Cloudscape

Love is immortal. It is the driving force of all life. Once the need for love sets a heart on fire it will last forever, for it cannot forget itself. Whatever may happen to it, everything will always seek for love until it finally finds it in everything. Longing for love can grow, but it can never die. Even when a heart is embittered, it will still need love as much as ever, in some form or other. Love is an ever growing light that shines from the end of our tunnel as we walk through it, onward to infinity. It is the energy of life of the universe, for some way or other it is in all we do the energy with which we act, even if it is the love for darkness. It is the creative force behind all that exists.

To have a positive attitude towards life does not mean that one concentrates on that which one sees as positive in life, but to see life itself as positive, positive and negative things alike. If one truly loves someone, one will accept them as they are, and the same counts for everything. One's love for something can never be consummate until one loves the whole of it, and therefore every facet of its existence.

If you do not love life, life will not love you; if you do not love yourself you will not love life. For life is you.

We are ourselves - I am I and you are you - because we perceive ourselves. We are, then, who or what we perceive. We are, therefore, just as much the world we perceive as our minds we perceive. Mind and matter are but two parts of our perception. Matter, therefore, even if it has a discrete existence on its own, is at the same time part of our own mind.
But the world around us - within us - does things we do not choose to do. This is because we are not conscious of doing them, just like we do not choose anything that happens in our mind - addictions, complexes, phobia… The first step to gaining control over our subconscious is to become conscious of it rather than, as we often do, repressing it.

As and when self-improvement, which has already been part of our society for thousands of years, will become more and more advanced, there will eventually arise competitive sports in which the use of supplements ("dope") is no longer secretly done by some of the athletes but openly by all of them, as well as other forms of enhancement such as genetic and robotic. The use of these supplements will be supervised by doctors, however, and supplements which could be harmful to the athlete could be either forbidden (so that, unfortunately, there would still be illegal dope) or advised against. This supervision would have to be very strict, much like the dope tests today, so that there would be no risk of an overenthusiastic athlete experiment recklessly with the wrong enhancements, that is to say, enhancements known or unknown to be dangerous.

This would also be interesting in that it would allow researchers to find the best way of improving the human body's performance. That doesn't mean the athletes would be used as test animals for new enhancements, but that once was known that they are safe, they could try to find the ideal combination of enhancements. The doctors would place a limit on the number of enhancements, so that they would not harm their health, depending strongly on the nature of the enhancements.

Because this enhancement is a complicated process, the sports would be as much a cognitive sport to the doctors (or the athletes, in case they also occupy them with this), as a physical sport to the athletes.

Think of life as a beautiful garden maze. In the maze every passage has its own beauty: here there is a fountain, there there a flowerbed, somewhere further a statue or sculpture or a pond a tree or just a tirelessly singing bird…
Perhaps you are just passing them by as you are running through each passage to go to the next, around the next corner, always looking around the corner to find the exit in the maze. Perhaps you are trying to find a destination in the maze, but there isn't really one.

Don't seek, and you will find.

Accepting is not something one does. Resisting is. To accept all one has to do is to stop resisting.

One can only lose time by considering whatever one is doing a loss of time.

The mind is made of many layers of perception and meta-perception, and this is so too for the heart. We don't feel only because of things, but also because of what we feel. In this way every emotion intensifies itself and escalates. We have not only emotions but also meta-emotions: emotions about emotions, and emotions about those emotions and so forth. If there is resistance in us, it might be that that resistance is far greater than the original resistance was, because it is resistance of that resistance. Thus, much can be done about it by just allowing yourself to resist life for a while, that is to say, to give up, to despair. Despair is a functional emotion meant to purify our minds.
The only negative thing about despair is that people see it as negative, so that people in despair will usually also see it as negative and resist it. The reason people see it as negative is because people who are in despair do not function properly. But despair is a means for the heart to get rest, much like sleep.

You can either accept or resist an experience, and if you resist, then that too is an experience, and there is nothing wrong with that. The point is, you can either run from an experience or stand before it and look it in the eyes, and like the monsters in our dreams, the more we'll run from them the more frightening they'll seem, but look closely and you'll find that they're just baby goblins with toy clubs.
You can either accept or resist an experience, and if you resist, then that too is an experience, and there is nothing wrong with that, either. The point is, you can either run from an experience or stand before it and look it in the eyes, and like the monsters in o ur dreams, the more we'll run from them the more frightening they'll seem, but look closely and you'll find that they're just baby goblins with toy clubs.There is nothing to be afraid of, not even fear itself.
The only difference it makes if one is afraid is that one is no longer conscious of the real nature of one's experiences. Like when one is running from a monster, one faces away from it and so no longer sees what it really is, let alone see it for what it really is; likewise, if one is afraid of something, one tries to become unconscious of it - and it works, but not with the desired effect. Suffering is, in effect, is ignorance.
And that's what people just won't get.
If you face your fears, they'll disappear. But what does that mean, facing your fears? It means you accept them, and whatever it is you fear, not resisting. Usually, people are incapable of both accepting their fears and at the same time enjoying. It is in our nature.
When we enjoy life, we try as hard as we can to forget our fears because those might interfere with our happiness. We cannot accept our happiness and at the same time that it might disappear. This brings us into a perpetual cycle of joy and suffering and hope and despair, and the only way we can break free from this cycle is to dispense with the illusion that there is any such thing as good and bad. This liberation is a painstaking process that can only be achieved by suffering - that is, in the sense enduring - those things we cannot accept, and learning to love those things and seeing their beauty.
If we drop the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we will regain Paradise. That does not mean we must cease to distinguish light from darkness, but that we should condemn neither. Do that which is most beautiful, and it will create more beauty. But let us see what is most beautiful with our hearts, and not with our minds. Only the mind knows such duality between good and bad because only the mind sees in black and white.