17 June 2024         

   

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The Principle of Now (an excerpt)
Wayne Dyer

From Wake Up and Live
Dorothea Brande 

Beauty
tom walsh

   

   

     
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Simple and Profound Thoughts
(from Simple and Profound)

The true joy of humankind is in doing that which is most proper to our nature; and the first property of people is to be kindly affected towards them that are of one kind with ourselves.    -Marcus Aurelius

If you would be interesting, be interested; if you would be pleased, be pleasing; if you would be loved, be lovable; if you would be helped, be helpful.    -unattributed

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and the angels know of us.   -Thomas Paine

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles--by the ear, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.  It's the healthiest thing a body can do.    -Mark Twain

   

  
The Principle of Now
Wayne Dyer

You've heard it many times, so often in fact that it has become a cliché:  Live in the present.  The now is all there is.  Forget about the past; it's over.  Don't worry about the future; there is only today.  While these are familiar refrains, the truth is that living in the now is an elusive activity for virtually everyone.  It may be easy to say, but it's very tricky to do day in and day out.  And yet, Alan Watts is absolutely correct in the above quotation when he states that it "already is the case."  This is why living in the present moment is so baffling.

Think about the past and you're not living in the now. . . but the now is the only time available for thinking about the past!  Live in anticipation of the future and you're admonished for not being here now. . . but now is all you have for engaging in that delicious "futurizing."  Thus, as Alan Watts reminds you, you strive for what already is.  To be in the now is really your only option.  But the real question isn't how to live in the now, it's how to use the now by being present--rather than wasting it on reflections of the past or concerns about the future. . . .

Ego, Excuse Making, and the Elusive Now

After spending several days preparing to write this chapter, I was trying to focus on its significance when I decided to go for a long swim in the ocean.  As I walked toward the water, I noted that I felt some tension in my solar-plexus region.  It wasn't anything serious--it was just the discomfort I often feel when I have many things to do or decisions to make. 

At the moment I was about to dive in, my thoughts went back to the reading I'd just finished on the psychology of the now.  I decided to see if I could totally immerse myself in the moment (which, of course, meant that I was in fact striving for what "already is the case," since I have no other moment than this one), only this time, I'd be fully present, letting everything just be.  I wouldn't worry about the ache in my chest, think about how cold the water would be or which direction the current was flowing, or rehash all the things I had on my current to-do list.  I'd simply be in the now.

I indeed let everything go and stayed focused on the instant, the place, and the surroundings.  And something strange and wonderful happened.  My chest stopped hurting, I loosened up, all of my anxiety dissolved, and I felt totally energized.  For the next 60 minutes or so, I moved through the water staying 100 percent present.  The moment I decided to just be there completely, with all other thoughts pushed aside, the discomfort I was experiencing disappeared.  Moreover, I had the most peaceful swim I've ever had, and I emerged from the water fully refreshed.

My conclusion is that the present moment is an antidote for the pain and difficulties we experience, which we habitually try to soothe with rationales and explanations.  When we plunge ourselves 100 percent into the now, experiencing it and nothing else, we're on an Excuses Begone! journey, with no need for all of those old habituated thinking patterns.

In fact, excuses are simply what you've developed to explain now moments that are tangled into the past or future.  If you're truly in that blissful presence of the now, there's no desire to alter what is.  When your sentences express that "It's going to be difficult . . . it will take a long time . . . I'm not smart enough . . . I'm too old," you're wasting a present moment with excuses from a not-now moment!  And when are you having these thoughts?  You guessed it--the only time you have a thought is in the now.  So if your present moment is being used up replaying why present-moment thinking is incorrect (making excuses), is it available for you to do something constructive?  Obviously not!

All excuses are avoidance techniques to keep you from taking charge and changing your thinking habits.  If you weren't rehashing your excuses but were instead immersed in the now, you'd be experiencing your own form of the bliss and healing that took place for me during my magical swim.  You see, when I removed ego from the moment, I stopped thinking about myself and focused on being fully present--and then I was able to be truly here without ego's excuses.  I had plenty of explanations for the tension in my chest, but when I moved totally into the now with no other thoughts, the excuses disappeared along with the pain.

more thoughts and ideas on now

   

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from Wake Up and Live
Dorothea Brande
(1936)

Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to be put under the sway of another's will in order to do our own work.  The solution is far simpler.  All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this:

Act as if it were impossible to fail.

That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

Clear out, by an easy imaginative feat, all the distrusts and timidities, all the fears of looking ridiculous which you may hardly suspect of being treacherous troublemakers in your life.  You will find that if you can imaginatively capture the state of mind which would be yours if you knew you were going towards a prearranged and inevitable success, the first result will be a tremendous surge of vitality, of freshness.  Then--well, the only way to put it is that it will seem as though your mind gave a great sigh of relief, of gratitude for the liberation, and stretched itself to its fullest extent.  This is the moment where one may be forgiven for feeling that there is something truly magical about the whole affair.  There will appear an extension of capacity which seems more than normal.

