STEPHEN COVEY
I think if a person really wants to live a life that is creative, where they tap into their deepest passions and have a sense of fulfillment about what their life really is, that the most practical thing that I know is to develop a personal mission statement. I'm serious. To take the time to do it. To get into nature, to get into a reflective state and to write. Writing crystallizes thinking, writing distills your learnings, and you write. What is my life really about? You have to use a lot of self knowledge, you have to explore your own heart, you have to sense where your gifts are.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
It's difficult for people to change and confront their habits because they become bundles of conditioned reflexes that are constantly being triggered by people and circumstance into predictable outcomes of behavior. It's called the hypnosis of social conditioning. And we are influenced by social conditioning. Some people can break out of it. It's an interesting group of sages and psychotics and geniuses. But I think the only way to really radically transform a person's belief and to get them out of conditioned response is through education.
STEPHEN COVEY
You have to have the ability to step in on yourself at anytime to see what's happening, to stand apart. You have to use these four unique human endowments. It's like bringing to yourself, having four counselors who care about you. