spencer's cafe

Search

SearchSearch

That Little Voice in Your Head

Jan 10, 2024, 32 min read

That Little Voice in Your Head

rw-book-cover

Metadata

  • Author: Mo Gawdat
  • Full Title: That Little Voice in Your Head
  • Category:#books

Highlights

  • I’m trying to make a billion people happy. Crazy, I know, but I believe it’s the only goal worth spending the rest of my life trying to reach. (Location 35)
  • Seventeen days after his death, I started to write, and I couldn’t stop. My topic was happiness – the most unlikely subject to choose after such a tragic event. (Location 38)
  • Your happiness is greater than or equal to the difference between the perception of the events of your life and your hopes and expectations of how life should behave. (Location 42)
  • Ali was my son and my sun. (Location 47)
  • dreamed that I was everywhere and part of everyone. It was so incredible that when I woke up, I felt I didn’t want to be confined in this physical body any more.’ (Location 51)
  • My life was no longer mine, but rather belonged to his mission. (Location 56)
  • to spread his essence to humanity at large and in doing so, through six degrees of separation after many years, a bit of Ali-ness was going to be everywhere and part of everyone. (Location 58)
  • Only six months after the launch of the original mission, I had already reached tens of millions of people online. (Location 62)
  • the content we created has now been viewed more than 120 million times online – (Location 68)
  • more people focused on being kind and compassionate to others there would be a ripple effect. People would start mimicking that kind and compassionate behaviour. We would start a positive Ponzi scheme, with each newly happy person bringing in two more. This scheme would have the power to change the world, and it starts right inside you, with the very biggest reason for unhappiness – negative thoughts. (Location 71)
  • thought is the most immersive of all illusions. There’s a little voice in our head always, always telling us what to do. It’s constantly there, like air, so we deal with it mechanically, just like our brains deal with our breathing. Year after year, we take that little voice for granted and it takes us for a ride to suffering. (Location 74)
  • thoughts, have the single biggest impact on our state of happiness. (Location 77)
  • That little voice in our heads affects our mood even more than some of the harshest circumstances we endure in life. (Location 77)
  • your brain, just like your computer, can be highly predictable. That if you give your brain specific inputs and run specific programmes on it, it will always give you the same output. (Location 80)
  • Any process starts with inputs. Regardless of how smart a computer is, the wrong inputs yield the wrong results. (Location 94)
  • Then there’s the process – the way the programme runs. (Location 97)
  • This is a practical book, full of exercises, (Location 120)
  • Books are like houses: they are meant to be lived in. (Location 124)
  • Feel free to scribble all over it, take notes and fill in the blanks on the pages themselves with your own commitments and observations. (Location 125)
  • Be–Learn–Do. (Location 134)
  • Awareness exercises will help you reflect and learn something important about yourself. Practice exercises will help you develop a necessary skill. (Location 157)
  • look beyond the obvious and reflect on your own life to see how a scene or a concept of a movie may apply to you. (Location 179)
  • Learn those happy songs by heart. (Location 181)
  • The free downloadable app contains thousands of useful videos, inspirational quotes, tasks and exercises. Appii will also use artificial intelligence to help you develop healthy happiness habits. (Location 187)
  • slow down and reflect on topics that matter. (Location 194)
  • Despite the progress and technological advancements we’ve made in the last one hundred years, humanity is failing when it comes to our happiness. (Location 201)
  • One in every six people will be diagnosed with depression in their lifetime – (Location 202)
  • One human life is lost to suicide every forty seconds. (Location 203)
  • One in every four people surveyed in the USA say that when they feel unhappy, they don’t have a single person to turn to for help.3 (Location 204)
  • www.OneBillionHappy.org (Location 211)
  • we are all born happy. (Location 217)
  • Happiness is innate within us. (Location 218)
  • Happiness is our default state. As we become adults, societal pressures, obligations, expectations and the illusions we learn to believe convince us that success is more important than happiness. (Location 219)
  • We relentlessly chase success and, in the process, we lose our happiness. (Location 220)
  • Happiness is not found by adding things to your life – all the fancy clothes, gadgets and vacations. A child is happy until something interrupts its happiness. (Location 225)
  • If a diaper gets wet, the child will cry. Change the diaper and the child will go back to its default state – happy. This is still your nature even today. If (Location 226)