Then the long-dammed-up flow sets in:  directly, irresistibly, turned at last in the right direction, the current gathers strength from minute to minute.  At first you may still harbor some fear that the spell which worked so instantaneously may break in the same way. It will not, simply because it is no spell; it is a reminder to yourself of the way in which work can always be successfully undertaken.  If you remember that, far from your seeing the successful action stop, you will find that each hour of unhampered activity opens out into a promise of others in the future.  There may actually be some embarrassment from seeing too many expanding possibilities until you have learned to organize your new life.

Those fears, anxieties and apprehensions, you see, were far more than mere negative things.  By acting as if they were important, you endowed them with importance, you turned them into realities.  They became parasitic growths, existing at the expense of everything that is healthy in you.  While we allow them to sap us, we are allowing the nourishment which should go towards expanding growth to be used for feeding monsters, cherishing the freaks and by-blows of the mind instead of its extraordinary and creative elements. So that it is not that one is suddenly given wonderful new powers; by ceasing to let fear hold its frustrating sway we come into the use of already existing aptitudes which we formerly had no energy to explore.  We discover that we already possess capacities we had not suspected, and the effect, of course, is as though we had just received them.  And the rapidity with which these capacities make themselves known when once the aspects are favorable for them is truly somewhat startling.  It is even more enjoyable.

Next, there is the further experience of seeming to become, in contrast with one's old self, practically tireless.  Actual records of working periods introduced by using this formula would strain the credulity of those who have never yet had the experience.  And these periods are not followed by any depressed reaction.  There is always so much ahead, and it is so clearly seen, that there is no chance for depression to set in when the mind is turned back from its onward drive to consider all the tribulations of the past, all the possible mischances which might conceivably happen, it cannot, of course, at the same time explore the road into the future.  But once absolve it of the thankless and unnecessary task, and it rewards you by seeming to fly where before it had stumbled and groped.

It takes some self-education to learn how to go from one item of successful work to the next, not to lose time and spend strength---much more happily, but just as surely---in gloating over either the ease with which the task as done or in contemplating too fondly the truly remarkable work one has just been so fortunate as to
produce.  But a few days' Harvest Home is quite excusable; and since, still resilient and unexhausted, one looks forward to further activity with enjoyment, there is no permanent danger that the first success under the new regime will be the last.

If you are tempted to look askance at this procedure, to feel that you are being invited to deceive yourself into a feeling of success, you are quite wrong. We are all pragmatists and empiricists in our daily life; what "works" for us is our practical truth, and becomes the basis of our further activity.  "Our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function," as William James says.  And even more fully and convincingly, the late Hans Vaihinger worked out these conceptions in his book, The Philosophy of "As If."  Not everyone will go with him to the furthest boundaries of his theory, but it is certainly plain that in most matters of life each of us must act as if this or that fact were a self evident truth.  For one thing, if we insisted on proving the reality or efficacy or even probability of most of the conceptions on which we base our practical procedures, we should have no time left in which to act.  So, in general, we accept the premises for action which are presented to us on good authority, and use them as proved unless or until our experience causes us to doubt the wisdom of so doing.  Then we may reexamine them and perhaps reach different conclusions from our mentors, but for the most part we all act as if our norms of conduct, our standards of values, were eternally and everywhere valid, so long as they prove practicable for us.

In everyday life, then, if you are ineffectual in your daily encounters and unproductive in your work, you are to that extent acting as if you willed to fail.  Turn that attitude inside out, consciously decide that your "As If" shall be healthy and vital, shall be aimed towards accomplishment, and you have made success a truth for yourself.

"The law of nature is:  Do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not do the thing have not the power."
  

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I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think,
all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read,
and all the friends I want to see.  The longer I live the more my mind
dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world.  I hardly know
which feeling leads, wonderment or admiration.

John Burroughs

   

 
Beauty

This world is full of beauty.  It's full of things and places and people and animals who share their beauty with us each day--but unfortunately, we've been conditioned over the course of our lives not to see that beauty any longer, if we ever noticed it in the first place.  And therein lies the problem with beauty:  it has tremendous potential to make our lives richer, yet it can only do when and if we notice it and appreciate it.  So the problem with beauty lies not in the beautiful object or person, but in ourselves and our lack of awareness and gratitude.

Beauty is, they say, in the eye of the beholder.  But this isn't necessarily true.  While there are some works of art or industry, for example, that one person may find beautiful and another may find horribly ugly, the fact that I don't see something as physically attractive does not mean that it is devoid of beauty.  This is especially true in people--our society teaches us that certain types of looks are more beautiful than others, so it's very easy to miss the beauty in a person whose looks don't match the societal "ideal."  And this is a huge shame because if we're unable to see the beauty in other people who are, indeed, beautiful, then our lives are much, much poorer.
   

The fact that we can't see the beauty in something doesn't suggest that it's not there.  Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.

Richard Carlson

   
Seeing beauty isn't necessarily all that easy, though.  I've known many people who do their best to hide their beauty, often simply because they don't think they're beautiful at all.  They hide their talents and abilities, and they show the world their hardness or their anger, and that's a facade that is very often difficult to see through.  Some young girls who have been made to feel ugly learn to dress and act in unattractive ways; some young boys who don't feel at all beautiful do their best to make themselves ugly, either through their actions or their clothing or their hygiene.

