Your Most Beautiful Experience

Truth is so rare it is delightful to tell it.

—Emily Dickinson





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THE MOST BEAUTIFUL

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in your life? It's OK if you can't decide between the three or four most beautiful things. What's important is to keep visions of those amazements dancing in the back of your mind for the next two days.

Play with them in your imagination. Feel the feelings they rouse in you as you muse about the delights they have given you. Regard them as beacons that will attract other ravishing marvels into your sphere.

Now here's your second assignment: Be alert for and go hunting for a new "most beautiful thing."





THE ART OF CHANGING YOUR MIND

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw

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Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.
—Vera Nazarian

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The person who never alters their opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
—William Blake

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The interesting thing is always to see if you can find a fact that will change your mind about something, to test and see if you can.
—Diane Sawyer

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Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
—W. Somerset Maugham

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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books.
—Annie Dillard

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The snake that can't cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
—Beverly Cleary

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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.
—Enid Blyton

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Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.
—Walt Whitman

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The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
―Stuart Sutherland

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I came from a different mind-set growing up, and my mind has changed.
—Katy Perry

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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
—Hannah Arendt

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There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.
—Michel Houellebecq

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You have the RIGHT to change your mind
—Oprah Winfrey

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A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.
—Carl Rogers

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We are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.
—Eduardo Galeano





MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS

In my dream two nights ago, I told the mathematician-philosopher Ralph Abraham that what’s wrong with the world is that we are becoming embedded in machine consciousness.

More and more, we’re thinking like machines and expecting reality to be machine-like. This can be frustrating, because life is inherently non-machine-like.

I told Ralph that one cure is to spend more time in nature without a phone.

As a devoted dreamworker/player, I also regard the loving attention I give to my dreams as being essential in cultivating the alternative to machine consciousness.

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As David Byrne says, "The world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe . . . I wouldn't be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song."

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I have been listening closely to my dreams for decades. There's a lot to say about the subject, of course, and my upcoming book Lucky Storms will address the question in depth.

Simply, I think my dreams have loved me well because I approach them like a curious child more than as an exploitative entrepreneur looking for treasure to harvest and use in the waking realm.

I don't have any fundamental problem with looking in dreams for treasure that's useful in the waking world, and I have found great droves of it. But the attitude that predominates in me is the sense of wonder and innocence that loves to be amazed and surprised and mystified. I think that at least partially explains my modest success at being a dream listener.





THE MORE SPECIFIC YOUR GOALS, THE BETTER

"Having very broad and abstract goals may maintain and exacerbate depression. Goals that are not specific are more ambiguous and, therefore, harder to visualize. If goals are hard to visualize it may result in reduced expectation of realizing them which in turn results in lower motivation to try and achieve them."

—Researchers at the institute of Health, Psychology, and Society

Read more.





THE ASSUMPTION OF CLAIRVOYANCE

A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance.

You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don't ask for it.

This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can undermine the most promising alliances.

To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.





THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Some of us may have imagined, from time to time, that we are living in the hippest, coolest, most happening place in the world. New York? London? Berlin? Montreal? Shanghai? Barcelona? I can recall having delusions like that myself.

But the truth is, as far as I can tell, that everywhere is the center of the world.




STRONGEST TABOO

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask.

—Alan Watts





A LIMITLESS RANGE OF AWARENESS

"Accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them."

—Walter Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of The Dead







RADICAL AND REVOLUTIONARY

If it's inaccessible to the poor, it's neither radical or revolutionary.
—Jonathan Herrera Soto

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

"Esoteric astrology teaches that anyone whose future can be predicted by any means is living like a robot. It assumes that some people are more robotic (predictable) than others; and that further implies some of us have more free will than others."

—Carolyn L. Vash, Noetic Sciences Review





BE READY

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life––

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?