Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

experiences.

We can be awake and intimately in touch with the mystery of the present moment. This is a lifestyle choice, not a goal. When something appears to take us out of present-moment experience, we can question it rather than follow it with credulity. We don’t have to let it hoodwink us with the promise that we will be in touch with the mystery of present

The fact is, we can't improve and improve, and finally get to ourselves. It won’t work and it’s not necessary. We are already ourselves.

By contrast, these poignant feelings come, not from a subject, but from an unbounded openness, which wants only what is happening now. This unbounded openness does not look for satisfaction in the next person, emotion, or thought. It seems to accept every situation as is.

If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be lib

The self, or the activity of ‘selving,’ is characterized by a search for something we think is missing. ‘Selving’ is a misunderstanding which causes us to problematize our experience. As soon as we postulate an independent and self-enclosed self, we start to bother ourselves.

Like the problem of simple substances in physics – each particle of dissatisfaction turns out to be another compound. Dissatisfaction can be broken down into ever smaller particles. And infinitesimal dissatisfaction turns out to be as vexing a problem as infinite dissatisfaction was. We find that we end up scrubbing our hands all day like Lady Macb

Appreciation of the mystery of life is not another state that we have to attain. It is merely the knowledge and acceptance that there is really nowhere else we have to go, nothing else we have to do. Now, there are feeling-states which I associate with this freedom and this appreciation of the mystery of life. They are a kind-of pervasive, loving p

We can experience profound joy if we give ourselves permission to. Instead we look outside ourselves for a perfect situation. And it is the act of looking that takes us away from our happiness.