CORE TRUTHS
2 IDEAS FROM ME
Core truths essential to live your best life:
We must wake up to who we really are in terms of our true nature, signature strengths, reality-based highest values, and full potential.
Waking up is not enough. We must consistently live our life in harmony with our true nature, signature strengths, and highest values. This is a life-long quest that Joseph Campbell refers to as the “Hero’s Journey” and Plato describes in the “Allegory of the Cave”. It’s an ultrajourney into our soul to discover our signature strengths, define our highest values, cultivate an experimental growth mindset, and implement an atomic habit framework that harmonizes it all.
Love, intimacy, peace, and passion are essential and flow from a deep understanding of three universal characteristics of the human experience: uncertainty, imperfection, and impermanence. A deep dive on impermanence reveals essential insights to the power of suffering and true nature of self.
We live in a Desolation Sound Type Archipelago of universal opposites: Joy-Suffering, Love-Hate, Truth-Delusion, Peace-Conflict, etc. Our experience of each opposite originates from dependent conditions. Joy originates from mindfully living in harmony with our true nature and highest reality-based values. Suffering originates from active ignorance of the Four Nobel Truths. Our experience of each opposite is determined by where we choose to focus our awareness and energy. Where awareness goes, energy flows and our experience grows through neuroplastic Hebbian Learning.
Five Hinderances distort and distract us from the necessary focus and clarity on truth, freedom, and peace: Sensual Desire, Ill will, Sloth-Torpor, Restlessness-Worry, and Doubt. Seven Factors of Awakening (Mindfulness, Investigation, Energy, Joy, Tranquility, Concentration, and Equanimity) are antidotes to the Five Hinderances.
Five Hinderances: Our mind is like an oceanic tide pool. Under calm and tranquil conditions, the surface is like a two-way mirror revealing the internal reality beneath the surface and reflecting the external reality above the surface. Sensual desire is like injecting black opaque octopus ink into the pool. Ill will is like having geothermal vents boiling the water with the heat of hatred and anger. Sloth and torpor is like cultivating clouds of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and sea weed. Restlessness and Worry are like pounding the tide pool with wind and waves. Doubt is like infusing milky grey rock flour from a glacial stream.
Seven Factors of Awakening: Each factor creates the conditions to originate the next. Mindfulness creates the necessary space in our mind between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl calls “The Last Human Freedom” - The freedom to choose our response from our true nature and highest values regardless of conditions. The Pali word for mindfulness is “Sati” which means “To remember our true nature and highest values and observe our experience in the present moment with nonjudgemental loving kindness in terms of body, feeling, mind, and insight. Mindfulness is a skillset similar to learning to roll a kayak. It’s best practiced in a calm, comfortable, uninterrupted space under the guidance of a qualified instructor. Establishing a daily mindfulness meditation practice is essential to learning the fundamentals. Experimenting with mindfulness fundamentals in the whitewater of daily life is essential to cultivate the necessary skills in real-world situations. Doing so creates the dependent conditions to originate the second factor of awakening, Investigation. Investigation is a skillset similar to mindfulness that is cultivated as part of a daily meditation practice and experimented with in daily experiences. It requires hollow-bones curiosity, a beginners mind, and a don’t know mind. It’s a deep dive into the felt sense of experience in the present moment, an inquiry into root causes, and an exploration of best responses in harmony with your true nature and highest values. A proven meditative investigation practice is RAINDROP, developed by Michelle MacDonald. R=Recognition of Reality. A=Acceptance of reality. I=Interest to Investigate. N=Non-identification and Nurture with Self-Compassion. D=Delusions which must be extinguished to recognize reality. R=Resistance which must be eliminated to accept reality. O=Obliviousness which must be overcome with Interest to Investigate. P=Personalization which must be replaced with Non-Identification and Nurturing. Cultivating investigation skills creates the dependent conditions to originate the third factor of awakening: Energy. Energy is a skillset similar to mindfulness and investigation. It is best cultivated as part of a daily meditative practice as well as daily life experiences. Applying the right energy at the right time with the right understanding, intentions, speech, action, effort, mindfulness, and concentration takes practice in a safe uninterrupted environment as well as daily life. Doing so creates the conditions to originate the fourth factor of awakening: Joy. Joy is an essential precursor to living your best life. Goethe captured it best when he said: “I have come to the frightening conclusion that it is my personal response that creates the climate. It is my daily moood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In every situation, it is my response that determines whether a crisis is escalated or deescalated and a person humanized or dehumanized.” Like mindfulness, investigation, and energy, Joy is best cultivated in a daily practice using the FEEL (Flourishing, Eudaemonia, Equanimity, and Lifeblood) meditation. Reflecting on each type of experience with gratitude evokes feelings of joy. Choosing to respond to daily experiences with mindfulness, investigation, and energy creates joy in the present moment as well as develops the dependent conditions to originate the fifth factor of awakening: Tranquility. Tranquility is also a skillset developed as part of a body scan in a daily meditation practice and experimented with multiple times throughout daily life. Practicing tranquility creates the necessary conditions to originate the sixth factor of awakening: Concentration. Concentration is a skillset best cultivated during a daily meditation practice by focusing on a direct connection with your true nature (not your ego) and the content and impermanence of your experience in the present moment. Practicing concentration skills develops the conditions to originate the seventh factor of awakening: Equanimity. Equanimity is unshakable inner peace balanced with mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion. It is cultivated both in a daily meditation practice and daily experiments in normal life. A deep understanding and embodiment of the following insight is necessary to practice equanimity. All beings are the heirs of their own actions. Their joy or suffering is the direct result of their own daily choices, regardless of my insight, wisdom or compassion.
2 QUOTES FROM SAGES
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”—Pablo Picasso
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”—Dalai Lama
1 QUESTION FOR YOU TO EXPLORE
How do you stay connected to who you are at your core?
Namaste,
Duane Nelson
