True Measure Of Wisdom

The years teach much which the days never know. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson on Small Mercies, the True Measure of Wisdom, and How to Live with Maximum Aliveness

--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Aug 03, 2015

“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”

In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of arriving at happiness is proving more and more disorienting.

How to orient ourselves toward buoyant aliveness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) examines in a beautiful essay titled “Experience,” found in his Essays and Lectures (public library; free download) — that bible of timeless wisdom that gave us Emerson on the two pillars of friendship and the key to personal growth.

Emerson writes:

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them… To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics … to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are… Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons.

Indeed, Emerson highlights the practice of kindness as a centerpiece of the full life, suggesting that our cynicism about the character and potential of others — much like our broader cynicism about the world — reflects not the true measure of their merit but the failure of our own imagination in appreciating their singular gifts:

I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with sincere homage.

An equally toxic counterpart to such self-righteousness, Emerson argues, is our propensity for entitlement, which he contrasts with the disposition of humility and gratefulness:

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.

In a sentiment almost Buddhist in its attitude of accepting life exactly as it unfolds, and one that calls to mind his friend and Concord neighbor Thoreau’s superb definition of success, Emerson bows before the spiritual rewards of this disposition of gratefulness unburdened by fixation:

In the morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt.

Only by surrendering to life’s uncontrollable and unknowable unfolding graces — or what Thoreau extolled as the gift of “useful ignorance” — can we begin to blossom into our true potentiality:

The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing impossible until we see a success.

Or, as a modern-day wise woman admonished in one of the greatest commencement addresses of all time, it pays not to “determine what [is] impossible before it [is] possible.”

A century and a half before Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert illuminated how our present illusions hinder the happiness of our future selves, Emerson adds:

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know… The individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself.

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This article originally appeared in Brain Pickings and is republished with permission. The author, Maria Popova, is a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, and is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings.

Be The Change: One way to live fully is to let go of what you're holding onto tightly. Ask yourself what could you let go of today?

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Death

Death -  Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed

at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.

For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.

All Is Well.

The Joy Is In The Journey!

Some people sit and ponder about getting to "the end" of their journey. That there is some sort of great prize awaiting at the arrival. There are many journeys, and some are quite difficult. The truth though, is that life is not really so much about the destination, the ending place one arrives at as it is about the pathway and experiences one learns from the whole thing.

Look at your life. It’s always another climb, another great distance to cross. We look only at the horizon where we hope to eventually be, and never at the ground beneath our feet, a place that deserves more of your attention than anything. Because it doesn’t just end. The path you just took leads to a hundred more, as the process of discovery is not a short one.

Those that look back on their lives and regret not doing more are the people that had their eyes glued on the horizon and nothing else. Growth can never have a final point and true “perfection” can never be achieved as long as we’re human.

It’s not about getting there, and it’s not about how quickly one can arrive. It’s about what you got out of your experiences on the way there. Our attention and energy should be concentrated on the journey of exploration and discovery; and of mistakes and learning. That is where the true rewards and the truly important pieces of life lie.

The Joy is in the Journey!

Lessening The Power Of Negative Emotions

Lessening The Power Of Negative Emotions - The Dalai Lama

I profoundly believe that real spiritual change comes about not by merely praying or wishing that all negative aspects of our minds disappear and all positive aspects blossom. It is only by our concerted effort, an effort based on an understanding of how the mind and its various emotional and psychological states interact, that we bring about true spiritual progress. If we wish to lessen the power of negative emotions, we must search for the causes that give rise to them. We must work at removing or uprooting those causes. At the same time, we must enhance the mental forces that counter them: what we might call their antidotes. This is how a meditator must gradually bring about the mental transformation he or she seeks.

How do we undertake this? First we identify our particular virtue's opposing factors. The opposing factor of humility would be pride or vanity. The opposing factor of generosity would be stinginess. After identifying these factors, we must endeavour to weaken and undermine them. While we are focused on these opposing factors, we must also be fanning the flames of the virtuous quality we hope to internalize. When we feel most stingy, we must make an extra effort to be generous. When we feel impatient or judgemental, we must do our utmost to be patient.

