What Do You Need to Learn Next?

LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR LIFE?

I dream that I love everything about my life. I dream that each event I have ever experienced or will ever experience is precious and glorious, even the painful interludes.

I dream that I have personal possession of the universe's most monumental and mysterious accomplishment: "consciousness."

I have a visceral insight about the mercurial flash and shimmer that ceaselessly whirls around inside my head: It's miraculous. I can think thoughts any time I want to—soaring, luminescent, flamboyant thoughts or shriveled, rusty, burrowing thoughts . . . thoughts that can invent or destroy, corrupt or redeem, bless or curse.

There's more. I can revel and wallow in great flows of feelings. It's ultimately irrelevant whether they are poignant or intoxicating or somewhere in between. I simply relish the fact that I can harbor so much intensity. I cherish the privilege of commanding such extravagant life force.

And maybe the best part is being in possession of a prodigiously potent magical tool: an imagination. I can use it to change and shape the way my thoughts and feelings unfold. It potentially gives me the power to treat every single one of my experiences as a door leading to infinity.





TOXIC NEGATIVITY

I am all in favor of critiquing what some call "toxic positivity." When we refuse to look at difficulties and insist on being compulsively optimistic, we spawn monsters. At the same time, I think toxic negativity is at least as big a problem.

Science says that we actually take pleasure in the negative emotion itself. We willingly dive back into misery again and again for the same reason we willingly board a roller coaster or go bungee jumping: We get a rush from it.

That is, the pleasure/reward centers of your brain light up and release dopamine. And you can get addicted to whatever causes your brain to release dopamine, whether it's chocolate or fistfights.

More info

How to overcome your brain's fixation on bad things

More Info on How to overcome your brain's fixation on bad things





MALEFIC ECSTASY

"Malefic ecstasy" or "pestilent ecstasy" or "exultant malaise" is the pleasure that the disenchanters feel as they dwell on and talk about horrific futures and demoralizing events.

They don't want their blissful pessimism to be diluted. That's why they hate it when we offer evidence that world is a paradise replete with miracles and blessings, even if it is also a realm where much suffering occurs.

We align ourselves with poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's hypothesis: "Earth's crammed with heaven."





ENLIGHTENMENT IS LOVE IN ACTION

One thing is certain about your destiny in the coming years: Life will conspire to bring you deep insights into the nature of reality—and the excited joy that comes with it.

If you decide to cooperate with life’s efforts, keep in mind these provocations from designer Elissa Giles:

“Enlightenment is not an asexual, dispassionate, head-in-the-clouds, nails-in-the-palms disappearance from the game of life. It’s a volcanic, kick-ass, erotic commitment to love in action, coupled with hard-headed practical grist.”





WEAVE THESE ALL TOGETHER

“There isn't anything in your life that cannot be changed.”

—Caroline Myss

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"I am not excited by the idea that the world we live in is made up of 90 percent ugly things and ugly places, while things and places endowed with beauty are rare and difficult to find. My opinion is that there is no ugly object or ugly person in this world. Anything is potentially fascinating."

—Jean Dubuffet

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"Expect the unexpected or you won't find it."

—Heraclitus

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"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

—Buckminster Fuller

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"Try with all your might and work very, very hard to make the world a better place. But if all your efforts are to no avail—no hard feelings."

—The Dalai Lama

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“If you don't appreciate what you have in life right now, whatever it is, you will never realize your purpose. Without appreciation, you will never become strong enough to respect yourself.”

—Caroline Myss

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"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

—Alvin Toffler, *Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century*





OPTIMISM

Some people get mad at me for not being "optimistic" in the face of the world's travails. So I periodically reiterate one of my definitions of optimism:

cultivating the bright energy and practical love to fight with all our ingenuity against those who would degrade our beautiful world with their selfishness and cruelty and carelessness.