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Choosing to have hope needs no justification.
Living is unceasing rebellion against destruction in the name of creation.
People knowingly hold on to false beliefs because letting go would shatter their sense of self.
Foolishness is creating an identity by adding labels – becoming impervious. Wisdom is creating an identity by removing labels – becoming vulnerable.
Being lost is how you find yourself.
No one should be insecure in who they are, but neither should they be confident. The idea of "who" they are is an abstraction that needs to be shed in order to truly understand themselves.
Everyone has a story that they tell themselves about themselves. When loss is experienced, one can either believe that their story is lost, or that the loss is part of their story.
If God is Infinitely Unknowable, then every statement about God is infinitely false, but can awaken something in the heart that is infinitely true.
If a starving village discovers a cache of seeds, they do not eat the seeds; they plant them and eat the harvest. Wisdom is seed looking for fertile soil – it is not the seed that nourishes us, but the fruit.
If you want the world to be better, make yourself better, as that is the only piece of the world you can truly change.
The ego is an illusory support scaffolding that helps one understand the world.
Introspection reveals something about God, because God is within one's self.
If an observation of the self leads to loss of self-value, rather than invalidating the observation, challenge what the value is based upon.
When we have experiences that have a deep impact on us, there is what happened, the mythology of what happened, the memory of what happened and the mythology of the memory. Somehow it all defines us, and we choose to wear some of it more often than the others.
Your true self at your core is 3 things: Unblemished, Unfinished, Unmeasurable. Nothing about you is broken or wrong, You will grow in your understanding of the world, Your identity is deeper than any desire or label.
You can't hate yourself into a person you'll love.
Enlightenment is about staying the course, not reaching port.
Maturity is consistency regardless of circumstance.
Maturity is understanding your conditioning without pointing any blame.
Contentment is escaping the dualism of triumph and failure.
True nihilism is not the end of purpose, but the end of the ego.
The child changes who they are to fit in with whoever will accept them. The adolescent insists upon being seen exactly how they want to be seen. The adult makes room for others just as they are.
People become so familiar with failure they drive themselves towards it without realizing they even have a choice to do otherwise.
A belief is a signpost pointing the way to Truth. When you cling to the signpost you are prevented from moving towards the Truth because you think you have it already.
If our options are either the complacency of the ego or the terror of uncertainty, we are blind to the Third Way - anchoring our identity on something Other.
Help, care for, love, and forgive all people equally, remembering that you are the person in the best position to help, care for, love, and forgive yourself.
You cannot truly understand how much you don't know until you understand one thing profoundly - then you realize how many things you don't understand profoundly.
Superficial knowledge leads to pride, but deep knowledge gives way to humility.
If God is the Light of the world, then we should not seek to see Him, but instead seek to see all things by Him.
If there is a conceivable alternate universe with a version of you that is capable of something merely because that version of you lacks a traumatic experience that you had, then you are also capable of that thing.
Boredom is not evil - it is the springboard for creativity.
Adults are not people who used to be children. They are people who grew a person around the child they used to be. But that child is just as present as it always was. Becoming an adult isn't no longer needing to be parented. It's learning to parent yourself.
Children shouldn't always be taken literally. But they should always be taken seriously.
Friends don't provide unconditional approval. Friends provide unconditional love and conditional approval.
Wise friends know when criticism is pointless.
Hating someone is allowing them to control you.
Manipulation requires empathy. Do not assume only those without empathy can manipulate.
No one ever makes you feel anything. No one makes you angry or makes you happy. You allow yourself to feel emotions in response to a trigger.
Being responsible for your reaction does not mean the other person is not responsible for their action.
Children should be both given security in the identity you craft for them, and also given the tools they need to dismantle that identity. One should neither beholden a child to the identity you give them, nor refrain from giving them any identity in the first place.
When you praise a child for being beautiful, strong, or smart, they learn they must be these things in order to be valuable. Tell them they are valuable for their choices, ethic, and existence, not their gifts.