  • you manage to remove the things that make you unhappy, what’s left behind is happy. Simple as it sounds: happiness is the absence of unhappiness. (Location 227)
  • equation: (Location 229)
  • We feel happy when the events of our life match our expectations, our hopes and wishes of how life should be. (Location 232)
  • Rain doesn’t make us happy or unhappy. Rain makes us happy when we want to water our plants and unhappy when we want to get a tan. (Location 233)
  • Happiness happens when events meet or exceed our expectations. (Location 235)
  • It is that calm, peaceful contentment we feel when we’re OK with life as it is. (Location 235)
  • It doesn’t matter exactly how life is. If you’re OK with it, you’re happy. (Location 236)
  • Unhappiness, (Location 237)
  • happens when our brains look at the world around us, find something that worries them and attempt to alert us that something might be wrong. (Location 238)
  • comes in the form of an emotion – (Location 239)
  • Between feeling happy or unhappy, we find a state that is neither – the state of escape. (Location 240)
  • Escape is when we engage our physical forms in activities that occupy our brains and numb (Location 241)
  • them long enough to stop trying to solve the happiness equation. (Location 241)
  • We find this state of escape when our bodies engage in fun and pleasure. (Location 245)
  • acts rather like a painkiller – a replacement for happiness but not the real thing. So, we go back for more and more; we become addicted to fun. (Location 246)
  • People who are in the state of joy are constantly happy. They look at life in a way which recognizes that most events don’t deserve unhappiness. They rise above the clutter of useless, harmful thoughts and there they find their joy. (Location 248)
  • Those, on the other hand, who are in a state of confusion always search for what’s wrong with every passing event, big or small. (Location 250)
  • difference between pain and suffering. (Location 253)
  • Pain is out of our control; it happens to us. Suffering is a choice! We choose to stay unhappy by replaying the events that triggered our emotional pain over and over again inside our heads when they are no longer happening or have not yet happened in the real world. (Location 255)
  • No event in your life ever has the power to make you unhappy until you choose to grant it that power by turning it into a thought and ruminating on the negative side of it to torture yourself with unhappiness. (Location 258)
  • What is real? (Location 263)
  • How can you tell for sure that you are not in a dream? (Location 265)
  • As you read my words, you turn them into concepts in your own brain. Those concepts will become reality … but only for you. They will become your reality which could be different to how someone else may comprehend the same words. (Location 267)
  • If I managed to simulate the electrical signals directly into your brain using electrodes that touched your scalp, you would end up seeing the same vision, only in that case there would not even be a book there. (Location 278)
  • A simpler version of it happens when we get completely absorbed in a movie. We feel as if we are actually observing some form of reality when it is actually nothing more than moving pictures. (Location 280)
  • We all know that what we see on a movie screen is not real. We all know that the actors are not really making love, just acting it out, and yet we perceive it as reality. (Location 281)
  • We sometimes wake up from a dream feeling it was completely realistic, (Location 283)
  • None of the events of the dream happened, but the electrical signals occurred in our brain. This is sufficient to make us see it and even believe it is real. (Location 284)
  • it doesn’t really matter what the world presents to you (Location 285)
  • Nothing is real until your brain decides that it is. (Location 287)
  • when your brain has so much power over your perception, how often does it tell you the truth? What happens when it doesn’t? (Location 293)
  • Have you ever believed something so wholeheartedly that it affected every single one of your actions – only to find out later that what you believed wasn’t true? (Location 295)
  • corporate slogans, patriotic biases, religious doctrines, (Location 297)
  • ‘What is the most resilient parasite? (Location 331)
  • ‘An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.’ (Location 332)
  • thoughts, (Location 337)
  • have the single biggest impact on our state of happiness. The little voice in our head affects our mood even more than some of the harshest circumstances we endure in life. (Location 338)
  • To become aware of the relationship between our thoughts and unhappiness (Location 345)
  • For the first part, your task will be to think of something that makes you unhappy. For the second part, the task will be to construct the name of something from the letters on the next page. (Location 348)

