What am I?

There is no conflict that does not entail the single, simple question, "What am I?"
Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself? Only refusal to accept yourself could make the question seem to be sincere. The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is. From this one point of certainty, it looks on other things as certain as itself.

ACIM Workbook, lesson 139

Love and Business

For a couple of years in my business, when choosing an important picture (which one to represent a photo shoot to potential customers), I have used intuition, focused simultaneously on 1) Love, and 2) good business.

It works, but it’s a bit divided thinking. Feels like a balancing act. 

While doing it today, it suddenly struck me: there’s absolutely no reason there has to be any conflict or division between them! 

There are people doing good business with really bad products, but there are also people doing amazing business with totally loving products or services. 

I guess the idea that there must be a conflict is just guilt about making money. But being rich is not real, just like being poor is not real. There’s no more guilt necessary about one than the other. 

Being rich doesn’t make you happy for the same reason, it’s not real. I’ve found that out myself. (Not “rich” I guess, but comfortable.) But being in constant struggle with finances is unnecessary and guilt-based, so one might as well take the opportunity to not have that drain on attention. 

Admittedly there are also people who have no money at all, and are perfectly happy and worry-free, it seems, but that’s a bit further on for me.     :-)

Lichtenberg/O'Keeffe

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

           -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

           -- Georgia O'Keeffe

Only the closed mind is certain

"Only the closed mind is certain." 

Used in Dean Spanley.

Hitler's last days

I warmly recommend Downfall, as an excellent film and as testimony to how humanity is working through some of our most difficult forgiveness lessons. 

We all change

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. 

- Horace Mann

God, being Love, is also happiness.

A Course In Miracles, Lesson 103, in part:

God, being Love, is also happiness.

Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has no limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well.

---

I was always a little confused by "love" as it's normally understood. You "love" your spouse and your child, but you hate a colleague or terrorists. 

And now I understand, via the course. "Love" which is specific and limited, is not really love. It may have elements of the true, unlimited love, but it's mostly a business game the Self runs: "I love you, and you love me, so we both gain". 

What is important? (updated)

What is most important, what happens TODAY, or the more timeless questions?

Update:
ttl said:

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

Yes, that sounds like it explains it. (See comments.)
And it sounds like what enlightened people will often tell you. They are perfectly contended, so they can't see any reason why you shouldn't be perfectly contended either.

I think many people, amazing as it sounds, are actually totally blind to the *process* which happens between not-enlightened and Enlightened. It seems to them it just happened spontaneously one days as they were walking in the park.
I think that's because the bulk of the Process happens in the much deeper mind which the Human mind does not have access to normally. But this doesn't mean that we can't influence it necessarily.

Proust on wisdom

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

           -- Marcel Proust

About humility

I am no more humble than my talents require. 

- Oscar Levant

It may be true that humility is part of the road to Awakening. But I feel that when others demand that you must be humble, it may have more to do with the fact that a lack of humility is offensive to other egos, they may feel trampled on or looked down upon. 

"Do we praise the blade of grass which stand taller than the rest?! No, we cut it down!" 

A personal learning of truth is a different matter, of course, here you may learn that personal differences are all illusory.

Update:
Funny koinkidink: a couple minutes after posting this, I was chilling to a silly cartoon, Kick Buttowski, and in that particular episode Kick, a kid who's big raison détre is daredevilry, find's out his mom is one too, and famous too. And he's bummed out. Explaining, he says: "somehow Mom being awesomeness makes me... less awesome." His friend says: "Since when does Awesome + Awesome make Less Awesome? 

Welcome To Reality / Adyashanti

He was born in 1962, he was almost fifty here (it seems to be rather recent), I wouldn't have guessed.
Good interview. Insight into a Driven Personality related to achieving enlightenment.

Some would say that Awakening is a one-shot thing, a decision, one thing or another. But it seems to me that almost anybody who seems to have achieved it went through a long process. Long, often intense process. And even for those who seem to not have, well, they lived half a life before it happened, and possibly many lifetimes before, who's to say a Process didn't happen in all that time, beyond their awareness?