Growing up replaces apathy and feigned exhaustion with passion and concealed exhaustion. Maturity replaces both with ethic and self-care.
If people are broken because they are unloved, then instead of condemning them for being broken, condemn yourself for not loving them.
Family Values are built on Norms, Rituals, and Traditions.
Family traditions create positive family culture if they are created with intentionality.
It is vital for families to have traditions, but it is equally important that each family member understand that it is not the tradition itself that is valuable, but the community experience that is shared.
First seek to serve others, then serve yourself - never wait to be served. But do not serve others out of unworthiness. Know when to give others the gift of serving you.
Meaning can never be transferred, but must be created for yourself.
Everyone is winging it.
You cannot judge humanity based on the attitudes of one group. You cannot judge a group based on the attitudes of one member.
When you ask the public a question, the people that answer are a self-selected biased group.
The wise man knows he cannot tell you what the meaning of life is - only where it can be found.
No one is foolish enough to ride their horse in search of their horse, yet they still go out into the world in search of meaning.
The monkey puts the fish in a tree to save it from drowning. The eagle warns the bat not to fly at night. The falcon cuts his wings to fit in with the pigeons. What softens the potato hardens the egg. Diamonds form under pressure but bread rises during rest. Order to the spider is chaos to the fly.
'Spirituality' is whatever succeeds in creating inner transformation. If any rituals or traditions cease to perform that vital function, then they cease to be spirituality. What generally goes under the name of 'spirituality' is merely the record of past methods.
To know something is to love it. We only fear what we do not know. Fear is merely the absence of love.
Second-Order Thinking is the key to success. It isn't just the immediate outcome that matters, but the subsequent interactions that should be considered.
Be a good ancestor.
People value narratives more than truth, even when they claim to believe a narrative because of its truth.
All perspectives contain some fragment of truth, and there is a stance from which a perspective can be seen as completely true. It's not the perspective, but rather the stance that is flawed.
Any statement that begins with "in an ideal world we would" is insufficient for justifying an action, because we do not live in an ideal world.
You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
Empathizing with bigots and monsters is the best defense against becoming one. When you demonize villains, you become unable to recognize villainy in yourself.
Money is a store of value. It is fundamentally a ledger of what you are owed by society. Too much money is hoarded by those who are owed nothing.
Growth for the sake of growth at the expense of all else has a name: cancer.
Love is the greatest good, and fear is the greatest evil.
There are three types of regret: What you did, what you didn't do, and what you will never do.
Entropy is the nature of the universe, but not the nature of the soul.
Our map of reality is not reality itself.
The grand struggle is between integration and rejection. Order, chaos, preservation, and ruin can manifest in service of either one.
Systems and models do not act the same at every scale, unless they are fractals.
Systems are made of meaningless elements, yet by behaving according to rules, they create meaning.
Psychedelics, meditation, and prayer all activate the same part of your brain. But the one who takes a helicopter to the summit learns much less than the one who climbs up.
A superficial truth's opposite is false, but a deep truth's opposite is equally true.
Reality is neither exclusively truth nor illusion. It is both.
Everything is Design, Narrative, Storytelling, Experiential, Spiritual.
Western traditions think that praying is where you ask the universe for something and then you go about the rest of your day looking for the answers. The truth is that you should go about your day hearing the universe ask you for things, and then prayer is where you answer back.
The appearance of duality is seen as arising from the mind's need to impose divisions and boundaries upon an essentially unified whole. Thus, reality is ultimately one but can only be experienced in terms of division.
Consciousness, and therefore love, is a fundamental force like gravity or electromagnetism. It could not have evolved - it is the fabric of everything.
The universe is consciousness itself. We are the universe having thoughts.
God is more than a craftsman making a quilt. He is the fabric itself, and we are the threads. The spark of our neurons is the fire of the stars, and we are made of energy that has been around since the universe was born.
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