New highlights added September 13, 2022 at 8:11 AM

  • When the little voice in your head speaks, it can’t focus on anything else, and when it focuses on something else, it simply can’t speak. (Location 366)
  • It’s the thought that makes us unhappy! (Location 388)
  • No event, (Location 389)
  • in your entire life ever had the power to make you unhappy unless you granted it that power by turning it into a thought and running it through your head over and over to make yourself miserable. (Location 389)
  • when you think, you feel unhappy and when you stop thinking you focus on other parts of your life as if the problem doesn’t exist. (Location 392)
  • Those thoughts, as they occur, are not real events. They are just reconstructions of past events or predictions of future possibilities. (Location 397)
  • you are rarely ever unhappy because of something that is happening to you. If ever you manage to make yourself unhappy, it is because of an imagined event, generated in the form of a thought in your head, and not the reality of what is happening to you right then. (Location 398)
  • the voice (Location 401)
  • only speaks when things are OK here and now. (Location 402)
  • Is the voice inside your head really you? (Location 416)
  • ‘There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.’ (Location 426)
  • If the voice in my head isn’t me, then who is it? (Location 430)
  • If thinking is a biological function, then a thought is analogous to urine and CO2. It is just a biological product. (Location 452)
  • ‘I think, therefore I am’, (Location 473)
  • is an illusion. The reality of the illusion is I am, therefore I think. (Location 474)
  • am, therefore my brain thinks. (Location 475)
  • your thoughts don’t define you. If you are not the thoughts in your head, then you no longer need to obey. (Location 476)
  • you can – and should – frequently tell your brain to shut up completely. (Location 478)

New highlights added September 22, 2022 at 5:59 AM

  • Our brains are the best gift humanity has ever been given. We’ve just never learned how to properly use them. It’s like being given the most powerful computer on the planet when you don’t know how to use a spreadsheet. (Location 479)
  • There’s nothing wrong with your computer. Let’s learn how to use it. (Location 482)
  • the most sophisticated computer on the planet. (Location 484)
  • comes complete with an entire sensory monitoring system that can detect vision, sound, touch, weight, temperature and many other complex stimuli, (Location 485)
  • of impressive memory storage and recall. (Location 487)
  • incredibly accurate motor functionality controls that would put any robotics engineer in our world today to shame. (Location 488)
  • It has its own power generators contained within the body and, most impressive of all, it is capable not only of solving complex problems, but also of formulating them into problem statements that accurately describe the challenges that need to be addressed. (Location 488)
  • capable of reading, communicating and exchanging information with other brains. (Location 490)
  • We teach it to comprehend and control everything around it, but we rarely ever teach it to understand or control itself. (Location 494)
  • the concept of teaching a machine to run itself. (Location 495)
  • The closest we have come to this with our brains is meditation, (Location 497)
  • by enhancing (Location 498)
  • deliberate attention. (Location 499)
  • what if we could learn and practise ways to improve every other process the brain can perform? How much better would our whole lives become then? (Location 500)
  • a picture that looks like this: (Location 531)
  • the most pivotal step in ensuring your brain delivers valuable results is to know what you want it to do. (Location 545)
  • ultimate (Location 546)
  • three outputs. (Location 547)
  • realize their own individual happiness, they achieve a reasonable measure of success (depending on how they define success) and they live with the compassion needed to impact the lives of others positively. (Location 547)