But beauty is an important part of our world, and thus an important part of our lives.  And beauty is something that we all share, both in its possession and in the enjoyment we get from it.  If I'm able to see your beauty clearly--in your eyes or your smile or your words or your actions, then my life is richer.  If you're able to see mine, your life is richer.  If I hide my beauty, though, I won't be making your life even the slightest bit more positive.

Most of us need to make an effort to be able to see beauty more easily.  It makes me feel awful to think of how often I've taken people for granted as just "ordinary" people with no real beauty, only to see later that their beauty was amazing--it was just somewhere that I hadn't even thought of looking.  My own judgmental attitude and inability to recognize something that was right in front of my eyes kept me from experiencing some amazing things.  It's taken me a long time to learn to actively seek a person's beauty, or a town's beauty, or a work of art's beauty, but nowadays I think that if I don't see the beauty immediately, that's a sign that the beauty is probably going to be more extraordinary than superficial beauty usually is.
    

People should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of their lives, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    
Far too often, we consider superficial beauty to be the true indicator of beauty, and that's far from the case.  Yes, the spectacular sunset is beautiful, but the less dramatic sunsets have their own subtle beauty, too.  Some trees don't seem to be nearly as beautiful as others, yet what they contribute to the planet is necessary and, therefore, beautiful.  Sometimes we need to look very closely at things to see the beauty of their intricacy, while other times we may be looking too close and we should back up a bit to see the beauty in the bigger picture.

The appreciation of beauty is a gift that we should not squander.  But it's also a gift that we should not allow to be affected by the superficial mores of our culture--we should not let other people define beauty for us.  If we do so, we're making our lives poorer, for then we will lost out on much beauty that remains unrecognized and unappreciated.  When we're able to recognize beauty, we then allow wonder and awe to be an important part of our lives, and these two attributes also contribute much to a healthy and fulfilling life.

If we actively make an effort to allow beauty to be an important part of our lives, then we can enrich our lives ourselves.  And if we make sure that we define beauty ourselves, based on our instincts and our personal tastes, we won't spend a lot of time wondering why we don't feel the same way about a particular object or person that other people feel.  As Jean says below, the appreciation of beauty opens doors to our souls, and those are doors that always should be open.
   

As I experience it, appreciation of beauty is access to the soul.  With beauty
in our lives, we walk and carry ourselves more lightly and with a different look
in our eyes.  To look into the eyes of someone beholding beauty is to look
through the windows of the soul.  Anytime we catch a glimpse of soul, beauty
is there; anytime we catch our breath and feel "How beautiful!," the soul is present.

Jean Shinoda Bolen

   
I've reached a point at which I can see beauty in almost everything, even litter on the highway (in its texture or shape or form) or other things that don't seem to have any inherent beauty.  (Of course, I pick up all the litter I can, because even if it does have some beauty, the natural state of a place is usually better.)  In being able to recognize and appreciate the beauty in the world in which I live, I've given myself a tool that can help me to feel better when I feel down, that can help to elate me when I need to feel elation, that can brighten a dull day or make even brighter a day already bright.  Seeing and appreciating beauty is a gift that I can give to myself whenever I feel the need.  And when I do this, my life is brighter and my spirit soars, knowing that I'm not neglecting it at all.

    

   More on beauty

  

   

   

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Always, I suppose, if you have a few perfect days, you can count on some kind of trouble.  But whether or not you live with a happy attitude depends on your own cast of mind and the power of your faith.  What you think determines what you are.

Norman Vincent Peale

  
I remember this illumination happening to me one noontime as I stood in the kitchen and watched my children eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  We were having a most unremarkable time on a nondescript day, in the midst of the most quotidian of routines.  I hadn't censed the table, sprinkled the place mats with holy water, or uttered a sanctifying prayer over the Wonder bread.  I wasn't feeling particularly "spiritual."  But, heeding I don't know what prompting, I stopped abruptly in mid-bustle, or mid-woolgathering, and looked around me as if I were opening my eyes for the first time that day.

The entire room became luminous and so alive with movement that everything seemed suspended--yet pulsating--for an instant, like light waves.  Intense joy swelled inside me, and my immediate response was gratitude--gratitude for everything, every tiny thing in that space.  The shelter of the room became a warm embrace; water flowing from the tap seemed a tremendous miracle; and my children became, for a moment, not my progeny or my charges or my tasks, but eternal beings of infinite singularity and complexity whom I would one day, in an age to come, apprehend in their splendid fullness.

Holly Bridges Elliott
   

  

Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself
miserable I had to work in the most intense fashion, and that it was absurd.
I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong.
"The trick is in what one emphasizes," he said.  "We either make ourselves miserable,
or we make ourselves strong.  The amount of work is the same."

Carlos Castaneda

    

  

Yes, life can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's actually rather dependable and reliable.  Some principles apply to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning.  I use it a lot when I teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.  What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or generous, compassionate or arrogant?  In this book, I've done my best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life, writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.  Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too!
Universal Principles of Living Life Fully.  Awareness of these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration out of the lives we lead.

   
    

   

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