High signal digest #12

Summing "the Power of Now" + things I read online this week

Est. reading time: 3 min

Today at a glance:

• Raw notes from “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightment” by Eckhart Tolle. This book is about how we interact with life and with ourselves. The book was published in 1997 and sold >2M copies.

• Things I read online this week that you may enjoy

source: book cover for “the power of now”

Why did I read this book?

Someone recommended it. Around that time I read the Surrender Experiment and decided to check it out.

Raw notes from the book¹

• We are not our mind. Start watching the “thinker” to go to next level of consciousness. 3rd person. We are not the emotion, but the watcher

• Accept the now and make the present the focus.  First accept → then act 

• Pain feeds on pain. To heal: observe the pain→become aware of it→do not judge it or analyze it. To fight pain you must become aware of pain 

• Dissolving yourself from pain is dissolving yourself from a part of your identity which is scary. Am I deriving pleasure from being unhappy? 

• Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within

• Your ego is afraid to die. Fear of being wrong, fear of failure, fear of being hurt. Our mind and our ego love problems because they give ego an identity

• Ego is a derived sense of self. It needs to be defended and fed constantly (possessions, social status, being right etc.)

• We engage in dangerous activities (i.e. mountain climbing, car racing, surfing) because it forces us into the now (flow).

• All negativity is caused by worrying about the future or the past. All of our lives are full of problems. Is there a problem this very moment? 

• Do not be concerned with the results of your actions. Focus on the action itself. Results will come

• If unhappy - take action, speak up, or leave the situation. No other path 

• Growth is considered positive, but nothing grows forever. Forever growth is destructive so problems are a natural part of life. Embrace problems.

• Let negativity pass through you

Select quotes that stuck with me:

• Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.

• Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.

• Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

• If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

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Things I read online this week that you may enjoy:

• 20 things I learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

• Stock market charts you never saw

• Why to start a startup in bad economy?

• My 8 best techniques for evaluating character

• GPT-3 is the best journal I’ve ever used

• The art of knowing when to quit

• What can we learn from Barnes and Nobles surprising turnaround?

• How much does aging really hurt a country?

1. obligatory reminder that I am a biased man with a certain world view and that if any of this is remotely interesting - check out the book and draw your own conclusions