When we recognize how our thoughts have particular effects upon our psychological states, we can prepare ourselves for them. We will then know that when one state of mind arises, we must counter it in a particular way; and if another occurs, we must act appropriately. When we see our mind drifting toward angry thoughts of someone we dislike, we must catch ourselves; we must change our mind by changing the subject. It is difficult to hold back from anger when provoked unless we have trained our mind to first recollect the unpleasant effects such thoughts will cause us. It is therefore essential that we begin our training in patience calmly, not while experiencing anger. We must recall in detail how, when angry, we lose our peace of mind, how we are unable to concentrate on our work, and how unpleasant we become to those around us. It is by thinking long and hard in this manner that we eventually become able to refrain from anger.

One renowned Tibetan hermit limited his practice to watching his mind. He drew a black mark on the wall of his room whenever he had an unvirtuous thought. Initially his walls were all black; however, as he became more mindful, his thoughts became more virtuous and white marks began to replace the black ones. We must apply similar mindfulness in our daily lives.

About the Author: Excerpted from "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life", by The Dalai Lama, edited by Nicholas Vreeland.  

A Psychological Fortress To Cope With The Corporate World

A Psychological Fortress To Cope With The Corporate World - Devdutt Pattanaik

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49512730.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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You must be the change you wish to see in the world. --Mahatma Gandhi

5 Reasons Why We Serve

--by ServiceSpace Coordinators, syndicated from servicespace.org, Dec 27, 2011

At the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, a few of us walked into a homeless shelter to give without any strings attached. We were young twenty-something's then. Our motivation? We just wanted to be of service. The word 'service' here represents a practice of selfless giving -- something that we all have access to, no matter who we are or what we do. Our trip to the homeless shelter led to us building a website for them at no charge. That experiment in giving blossomed into an organization called ServiceSpace, which went on to develop and gift websites to thousands of small nonprofits. But the ripples didn't stop there. ServiceSpace has now evolved into a remarkable incubator for dozens of gift-economy projects, touching millions of people.

While the external impact of these projects is tremendous, what is most striking is the fact that ServiceSpace doesn't fundraise, has no staff, and remains 100% volunteer run. Everyone involved is driven simply by a volition to grow in service. In a world dominated by financial incentives that appeal to a mindset of consumption, ServiceSpace is a counterculture invitation to engage in small acts of generosity, continually shifting the mindset towards one of inspired contribution.

It's a beautiful fact that in practicing kindness, we can't help but deepen our understanding of how inner and outer change are fundamentally intertwined. Here are five reasons to serve that we've discovered through our own journey:

1. Serve to discover abundance: the radical shift from me to we

When you serve, you discover that often the most important things you have to offer are not things at all. You start to uncover the full range of resources at your disposal -- your time, presence, attention -- and recognize that the ability to give stems from a state of mind and heart, a place much deeper than the material. Inspired by the possibilities this opens up in every moment, you begin to discover humble opportunities to serve -- everywhere.

This process begins a shift from a me-orientation to a we-orientation. You start to look at people and situations with an eye for what you can offer them and not vice versa. You break the tiresome tyranny of questions like "What's in it for me?" The mindset shifts from consumption to contribution. Paradoxically, serving in this way, you are no longer operating from a space of scarcity. Your cup fills and overflows.

2. Serve to express gratitude

Such joyful gratitude becomes a foundation in service. When you acknowledge the fullness of your life, you can manifest a heart of service in any situation. In that sense, service doesn't start when we have something to give -- it blossoms naturally when we have nothing left to take. And that is a powerful place to be.

Yes, external change is required for the world to progress, but when coupled with inner transformation, it can affect the world in a radically different way. "We can do no great things -- only small things with great love," maintained Mother Teresa, a woman who made a difference to the lives of millions. It's a matter of what we focus on. Or, in other words, it's not just what we do that matters, but the inner impetus behind our action that really counts.

3. Serve to transform yourself

Any time we practice the smallest act of service, even if it's only holding a door for somebody, but doing it with a full heart that says, "May I be of use to this person," that kind of giving changes the deep habit of being self-centered. In that brief moment, there is other-centeredness. That other-centeredness relaxes the patterns of the ego, a collection of unexamined, self-oriented tendencies that subtly influence our choices. This is why no true act of service, however small, can ever really be wasted.

To serve unconditionally in this way takes practice and constant effort. But with time and sharpened awareness, we begin to brush against the potential for transformation that is embedded in every act of generosity. It's a realization that "Oh -- when I give, I actually receive." You begin to internalize this, not at the intellectual level but by experience.

4. Serve to honor our profound interconnection

Over time, all of those small acts, those small moments, lead to a different state of being. A state in which service becomes increasingly effortless. And as this awareness grows, you inevitably start to perceive beyond individualistic patterns: each small act of service is an unending ripple that synergizes with countless others.

