Exercise: Protect Your Potential 

Take a moment to reflect on the people in your life who, one way or another, could not achieve their full potential.

Consider what their lives might have been like if they had been able to commit to their best selves and bring them into being.

Imagine the beauty and goodness they would have added to the world. 

Now, make a list of your own inner aspirations, your dreams for yourself.

Look at them carefully, and consider whether they are worth a deep investment of your time and energy.

If you are convinced, make yourself a promise in the memory of all your friends and loved ones who couldn’t make their aspirations come true, you will do better: you will not give up on yourself.

Caring

But the same mind that can inflict great suffering can also manifest love, compassion, and great bliss—all that is positive can come forth from this mind.

It can be sophisticated and creative, a highly developed thinker, and a reliable intelligent leader.

It can even awaken the thought that it is possible to be completely free.

It can envision all our pain and negativity transformed into the quiet joy of loving kindness. 

Revelations of Mind

It has more to do with pursuing our highest ideals and values.

For instance, it might have to do with helping others – our family, our friends, our community – or making a contribution to humanity.

It might have to do with advancing knowledge or creating beauty.

Your values may be very different from someone else’s, and that is fine.

But the question to ask is whether you are letting time go by in activities that have nothing to do with our own sense of what’s important.

That’s what I mean by getting a good return on investment.

Dimensions of Mind

After an emotion has already surfaced, there are two ways to deal with it.

One is to objectify the emotional response by blaming someone or something for the way you feel. This way reinforces and escalates negative feelings.

The other choice is to go directly into the emotion, become it, discover it, feel it thoroughly, and calmly watch its nature.

Rather than ask why, observe how the emotion arises.

Instead of trying to push the emotion away, befriend it.

If you watch carefully, without involvement, you will see this emotion manifest in both body and mind and then dissolve into pure energy. 

Hidden Mind of Freedom 

 I see now with ever increasing clarity how good intentions and ideas are not enough.

The efforts human beings make fall short, or head off in directions leading only to more danger and more suffering.

We know how to travel to Mars or other planets, but we do not know how to turn inward, asking our hearts what they need.

We ignore what we know to be true.

We fail to be loyal to ourselves, and so the path to inner peace and freedom—the road home—is blocked. 

Love of Beauty 

If new knowledge is our aim, it is important to resolve at the outset to share whatever knowledge we gain as widely as we can.

Those who have lived in the past may be beyond our reach, but those who are alive today—our dear ones, our friends, and our community, all those known and unknown—can truly benefit, and so can those who are yet to come.

When we recognize and accept this, and resolve to act on it, we understand that our human condition is universal.

We see that we need a universal knowledge that offers universal benefits. 

Challenging Journey Creative Journey 

If we can exercise a kind of inquiry that is playful and friendly, more about questions and dialog than answers and pronouncements, we can show ourselves and others the possibility of engaging directly with everything that arises.

It’s that possibility of engaging directly that matters. If that’s there, nothing else needs to change.

Without any specific effort, we can live our lives with increasing confidence and inner joy. 

Dimensions of Mind

It may help to imagine mind as empty house with open doors and windows.

Breezes drift in and out like birds, now cool and now warm, entering and leaving through the open windows and doors.

Some are quiet and calm, some are noisy and demanding.

Like an empty house, you can simply be, welcoming all that arises — open, spacious, and accommodating, allowing the flow of experience to arise and fall without comment. 

As you relax and allow the mind to open like the sky, let go of any thought of what relaxation is.

There is no need to adjust or change anything; no need to improve or wonder if you are doing it ‘right’.

Let even these instructions fly in and out of sky-like mind like a gentle breeze or small, lovely bird.

Gesture of Great Love

We can model ourselves on the great spiritual beings who once walked the earth, letting goodness, kindness, and transcendent knowledge become our way of being.

The same qualities they displayed are still available, right now. 

Why not expand them? 

Why not embody love and limitless caring? 

The world needs this very badly!

Gesture of Great Love

You do not go in search of love, and you do not aim to teach it, not to yourself and not to others.

Later, there may be interpretations and explanations, but the truth of love comes before all that.

Gesture of Great Love