1.
Resilience is the way to eudaimonia & eudaimonia is the way home. Home is the place of absolute, uncontrived play.
2.
Arousal is the divine force given to us to break through the membrane of good/bad to the open field of creativity where we can re-script our entire self-story. Our methods for healing are wrongheaded and harmful. We decrease arousal and lock people behind the membrane in their own mental sewage and teach them how to “tolerate it.”
3.
The higher order states of consciousness we all seek, however skillfully or unskillfully, are to be found always and only by fastening the attention to desire.
You can live a tolerable life absent of desire. But, if you want a liberated mind that is free in love and expression; choice in what you think, feel, and experience; and most importantly the ability to interact with the morse code impulses of the body—you are going to need a rocket to those heights, not the clunker of the intellect.
4.
Your focus is your magic wand. It creates whatever vision lies behind it. Developing stable, deliberately generated vision that is attuned to one’s soul and to the karmic design of this life, is the way out of suffering and the way into flourishing.
5.
Don’t listen to the smooth-talker who says there is any way to go other than to pour your gold into the river of offering yourself to the well-being of others.
That rock you want to cling to that bargains with the gods that if they give you “this” then
you will “offer that.” That is the direct route to hell. Do it wholly and without reserve. You will find the river you dive into tends to everything, even little old you, better than you ever could.
6.
If you are irritated, you are off the spot. It is like holding your breath in yoga. The control impulse is the Self sneaking into the game. The enemy of all women is not “them,” it is control.
7.
Everyone who advances will learn this trick; the world will need to learn this trick. This is one of the most secret of tricks:
Take the most hated, the most denigrated, the most devalued. This is the sweetest berry. In yourself. In others. In the world.
Draw it into your very center, your transformative womb as it is considered in Buddhism. Let it give birth to the exalted form. Discover that embedded within it is the greatest potential, the most loyal form, the best friend, and fierce protector.
8.
You know that arid desert of mainstream success. The thing you are sure “they” have that you don’t. The “If only I were…another color, gender, class, thinner, with ‘the one.’” Give up that ghost. Let that mind die. This, this right here, is the gold. There is no other. That, that is the suffering. As they say, don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides.
9.
The everyday mind is chained to a platform. The platform is the problems, anxieties, and wounds that are the material for the sense of self. Break the chains. Dare, in the midst of all of it, to be unreasonably happy. Do it again until you lift off.
10.
Living in flight is the first class cabin of life. What is living in flight? It is allowing your aspiration, your intention to be of benefit in the world, to dedicate every activity to the interconnection of being. No! It is not without immense joy, even rapture.
You still make out, still drink a glass of wine, still flirt. Only now you give all the joy to that single intention, something that is vast enough so that you don’t end up all bound up by fixation and obsession.