21 Jan 2018, 8:44 pm
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22 Jan 2018, 6:26 am
A certain user has ruined Buddhism for me. Just like how certain people ruined Christianity for me, this person has done the same. I don't want to share a belief system with someone who attacked me.
I really don't think there is an answer for my suffering except to just put a gun to my head and blast my brains out of my skull.
If your belief system can be ruined by someone with the same belief system attacking you then it may not be the right system for you. Then again it could be a loss of faith thing and you just need to regain it.
There is always an answer to suffering but you just need to find it - which is difficult.
Marknis, I wasn't suggesting you become a Buddhist but pointed out that they say life is suffering. I asked about the mindfulness as you said a few weeks ago you would give it a go as it was advised by a professional. Mindfulness need not be a full blown belief system. Mindfulness based cognitive therapy is quite popular at present because of the quick results and ease of translating results into research data. Mindfulness can be so many different things. It is a way to help you move forward - if you are open to that.
For anything to work, Marknis, you need to be open to it. That goes for any therapy and any treatment they suggest. It can't be any worse than what you are feeling at present. So to give it a try won't make you life worse and you have only gains to think about.
But is it even possible for me to move forward? I fear that I can't because I missed out so much in my developmental years and high school. My mind keeps telling me that my life is fixed.
That voice in your head which tells you that your life is fixed is the loudest. The quiet voice which gets drowned out needs to be nurtured. The quiet one that wants to move on and knows you can seems to be subdued.
By believing you can change things for yourself will help this quiet one come out.
You have a good job in a library - I would love to work in a library and envy you. You may find this hard to believe but it is true. This is a major achievement - have you ever acknowledged this? That tiny quiet voice may want to have a go and see how it feels.
I would work on one thing at a time. That fixed mindset of yours is causing you so much pain and misery. I suspect it is keeping you depressed too. If you were to work on this, without an end goal,( the only goal would be to work on this daily and keep going) I believe you would make progress in the direction you want to go.
I would also suggest keeping a diary of how you feel and what you are doing to move forward so you can see for yourself how the changes materialise over the weeks or months.
You can do this Marknis.
22 Jan 2018, 1:42 pm
Here are forty-four quotations from The Power of Now and A New Earth [for Marknis and anyone else]:
1) “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
2) “Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
3) “Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.”
4) “It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”
5) “...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.”
6) “Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.”
7) “Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.
Let it teach you Being.
Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.
Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.” 
“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.”
9) “Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.”
10) “Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.”
11) “You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can’t, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker.
12) "At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.”
13) “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
14) “Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
15) “In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. “That’s dangerous,” says the ego. “You’ll get hurt. You’ll become vulnerable.” What the ego doesn’t know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming “vulnerable,” can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.”
16) “The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse... By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead.”
17) “The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.”
18) “Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.”
19) “Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.”
20) “Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”
21) “True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened — before you have freed yourself from your mind — you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind."
22) “When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.”
23) “This is my secret," he [the Zen Master] said. "I don't mind what happens.”
24) “Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.”
25) “You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.”
26) “So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.”
27) “Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.”
28) “You are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.”
29) "Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease."
30) “For what you do to others, you do to yourself.”
31) “This is most people’s reality: As soon as something is perceived, it is named, interpreted, compared with something else, liked, disliked, or called good or bad by the phantom self, the ego.”
32) “The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event—through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you—ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.”
33) “All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.”
34) “Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.”
35) "The harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the “problem.” Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego."
36) “Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.”
37) “Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not. Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn’t we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture?"
38) “Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.”
39) “To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”
40) “Death is the stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.”
41) “Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in — or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender [to the present moment] does it become a living reality in your life.”
42) “So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have?” ”
43) “As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.”
44) “I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”
Here's a couple of sutras I've come up with:
There is no separation between humans, nor between divinity and humanity. Many humans just think there is.
You are a beautiful, cherished child of the universe.
Everyone is so unconditionally loved. I don't mean love as in what people think of as an emotion, I mean love as a state of being comparable to joy or peace, beyond emotions, beyond the mind, a divine life force, as it were.
There are no sins, and the only one punishing you for them is yourself.
There is no difference, distinction, or separation between creator and creation.
Yet know: these are ultimately just words, not the awareness that exists beyond words. Experience the light [awareness], instead of looking and focusing and obsessing over the hand [words] pointing to it.
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