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title:: Books/Become What You Are - Highlights - ==“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal."== id:: 67af59fc-7ec0-44af-bd48-8d3d5d10cca1 - If I may put it in a way which is horribly cumbersome and inadequate, that fleeting glimpse is the perception that, suddenly, some very ordinary moment of your ordinary everyday life, lived by your very ordinary self, just as it is and just as you are—that this immediate here-and-now is perfect and self-sufficient beyond any possibility of description. - Well then, is it possible for me to stop seeking for these results? Surely, the very question implies that I have still a result in mind, even if this is the state of not seeking results. It seems, therefore, that I am helpless, that I am simply unable to think or act without some result in mind. It makes no difference whether I do or don’t do: I am still, compulsively, helplessly, seeking a result. So I find myself in a teleological trap. I must purpose. I might almost say, I am purpose. id:: 6326972f-88a6-4dc4-9898-39bb56e5fab8 Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is—a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism. But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched-up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. It is working purposefully, as it must, but to no purpose. It is looking for results in terms of itself. It wants to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. There is, however, just this one possibility. It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it. And this realization of “I can do nothing” is precisely mui. One has mysteriously succeeded in doing nothing. - Thus the first step on the Path is to ~~know what you want, not what you ought to want.~~ Only in this way can the pilgrim set out upon his journey fully prepared. Otherwise he is like a general that leads a campaign into an unknown territory, who, **instead of ascertaining his own strength and the strength and position of his foe, concerns himself only with what he imagines these things ought to be.** And however good his imaginations, he will without doubt lead his army into a hell. id:: 633adf36-4761-493a-b8b2-ca52ae784279 - It is as if we stood bound to illusion by a hair; to weaken it we split it with the knife of intellect, and split it again until its divisions become so fine that to make its cuts the mind must be sharpened indefinitely. id:: 633ae11f-b121-4925-b549-c227246bad0a - It is the central principle of Vedanta, Mahayana, and Taoism alike: there are no two principles in the universe; there is only Brahman, Tathata, or Tao, - The universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like the mirror that reflects everything instantly as it comes before it, yet making no effort to retain the reflection when the object is removed. “The perfect man,” says Chuang-tzu, “employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.” Yet, when the matter is carefully considered, we find that this is a description, not of what we should do, but of what we cannot help doing in any case.