  • Repeat at least once a week as needed (Location 560)
  • ask yourself what sources of information you have been allowing into your head. (Location 562)
  • To fix the unhappiness your brain is experiencing, you need to find out what causes it. (Location 572)
  • 4 (wrong) Inputs that distort our perception of the truth. 3 (exaggerated) Defences that keep us safe but make us suffer. 2 (opposite) Polarities failing to stay in balance. 1 (harmful) Thought that causes all the unhappiness you have ever felt. (Location 574)
  • you are what you eat. (Location 584)
  • You also are what you think. (Location 586)
  • Garbage in = garbage out (Location 591)
  • It doesn’t matter what your computer is capable of. If you feed it the wrong information you will get the wrong result. (Location 592)
  • name for the process of cleaning up the stuff that was left there unintentionally. (Location 635)
  • Garbage collection. (Location 636)
  • Have you given yourself the time to reflect on the validity of what you believe? Have you cleaned up useless or harmful concepts from your own memory system? (Location 636)
  • Once we believe something, it starts to shape us and if what we allow in is garbage, our resulting thoughts and the emotions that they produce within us also become, well … garbage. (Location 640)
  • Imagine you wake up on a Sunday morning with thoughts about your next vacation. (Location 644)
  • We allow so many things to input into our thoughts. (Location 651)
  • five categories: observation, conditioning, recycled thoughts, trapped emotions and hidden triggers. (Location 652)
  • Only one of the five comes close to the truth. The other four just mislead you. (Location 652)
  • sensory observations – theoretically – are the only source of information we should allow into our heads (Location 657)
  • three levels of knowing: knowledge, observation and experience. (Location 658)
  • Observation is a more confirmed form of knowing than ‘knowledge’. It is the bottom line, a level of knowing you can rely on for your decision-making. (Location 662)
  • But what if what’s in the pot looks like honey, but is, say, caramel? Better still would be to open the pot and taste the honey. Experience is the highest form of knowledge. (Location 667)
  • What you observe with your own senses is the closest you can get to the truth of the physical reality. (Location 671)
  • Taking something that you are told as truth may mislead you. Sadly, this happens way too often in our modern world. (Location 672)
  • Ask yourself how much of what you allow into your thought cycles is (Location 673)
  • gossip, hearsay, fake news or just plain guesswork by someone who is not qualified to assess the validity of what they are talking about? (Location 674)
  • sadly, we consume them as our primary source of knowledge and then we think we know. (Location 676)
  • to know something that is not true. (Location 677)
  • We think we know, but what we know is often not true. (Location 679)
  • False knowing is the first of the neural causes of suffering. In the modern world it is triggered by what I call the … Four Inputs (Location 679)
  • When we mix our own perceptions with what is presented to us by others or by our own irrationality, we can lose touch with reality. (Location 681)
  • There may be nothing at all with our life at this moment but our false knowledge convinces us that the world is about to end. (Location 684)
  • Conditioning is the summation of all the beliefs and traumas we develop or encounter throughout a lifetime. Your conditioning affects the way your thoughts flow, the way your decisions are made and, at a deeper level, it affects the way you see the world in the first place. (Location 690)
  • Once your conditioning is set within you, it will often affect you even more than your external circumstances. (Location 692)
  • Conditioning is a powerful lens that falsely recreates what we think is reality. (Location 709)

