“(SELF-)CULTIVATION TAKES AN UNIMAGINABLE TIME (WHILE) ENLIGHTENMENT IN AN INSTANT IS ATTAINED.”
IF THE TRAINING IS EFFICIENT, ENLIGHTENMENT WILL BE ATTAINED IN ONE FINGERSNAP.
IN DAYS GONE BY CH’AN MASTER HUI CHUEH OF LANG YEH MOUNTAIN, HAD A DISCIPLE WHO CALLED ON HIM FOR INSTRUCTION. THE MASTER TAUGHT HER TO EXAMINE INTO THE SENTENCE: “TAKE NO NOTICE.”
SHE FOLLOWED HIS INSTRUCTION STRICTLY WITHOUT BACKSLIDING.
ONE DAY HER HOUSE CAUGHT FIRE, BUT SHE SAID: “TAKE NO NOTICE.”
ANOTHER DAY, HER SON FELL INTO THE WATER AND WHEN A BYSTANDER CALLED HER, SHE
I mean this article to be the first installment in a series.
The underlying principle is the Anna Karenina principle
The Anna Karenina principle
The Anna Karenina principle is: good systems must meet simultaneously a number of requirements. All good systems are alike, bad systems are bad in their own way
Tolstoy said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
Aristotle said: success/failure: …it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the
My first foray, my first venture into joy or joyous is trying to figure out what joy is. After all we don’t know necessarily what words mean when it comes to feelings… do we. We, children, watch and learn… but in a world where what you see is a mask, what you see does not represent a feeling accurately, because the person isn’t feeling it, because the person is faking it, the looks don’t help.
My hunch is that joy is fabricated with the intention to cause craving for it, to cause an acute sense of the lack of it.
Actually, when I watch people who enjoy something, they
Let me ask you something: do you have to deserve a body? Did you have to deserve to be able to read?
No. Deserving is much more basic, and much more profound than that kind of deserving, which would equate the word with earning.
Earning is a mercantile world’s word: it measures your work, or your merchandise against the asking price… earning.
But deserving is different, regardless how crazy that word drove me when I was a kid. My kid brother whining that he deserved whatever he was whining about.
I didn’t think I deserved anything, so he asserting that he de
It’s Christmas Eve. Strong Southern wind… unusual noises… and bouts of wanting to weep. WTF? There is nothing wrong with my life, I am not connected to anyone in particular, and yet.
I muscle test if it is the Dark Side emotion transmission, and yes, it is…
Feelings come from who knows where, and yet, YOU are basing all your decisions on feelings. How utterly misguided is that?
Are you a nerd? ((One description I found on the internet is this: a NERD is an individual of vast intelligence and curiosity coupled with a natural knack for academics and discovery. You not only appreciate technology, biology, and all the other ‘ology’s – you know what they mean and how they work, too! While Geeks are busy flooding comic-cons and using the internet while pretending to know how it works, you are busy coding the damn internet and earning your Masters or Doctorate (if you don’t already have it/both). Of course t
There is a huge misunderstanding that most of you are the victim of: thinking that you need to be ready to do something, that you need to get rid of fear or discomfort to do something.
One of my clients is dealing with an issue. To solve the issue, I asked him to talk to people in the same kind of business as his, to pick their brains what to do in the winters when there is no snow… i.e. there is no business, no revenue… and he still has to pay his employees.
I had an interesting insight yesterday: you don’t know what it feels like to have courage available to you.
When you apply courage, it just feels like you are doing what you are doing, what you were afraid of. Normal.
Which indicates to me, that courage is a paradigm-shifter.
Paradigm is like a glass ceiling. A one-side mirror. When you are in a higher paradigm, you can see what is below you, but if you are still in a lower paradigm, you cannot see what’s above. In fact you don’t know there is something, anything.