Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether trau...
The result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace. Where there had been chaos there was now order. My mind was at rest. I had a philosophy at last. The words of Christ "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," had a new meaning for me. Not in...
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in th...
But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rath...
Learn to adapt. Things change, circumstances change. Adjust yourself and your efforts to what it is presented to you so you can respond accordingly. Never see change as a threat, because it can be an opportunity to learn, to grow, evolve and become a...
According to Hoge and colleagues (2007), the key to reducing stigma is to present mental health care as a routine aspect of health care, similar to getting a check up or an X-ray. Soldiers need to understand that stress reactions-difficulty sleeping,...
Just because you are alive, doesn’t mean that life is going to hand you everything. If you keep believing life will somehow automatically improve on its own, then you’re going to waste many years of your life in a state of disappointment. Life is...
Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of...
I know that it's easier to portray a world that's filled with cynicism and anger, where problems are solved with violence. What's a whole lot tougher is to offer alternatives, to present other ways conflicts can be resolved, and to show that you can ...
The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through ex...
Judaism, for example, presents itself as monotheistic and retrofits that claim on its history by revising its lore. But in ancient times, Judaism was much more accurately Henotheism, wherein people (particularly common folk) worshipped a principal go...
He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, ...
[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the...
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a n...
Her favorite stepping-aside technique was to lay out a dizzying mountain of complex steps and then pronounce the conclusion self-evident. Excuse me? Things that are self-evident don't need you or the presentation anyway. Relying only on logic, on wha...
During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of tr...
Using the combined, integrated force of the mind and body is more efficient than using one without the other. Since the body can only exist in the present, that’s where the mind should be too (unless we deliberately choose to contemplate the past o...
To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other ...
To live a fulfilling life is an endurance event, and the only way to get to the finish line is to focus on the present, checking from moment to moment that I am still heading in the right direction. The Atlantic taught me that no matter how huge and ...
No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a non-comprehending parrot-like apparent competence--a duty an...
...our loves ones truly are ever-present. We may bury their bodies or scatter their ashes, but their spirits are boundless and do not accompany them to the grave. The terms 'letting go' and 'closure' are just empty words. They mean nothing to someone...
