.)  Occasionally, a student wants to get up and walk out at this point. They “aren’t paying __ $’s to lay around on their a##.” For Americans, rest is something begrudgingly accepted between actually doing stuff.

The problem with the “rest as laziness” approach isn’t just that one is likely to suffer a relaxation deficit, but also that the rest one gets isn’t effective. But how can rest be effective? I’m glad you asked. Because when you’re doing savasana or yoga nidra (yogic sleep) you’re not just letting your monkey mind run wild as it does when one is watching television or stuck in afternoon rush hour.

 

4.) Breath is Anything but Mundane: Since breathing is constantly going on and one can choose not to think about it, people dismiss it as unworthy of consideration. However, breath is the one point at which we can consciously influence our autonomic nervous system. [Well, there’s also blinking, but to my knowledge there’s no evidence that one can adjust one’s energy level or emotional state through blinking–but you can with breath.]  Breath is the key to improved physical performance, but it’s also a powerful tool to train the mind.

 

5.) Use the Belly: I haven’t studied a large number of martial arts, but I’ve trained in a diverse few that were extremely different in both approach and priorities. It could be said that these arts (budō, tai chi chuan, muaythai, and kalaripayattu) had nothing in common. Except they did. They all valued strength in a point below the navel. Sometimes it was called dan tien; other times tanden. However, regardless of the pronunciation, name, or the precise anatomical location, there was this commonality.

Strength in the belly is tied to both breath and mental concentration.

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5 Works of Fiction That Teach Life Lessons

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Every novel or short story has lessons to teach. After all, stories are nothing more than problems resolved. Sometimes fiction teaches one how to do it right, and in other instances how to do it wrong–but there’s always a lesson.

But some works of fiction teach more than others (and more effectively.) It’s a great challenge to merge entertaining and thought-provoking story lines into one piece. Below are five books that I found both illuminating and engrossing.

[The hyperlinks in the titles go to my book review.]

 

1.) Ishmael by Daniel Quinn: Ishmael asks one to reevaluate what one thinks one knows about the world based on a lifetime of viewing it through the lenses of culture and anthropocentrism.

ishmael_quinn

 

2.) The Journeys of Socrates by Dan Millman: The “Socrates” in question is Millman’s [probably fictional and / or composite] teacher from the “Peaceful Warrior” books–not the Greek philosopher. This book shows us how a person whose life has been scarred by tragedy can attain peace of mind.

journeyofsocrates

 

3.) The Little Prince by  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince teaches one to reevaluate what one thinks is important, and encourages one to see the world through a more child-like lens.

littleprince

4.) Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo: How can the average Joe reshape the way he [or she] views life so as to live a happier one?

 

breakfastwithbuddha

 

5.) Veronika Decides to Die by  Paulo Coelho: A young woman who attempts suicide is told by her doctor that she damaged her heart and has only five days to live.

veronika

 

Happy reading.