Daniel’s Reviews > Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality > Status Update

Nourish yourself on good wholesome food, good wholesome food. I'm not talking about actual food, I'm talking about sunsets, about nature, about a good movie, about a good book, about enjoyable work, about good company, and hopefully you will break your addictions to those other feelings.

And living doesn't mean working in government, or being a big businessman, or performing great act of charity. That isn't living. Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness. "The birds of the air...they never toil nor spin." That is living.

So love the thought of death, love it. Go back to it again and again. Think of the loveliness of that corpse, of that skeleton, of those bones crumbling till there's only a handful of dust. From there on, what a relief, what a relief. So you probably don't know what I'm talking about at this point; you're too frightened to think of it. But it's such a relief when you can look back on life from that perspective.

So imagine your lying flat and your dead. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything doesn't it? What's a lovely, lovely meditation. Do it every day if you have the time. It's unbelievable, but you'll come alive.

He calls it tasting and feeling the truth - not knowing it, but tasting and feeling it, getting a feel for it. When you get a feel for it you change. When you know it in your head, you don't.

The pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the mind. Good reading, when you enjoy a good book. Or a really good discussion, or thinking. It's marvelous. Unfortunately, people have gone crazy, and they're getting more and more addicted because they do not know how to enjoy the lovely things of life. So they're going in for greater and greater artificial stimulants.

Unless definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.

You were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life - namely, work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention.

If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.

That's way people are so tired, so weary. You and I were trying to be dissatisfied with ourselves. That's where the evil comes from psychologically. We're always dissatisfied, we're always discontented, we're always pushing. Go on, put out more effort, more and more effort. But there's always that conflict inside; there's very little understanding.