The Dalai Lama Knows Whats Up

At the start of the new millennium the Dalai Lama apparently issued eighteen rules for living.

# 1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
# 2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
# 3. Follow the three Rs:
# 1. Respect for self
# 2. Respect for others
# 3. Responsibility for all your actions.
# 4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
# 5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
# 6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
# 7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
# 8. Spend some time alone every day.
# 9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
# 10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
# 11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
# 12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
# 13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
# 14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
# 15. Be gentle with the earth.
# 16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
# 17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
# 18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Just some food for thought.

Cognitive Science + Religion = Confusion

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Credit goes to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Celebration

Life should not be a waiting, but a celebration, as the person that waits is doomed to an abyss of neverending uncertainty and uneasiness. The person that celebrates holds no regrets...life lengthens itself through bursts of powerful emotion and love seldom found in today's world. So, I tell you: live. Live and let love, love and let live, just don't wait. Looking forward only ends in disappointment - so relish the moment and never breach the depths of yonder.

Time

Is it that our hair grows more quickly as the years pass by, or that our years grow more quickly as our hair passes by?

Remember in elementary school, how long the days used to seem? Lunch lasted days of today, recess lasted a month. Take a day, or any period of time for that matter, and live it. I mean truly live it - cherish it, adore it, nuture it. See how much length you can squeeze out of time, but don't rush it. Time is ordinary, a construct, a something that may or may not exist according to us or the world - so, we ignore it. I challenge you to embrace it, feel it, get to know it. You might be astounded by how interesting and fickle time (and, on a greater scale, being) really is. Sit down, meditate, play a game but slow it down - whatever you need to do. Time can be manipulated in a sense, and its interesting what happens when it stops being ignored and starts being attended to.

It is a common complaint that life is too short. In turn, we, as humans, desperately and superficially try to extend life on earth by any means necessary. Maybe if we paid attention to being and time in the first place, we wouldn't have to run away from death. When our time came, we would be able to embrace it if only for all the attention paid to life itself - all the tiny details, all the nooks and crannies, and, most importantly, the vast amount of substance that passes through a lifetime.

Stop looking to the future ("I can't wait for x!"). Stop looking to the past ("What if..."). Live now.