Book: Stop being good! How to stop adjusting to others and become happy

If I am attacked on the street, and I have no other means than to strike myself to avoid being hit, I will. Not to attack, but to protect your life. Life and only life serves as a measure of the legality of the use of physical protection. What is our intention: to belittle, shorten, destroy life, or protect, help and sustain life?

This is the goal that I especially like: despite the most insurmountable difficulties, without denial and suppression, to gain a sense of life, joy and taste for it. Without nihilism and diabolism, simply and consciously, survive your reincarnation, trying not to fall into the usual traps: obsession with habits, principles and old healed or unhealed wounds and flight into idealization or disembodied spirituality.

<...> the fundamental foundations of our existence: we need to feel the meaning of our life, its human, philosophical, spiritual significance, and we also need to feel that we exist in the flesh, that we live and tremble, that we can the bottom to drink the pleasure of being alive. If we do not take care of these needs constructively, we risk trying to satisfy them in a destructive way.

Until we understand the meaning of the rule, we want to go and play alone, without any restrictions. If we understand the meaning of the rule, our chances of enjoying the team play are increased.

Freedom does not mean being able to do whatever you want, but rather being able to do what you choose to do.

We are all dangerous if our life force does not find a way out, if there is no one to share our difficulties with and there is no place to find understanding. Violence is the explosion of a bomb on the field of unrealized life.

<...> how similar our institutions are to us - in that they still do not place a person at the center of their interests and responsibilities, but are intensively engaged in what surrounds a person.

If we grew up from the cradle in an atmosphere of tension and emotional discomfort, if from childhood we believed that aggression against another is the only way to take our place, unless we have renounced the idea of taking it at all, a certain rejection of well-being takes root in us. Well-being may not seem as exciting as difficulties, and not as safe, because it is unknown to us. Then it is possible that we will unconsciously recreate the circumstances familiar to us in order to find again the known and exciting.

As long as we ignore that a rule is an attempt to express or illustrate some value of our daily lives, there is a great risk that we will perceive it as an unfortunate compulsion.

It is only by taking responsibility for the choices we make or how we use our time that we become able to change whatever we would like to change.

I suppose we habitually say, "I have no choice," just as we say, "I don't have time." If we were more aware of our needs, it would be clear to us that we set our own priorities. And that undeniably affects how we use our time.

Ask yourself how much better you feel in realizing the values you serve rather than obeying the compulsion of a specific "need."

If we impose our requests as demands, then in return we will receive either submission or rebellion, not contact.

Coercion is well known to us. We are closely acquainted with him. It is familiar, uncomfortable, but familiar. And here is freedom! She is new and arouses the fear of the unknown. After having cultivated a sense of duty or habit in us for generations, it is difficult to act in accordance with our choices and emotional impulse. But this is vital. In order for the world not to become insensitive, it is necessary that each of us has a spiritual impulse.