“I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human
“A good life is still a life. It must involve a full share of suffering, loneliness, disappointment and coming to terms with one’s own mortality and the deaths of those one loves. To live a life that is good as a life involves all this.”
—Truth.“Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.”
—Bill Watterson, May 20, 1990“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
—Viktor E Frankl, Man’s Search For MeaningDo Not Wait for Peace
The peace for which you have to wait is the peace that is bound in time. It is mortal.
Peace that arises from causes will live and die by those causes. It is not ever-present and what is not ever-present is not real on the level of the Absolute.
Uncaused peace, which is no different than Being, is available at any moment. It is the recognition of the Self by the Self within the Self. It is you and always you.
When you fixate on the not-you, which means to say the body, mind, and ego, then you forget yourself and fall prey to the suffering that arises from confusion.
Often we are left with the mistaken belief that we need to get X and Y done before we can allow ourselves to feel okay. Or we have to prove ourselves in this or that way before we can consider ourselves a whole Being.
By all means, aim to achieve whatever inspires you. But don’t hinge your sense of Self on such transient things. Otherwise you will be a constant victim of your own imaginations.
Re-discover yourself without the context of a mind and body, as a timeless and endless expanse of contentment. Then be in touch with that Self even as you go about playing the part of a human in this world.
Namste, sangha.
