The Standards: You wake up each morning perfectly at peace. Your life is exactly as you desire it to be. It is what you might call dynamically balanced—there are moving pieces, things you are heading towards and things you are leaving, but you have the feeling that everything is right where it should be. Your mind can become quiet at a moment’s notice. The instant you desire it, it becomes a reality. There is no ‘gap’. In fact much of your time is spent not thinking, but not because you actively seek this out. It is just where you happen to find yourself. You are completely free from desire. You have your preferences, yet you feel entirely unmoved by them. Your mind no longer fixates on objects with the intent of satisfying itself. You do not react emotionally to things. Emotions come as they always have, they are felt as they have always been, but they lack the overwhelming nature that once threw you off balance. You find your experience entirely absent of certain emotions like anger, anxiety, fear, or jealousy. The present moment is your closest companion. It is your natural resting place. So much so that you no longer see any significance in it, just as a fish sees no significance in water. It just is. You no longer have any compulsion to run from it. You move freely through life because you are not attached to anything. You take things as they come, and enjoy them for what they are rather than hating them for what they are not. You dive headfirst into your relationships without fear because you know that you could never be hurt. Life feels impersonal. There is no longer a ‘you’ at the center of it. There is no sense of self, no owner of ‘your’ experience. It is almost as if you are hollow, that beneath your skin there exists only a vast expanse of space, but it is a fullness rather than an emptiness. It is the feeling of being complete. If anything here does not feel perfectly true to you, is not reflected in your experience, you still have further left to go.

You must be either very sick or very at peace to enjoy yourself while everything is crumbling around you.

You won’t change until you realize what it’s costing you not to.

Feeling guilty means you’re ignoring the fact that you had your reasons for acting the way you did. If they were bad reasons, learn from that and make better decisions in the future. No reason to feel guilty about it.

It’s a lot easier to see someone else’s perspective once you get out of your own head.

People would have a lot more free time if they stopped obsessing over fake problems.

Ego is the fastest way to kill a good relationship.

Easier to carry an umbrella than stop the rain.

You have to be willing to entertain any idea but smart enough to entertain very little.

The best books are a companion for life, not a lesson learned once and outgrown.

One of the beautiful things about travel is seeing the same raw humanity poking out from behind all the cultural differences.

Life doesn’t have to be so stressful. It’s ok to relax.

Imagine you were living in the golden age of human prosperity, and not only were you too blind to appreciate it, but you were so convinced the world was crumbling that you couldn’t even enjoy it.

The dumbest person you’ve met still has an internal narrative where all their actions make sense.

You don’t keep going because you’re certain of what you’ll find, you keep going because you’re certain you don’t want to stay where you are.

You don’t become enlightened when your mind is quiet, just as you don’t become an atheist when you stop thinking about god. Enlightenment is when the belief in self ceases, not when your mind stops expressing that belief.