awareness.md

awareness.md

Summary: Helps think more clearly about the importance of awareness. And talks about several phenomena we recognize when we're aware. Especially in interpersonal conversations, observe ourselves on what we say and feel and why. It's a great good with lots of interesting ideas, some of which struck a chord with me. I picked up information and I'm not yet aware of it. So I'll have to come back, revise to notes I took at some point. Anthony's perception of religion makes sense, many problems would go away if most people took religion this way. Keypoints: 9/10

I've highlighted the points that I found most enlightening below, I need to come back to them a few days later so that I can internalize these ideas better.

Most important ideas:

• Keep track of your emotions during conversations and see how they change. This awareness about yourself can do wonders.
• Detest labels. You are not your labels. Don't attach labels to "I". You don't feel threatend by anything when you don't have those labels. (Q: but how do we navigate conversations in the real world without these labels?)
• Any suffering you have arises from desire / craving. Isn't that crazy that you won't let yourself be happy because of your attachment to it? The only way you can't experience bliss is if you're focusign on what you don't have.
• Having negative feeling towards others poisons you.
• Interdependence for a more productive life is okay. To depend on someone emotionally (that attachment) is not okay. If you depend, the next thing that will happen is you will demand them to fulfill this feeling. You will have fear of loss and rejection.
• Enjoy love in a non clinging way. Don't demand anything from the other person. You will never be lonely.
• Success or failure. Money or no money. Looking dumb. It means nothing. It's only a herd monkey attributing a status value to each of these experiences.
• The need to win drains your power.
• Three hard things for humans: (i) returning love for hate, (ii) including the excluded, (iii) admitting that you're wrong.
• You can be happy while anxious and depressed by just observing them.
• Only good: love, only bad: fear. Anger comes from fear. Give them compassion.
• As you spend more time observing your experiences as it were happening to someone else (some random stranger), the more you disidentify from the feeling of "me". Don't identify with my family, my body, my country, etc.,
• You can predict the behavior of people by looking at them for just as they are. They are unaware computers.
• Concentration is a spotlight. Awareness is a floodlight, a panaremoic view.
• What you're aware of, you're in control of. What you're not aware of, controls you. You're a slave of what you're not aware of. If you're aware, you're free from it.
• True happiness is uncaused. There's no cause, it's the natural state of living when you drop all illusions.
• Put this program into action
  • identify negative feelings in you
  • understand that they are in you, and not a part of reality
  • do not see them as an essential part of "I"
  • understand that when you change, everything changes.
• Say to the person who troubles you: I have no right to make demands on you. I'll protect myself from the consequences of your actions and moods, but you can go right ahead and be what you choose to be.
• To your partner: Don't waste a single one of that negative feelings. Make the most of it by being aware, disassociating.- I don't need you to be happy! I don't need you. I can be just as happy without you. This leads to less possessiveness, no jealousy, no clingingness but just genuine happiness spending time with you.
• If you're desperate to live, you're already dead. Don't give a damn about it and go about doing your duty.
• Feed yourself on good books, enjoyable work, nature, and good company. Not on other people's appretiation, your apparent status, etc.,

Other ideas:

• We need to be open to learning the truth. That's the most important skill. We often want to stick to our beliefs and are not open to understanding other's perspective. We're often gaurding this self image that we've built up and try to keep living upto. Let go of that image.
• You're here because of good fortune, there's nothing to be proud about that.
• It's expected that people are selfish. There's nothing to be disappionted or surprised about.
• You're experiencing depression, you're not depressed. You're only experiencing these changes in your consciousness.
• Be genuinely curious about your experiences without judgement.
• Be unaffected by praise or blame. It makes no sense to be. It's evidence that you're living an unaware life.
• When you observe yourself, you realize how much of your life is affected by externals and not internals.
• Drop your past. Drop your future. Stay in the present.
• Awareness changes your life. Being aware of why you're angry, how you fear, how you feel lust, etc.,
• Forget yourself when you go out to help others.
• Anthony couldn't remember what he said to other people in a therapy session. He was surprised listening back to his own tapes. It's crazy how unaware we are.
• When I'm listening to you, it's even more important for me to listen to me so that I can keep my biases away while I listen.
• As long as you're aware, you're not distracted. Being aware is the opposite of distraction.
• When you train in awareness, the moment something off happens, you'll be alerted (eg. anger) so that you can defuse it.
• Mystics have disidentified from themselves. They see all their problems as some stranger's problems. The key to the peace.
• If you're suffering you're not aware. You can't be aware and suffering at the same time.
• The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick. Being a president of a corporation or having a lot of money has nothing to do with being awake or successful.
• To be happy is to be free. Free from being worried about other people's judgments. Free from worrying about a stain on your shirt. Free from worrying about your laptop crashing. Free from worrying about what other people think of you.
• Don't depend on your sense of belonging. True happiness doesn't depend on belonging.
• The negative feeling is in you, no in reality. There's no event that justifies negative feelings.
• If you think your life will be better if someone else behaves differently, you're sleeping.
• The triumph you feel from competition is not good. If you're good superior to others and that's your cause for happiness, you're asleep. We're meant to work together, not against and revel in other's failures.
• Do things to enjoy them, even if you're not doing them well.
• Awareness is the key to change and happiness.
• Happiness releases you from the self. Pain and depression ground you further into the self.
• Just like physical pain points to the problem in the body, mental pain points to the problem in the mind.
• Have preferences, not desires.
• Allow experience to flow, don't cling onto anything.
• The problem with labeling something with concepts is that you lose interest in them. You've already seen 100s of birds before, why see this one? Every experience is different and just observing it can be a source of bliss.
• The difference between awareness and information is huge. Information: knowing that smoking kills but not stopping the habit, awareness: realizing that it actually kills (which is inevitably result in changing behavior). Focus on being aware, not just a fact collecting machine. (Q: how can one change from information to awareness? I think by ysing mindfulness?)
• If you're not mind blown by facts about the universe or evolution, it's because you just have the information but you're not aware of it.
• Be in the middle of people, but don't give them the power to make you happy or miserable.