As Rachel Naomi Remen puts it, "When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole." With that understanding, we begin to play our part -- first, by becoming conscious of the offerings we receive, then by feeling gratitude for them, and finally by continuing to pay forward our gifts with a heart of joy. Each of us hassuch gifts: skills, material resources, connections, presence -- everything we consider ourselves privileged to have. And when we actually start to use our gifts as tools to facilitate giving, we deepen our understanding of relationships and start to sync up with this vast "inner-net."

5. Serve to align with a natural unfolding

When we increasingly choose to remain in that space of service, we start to see new things. The needs of the current situation become clearer, we become instruments of a greater order and consequently our actions become more effortless. When a group of people perform this kind of service as a practice, it creates an ecosystem that holds a space, allowing value to emerge organically. All of this indirect value, the ripple effect, has space and time to add up, synergize with other ripples, and multiply into something completely unexpected. In humble fashion these ripples continue to seed unpredictable manifestations. Such an ecosystem can have its plans and strategies, but places more emphasis on emergent co-creation. So a lot of the ripples will remain unseen for years; some perhaps will be the basis for a seventh-generation philanthropy. It doesn't matter, because they are unconditional gifts.

What each of us can do, on a personal level, is make such small offerings of service that ultimately create the field for deeper change. The revolution starts with you and me.

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ServiceSpace.org is an incubator of gift-economy projects that is run by inspired volunteers.  Its mission statement reads: "We believe in the inherent goodness of others and aim to ignite that spirit of service. Through our small, collective acts, we hope to transform ourselves and the world." Drawings reprinted here with permission from DharmaComics.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

We Are What We Choose To Be

We Are What We Choose To Be - Dawna Markova

On rare and precious moments, someone will tell me about when he used to play the saxophone or when she used to dream about opening a halfway house for abused women or when he thought he could mentor boys in the inner city or when she was going to write a book about how she made it through her childhood. And they light up. There is no other way to describe what happens. Their cheeks flush, their bodies become animated, their voices are electric as they speak. For a moment, the clock stops ticking. Then they pause, shake themselves the way a dog does on a hot day after swimming in a cool lake, and they crawl back in their girdle, talk about money and time and reasons why not. "Well, (...) I am not the sort of a person who could just... I wouldn't feel like me that way." I watch heart failures as the clock begins to tick again.

My son once told me he didn't want to grow up to be a man because they all seemed like they were walking dead. I came back from being dead realizing we are totally free to live fully alive. Now. In this moment. Free to define ourselves. We are what we choose to be. I don't mean free to have. I mean free to be. I know many among us don't have sufficient nourishment, space, education. But I also remember learning how Nelson Mandela sang of freedom at the top of his lungs on a boat while being taken to prison. And I remember the Jamaican angel who swept the floors in a hospital and whispered words to me in the dark of the night that changed everything: "You are more than your fear." I know there are others among us who have more food than they can ever eat, bigger houses than they can ever occupy, more education than they can ever use, and still they suffer from spiritual insufficiency and lack of the kind of nourishment that a sense of purpose brings. Most of us would never dare sing at the top of our lungs on a boat for fear of being embarrassed!

Parker Palmer (...) wrote, "No punishment anyone might inflict on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we inflict on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment."

About the Author: Excerpted from Dawna Markova's book, "I will not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion." 

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4 Practices For Deepening Gratefulness

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses. --Alphonse Karr

Four Great Gratitude Strategies

--by Juliana Breines , syndicated from Greater Good, Jul 27, 2015

Here are the key research-based principles for turning gratitude into a lasting habit, drawing from the GGSC’s new website, Greater Good in Action.

Over the past two decades, much of the research on happiness can be boiled down to one main prescription: give thanks. Across hundreds of studies, practicing gratitude has been found to increase positive emotions, reduce the risk of depression, heighten relationship satisfaction, and increase resilience in the face of stressful life events, among other benefits.

The problem is, gratitude doesn’t always come naturally. The negatives in our lives—the disappointments, resentments, and fears—sometimes occupy more of our attention than the positives.

But Robert Emmons, a leading scientific expert on gratitude, argues that intentionally developing a grateful outlook helps us both recognize good things in our lives and realize that many of these good things are “gifts” that we have been fortunate to receive. By making gratitude a habit, we can begin to change the emotional tone of our lives, creating more space for joy and connection with others.

