Temple
Personal insights and wisdom
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Simple Principles
- Always leave things better than you found them (mess, work, relationships).
- Make your commitments clear and stay true to your commitments.
- Always share love, never hate. Always choose kindness.
Life tells us that nothing lasts forever. Spirituality tells us that everything is eternal.
The sound of the wind in the trees does not come from the moving air itself, but rather from the leaves rustling under its influence.
So too, the effects of our experiences are more a result of how we bend and sway to the experience rather than the experience itself.
It is impossible to know what our actions will lead to, how our relationships will turn out, what our impact will be.
The most we can ask for and expect from life is to reflect and ask, “Did I treat others with love and compassion? Did I take advantage of every opportunity to grow? Did I stay present - truly living in the moment with appreciation and love? Did I pursue my passions?”
This is how to live without fear or regret.
A belief in being genuine, but nothing else creates paralysis of the psyche.
Belief (in ourselves, our efforts, our community) is perhaps the only force keeping us from self-destructive chaos.
Place no blame; take no credit.
Understand your connection to the universe;
Feel its connection to you.
Perhaps the only skill we need is strength, not to fight back but to be vulnerable enough to let others in.
No matter our background, education, or privilege we each feel passionately and have important stories to tell.
Perhaps faith should not be defined as the belief in what cannot be proven, but rather as the embracing acceptance of what cannot be understood by limited human perception. In this context the grand diverse concepts of exponential growth, climate change, empathy and technology become spiritual pursuits worthy of humble reverence.
All feelings derive from judgment (e.g. that an event or the self is good or bad) and are therefore caused by having certain philosophical beliefs about what makes something good or bad. Existential crisis happens when one starts questioning their fundamental beliefs. It is only uncomfortable when it causes emotional response. This happens because you are still holding onto some beliefs! You are not free until you work through and restructure your belief system.
When enough people start questioning the outcomes of a system they will start questioning the system itself.
Everyone has reasons. Not everyone has valid reasons.
The more I learn, the more I realize I do not know.
Knowledge is power.
Love is power.
Love is infinite.
Strength and happiness come from within.
Passions are the interests that we love doing. They inspire us, unlock our creativity, engage us spiritually and invoke strong emotional feeling. They also reveal our values- what is truly important to us. They connect us to the universe and if pursued, lead to life fulfillment.
With passion, our dreams become hopes.
With inspiration, our hopes become goals.
With strategy, our goals become plans.
With values, our plans become decisions.
With action, our decisions become reality.
When you truly start living, reality feels surreal.
To fix the errors of the past focus on the possibilities of the future, not the limitations of the present.
What would society be like if we only recorded and shared what was true, without lies?
There is only one true crime, and that is to convict and punish people for acts for which the solution is love, not retribution.
Spirituality is a reverence for something greater than yourself and a feeling of divine connectedness to it.
Humanity has developed schemes which are global in scale such that the average individual human can not get their heads around the crimes that are being committed on them. It is this scope that makes it the greatest form of slavery ever devised. How better to control a population than to give them the illusion of freedom, choice and liberty through structural violence in the form of misinformation, wage slavery and externalities?
By definition, profit is selling something for more than its inherent resource or use value. It therefore requires manipulating people to buy the product through marketing. Laws are established to limit how much is “fair” to take advantage of people. Is it really possible to act ethically in this system?
Know Thyself
- Compose myself (gain clarity of mind)
- What contracts do I need to honor? (Clarity of intention)
- Do (whatever I do best at)
If there is one religion to believe without question, let it be that of life. And love.
All inhabitants of Earth share the same parents. Mother Earth nurtures us and Father Sky challenges us.
When you obsess over missed opportunities you become blind to the new ones facing you in the moment.
Listen to your brain and go with your gut.
In a universe of entropy, life is the only force that creates order.
To fix the errors of the past focus on the possibilities of the future, not the limitations of the present.
