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The Boy in the Photo

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I know the boy in the photo. He was born into paradise, but through ignorance he painted a battlefield. Every character is an enemy soldier. He lived in heightened fear, alertness, and anxiety, to protect himself. Each encounter left a wound, and each wound makes the painting darker. Many days he stared into the depths of hell through the loop of his escape portal. One slip and it would all go away. Yet, what he was truly hoping for was someone to end the war. He didn't want to fight anymore. Years became decades, the help never came. Those who don't see the wounds, in their own ignorance, re-infect them over and over, not recognizing the need for treatment. Yet, it was not the others who have wronged him, it was me. I was with him since the first blip of his consciousness, I was his most trusted friend. But I did not help him. I too was absorbed by the illusion of the painting. It was my duty to dispel the illusions and guide him out of the darkness when his own faculties coul...
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Worldview influencing your world

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I don't think it's a coincidence that the moment I stopped judging people, people stopped judging me. A mind which is hurting will find pain everywhere. I am grateful for the remedies that society has given me to dull the pain, whether they are in the form of entertainment, distractions, or actual medicine, but now it is time apply right effort, right concentration, right awareness. Nothing in the whole universe can heal me other than for me to walk the right path.
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Idle Hands and Impermanence

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Impermanence (anicca) is one of the fundamental characteristic of all things that are perceivable by the mind. Indeed, I have found that to assume something to be permanent is always a fast track to suffering. Be it wanting your beloved pet to live forever, or wanting the happy times to last forever, all of these misunderstandings result in suffering. We are all born with a time limit, and only after accepting this limit can we continue to live the correct way. Upon further inspection, there is a connection between procrastination and this kind of misunderstanding (that things are permanent). If you think about it, procrastination has an embedded assumption that "tomorrow will be the same as today". There's no rush to finish what must be done, because I can do it tomorrow, and the conditions will be the same tomorrow. This is fundamentally untrue. As an example, I learned this the hard way when I procrastinated on doing a batch of laundry, putting it off day after day. Th...
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Passing Thought

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We can not begin to discuss what is true and what is not without first acknowledging the flawed sensor through which we experience the world: the mind.
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Passing Thought

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If you present a false self, you are safe from potential enemies who seek to find your weakness, but you will also block yourself from finding the potential friends who seek to help.
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Triumph of Evil

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Does evil triumph because you did nothing? Or because you paved the way for it? It's important to answer that question for yourself. One of the answers contains a misunderstanding that evil and good are independent of each other. That answer will forever look for scapegoats, but never look at the one thing you can change: yourself. Duality is a human construct that nature doesn't care about. Dualistic thinking is a smudge on your lens that prevents you from seeing how things truly work. Once you understand that good and evil are one and the same, you may start to notice the puppet strings that connect you to the "evil" that you try to vanquish. In such a situation, the best solution may not be to rage at evil, but to first cut the puppet strings.
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The Ever-Rationalizing Machine

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In terms of the amount of information, I always felt that it's as if we have about 1KB of emotion, but we rationalize it with about 100GB of stories. The 1KB is real, and the 100GB is fiction. Yet we spend most of our lives pitting our fictions against each other.  We have so much to say about how we think the world should be, and how we think others should act. We're convinced we are irreconcilably different because our stories are different.  Perhaps the underlying story is much simpler. "I have been hurt, and I don't want to be hurt again." If we shared our 1KB we'd realize we're not so different after all.
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