Fortunately, researchers have identified a number of practices for cultivating gratitude. Many of them arecollected on the Greater Good Science Center’s new website, Greater Good in Action (GGIA), which features the top research-based exercises for fostering happiness, kindness, connection, and resilience. Here I highlight GGIA’s gratitude practices, which can be divided into four main categories.

1. Count your blessings

Some days it feels like everything is going wrong. But often, even on bad days, good things happen, too—we’re just less likely to notice them.

That’s where the Three Good Things practice comes in. This practice involves spending 5 to 10 minutes at the end of each day writing in detail about three things that went well that day, large or small, and also describing why you think they happened. A 2005 study led by Martin Seligman, founder of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, found that completing this exercise every day for one week led to increases in happiness that persisted for six months.

This simple practice is effective because it not only helps you remember and appreciate good things that happened in the past; it can also teach you to notice and savor positive events as they happen in the moment, and remember them more vividly later on. By reflecting on the sources of these good things, the idea is that you start to see a broader ecosystem of goodness around you rather than assuming that the universe is conspiring against you.

Similar to Three Good Things is keeping a Gratitude Journal, which involves writing down up to five things for which you are grateful once a week and reflecting on what these things mean to you. For this practice, you can expand the scope of your gratitude beyond good things that happened that day and consider positive events from your past and even those coming up in the future. The Gratitude Journal is especially effective when you focus on specific people you’re grateful to have—or have had—in your life.

2. Mental subtraction

In the words of Joni Mitchell, “you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone.” But sometimes just imagining that something is gone is enough to make you appreciate what you’ve got.

One way to do that is to engage in the Mental Subtraction of Positive Events practice, which involves considering the many ways in which important, positive events in your life—such as a job opportunity or educational achievement—could have never taken place, and then reflecting on what your life would be like without them.

A series of 2008 studies led by Minkyung Koo found that completing a 15-minute mental subtraction writing exercise led to increases in happiness and gratitude.

Mental subtraction can counteract the tendency to take positive events for granted and see them as inevitable; instead, it helps you recognize how fortunate you are that things transpired as they did.

One variation on this practice is Mental Subtraction of Relationships, which is similar to Mental Subtraction of Positive Events but involves focusing specifically on important relationships, such as close friends or romantic partners. Although it may be painful to imagine your life without someone you care about, doing so once in a while can serve as a reminder not to take that person for granted and may improve your relationship as a result.

3. Savor

Ever notice that the first bite of cake is usually the best? We have a tendency to adapt to pleasurable things—a phenomenon called “hedonic adaptation”—and appreciate them less and less over time. But we can interrupt this process by trying the Give it Up practice, which requires temporarily giving up pleasurable activities and then coming back to them later, this time with greater anticipation and excitement.

A 2013 study conducted by Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn found that abstaining from a pleasurable activity for a week (in this case, eating chocolate) led people to derive greater pleasure from it and feel greater appreciation for it when they eventually indulged in it again.

The goal of this practice is not only to experience more pleasure but to recognize how we take lots of pleasures for granted, and to try to savor them more. We often assume that more is better—that the greatest enjoyment should come from abundance and indulgence—but research suggests that some degree of scarcity and restraint is more conducive to happiness.

But abstaining from the pleasures in your life isn’t the only way to help you savor them. Instead, you can try taking a Savoring Walk.

In the age of smartphones, it’s a common experience to walk down the street with your eyes glued to your screen, unaware of your surroundings. But even without a phone in hand, you may simply be distracted or in a rush, and as a result you may miss opportunities to take in some things that can make you feel good—beautiful or awe-inspiring scenery, acts of kindness between people, adorable children.

The Savoring Walk involves walking for 20 minutes by yourself once a week, ideally taking a different route each time, paying close attention to as many positive sights, sounds, smells, or other sensations as you can. Research by Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff has found that taking this kind of stroll led to an increase in happiness one week later.

In addition to making you feel good, becoming more attuned to your surroundings can also give you more opportunities to connect with other people, even if it’s just to share a smile.

4. Say “thank you”

Gratitude can be especially powerful when it’s expressed to others. Small gestures of appreciation, such as thank you notes, can make a difference, but there are some things that deserve more than a fleeting “thanks!”

If there is anyone in your life to whom you feel you’ve never properly expressed your gratitude, writing a thoughtful, detailedGratitude Letter is a great way to increase your own feelings of gratitude and happiness while also making the other person feel appreciated and valued; it may also deepen your relationship with them.

