Where to look when… you are feeling curious
There are three areas in which the person who would be wise and good must be trained. The first has to do with desires and aversions- that a person may never miss the mark in desires nor fall into what repels them. The second has to do with impulses to act and not to act- and more broadly, with duty- that a person may act deliberately for good reasons and not carelessly. The third has to do with freedom from deception and composure and the whole area of judgment, the assent our mind gives to its perceptions. Of these areas, the chief and most urgent is the first which has to do with passions, for strong emotions arise only when we fail in our desires and aversions.
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.2.1-3a
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When you cling to your desires and expectations -- even after life crosses its arms and says, "Nope" -- you suffer. We must accept that life is not always going to give us what we want.
When we give up trying to control things we can't, we feel better.
— Buddhism —
[Javits Wild] When he was in the country, he always asked the people he chanced to meet what "normal life" was like, because he had forgotten. The answers varied, and he gradually came to realize that, even when he was surrounded by other people, he was absolutely alone in the world. He decided to draw up a list of what constituted normal attitudes and behavior, based on what people did rather than on what they said.
Paulo Coelho | The Winner Stands Alone
- Normal is anything that makes us forget who we are and what we want; that way we can work in order to produce, reproduce, and earn money.
- Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).
- Spending years studying at university only to find at the end of it all that you're unemployable.
The young nurse closes her story, saying, "I keep thinking about her... It occurred to me that I owe her an awful lot. Except for Eileen, I might never have know what it's like to give myself to someone who can't give back."
Lessons from a young nurse
Rebecca Manley Pippert (From Out of the Saltshaker & Into the World)
Alice Gray, Stories from the Heart
The Banyan Deer
— Buddhist Zen Story
Paulo Coelho, Stories for Parents, Children and Grandchildren
It is told about Gautama Buddha that he spent many lives in animal form, as various animals of the forest as the prince, Siddhartha of the Sakhya clan. This story is about his life as King of the Deer.
In object-referral we also feel an intense need to control things, and the need for external power. The need for approval, the need to control things, the need for external power are needs based on fear. This kind of power is not the power of pure potentiality, or the power of the Self, or real power. When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.
(resource)Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
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