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20 Quotes That Will Help You Live For Today And Ultimately Find Happiness

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20 Quotes That Will Help You Live For Today And Ultimately Find Happiness

Live in the moment, live in the breath. 

Brianna WiestSeptember 21, 2016
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Emotions are slowly killing us because we keep channeling them into things that don't exist – the future, the past. We don't tap into the astounding power of the present moment. We're too caught up in constructing what "should" happen or trying to understand what already did. And intellectually, everyone claims to know this – you know, live in the present, live in the moment. But it remains an annoying platitude because we haven't felt it yet.  You need to open your apertures to the power that's in front of you, not just keep throwing your old shit in the moment, tensing yourself up and sustaining the bullshit. Your power to create something completely new, and even miraculous, is resting right in front of you. Right now. When you feel it, you'll work with it. Get out of your head. It can show you the way, but it can't tell you to where.

— Brianna Wiest, Power, Presentness

 

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.

— David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

 

What is important is to understand the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence; that is free to be determined. One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist at any future moment. This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. But we can make the inductive leap of faith that has to do with accumulated experience. We project that the existence of the room will remain a boundary condition, but in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might not be left standing. However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted in some unexpected and improbable manner. What is so curious is that such a thing could occur.

— Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution