Cloudscape

If you seek beauty, deem only of worth that which is done with love, as love is the appreciation of beauty. However, though all things are created with love in some way or other, albeit the love of destruction, not all love is equal.
Love the whole, however, not its parts, as you will otherwise led astray from the greater beauty; for as far as you yourself are concerned, the whole means all that which you perceive, indeed you can be said to be the whole of your perceptions. If we see the self as such, to love the whole therefore means to love oneself. What this means, then, is to do whatever feels best for oneself, as only through feeling, not through thought, one can consider the whole rather than just the parts.
If what is best for you means to you what is most comfortable, then by all means, do whatever feels most comfortable when all is said and done. If you seek beauty, then do whatever feels most beautiful to you. Do not then be held back by either fear or craving to love whatever beauty you seek, but listen to your center, the heart.
For you can know what will bring you to beauty only through feeling it, as only you can feel what beauty means to you. For everything you do, listen to your feelings and examine whether or not you truly want to do it, accepting whatever it may bring along with it.
If you are urged to do something out of craving, no matter what it may be, even if it is something beautiful, then check yourself, until you feel you can do it out of love rather than out of craving; for nothing is beautiful with love, as love is what defines beauty, and craving can make even that which is beautiful worthless.
To achieve beauty, one must struggle against the forces of gravity, up towards the sky; craving and fear pull one down, but love tells one to fly on upward.

If you are unbalanced in some way, try not to decrease that of which there is too much, but to increase that opposed to it of which there is to little. In this way, rather than towards a lower level you will move to a higher level. Do not, for instance, decrease your determination if it becomes exhausting, but rather, increase your patience. Balance need not entail static stability.

In whatever we do, we should start from our feelings and end with it, using thought only when we need it as a tool.

Cherish positive emotions as love and hope, and they will grow. Pay no further attention to negative emotions as hate and despair, and they will dwindle. With positive emotions, I mean to refer to emotions that further growth, and with negative emotions, to emotions that destroy; in this sense, positive emotions need not always be pleasant, and negative emotions not always painful.
Remember to recognize negative emotions rather than repress them, but pay no further attention to them, for whatever thought one will pay attention to will grow.
Some negative emotions may sometimes partly feel positive. Despair often comes with a resignation which takes away our fears, while anger takes away our fears through defensiveness; despair, then, is an extreme of yin, while anger is an extreme of yang. While both these extremes should be avoided, the the yin and yang of these extremes can be used; thus, rather than decreasing the yin or yang of either extremes, perhaps we should complement them with their opposite.
We sometimes yield to them because, ironically, they give us a feeling of safety; if that happens to us, we should not repress the negative emotion but focus on its positive aspect of safety. Pain can bring us into a state of detachment; if we can preserve this state of detachment even when our pains have not been in vain.
Some people believe that only through suffering one can grow; I would say that suffering is, rather, a side effect of growth: suffering is resistance to growth. Hardship makes one stronger only if one learns to love what life brings you even in your hardship, even if that means to love your hardship in itself. One can grow only through love; but love can bring suffering along with it as it causes you to grow; remember therefore that love does not need to be pleasurable, and can just as well be painful. It is not an feeling in itself and can manifest in many kinds of feelings; but unless it is incomplete, love always brings us to greater beauty.

Indifference and craving are the two things we must avoid. They are two extremes, and balanced between the two is love, which neither craves nor is indifferent. It accepts and yet not resigns, cherishes and yet does not desire.
Craving can be in the form of desire, or in the form of anger; the craving to add something, or the craving to remove something. Yet both in the end are forms of destructivity.
Many people who seek enlightenment focus on reducing craving, but do not love, and in so doing become indifferent; enlightenment, however, is unconditional love. In its perfect sense, it is love for all things in the universe, which is a state of divinity. In apathy one will find enlightenment no more than in desire. We should not merely seek to avoid pain, but also seek love.
And yet, at the same time, we should not crave even for enlightenment. It is very difficult.

