A Quote by Henepola Gunaratana
DUE TO OUR FEELINGS ARISING FROM CONTACT, we think and we rationalize, conceptualize, theorize, philosophize and speculate. Because of the feeling arising from the six senses, we increase our desire; we come to wrong views and wrong beliefs. We recall our past sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touches and ideas and build up more desires, thoughts, concepts, beliefs, ideas, theories and philosophies.
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Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts.
In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion.
We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.
What? What am I 'bound to be feeling?' People don’t think anymore. They feel. 'How are you feeling? No, I don’t feel comfortable. I’m sorry, we as a group we’re feeling….' One of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas. Thoughts and ideas. That interests me. Ask me what I’m thinking.
The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.
Our negative thoughts are valuable messages to us about our deeper fears and negative attitudes. These usually are so basic to our thinking and feeling that we don't realize they are beliefs at all. We assume that they are simply "the way life is." We may be consciously affirming and visualizing prosperity, but if our unconscious belief is that we don't deserve it, then we won't create it. Once we become aware of our core negative beliefs, they begin to heal.
Our experience of reality is the result of the magical alchemy of the creation of our thoughts, our beliefs, our decisions, our attitudes, our feelings. All of these are, for the most part, unconscious. Mindfulness allows us to watch these thoughts and choices and decisions without being triggered and having to take action and give meaning.
One reason why I recommend the abandonment of religious beliefs is because I think those beliefs are wrong. There is no evidence that our world was created by divine intention, that a god intercedes in human affairs, or that there is life after death. Religion is a hangover from humankind's timorous infancy; it's time for us to walk upright and unafraid, and to take charge of our own lives.
Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.
Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take them, without question, for the absolute truth.
We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.
The birth of excellence begins with our awareness that our beliefs are a choice. We usually don't think of it that way, but belief can be a conscious choice. You can choose beliefs that limit you, or you can choose beliefs that support you. The trick is to choose the beliefs that are conducive to success and the results you want and to discard the ones that hold you back.
More and more people are beginning to feel that there must be another way of thinking, perceiving, and acting. And perhaps the beginning of another way of looking at the world is to re-evaluate all of our beliefs. It is, after all, our beliefs that determine what we are, experience, and expect. When we are willing to take a new look at our own beliefs, we then have an opportunity to begin rediscovering who and what we are and to redetermine our true purpose on Earth.
I think it's important and I think it's true that our life experience is going to be about our attitude, our thoughts, our beliefs, our speech and our actions. We can transform our life experience simply by changing our language.
No amount of effort could have stopped that, because our points of view - the way we perceive things - are inextricably linked to our beliefs, ... ,our beliefs color what we see.
We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.
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