You Can Only Have Bliss If You

Mindfulness Gives You Time. Time Gives You Choices. Choices, Skillfully Made, Lead To Freedom. You Don't Have To Be Swept Away By Your Feeling. You Can Respond With Wisdom And Kindness Rather Than Habit And Reactivity.

You Can Only Have Bliss If You Don't Chase It.

Deeply Buried In The Mind, There Lies A Mechanism That Accepts What The Mind Experiences As Beautiful And Pleasant And Rejects Those Experiences That Are Perceived As Ugly And Painful. This Mechanism Gives Rise To Those States Of Mind That We Are Training Ourselves To Avoid-- Things Like Greed, Lust, Hatred, Aversion, And Jealousy.

Somewhere In This Process You Will Come Face-to-face With The Sudden And Shocking Realization That You Are Completely Crazy. Your Mind Is A Shrieking Gibbering Madhouse On Wheels Barreling Pell-mell Down The Hill Utterly Out Of Control And Hopeless. No Problem. You Are Not Crazier Than You Were Yesterday. It Has Always Been This Way And You Just Never Noticed. You Are Also No Crazier Than Everybody Else Around You. The Only Real Difference Is That You Have Confronted The Situation They Have Not.

We Usually Do Not Look Into What Is Really There In Front Of Us. We See Life Through A Screen Of Thoughts And Concepts, And We Mistake Those Mental Objects For Reality. We Get So Caught Up In This Endless Thought-stream That Reality Flows By Unnoticed. We Spend Our Time Engrossed In Activity, Caught Up In An Eternal Flight From Pain And Unpleasantness. We Spend Our Energies Trying To Make Ourselves Feel Better, Trying To Bury Our Fears. We Are Endlessly Seeking Security. Meanwhile, The World Of Real Experience Flows By Untouched And Untasted.