The "untethered soul" book learnings

Thanks to my Milwaukee colleague who recommended this book

• We do only two things in life: cling and resist

• Living life with the mentality of dying any moment will make you more accommodating of people, more patient with circumstances and more soft and pliable. In other words - death teaches us how to live.

• Who are you that is lost and trying to find yourself? The concept of you and your world and your clinging and your resistance was created by you out of nothing. You created the dark clouds (thoughts) around and now trying to find who exactly are you in those clouds?

• Do your dharma (duties) well and then it will clear you from your karma

• The inner room mate is always there trying to tell you something, it doesn't let you stay quiet. Surrender to His will and stay so, The "quiet" will come.

• We end up meeting our destiny in the path we take to avoid it (this line is from Kung Fu Panda actually).

• Everything is predetermined. Its an illusion to think you are under control. You can will what you wish, but can you will what you must wish?

• Use the circumstances offered by life to free yourself by staying as the subject. Do not ever try to identify yourself with the objects

• Sometimes when the ego is watching the object, it suffers or enjoys, becomes the possessor or loser, owns or disowns. So both the subject and the object are the creations of the mind only.

• First the one became two, and then more vrittis followed. Know that the moment you name/give a sound/form for something, you have switched from nonduality to duality.

• Lack of inner resources leads to laziness and boredom.

• All the states that you want to attain in life are already present in the mind.

• That emptiness is the fullness of everything. Say loudly "Siva's will be done" and stay quietly.

Watch

everyday i watch it, it watches itself. It has nice thoughts, it has bad thoughts. It is the saint, it is the sinner. It is fame and success, it is humiliation and loss. It is stability. It is change. It is creating new relationships and discarding old. Craving for old, discarding new. It is what it is. A self created principle. The great illusion which you dare to think of as real.

It is ambition and willpower, it is peace and being. It is addiction and instinctive. What gives it that power if it were unreal? It is the one which seeks answers for questions. I am Not that. I am ....

Poise

"The struggle with the mind is an easy struggle if you are constantly vigilant, all of the time, doing always what you know you should do, not allowing the mind to become instinctive, not excusing the mind when it does become instinctive, not allowing the mind to justify, rationalize, excuse, become combative, but making the mind always remain poised, like a hummingbird over a flower, so that you begin to live in the eternal now, constantly, permanently. And then the within becomes natural to you, not something you hear about, study about, talk about, sing about, for you become open, awakened within."