Link: Are you being had?

Link: Neil Pasricha: The 3 A's of awesome

Link: Love is for giving

What is love and where is it found? We search for love and try to get love, and yet it seems like we never get enough. Even when we have found love, it can slip away as time passes. What if there is a source of love that never fades and is always available? What if love is as near and easy as breathing? What if we have been “looking for love in all the wrong places” instead of actually lacking love?

Love is both simpler and more mysterious and subtle than we have imagined it to be. Love is very simply the spacious, open attention of our awareness. Awareness itself is the gentlest, kindest, and most intimate force in the world. It touches things without impinging on them. It holds all of our experience but doesn’t hold it down or hold it back. And yet, inherent in awareness is a pull to connect and even merge with the object of our awareness.

It is this seemingly contradictory nature of awareness—the completely open and allowing nature of awareness and its passionate pull to blend with and even become the object of its attention—that gives life its spirituality, depth and sweetness. There is nothing more satisfying than this delicious dilemma of being both apart from and at the same time connected to something we see, hear, or feel.

Awareness is the beginning of all separation. Prior to awareness, there is just “oneness” or “is-ness,” with nothing separate from the oneness that would be able to experience it. With the birth of awareness, there is the subtle distinction of two things: that which is aware and the object of awareness. And yet, those two are still connected by this mysterious force we are calling awareness, or love.

Read the full article here... http://endless-satsang.com/lovearticle.htm

A New Home

When you awaken to the evolutionary impulse behind the entire cosmos as your very own Authentic Self, you find yourself living in a new world. It’s not the small, personal world that your ego or separate self-sense has lived in since the day you were born. You may still exist and function in that world, but deeply, it’s no longer your home. Your home is the vast process that began the day the entire cosmos was born. When this kind of shift occurs irrevocably, the idea of living “for a higher purpose” doesn’t even make sense any more, because at an interior level, you and that purpose have merged and become one. You have become the actual manifestation of that higher purpose. It’s no longer external to who you are. To a significant degree, you and that higher purpose become indistinguishable. That’s what Evolutionary Enlightenment means. Your entire life becomes permeated by that evolutionary impulse, because that is who you have become.

http://blog.enlightennext.org/?p=2801

Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected'

This is Your Brain on Bliss

After 2,000 years of practice, Buddhist monks know that one secret to happiness is simply to put your mind to it.

What is happiness, and how can we achieve it?

Happiness can’t be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world—a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.

Read the full article here... http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustainable-happiness/this-is-your-brain-on-bliss

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

If You Really Pay Attention

When I was a little bitty kiddy, about five, my Dad began a process … anytime somebody came and said something to us, my dad would say, "You remember what he said, honey girl?” I would tell my father what the person said until I got so good at it that I could repeat verbatim even long presentations of what the person had said.

And he did this all the time.

Finally, one day there was this old gentleman, Richard Thompson. I still remember his name, he lived across the street. And every time my Dad started to mow the lawn, there came Mr. Thompson. And so I would stand out there.

Read the full post here... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=654

Riches

The greatest good we can do for others is not to share our riches with them, but to reveal to them their own.

www.thoughtfortoday.org.uk

The Secret of Happiness

The secret of happiness is to be free of fear. Fear is like a toxin that runs through much of our thinking. It feeds on insecurity, feeling of loss, loneliness, inadequacy and attachment.
You are loveable and loving. Accept this as Truth. Appreciate and care for yourself - truly, deeply, intensely, in a way that reflects your real value. Then you will automatically have the same regards for all other living beings and things.

www.thoughtfortoday.org.uk

Positive Attitude

Your attitude creates an atmosphere around you. Your attitude is the result of the way you think and feel. You communicate your attitude. Create a positive attitude, filled with good feelings, and even just your presence will do wonders in situations.

www.thoughtfortoday.org.uk

Where are you going? And, why? (Pretending like crazy that what you’re doing really matters)

I recently had my mind blown by an incredibly profound experience of what Buddhists call emptiness, or “dropped-off body-mind.” In such an experience “how it all is and what it’s all about” becomes stunningly obvious. All ideas dissolve–ALL ideas. Ideas, premises, beliefs, theories, maps of reality, are seen as inconsequential, insubstantial, uninteresting, beside the point. Instead, there’s just an infinitely deep peace, a vast expansiveness, a deep and profound knowingness about the essence of it all–and, the realization that all of this is who you are.

Read the full post here...
http://www.centerpointe.com/blog/2009/07/13/where-are-you-going-and-why-pretending-like-crazy-that-what-youre-doing-really-matters/#more-51

Incline Your Mind Toward Joy

“One evening a Cherokee elder told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside of people. He said, “My son, the battle is between the two ‘wolves’ that live inside us all. One is Unhappiness. It is fear, worry, anger, jealousy, sorrow, self-pity, resentment, and inferiority. The other is Happiness. It is joy, love, hope, serenity, kindness, generosity, truth, and compassion.”The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” ~ Marci Shimoff from Happy for No Reason

Read the full posting at...
http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/503-philosophers-notes/episodes/47894-incline-mind-toward

How to Awaken Your Heart

First, train in the preliminaries.

The preliminaries are also known as the four reminders. In your daily life, try to 1) Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life. 2) Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone. 3) Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what goes around comes around. 4) Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness.

Read more slogans by Pema Chödrön...
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1562

Destination Addiction

Be aware of this affliction, something that we surely all suffer from to some degree.

Destination addiction is an attempt to get on with life faster in the hope that we will enjoy our lives better.

Read the full descriptions below...
http://www.itn.org.za/News/Articles/Destination.htm

http://frugaldad.com/2009/01/05/do-you-suffer-from-destination-addiction