Stuff I Didnt Know

"The sense of lack can never be satisfied, only transcended."

"How does motivation relate to acceptance? This is subtle and may have to sit with you awhile before it sinks in. When you are motivated to satisfy any desire that comes from a sense of lack, you are essentially rejecting yourself because you are attempting to avoid the feeling of lack. The nature of the dualistic experience is such that no amount of 'satisfaction' will be effective, and the lack is affirmed and perpetuated, instead of being finally transcended."

"Often the attempt to escape from lack through satisfying it in one form or another is not apparent to us. We assume we act normally, we think we have needs, we rationalize our behavior, but the truth is that we are attempting to avoid feelings, rejecting ourselves. After blame, wrong motivation is the next largest area of blindness that keeps us in suppression."

(did you read that? blame keeps us in suppression)

"This type of motivation is referred to in the classical literature as the problem of desire. Most desires are considered as keeping us in bondage. Release from desire, not the satisfaction of desire, is a major part of liberation. Release from desire comes about by processing the desire impulse and whatever negative feelings may be behind it instead of being motivated by them."

"...our efforts are all self-defeating because they affirm and perpetuate the very thing we are trying to avoid. We are trying to avoid one side of the dualistic experience by escaping into the other... When you resist the pain, you stregnthen it by feeding additional energy to it... Simply be aware of your negative moods; accept and experience them. Let them dissolve by neither opposing nor being motivated by them."

"If you understand that you cannot avoid the negative, you will cease to be motivated by it. You will accept it and end its compulsive influence."


Some shrink left me alone with this book "Emotional Clearing" by John Ruskan. I was kind of skeptical but the first few times I opened it were eerie. After having a little internal fit about something one day and doing something kind of rash about it, I sat down with the book to calm my mind and opened randomly to a page that was titled, "Acting Out". Another day I was waiting for my friend to come over to my house and he was 45 minutes late; I was pacing the floor and finally just sat down and randomly opened to the page entitled, "Impatience".

The author blends modern psychoanalytic theory and transpersonal pyschology with eastern philosophy and spirituality. Talk about calling you on your shit and nailing your butt to the wall. It reads like a cross between a fortune cookie and a talk with your Higher Self. Ouch. Here's some more odd nuggets for you to digest, if you can handle.


"The pain that comes as a result of dependency must be accepted and experienced in order to grow beyond dependency - it is the only way."

"Worry is the condition of thinking about feelings instead of feeling the feelings."