title: “That Little Voice in Your Head” author: “Mo Gawdat” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

That Little Voice in Your Head

rw-book-cover

Metadata

  • Author: Mo Gawdat
  • Full Title: That Little Voice in Your Head
  • Category:#books

Highlights

  • I’m trying to make a billion people happy. Crazy, I know, but I believe it’s the only goal worth spending the rest of my life trying to reach. (Location 35)
  • Seventeen days after his death, I started to write, and I couldn’t stop. My topic was happiness – the most unlikely subject to choose after such a tragic event. (Location 38)
  • Your happiness is greater than or equal to the difference between the perception of the events of your life and your hopes and expectations of how life should behave. (Location 42)
  • Ali was my son and my sun. (Location 47)
  • dreamed that I was everywhere and part of everyone. It was so incredible that when I woke up, I felt I didn’t want to be confined in this physical body any more.’ (Location 51)
  • My life was no longer mine, but rather belonged to his mission. (Location 56)
  • to spread his essence to humanity at large and in doing so, through six degrees of separation after many years, a bit of Ali-ness was going to be everywhere and part of everyone. (Location 58)
  • Only six months after the launch of the original mission, I had already reached tens of millions of people online. (Location 62)
  • the content we created has now been viewed more than 120 million times online – (Location 68)
  • more people focused on being kind and compassionate to others there would be a ripple effect. People would start mimicking that kind and compassionate behaviour. We would start a positive Ponzi scheme, with each newly happy person bringing in two more. This scheme would have the power to change the world, and it starts right inside you, with the very biggest reason for unhappiness – negative thoughts. (Location 71)
  • thought is the most immersive of all illusions. There’s a little voice in our head always, always telling us what to do. It’s constantly there, like air, so we deal with it mechanically, just like our brains deal with our breathing. Year after year, we take that little voice for granted and it takes us for a ride to suffering. (Location 74)
  • thoughts, have the single biggest impact on our state of happiness. (Location 77)
  • That little voice in our heads affects our mood even more than some of the harshest circumstances we endure in life. (Location 77)
  • your brain, just like your computer, can be highly predictable. That if you give your brain specific inputs and run specific programmes on it, it will always give you the same output. (Location 80)
  • Any process starts with inputs. Regardless of how smart a computer is, the wrong inputs yield the wrong results. (Location 94)
  • Then there’s the process – the way the programme runs. (Location 97)
  • This is a practical book, full of exercises, (Location 120)
  • Books are like houses: they are meant to be lived in. (Location 124)
  • Feel free to scribble all over it, take notes and fill in the blanks on the pages themselves with your own commitments and observations. (Location 125)
  • Be–Learn–Do. (Location 134)
  • Awareness exercises will help you reflect and learn something important about yourself. Practice exercises will help you develop a necessary skill. (Location 157)
  • look beyond the obvious and reflect on your own life to see how a scene or a concept of a movie may apply to you. (Location 179)
  • Learn those happy songs by heart. (Location 181)
  • The free downloadable app contains thousands of useful videos, inspirational quotes, tasks and exercises. Appii will also use artificial intelligence to help you develop healthy happiness habits. (Location 187)
  • slow down and reflect on topics that matter. (Location 194)
  • Despite the progress and technological advancements we’ve made in the last one hundred years, humanity is failing when it comes to our happiness. (Location 201)
  • One in every six people will be diagnosed with depression in their lifetime – (Location 202)
  • One in every four people surveyed in the USA say that when they feel unhappy, they don’t have a single person to turn to for help.3 (Location 204)
  • www.OneBillionHappy.org (Location 211)
  • we are all born happy. (Location 217)
  • Happiness is innate within us. (Location 218)
  • Happiness is our default state. As we become adults, societal pressures, obligations, expectations and the illusions we learn to believe convince us that success is more important than happiness. (Location 219)
  • We relentlessly chase success and, in the process, we lose our happiness. (Location 220)
  • Happiness is not found by adding things to your life – all the fancy clothes, gadgets and vacations. A child is happy until something interrupts its happiness. (Location 225)
  • If a diaper gets wet, the child will cry. Change the diaper and the child will go back to its default state – happy. This is still your nature even today. If (Location 226)
  • you manage to remove the things that make you unhappy, what’s left behind is happy. Simple as it sounds: happiness is the absence of unhappiness. (Location 227)
  • equation: (Location 229)
  • We feel happy when the events of our life match our expectations, our hopes and wishes of how life should be. (Location 232)
  • Rain doesn’t make us happy or unhappy. Rain makes us happy when we want to water our plants and unhappy when we want to get a tan. (Location 233)
  • Happiness happens when events meet or exceed our expectations. (Location 235)
  • It is that calm, peaceful contentment we feel when we’re OK with life as it is. (Location 235)
  • It doesn’t matter exactly how life is. If you’re OK with it, you’re happy. (Location 236)
  • Unhappiness, (Location 237)
  • happens when our brains look at the world around us, find something that worries them and attempt to alert us that something might be wrong. (Location 238)
