the first

Then you win

Pursue Your Passion

"You should pursue your passion. If you're passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you'll be successful. If you start a business because you think you're going to make a lot of money at it, then you probably won't be successful, because that's the wrong reason to start a business. You have to really believe in what you're doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you'll be successful."
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay

Speak with a Thousand Voices

"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers ... he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night."
(from The Red Book by Carl Jung)

Sven Dangers

Two agreements

According to ancient myths, each soul makes two agreements upon entering the world. The First Agreement binds the individual to a distinct destiny that becomes each soul’s great project in life. The second level of agreement entangles each person in specific limitations of fate, in family issues, and in the immediate dramas of culture. Whereas all second agreements can be renegotiated, the First Agreement of one’s soul is non-negotiable. At the same time, if a person doesn’t face their fate, they may never find their deepest resources and their natural gifts. Facing fate and risking destiny are the two great adventures that the soul must undertake if we are to become who we are intended to be in the world.
Michael Meade:

“Action has quality when action and contemplation are interrelated and integrated. The hunter for example is not just participating in a purely mechanical subsistence activity, but is engaged in a complex set of meditative acts, all of which -- preparatory prayer and purification, stalking the quarry, the sacramental manner by which the animal is slain and subsequently treated -- are infused with the sacred. Black Elk says the “act of hunting is being (not representing) life’s quest for ultimate truth.” (Joseph Epes Brown)

The Haida believe everything is a human being. In the spirit world, all creatures look human being. They only put on their cause-and-effect masks when they are in this world, forming a giant puzzle of images which are all interconnected. The interconnections draw people “in.” Hands appear in Haida creature carvings symbolize a creature’s human being-ness.

Humans are tuned

Humans are tuned for relationships..... for the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every ... form. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied -- whether through sounds or through movements of minute shifts of mood ... and every sound was a voice, every scrape a meeting -- with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. We have an ages-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape.
Dave Abrams’

For those who are awake

"For those who are awake the cosmos is one." -Heraclitus

"...the flickering film of the phenomenal world is an illusion which cannot obscure the eternal unity that lies behind it..."
Arnold Toynbee

"Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others.... the universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece." -Teilhard de Chardin

"Ultimately, the entire universe...has to be understood as a single undivided whole..." -David Bohm, physicist

"Heaven and earth and I are of the same root...are of one substance." -Sojo, a monk and scholar from the Zen tradition.

"I am in some sense boundless, my being encompassing the farthest limits of the universe, touching and moving every atom of existence. The same is true of everything else.... It is not just that 'we are all in it' together. We all are it, rising and falling as one living body." -Buddhist scholar, Francis Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism

When Jesus was asked, "When will the kingdom come?" He replied: "It will not come by waiting for it.... Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it." Jesus also said, "...the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you." -Gospel of Thomas, Gnostic Gospels

"We may imagine that the One, since It is absolute, must be distant from us spiritually or even spatially... We forget that the absoluteness of the One includes absolute immanence, or omnipresence. Thus the One is here and now, not a stranger, not even an other, but the very nature of what we are." -Lex Hixon

"Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere." -Plotinus

Truth is still the Truth

"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you're right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."
-Gandhi

Dalai Lama answers:

Godd advice

Ignorance

Prajnaparamita Sutra

"Never abandon living beings by crossing over entirely into the expanse of the absolute, by rejecting or negating relativity. These Bodhisattvas do not become liberated from life, nor do they pursue any form of separate self-realization. They direct an ecstatic flood of love and friendliness toward all, connecting their mind streams as intimately with all beings as with their most cherished family members and beloved friends. This astonishing spiritual feat frees the Bodhisattvas from every impure intention of harming, denigrating, abandoning or even merely ignoring others."
From the Prajnaparamita Sutra in 8000 Lines translated by Lex Hixon