The 2005 study led by Martin Seligman described above also tested the effects of writing and delivering a gratitude letter, finding that, of the five different practices that the researchers tested, this practice had the greatest positive impact on happiness one month later. Those who delivered and read the letter to the recipient in person, rather than just mailing it, reaped the greatest benefits.

It’s important to note, though, that six months after writing and delivering their Gratitude Letter, participants’ happiness levels had dropped back down to where they were before the visit. This finding reminds us that no single activity is a panacea that can permanently alter happiness levels after just one attempt. Instead, gratitude practices and other happiness-inducing activities need to be practiced regularly over time, ideally with some variety to avoid hedonic adaptation.

And because not every practice will feel right for everyone, it’s worth trying out as many practices as you can to find the ones that work best for you. The gratitude practices you’ll find on Greater Good in Action are as reliable a place to start as any.

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This article is printed here with permission from the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. You can learn more about the science and power of gratitude at the Greater Good Gratitude Summit. The author, Juliana Breines, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University.

Be The Change: This week try adopting one of the strategies suggested in the article, and see what effect it has on your state of being.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Ask Him For Help

Ask Him For Help - Dada J P Vaswani

"Why do we have failures at all?" someone asked me. "Why did God not create a world in which there was only success? What a wonderful world it would be!"

But when you come to think of it, it is failures that give a meaning to success. Wherever you have success, there is bound to be failure. The two go together. It is failure that draws out the best that is within us. It is failure that unfolds, unlocks our hidden powers. In the measure in which we face failures in the right spirit, in that measure the tremendous power that lies locked up within us is unfolded.

In a certain cotton factory, a notice was put up on the walls of the workroom. It read as follows: "If your threads get tangled, send for the foreman."

One day a new worker got her threads tangled. She tried to disentangle them, but only made them worse. Then she sent for the foreman.

He arrived quietly and looked at her threads. "You have been trying to do this yourself?" he asked her.

"Yes," she replied.

"But why did you not send for me? Those were your instructions."

"I was doing my best," she said.

"No, you were not," the foreman said. "Remember that doing your best is sending for me!"

How often do we act like this worker! When we are in trouble, we often make things worse for ourselves. We run from pillar to post, appealing for help. We turn to our relatives; we entreat our friends for their support; we knock at the doors of our bank manager; we appeal to our business associates.

We are only making things worse. We should call upon God for help, for that is the best thing we can do!

For The People ...

This goes out to ...

• For the people who have been broken, but have been strong enough to let go.
• For the people who have hurt so badly that they felt that they could never love again, but kept their head up.
• For the people who learn from their mistakes and never stop moving forward, even when they take two steps back.
• For the people that wish loneliness wasn’t a part of them, but put up with it anyhow.
• For the people who periodically miss the past, but are so much more excited for the future.
• For the people that have wounds still healing.
• For the people that have so much tied to their past relationship, but break those chains to start fresh.
• For the people that want to look back so badly, but focus on the road ahead.
• For the people that pick up the phone and are tempted to call, but keep their dignity intact instead.
• For the people that never wanted to let go, but had to.
• For the people that still believe in love even after all of the hurt their heart has endured.
• For all the people that gave up, not because they were weak, but because most times, it’s better just to let go.

 We’ll all get our happy ending someday.

Humility Really Cannot Be Considered A Virtue

Humility Really Cannot Be Considered A Virtue - Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Ego and pride are closely related, almost synonymous effects born of the same cause, ignorance of the relationship of the individualized sense of I with the world. (...) Although, graced by free will, I have the power to choose my actions, I have no power over the actual result of the action chosen; the result I anticipate can never be more than a probability among possibilities. I do not produce the result. The result of any act of mine, occurs both as the product of materials that I have not authored as well as the outcome of many circumstances, past and present, known and unknown, which must operate in concert for the given result to occur.

If my strong skillful arm throws the winning pass in the final seconds of an American football game, the material and circumstantial factors that come together to produce this are too many for the final result to be a matter for personal pride. I am neither the creator of the football itself nor of my athletic body. Many people and experiences contributed to the development of the skill in the arm that threw the ball. I am not responsible for the clearing of the rainstorm so that the game did not have to be canceled, or for the sharp earth tremor that occurred 60 seconds after my pass, since a minute earlier, my pass would have been spoiled. Nor can I claim credit for my colleague for who caught the pass to convert the possibility into the winning points.