Blossoming

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

           -- Anaïs Nin

-----

I feel this nails it. 

Unfolding and softening is a long and painful process, but at some point it just become preferable. It does take time though, so we should not be impatient with ourselves or each other. 

Milhouse

"...Milhouse? Funny little guy. Afraid of the dark. And the light." 
- Bart Simpson


A very funny line. And as usual, no joke without a bit of truth. I think we all may be, at least metaphorically, more afraid of the Light than of the Dark. Why else would we be here instead of with the Light?

Lord of the flies

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.  - Bertrand Russell

Punishment

Punishment is always the great preserver of sin; treating it with respect, and honoring its enormity. What must be punished, MUST BE TRUE. And what is true MUST be eternal, and WILL be repeated endlessly.

-- A Course in Miracles, chapter 19

Taken out of context, it looks like The Course supports punishment, but it's the opposite, it is talking about the belief of the Ego, which is wrong.
So long as you believe "sin" must be punished, you are just making it real and perpetuating it. 

Laughter gives us distance

Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on. 
- Bob Newhart

And I think this is true whether it is directly connected to events in our own life or not. (Since they are all equally illusory anyway.) Large dozes of comedy, whatever works for one, is recommended, both for relaxation and for deeper healing.

Anne of Green Gables. And, we don't want our medicine

I really like the books of LM Montgomery. They are often regarded as childrens' or young-girls' books, but they reach well beyond their genre, and they are very funny and wise.

By far the darkest one is Rilla of Ingleside, because it relates to WW1.
In it, one character comments to another about the past two years which have been very difficult. And she asks her if she would exchange them for two years of happy times. And the other character said that she would not, because of how much she has changed and grown.
But they agree that they would not have the heart to ask for two more similarly hard years, and the older character says how it's remarkable that even if and when we recognize how hardship has made us grown, we never want more of that kind of medicine, which is why we are not ourselves in charge of our path.
I thought that exceptionally wise.

The first book in the loosely-connected series by the way is the famous Anne of Green Gables. I think Lucy Maud Montgomery did a fantastic job in making a series of books taking place through the life of Anne Shirley, and have them all fit but yet be independent. Some of them don't even have Anne as main character, which is true of Rilla (Anne's daughter), and Rainbow Valley, one of my favorites, which is about two sets of siblings. The most important set of siblings is not even in Anne's family, but the book still fits perfectly in the whole saga.
The books are pretty much independent, but I think one may find greater satisfaction by reading them in sequence.
Almost all of them can be found on paper, ebook, and audiobook. (Though I haven't been able to find the sixth one, Anne Of Ingleside, in audio. If anybody knows of it...)

What is nothing?

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

           -- Martin Gardner, "The Mathematical Magic Show"

How to be passersby

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

- Susan Sontag

Apropos sound alienation, thanks to TCG and Biblegateway for these interesting bible verses: 

John 15:18-21 

18 "If the people of this world [a] hate you, just remember that they hated me first."

19 "If you belonged to the world, its people would love you. But you don't belong to the world. I have chosen you to leave the world behind, and that is why its people hate you." 

I suspect that alienation is a necessary step towards Awakening. 

Steps (and rest)

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

           -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

           -- Ovid

What god can do

Even God cannot change the past.

           -- Agathon

I'm a little astonished at the postulates people are willing to put forth about what God can or can't, or will or won't, do. How can we possibly know? It's like amoebe claiming to know what humans can do.

As a simple example: let's say God changed the past so that ants became the intelligent race and ruled the earth, and humans numbered a few thousand, cowering in trees. Well, the present might change as well, and how would the inhabitants of this world know that it had ever been any different? Heck for all we know, ants were our masters until last week, when God got bored and changed it all. 

Be a doubter

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. 

- Rene Descartes