  • comes in the form of an emotion – (Location 239)
  • Between feeling happy or unhappy, we find a state that is neither – the state of escape. (Location 240)
  • Escape is when we engage our physical forms in activities that occupy our brains and numb (Location 241)
  • them long enough to stop trying to solve the happiness equation. (Location 241)
  • We find this state of escape when our bodies engage in fun and pleasure. (Location 245)
  • acts rather like a painkiller – a replacement for happiness but not the real thing. So, we go back for more and more; we become addicted to fun. (Location 246)
  • People who are in the state of joy are constantly happy. They look at life in a way which recognizes that most events don’t deserve unhappiness. They rise above the clutter of useless, harmful thoughts and there they find their joy. (Location 248)
  • Those, on the other hand, who are in a state of confusion always search for what’s wrong with every passing event, big or small. (Location 250)
  • difference between pain and suffering. (Location 253)
  • Pain is out of our control; it happens to us. Suffering is a choice! We choose to stay unhappy by replaying the events that triggered our emotional pain over and over again inside our heads when they are no longer happening or have not yet happened in the real world. (Location 255)
  • No event in your life ever has the power to make you unhappy until you choose to grant it that power by turning it into a thought and ruminating on the negative side of it to torture yourself with unhappiness. (Location 258)
  • What is real? (Location 263)
  • How can you tell for sure that you are not in a dream? (Location 265)
  • As you read my words, you turn them into concepts in your own brain. Those concepts will become reality … but only for you. They will become your reality which could be different to how someone else may comprehend the same words. (Location 267)
  • If I managed to simulate the electrical signals directly into your brain using electrodes that touched your scalp, you would end up seeing the same vision, only in that case there would not even be a book there. (Location 278)
  • A simpler version of it happens when we get completely absorbed in a movie. We feel as if we are actually observing some form of reality when it is actually nothing more than moving pictures. (Location 280)
  • We all know that what we see on a movie screen is not real. We all know that the actors are not really making love, just acting it out, and yet we perceive it as reality. (Location 281)
  • We sometimes wake up from a dream feeling it was completely realistic, (Location 283)
  • None of the events of the dream happened, but the electrical signals occurred in our brain. This is sufficient to make us see it and even believe it is real. (Location 284)
  • it doesn’t really matter what the world presents to you (Location 285)
  • Nothing is real until your brain decides that it is. (Location 287)
  • when your brain has so much power over your perception, how often does it tell you the truth? What happens when it doesn’t? (Location 293)
  • Have you ever believed something so wholeheartedly that it affected every single one of your actions – only to find out later that what you believed wasn’t true? (Location 295)
  • corporate slogans, patriotic biases, religious doctrines, (Location 297)
  • ‘What is the most resilient parasite? (Location 331)
  • ‘An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.’ (Location 332)
  • thoughts, (Location 337)
  • have the single biggest impact on our state of happiness. The little voice in our head affects our mood even more than some of the harshest circumstances we endure in life. (Location 338)
  • To become aware of the relationship between our thoughts and unhappiness (Location 345)
  • For the first part, your task will be to think of something that makes you unhappy. For the second part, the task will be to construct the name of something from the letters on the next page. (Location 348)
  • When the little voice in your head speaks, it can’t focus on anything else, and when it focuses on something else, it simply can’t speak. (Location 366)
  • It’s the thought that makes us unhappy! (Location 388)
  • No event, (Location 389)
  • in your entire life ever had the power to make you unhappy unless you granted it that power by turning it into a thought and running it through your head over and over to make yourself miserable. (Location 389)
  • when you think, you feel unhappy and when you stop thinking you focus on other parts of your life as if the problem doesn’t exist. (Location 392)
  • Those thoughts, as they occur, are not real events. They are just reconstructions of past events or predictions of future possibilities. (Location 397)
  • you are rarely ever unhappy because of something that is happening to you. If ever you manage to make yourself unhappy, it is because of an imagined event, generated in the form of a thought in your head, and not the reality of what is happening to you right then. (Location 398)
  • the voice (Location 401)
  • only speaks when things are OK here and now. (Location 402)
  • Is the voice inside your head really you? (Location 416)
  • ‘There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.’ (Location 426)
  • If the voice in my head isn’t me, then who is it? (Location 430)
  • If thinking is a biological function, then a thought is analogous to urine and CO2. It is just a biological product. (Location 452)
  • ‘I think, therefore I am’, (Location 473)
  • is an illusion. The reality of the illusion is I am, therefore I think. (Location 474)
  • am, therefore my brain thinks. (Location 475)
  • your thoughts don’t define you. If you are not the thoughts in your head, then you no longer need to obey. (Location 476)
  • you can – and should – frequently tell your brain to shut up completely. (Location 478)
