Cloudscape

If you have become too so absorbed in your thoughts that you can no longer feel, the only way you can feel again is by letting go off control. Ironically, you have to let go off control to regain control over your thoughts.

With letting go off control, I do not mean that you become passive to everything that happens, but that you accept it. You might still change those things, but it will no longer be because you think you have to. Change things because you feel you want to, not merely because you think you must. Thought is a medium through which change is organized, but the motivation for change originates from our feelings.

The irony is that through acceptance, you may become much better in changing things than through rejecting them, since it allows you to build from the things that are already there, rather than seeking to undo them before starting over. Everything can be used to build something else, even if it is its opposite.

In order to be in control, you must control your need for control. Do not be attached to control, for this is in itself loss of control.

We resist suffering merely because suffering is per definition that which we resist, nothing more and nothing less. Suffering, then, is but resistance and otherwise nothing but an illusion. Pain itself is not an illusion, but if one will not resist it, one will not suffer from it. Do not resign yourself, but do not resist either.

Meet whatever waves of emotion flow towards you; be not swept away in them, but resist them neither.

To achieve the balance of neither repressing negative emotions nor surrendering to them, acknowledge them first of all and afterwards do something about them if needed, be it either by changing one's way of thinking, or the situation that causes it; when it comes to this, do this both through thought and through action in balance. Remember how you feel, but also remember how you could feel instead of how you feel.

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.

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.