If for everything one paid, taxes were levied equivalent to the damage to ecology it entailed, and the money of those taxes were used to negate it, then no further damage would be done to ecology at all. This would be similar to VAT, yet serving to a far more important cause. It is ridiculous not to include one's ecological footprint to the price of products or services.
This could also apply to population growth, for instance in crowded countries such as China: rather than fining families which have more than one child, one could simply make life more expensive so as to discourage familial growth. Increasing the price of residential zones would also save space. If there are families who are willing to tighten their belt to have more than one child, they could do so without causing environmental destruction if they paid the price to undo it.
In this way, all weight imposed upon environment would be reduced to zero. Awareness of ecological footprint would no longer be necessary because it would no longer exist at all: for whatever damage one would cause nature, one would pay the same price needed to repair that damage.
Instead, people would come to prefer more ecological means simply because they are less expensive. Thus, taxing ecological footprint would not only reduce the damage of ecologically unfriendly means, but also reduce their use.
This is viable. There are plenty of ways to undo environmental damage, though they aren't always cheap. The only thing that keeps us from doing so, then, is greed. However, the more technologies to restore environment would be used, the more efficient and therefore less expensive they would become, as their increased use would encourage their further development.
It is an absurdly simple notion, but as it would check the mass consumption of our society, it is unlikely to be implemented with a mindset as we have today. We have acquired the attitude that economy is more important than ecology. We have become so estranged from nature that we have come to appreciate hedonism more than nature's sublimity.

There can be no ultimate limits in the universe, because those limits would themselves need to have a reason to be what they are. Everything has a cause, and therefore so do physical constants; if they had not, then why could they not just as well have another value? Why do physical constants have one value rather than another, if they are purely random? There is a reason, for instance, that the speed of light is 300.000 kilometers per second, rather than 400.000 or 200.000; the same counts for every other physical constant.
The fact that physical constants are fine-tuned to life means that they cannot have been predetermined before existence; they must have been determined by existing factors. If they do have a cause, however, then that cause must be changeable. We cannot assume constants to be fully constant without dispensing with causality.
Since it would be too coincidental that there would be only one universe which is fine-tuned to life, there must be many other universes, most of which are not fine-tuned; ours merely continued to evolve because of natural selection. Something must have fine-tuned its constants. If we can find out how this happened, we might change these constants within a closed system, and so even these may not pose ultimate limits.
If all things have causes, and those causes themselves have causes, then this must essentially go on in infinity; this means that causation occurs in an infinite series. Thus, throughout this series, as everything will have random causal connections with other things, it must follow that all things are causally connected in infinitely many ways, throughout the infinite series of causations.
This means that all causes can themselves be changed; this also means that with sufficient science, all things can be observed, and that with the right technology, all things can be influenced. There can simply be no one-way causation if all things are causally interconnected, and so all causes can themselves be changed.
If everything has a cause, including physical constants, this may also mean that the universe cannot be finite. If the universe would be finite, this would mean that it possesses a certain finite amount of energy.
As this amount of energy would be specific, however, it would again be the question why it would be the specific amount it is: why one amount rather than another? If there is any such finite amount, we can only suppose that this amount would be random. Even if there were a reason that it is this specific amount, that reason would itself have been determined by other specific parameters and so forth. However, if this amount is ultimately random, it follows that its determination is acausal.
All limits, like anything else, must have a cause. If a system is limited, there must be something that limits the system; but the Universe itself cannot be limited as there is nothing to limit it. There is nothing outside the Universe to limit it, neither was there anything before the Universe to limit it, as the Universe is all that exists.

The only thing one can do about negative emotions is to one way or another pay no more attention to them; that can only be done by turning one's attention to something else, as one's thoughts will otherwise always stray back to one's negative emotions. The attention one gives to an emotion is the only thing that keeps it alive.

Sensations are the foundation upon which all else is built; therefore, focus on your sensations unless you have found something more interesting to focus on, which may be an insight, an imagining, an impression or an emotion. But order not to get lost in discursive thought, return to your sensations by default, straying from it only when needed.

To become free of suffering one must become free of craving. But to become free of craving, it is not enough to detach from craving when suffering has already occurred, for it might by then already have brought one out of balance; instead, detach from craving when one has wishes for the future. Do not crave one outcome above another, even though one outcome may be better; in the end you will see what outcome fate has brought you. Realize then that all outcomes have their own value, and, if only one is aware of it, also their own beauty.