Naikan & the ToDo Institute

Quotes:

To me, grace comes from an examination of one’s life in which you realize that you don’t deserve what you’re getting, yet you’re getting it anyway.

We’ve gotten into the habit of seeing only the problems, because they are more dramatic. That’s what gives a story value.

It’s hard to imagine compassion in the absence of attention. The people I think of as being the most compassionate also tend to be the most attentive to others. It’s a great shock to realize how much of our attention is constantly on ourselves and how rare it is for us to focus our attention on someone else.

Research shows almost every psychological disorder is associated with self-focused attention. That doesn’t mean that self-focused attention causes tbut it’s an important element of the problem.

A beautiful interview (Many Thanks, Gregg Krech on the Revolutionary Practice of Gratitude - PDF link) with Gregg Krech, founder of the ToDo Institute.

Naikan practice is based on 3 questions, focused on a single person:

1. What have I received from THIS PERSON?
2. What have I given to THIS PERSON?
3. What troubles & difficulties have I caused THIS PERSON?

Truth

From the wonderful Ted talk by Jonathan Haidt:

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease. -- Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE

Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers speech to Berklee College of Music from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

Lama Anagarika Govinda (Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism) on Modern Physics, etc.

The ultimate concepts of physics may lead us to a greater understanding. It is very interesting, for instance, that in modern physics the more logical you are, the more wrong you are. This shows very clearly the limits of our logic. Actually, the universe often seems unreasonable to us because we apply our own logic to something which is not of the same category. We never can say where a particle is and what it does, and so we can only guess, or define it as either particle or a wave. Yet it is neither one nor the other, but both. You may ask, for example, about the "logic" of reincarnation. I don't feel we can reduce the idea of reincarnation to pure logic. Since our beginnings are infinite, and the causes are also infinite, the combinations must necessarily be infinite. It is impossible to explain such things with our linear logic since the cause and effect, from the universal point of view, are multi-dimensional. For instance in the Lankavatara Sutra, I was impressed by the description of karma as "habit energy." Having done something once, we are impelled to do the same thing again under similar circumstances. Karma is indeed habit energy, and the moment we get out of the habit of something, it is gone.

--Lama Anagarika Govinda (Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism)

The illiterate of the 21st century...

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. -Alvin Toffler