Pride and ego, when examined, become so silly that humility really cannot be considered a virtue. Humility is simply understanding the world, including myself, because I am part of the world, just as it is. When I understand things as they are, I will be neither proud nor will I be self-condemning. Self-condemnation also is an expression of the ego (...), to be cleansed by the understanding that there is no locus for condemnation other than a particular thought. (...) I see that personal credit for anything is irrelevant and cannot be substantiated. I simply enjoy the world as a field for the discovery of knowledge, without pride, without egotism.

About the Author: Excerpted from Swami Dayananda Sawaswati's book, "The Value of Values." 

The Surrender Experiment

The Surrender Experiment - Michael Singer

Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the processes that determine the flow of life around us did not begin when we were born, nor will they end when we die. What manifests in front of us at any given moment is actually something truly extraordinary—it is the end-result of all the forces that have been interacting together for billions of years. We are not responsible for even the tiniest fraction of what is manifesting around us. Nonetheless, we walk around constantly trying to control and determine what will happen in our lives. No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.

Every day, we give precedence to our mind’s thoughts over the reality unfolding before us. We regularly say things like, “It better not rain today because I’m going camping” or “I better get that raise because I really need the money.” Notice that these bold claims about what should and shouldn’t be happening are not based on scientific evidence; they’re based solely on personal preferences made up in our minds. Without realizing it, we do this with everything in our lives—it's as though we actually believe that the world around us is supposed to manifest in accordance to our own likes and dislikes. If it doesn’t, surely something is very wrong. This is an extremely difficult way to live, and it is the reason we feel that we are always struggling with life.

Nonetheless, it is also true that we are not powerless in the face of the events unfolding around us. We have been gifted with the power of will. From deep inside, we can determine how we want something to be and apply the power of our minds, hearts, and bodies in an attempt to make the outside world conform. But this puts us in a constant battle of our way versus the way it would be without our intervention. This battle between individual will and the reality of life unfolding around us ends up consuming our lives. When we win this battle, we are happy and relaxed; when we don’t, we are disturbed and stressed. Since most of us only feel good when things are going our way, we are constantly attempting to control everything in our lives.

The question is, does it have to be this way? There is so much evidence that life does quite well on its own. The planets stay in orbit, tiny seeds grow into giant trees, weather patterns have kept forests across the globe watered for millions of years, and a single fertilized cell grows into a beautiful baby. We are not doing any of these things as conscious acts of will; they are all being done by the incomprehensible perfection of life itself. All these amazing events, and countless more, are being carried out by forces of life that have been around for billions of years—the very same forces of life that we are consciously pitting our will against on a daily basis. If the natural unfolding of the process of life can create and take care of the entire universe, is it really reasonable for us to assume that nothing good will happen unless we force it to? 

For lack of a better name, I have called this the Surrender Experiment.

About the Author: Michael Singer is the author of Unthered Soul and above excerpt is from his book, The Surrender Experiment. 

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People Will Keep Asking ... But Its Your Life ...

When you are living in your sweet spot you feel ... calm and energetic, accomplished and joyful. --Deepak Chopra

Three Tricks to Help Find Your Flow

--by Christine Carter, syndicated from Greater Good, Aug 21, 2015

When was the last time you were so focused that time stood still? 

Athletes call this mental state being in “The Zone”; psychologists call it “flow” or peak experience, and they have linked it to leading a life of happiness and purpose. Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who authored the Tao Te Ching, called it “doing without doing” or “trying without trying.”

I think of this mental state as our “sweet spot,” where we have both great strength and great ease; it’s the mental state when our best work emerges without strain or anxiety. Instead of making our most powerful effort, we get to experience our own effortless power.

Although we usually assume that a state of deep concentration is hard to achieve (and getting harder these days, as the interruptions from our smartphone/email/texts mount) the truth is that we can access this wonderful state much more easily than we often realize. Here’s how.

1. Clear mental clutter.

What is going on in your mind that will keep you from your sweet spot?

Take a quick look at your task list, and decide what you will do today and when you will do it. When our subconscious mind doesn’t know when we will complete a task, it will often interrupt our flow state with intrusive reminders about what else we need to do. Research shows that our unconscious isn’t actually nagging us to do the task at hand but rather to make a plan to get it done. So scheduling a task can make a huge difference in our ability to focus on something else.

