“Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.” ~ Amy Cuddy, via Talk Like TED
“If you don’t challenge yourself, you don’t know yourself.” ~ SEAL, Living With A SEAL
“Know eternity. Do whatever it takes. And from this depth of being, live the details of your life. But if you postpone the process of submerging yourself in the source for the sake of taking care of business first, your life will be spent in hours and days of business, and then it will be gone. Only if you are well grounded in that which is larger than life will you be able to play life with humor, knowing that each task is a mirage of necessity.” ~ David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man
Become your deepest, most easeful version.
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“Make your life an ongoing process of being who you are, at your deepest, most easeful levels of being. Everything other than this process is secondary. Your job, your children, your wife, your money, your artistic creations, your pleasures – they are all superficial and empty, if they are not floating in the deep sea of your conscious loving.” ~ David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man
“It is honorable for a man to admit his fears, resistance, and edge of practice. It is simply true that each man has his limit, his capacity for growth, and his destiny. But it is dishonorable for him to lie to himself or others about his real place. He shouldn’t pretend he is more enlightened than he is – nor should he stop short of his actual edge. The more a man is playing his real edge, the more valuable he is as good company for other men, the more he can be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a man’s edge is located is less important than whether he is actually living his edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded.” ~ David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man
“Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.” ~ David McCullough
Original Self [Book]
Book Overview: In Original Self, spiritual pioneer Thomas Moore guides readers back to their God-given personalities through fifty heart-lifting meditations. This inspiring collection offers fresh interpretations of living with originality rather than conformity, presenting multidimensional portraits of the creative self and different angles from which to top one’s primal emotions and possibilities. Learn what it means to live from the burning essence of the heart, with the creativity that comes from allowing the soul to blossom in its own colors and shapes. With his usual grace and insight, Moore counters the prevailing assumptions of the day and offers strikingly unorthodox views on what is virtuous and healthy, opening up possibilities for a renewal of the way we live socially and in our private lives.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Yet we are what we read. We are the educators of our own personalities. Certainly we have great influence in the crafting of our children. If we brought half the intelligence to the making of souls that we bring to the making of machines, we would be people of character and imagination. We would be sharp and therefore less inclined to kill and cheat each other. We would know where to find the deep pleasures, so we would be less desperate for shallow entertainments and the ephemeral gratifications of gadgets.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The capacity for solitude is a prerequisite for intimacy with another. Otherwise, it may well be that the desperate search for a partner is merely the expression of personal emptiness, and if that is the case, any relationship will be founded on weak grounds and will not satisfy the yearning for connection. The expression ‘soul mate’ can mean a partnership in which the soul is engaged, in which one’s own soul connects with another’s. This is no small thing, and it reaches far deeper than the resolution of any superficial search for romance. Part of what we long for in our wish for a soul mate is intimacy with and the expression of our own soul.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity – following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Almost every day we are asked to extend the range of our acquaintance with life. It is one of several ways to live intensely, and it is also a way to prepare for death. For death is the ultimate stranger. This is not necessarily a morbid thought, because only by allowing death to play a role in daily life do we really live. Opening to another society or another individual – they are two levels of culture – we die a little death in relation to what has become familiar. But those little deaths create openings to new life.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“When we are living only a portion of what a human being is capable of, our lives are incomplete. I don’t mean that we each have to do everything possible in life, but that the more possibilities we can imagine, the richer our lives will be. Defending ourselves against the stranger is a way of keeping out our own potentiality. The diminishment of our acquaintances is a diminishment of ourselves. The most challenging stranger is life itself, or the soul, the face and source of vitality. Life is always presenting new possibilities ,and we may fear that bountifulness. It may seem safer to be content with what we have and what we are, and so we cling to the status quo. But in these matters there is no convenient plateau. When we refuse a new offering of life, we develop emotional calluses. The habit of acting from fear sets in quickly and becomes steadily more rigid. Refusing life, we become attendants of death.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Memory is potent. It does something to us. It makes us who we are. It gives us depth. It ties our past to our present to overcome the disjunction of a too literal life. It focuses our attention on the imagination of events rather than on events taken literally. Memory is a kind of poetry.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.