Listening to foreign music allows you to appreciate the human voice as an instrument without being distracted and limited by word language.
The Earth makes the greatest lover. Stay grounded and you will have a life-long companion to nurture, comfort, challenge, and fulfill you.
How much of our time do we spend thinking of doing good things rather than actually doing good things?
Everyday learn something about the world and something about yourself.
How different would the world be if we didn’t believe we are at the top of the consciousness “food” chain?
There is distance of our bodies, closeness of our minds, and unison of our hearts.
We may think we are antisocial, but perhaps we just can’t find anyone worthwhile to be social with.
I believe the world can be saved through open-minded holistic design, and genuine authentic love.
Violence begets violence; peace begets peace. Neither will understand the other until they learn to walk in the other’s shoes.
If I had 3 wishes, my first would be to live in the mind of someone I love for a day, live in the mind of someone I hate for a day, and live in the mind of someone I’ve lost for a day.
Do not be afraid of sociopaths, thieves, rapists, and terrorists. You should fear the greedy corporations, unjust laws, corrupt institutions, and systemic flaws in the socioeconomic system that create the conditions that drive people to that behavior. Under the right conditions everyone is capable of those acts, including you. Human nature does not describe what is inevitable, it describes what is possible in an bad environment.
There are shortcuts to schooling, but no shortcuts to learning.
Define yourself not by choices made in the past or future, but by your willingness to change right now.
There are an infinite number of ways to connect all things to all other things.
We often limit ourselves to frameworks of understanding: right vs. wrong, personality types, capitalism vs. communism, us vs. them, rational vs. irrational, scientific vs. religious. Expanding consideration outside these finite structures frees our minds and is the definition of thinking outside the box.
The notion that good must be balanced by evil breeds complacency and holds us back from reaching our full potential as a species. Perfection is impossible, but we can always strive for better. To say things are good enough is to give up on the future and our descendants.
We often confuse truth with what we want to be true. To differentiate the two we have to first recognize how our false perception would benefit us, what values those are based on, and how they might influence us.
I don’t care what your beliefs are. What do your actions tell about you?
In current society, we have to trust millions/billions of people we don’t know in order to stay alive.
Science plus atheism is dangerous. When you apply the methods if logic (which you should do if you follow the methods of science) then you conclude that the only unbiased way to pursue and study science is with that of an agnostic view, not atheist. In other words, the only way to discover and integrate new information objectively without bias is to have an agnostic perspective.
I am a hyperdimensional being operating a 3-dimensional machine.
Emotions are neither good nor bad. They are your subconscious giving you a call to action to address an imbalance or unmet need. Some are simple and some run deep. Listen and learn.
Fulfilling your needs allows you to achieve a level of enlightened mindfulness, free of distractions and worries and full of love and creativity.
You can tell more about someone’s character from how they handle uncomfortable/difficult situations than from familiar/easy ones.
Let those thoughts and words that bother you pass by like a cool breeze. Let those that enrich you be absorbed like a beautiful scent.
Our practice of bad habits seldom match our intentions. If you want to do something often, tell yourself you’ll do it seldom. If you want to do something seldom, tell yourself you’ll never do it. If you want to abstain from something completely, make it your religion.
Set yourself as a standard for what you expect in others.
How can we quantify the intangible value of a sky full of stars? Of coyotes howling? Is it possible to quantify the benefit this has for the soul?
Be confident in your approach, not your level of mastery. There is always more to learn, more to improve.
Identity without purpose is ego. Identity without growth is stagnation. Identity without attachment is true freedom.
True Freedom is
- realizing you are not confined to any cultural or self-imposed limitations on yourself.
- the empowerment to never compromise your values.
When someone dies, the best thing we can do is say “well done”.
An old man on his deathbed once said, “I could change the future once, but not any more.”
The key to happiness is to apply your values to every decision in life. Then your happiness is not dependent on the outcome, but the joy of the process. And if your values are clear, decisions are easy.