Another precursor to getting into The Zone is knowing where you are in your workflow. “That constant awareness of what is next is what keeps you focused,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, toldEntrepreneur magazine. “That’s where the engagement comes from.”

So note what you’ve just accomplished, what you hope to accomplish next, and what you’ll work on after that.

As I approach my tasks, I also find it helpful to take a quick peek at my calendar and email to clear mental clutter. Is there anything urgent? The idea isn’t to respond to emails; it’s a check that keeps me from worrying while I work that I should have checked my email, and keeps me from wondering if there is anything on my calendar that I should be preparing for.

2. Build yourself a fortress against interruption.

If you can’t concentrate, you can’t be in your sweet spot. Period.

That’s because if you keep getting interrupted, you can’t achieve the state of deep concentration that you need for flow. Even if you like the interruptions (as when you get funny texts from a friend). Even if the interruptions are good for your work (as when a colleague stops by to answer a question). If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this:

No focus, no flow.

Anything that might distract or tempt you away from your work needs to be taken care of before you drop into The Zone. Think of yourself like a toddler going on a road trip: What will make you pull over before you reach your destination? Will you need to plug your computer in? Get a kleenex? Adjust the thermostat? Something as small as an itchy tag on the back of your shirt can weaken your focus if you are tempted to go to the bathroom to cut it out. Here is what I have to do before I find flow:

Clear my desk of anything that might distract me. I remove yesterday’s coffee cup, close books, put pens away, stack papers into a deceptively neat pile. As I do this, I note anything on my task list that will need my attention later, and make a time when I will attend to it.

Open any documents on my computer that I will need to use while I’m doing my focused work, and then quit my email application. This prevents me from opening my email while I’m trying to write—once I do that, I have to exert a lot of mental energy to resist reading new emails.

I close open browser windows and any other apps that aren’t in use. I leave my calendar open, as one of the great benefits of working from our sweet spot is that we lose track of time, and my calendar keeps me from missing what’s next.

I put my smartphone into “do not disturb” mode and move it out of sight. I turn off the ringer on my landline. (All other alerts on my computer are already off. I would never dream of getting a device like an Apple watch, which would be a constant threat to my concentration.)

I go to the bathroom, and bring a glass of water, snack, and cup of coffee to my desk.

I close my shades and office door. If I’m not alone, I put on noise canceling headphones and then I tell Buster, my trusty canine colleague, to go to his “place,” where he’s trained to stay while I work.

Take a minute to anticipate your needs and take care of them now rather than when they will break your state of concentration.

3. Prepare your brain to go into a deep state of focus.

This doesn’t require any sci-fi technology that sends a probe or special rays into your brain. Instead, it just takes a few simple, very ordinary steps.

Have a small snack. Concentration is very taxing for our brain energy-wise. Research shows that our focus and stamina tend to improve when our blood sugar is on the rise. (No need to have a whole meal, though. Digestion diverts energy from the brain. A small handful of nuts works best for me.)

Drink a lot of water. Your brain is 73 percent water, and even mild dehydration can cause it to sputter. Research participants who are barely dehydrated—not enough to even feel thirsty—experience “significant deterioration in mental functions” according to one study. Drinking water corrects trouble focusing. We aren’t sure why, but one theory is that it is the brain’s way of getting us to pay attention to our basic survival needs rather than our big thoughts and ambitions.

Put on some music you’ve chosen as ideal for getting into your sweet spot. Star athletes have long understood the power that music has to raise our energy and focus our attention—as well as to block out distractions. (Just make sure that the music isn’t another distraction in and of itself. I’ve created a Pandora radio station that plays only upbeat instrumental music; lyrics distract me.)

Exhale deeply for a minute or so. Our breathing profoundly affects our nervous system and blood flow in our brain—and, therefore, our performance. Taking some nice deep breaths signals to our brain that we are safe, allowing us to access mental resources we can’t when our breathing is shallow (which our brain takes as a sign that we are in a state of fight or flight).

Elite performers—from Stephen Curry to Maya Angelou—train themselves to drop into The Zone unconsciously by performing little rituals like the one I’ve created out of these three steps. (Angelou said that she used her pre-writing routine to “enchant” herself.) Indeed, rituals like these make it possible for ordinary people to do extraordinary work.

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This article is printed here with permission. It originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.

Be The Change: Next time you have an important task to tackle, be sure to make an effort to see if you can get achieve a deep focus by getting into your 'sweet spot.'

Sourced From www.dailygood.org