Can you envision your a moment of supreme happiness?
Envision a moment of contentment, or when you were firing on all cylinders with glee.
Live in that feeling now.
Bring your positive past into your present.
Tag: happiness
- Theme: Self
recycling happiness
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
Owning your assery
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1–2 minutesYou can be an ass. You can realize you’re silly and emotional and ignorant and confused. But this does not mean you are not a good person who is trying.
Recognizing your flaws, owning them, and still attempting to be better is all we can ask of anyone.
The person to fear is the one takes pleasure in their assery or the one who hides it.
- Theme: Self
normalized anxiety
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1–2 minutesThe unknown and risk offer excitement and anxiety: the urge to rid ourselves of these extremes drives us forward. This drive is a biological attempt to find peace.
Yet, we are conditioned to no longer find comfort in rest: we can only find familiarity in anxiety.
- Theme: Growth
Enriching insight by demoting language
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1–2 minutesLanguage is the dominant form to carry messages, but it is not the only means of communication and understanding.
Overreliance on words (which can lie in the name of truth) leads to a flattened, abstract understanding.
Look for ways to enrich insight (and counter language as logic) by considering actions over time, physical comportment, or the circle of influence.
- Theme: Self
Finding yourself
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1–2 minutesYour identity is your form, which is an act. To be “you” is to behave as people imagine you should, even as you imagine “you” should.
However, beneath the act is a profound awareness that is not identifiable: it is formless and still you.
From this formless awareness, the fears, wants, and concerns of the self (the act of “you”) are merely passing desires to which we desperately cling to maintain a recognizable shape.
The idea that “to find yourself,” you double down on “you” only increases the identification with fear, wanting, and desire: you build a stronger shape/form which you then need to maintain.
To find peace, we need “to lose yourself.”
- Theme: Culture
Channeling Excess
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1–2 minutesSociety produces excess and then must channel it, either into conquest or religion, or conspicuous wealth. This frivolous expenditure, this blatant waste, undermines society’s stability. (The “peasants” become angry.)
In the face of revolt, society must find a new collective means to channel its excess, perhaps a means that decries violence and lot in the name of peace.
Those busy making peace would consume the surplus.
- Theme: Self
Procrastination is pleasure in pain
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1–2 minutesWhile we can easily break our day into chunks to manage it, the procrastinator requires more pain to invoke discipline.
They trade the current moment as stolen joy from a future burden, eventually pinned under the stress and anxiety of "too late."
Procrastinating seems akin to the thrill of gambling: risking loss as a means to generate excitement and challenge, and of course, the commensurate charge if you "pull it off." - Theme: Self
Losing your self to find joy
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1–2 minutesHappiness is found when “I” disappear.
The paradox of identity is we identify with something, which often has desires, demands, and behaviors (attachments).The paradox is to consider who you are making happy by trying to be happy: demanding “I” want to be happy sabotages happiness, while to dissolve the self and its desires you uncover happiness.
- Theme: Self
The pleasure of being already dead
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1–2 minutesThe ultimate freedom is the realization of your death: you are simply pre-dead, an inevitable corpse.
Instead of clinging to your dead-end job, stagnating in a pool of fear, knowing you are dead already brings you the courage to really live gracefully and fully.