Illusions Have to be Justified

Manners are cultural social intelligence.

Imagine it outside of you. You would not look at your heart and think: “This is me.” You think: “That is my heart.”

You don’t want what you want; you want what you’ve known. We are literally incapable of predicting an outcome that is out of the realm of what we’ve known previously.

You don’t need to have every answer, nor will you ever have every answer.

Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy–it’s acceptance.

Note to self, "I don’t owe anybody an apology for disagreeing with them."

Be your worst enemy so nobody else can be. Assume the worst so nobody can surprise you with it. Call it being realistic.

Psychologist Robert Thayer argues that moods are created by our habitualness: how much we sleep, how frequently we move, what we think, how often we think it, and so on.

The only thing that changes you and your life is the awareness of the parts that are not “I.” It is the whole, it is where you end up, it is where you began, it is the one thing, the only thing, that shifts, and raises, and facilitates the spark of awareness that made you question the elements of...

The notion that thoughts create reality is more than just a nice idea; it's also a fact of evolution. Many of the world's "best" people understood that to change their lives, they had to change their minds. If you consciously learn to regard the "problems" in your life a...

Chasing happiness is trying to keep ourselves sustained by “positive” life events, rather than adjusting the baseline as a whole. Motivating ourselves with the hope of achieving a sustained feeling of “good” is not only unhealthy, it’s impossible.

Here a few reasons why we reject positivity:

1. We see it as naive.

2. We're constantly reinforcing our subconscious belief in the negative.

3. We are more inherently fascinated by the negative in the world because we do not understand it.

Because we do not understand t...

It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim.

The solution to most of your problems is just changing the way you think about them.

Logic allows you to see objectively; passion is subjective and consuming.

Self-esteem is not how much confidence you have in how well people perceive you, but how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life.

Learn to differentiate what’s actually happening from what you’re currently thinking about. Realize that thoughts are illusions, but powerful ones. Stop pretending you know what other people are thinking. Stop pretending you know what the future holds, indefinitely.

They (socially intelligent person) do not try to inform people of their ignorance.

Creative people are depressed for a reason. The expression and experience of negative emotions are correlated with activation in the right frontal cortex (as well as in other structures such as the amygdala) or in other words, the same areas that are activated when consistently b...

A capacity to feel joy must be balanced by a capacity to know pain. Our world is born of, and exists because of, duality.

As C. G. Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When it comes to building the lives we want to lead, we’re taught to start constructing from how we imagine we want things to look.

Suffering teaches us that trying to change the external world to be happy is like trying to change the projection on the screen rather than the projector that’s playing it.

Your concept of self is an illusion (and construct) as well.