I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.
No matter what happens to us in life, we tend to think of it as 'good' or 'bad.' And most of us tend to use the 'bad' label three to 10 times as often as the 'good' label. And when we say something is bad, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such.
I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.
It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
Problems are rarely as bad as we think-or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.
One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time.
Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.
Once you subscribe to an ideological dogma as a solution to certain grievances, it then frames your mindset.
People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don't know. We don't know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you're not buying, it's staring you in the face. Psychologists call this 'salience.'
The only difference between 'fear' and 'excitement' is what we label it.
What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