  • Our brains are the best gift humanity has ever been given. We’ve just never learned how to properly use them. It’s like being given the most powerful computer on the planet when you don’t know how to use a spreadsheet. (Location 479)
  • There’s nothing wrong with your computer. Let’s learn how to use it. (Location 482)
  • the most sophisticated computer on the planet. (Location 484)
  • comes complete with an entire sensory monitoring system that can detect vision, sound, touch, weight, temperature and many other complex stimuli, (Location 485)
  • of impressive memory storage and recall. (Location 487)
  • incredibly accurate motor functionality controls that would put any robotics engineer in our world today to shame. (Location 488)
  • It has its own power generators contained within the body and, most impressive of all, it is capable not only of solving complex problems, but also of formulating them into problem statements that accurately describe the challenges that need to be addressed. (Location 488)
  • capable of reading, communicating and exchanging information with other brains. (Location 490)
  • We teach it to comprehend and control everything around it, but we rarely ever teach it to understand or control itself. (Location 494)
  • the concept of teaching a machine to run itself. (Location 495)
  • The closest we have come to this with our brains is meditation, (Location 497)
  • by enhancing (Location 498)
  • deliberate attention. (Location 499)
  • what if we could learn and practise ways to improve every other process the brain can perform? How much better would our whole lives become then? (Location 500)
  • a picture that looks like this: (Location 531)
  • the most pivotal step in ensuring your brain delivers valuable results is to know what you want it to do. (Location 545)
  • ultimate (Location 546)
  • three outputs. (Location 547)
  • realize their own individual happiness, they achieve a reasonable measure of success (depending on how they define success) and they live with the compassion needed to impact the lives of others positively. (Location 547)
  • Repeat at least once a week as needed (Location 560)
  • ask yourself what sources of information you have been allowing into your head. (Location 562)
  • To fix the unhappiness your brain is experiencing, you need to find out what causes it. (Location 572)
  • 4 (wrong) Inputs that distort our perception of the truth. 3 (exaggerated) Defences that keep us safe but make us suffer. 2 (opposite) Polarities failing to stay in balance. 1 (harmful) Thought that causes all the unhappiness you have ever felt. (Location 574)
  • you are what you eat. (Location 584)
  • You also are what you think. (Location 586)
  • Garbage in = garbage out (Location 591)
  • It doesn’t matter what your computer is capable of. If you feed it the wrong information you will get the wrong result. (Location 592)
  • name for the process of cleaning up the stuff that was left there unintentionally. (Location 635)
  • Garbage collection. (Location 636)
  • Have you given yourself the time to reflect on the validity of what you believe? Have you cleaned up useless or harmful concepts from your own memory system? (Location 636)
  • Once we believe something, it starts to shape us and if what we allow in is garbage, our resulting thoughts and the emotions that they produce within us also become, well … garbage. (Location 640)
  • Imagine you wake up on a Sunday morning with thoughts about your next vacation. (Location 644)
  • We allow so many things to input into our thoughts. (Location 651)
  • five categories: observation, conditioning, recycled thoughts, trapped emotions and hidden triggers. (Location 652)
  • Only one of the five comes close to the truth. The other four just mislead you. (Location 652)
  • sensory observations – theoretically – are the only source of information we should allow into our heads (Location 657)
  • three levels of knowing: knowledge, observation and experience. (Location 658)
  • Observation is a more confirmed form of knowing than ‘knowledge’. It is the bottom line, a level of knowing you can rely on for your decision-making. (Location 662)
  • But what if what’s in the pot looks like honey, but is, say, caramel? Better still would be to open the pot and taste the honey. Experience is the highest form of knowledge. (Location 667)
  • What you observe with your own senses is the closest you can get to the truth of the physical reality. (Location 671)
  • Taking something that you are told as truth may mislead you. Sadly, this happens way too often in our modern world. (Location 672)
  • Ask yourself how much of what you allow into your thought cycles is (Location 673)
  • gossip, hearsay, fake news or just plain guesswork by someone who is not qualified to assess the validity of what they are talking about? (Location 674)
  • sadly, we consume them as our primary source of knowledge and then we think we know. (Location 676)
  • to know something that is not true. (Location 677)
  • We think we know, but what we know is often not true. (Location 679)
  • False knowing is the first of the neural causes of suffering. In the modern world it is triggered by what I call the … Four Inputs (Location 679)
  • When we mix our own perceptions with what is presented to us by others or by our own irrationality, we can lose touch with reality. (Location 681)
  • There may be nothing at all with our life at this moment but our false knowledge convinces us that the world is about to end. (Location 684)
  • Conditioning is the summation of all the beliefs and traumas we develop or encounter throughout a lifetime. Your conditioning affects the way your thoughts flow, the way your decisions are made and, at a deeper level, it affects the way you see the world in the first place. (Location 690)
  • Once your conditioning is set within you, it will often affect you even more than your external circumstances. (Location 692)
  • Conditioning is a powerful lens that falsely recreates what we think is reality. (Location 709)

Graph View

Backlinks

  • No backlinks found