on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
this list could go on and on to include empathy, sympathy, humility, kindness, compassion - all qualities and characteristics that contribute to one having a balanced view of themselves and help us go a little easier on others.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
This is a very powerful statement. In this day and age it is so easy to fill our minds with an immense amount of information because its all right at our fingertips. Parents are often admonished to filter the content that accessible to our children on electronic devices; but its equally important for adults to do the same for ourselves. It is so imperative to protect our minds so as not to become overwhelmed with information. That could mean sometimes foregoing watching the evening news or taking a hiatus form social media. These platforms have proved to be double-edged swords. On one end beneficial in a lot of ways, but also harmful.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.
Self-awareness frees us from narrow minded thinking and helps us view people and society as a whole from various perspectives. In turn, this helps to prevent and counteract biases toward others. When we are self-aware, we not only acknowledge our individual strengths, but also our weaknesses and we're able to find commonalities between ourselves and others who we'd otherwise deem beneath or completely different than us.
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive.
It is easy to become consumed with secular jobs, education, and that we lose sight of the world around us and even if we don’t outrightly say or consciously believe we are, some operate as if the only things that matter are those pertinent to us. But unlike the nucleus of an atom, which is located at the core of an atom and holds all genetic information and controls the cell; no one individual is the center of the world. In fact, it’s the world around us that shapes who we are respectively.