Tag: Be fully present

Inside not outside

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

What are these false beliefs that block you from happiness? Here are some examples: Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world. If changing the world is your vocation in life, go right ahead and change it, but do not harbor the illusion that this is going to make you happy. What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well search for an eagle’s nest on the bed of an ocean, as search for happiness in the world outside of you. So if it is happiness that you seek you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your bald­ness or build up an attractive body or change your residence or job or community or lifestyle or even your personality. Do you realize that you could change every one of these things, you could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy? And deep down you know this is true but still you waste your effort and energy trying to get what you know cannot make you happy.

Anthony de Mello

Take the step

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

Jean-Luc Godard, 1930 – , French Film Director

Sunday quote: our deep sense

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We should not give up on our dreams or any deep sense that persists over time, or let it be blocked by our fears.

Since the powers of nature in this dreamer, in that dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only differently inflected,

the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world.

All the gods are within you,

Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God

Need to breathe

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world.

But you need to breathe.

And you need to be.


Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

The eight worldly winds

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Praise and blame,

gain and loss,

fame and disrepute,

pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.

To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.

The Buddha

Everything is miraculous

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the zen monks, from the humanistic and transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s own back yard. This lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Abraham Maslow