Tag Archives: values

The problem with problems

Typically when weighing the choice between two options, at any level from self to world, the fact is they’re both weighing you down. Dilemmas and problems are often just misrecognitions of the facts at hand, ready to dissipate at a moment’s rethinking.

The very process of thought with which we consider our personal and social “problems” is conditioned and controlled by the content which it seems to be considering so that, generally speaking, this though can neither be free nor even really honest. What is called for, then, is a deep and intense awareness, going beyond the imagery and intellectual analysis of our confused process of thought, and capable of penetrating to the contradictory presuppositions and states of feeling in which the confusion originates. Such awareness implies that we be ready to apprehend the many paradoxes that reveal themselves in our daily lives, in our larger-scale social relationships, and ultimately in the thinking and feeling that appear to constitute the “innermost self” in each one of us.

In essence, therefore, what is needed is to go on with life in its wholeness and entirety, but with sustained, serious, careful attention to the fact that the mind, through centuries of conditioning, tends, for the most part, to be caught in paradoxes, and to mistake the resulting difficulties for problems.

David Bohm, “The Problem And The Paradox,” On Dialogue

Resolution, at mid-year

Now is the time to hone my compassion, my creativity, and my focus. It is a time to transform gifts that I have into gifts that I give, a time to depose petty urgencies from the throne of true priorities.

I will invest more into the essence of what I have to offer: articulating and sharing insights, seeing and creating ways, connecting, forging paths to peace, saying effects as a making of causes. At core, delivering sentences, with all the nuances and multiple meanings that such a phrase suggests.

And I will cut, piece by piece, the worry, the fear, and the sour harmony that comes from false accommodations. I will leave behind nothing but the bare core of what I believe and value, because with every increment of calendar and clock, there’s less time left.

With the year half over, I thought I would take a look at a resolution I made to myself on New Year’s Day, to see whether I’ve made any progress. If taking a hard look, I’d give myself a six, I suppose, or maybe a seven. With no measurable objectives, I left it all subjective anyway.

On balance, I’m writing almost every day, I’m finding new means to put what I want to say out into the world, I’m giving more of myself to the people I care about, and I’m giving a good deal less internal air time to pointless worries and accommodations.

So what’s missing? I need to do more of it, and speed up. And I need to focus on the outputs as well as the process.

Listening

“Listen to all the noise that is going on in the world. Don’t take sides, don’t jump to any conclusions, but just listen. Don’t say one noise is better than another noise; they are all noises, so just listen first. And listen also to your own noise, your chattering, your wishes—‘I want to be this and I don’t want to be that’—and find out what it means to listen. Find out, don’t be told. Find out what it means to think, why you think, what is the background of your thinking. Watch yourself, but don’t become self-centered in that watching. Be tremendously concerned, in watching, about future enlargement of yourself.”

J. Krishnamurti, “What is the Central Core of Your Thinking,” Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

Values (http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/list-of-values.htm)

Values (http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/list-of-values.htm)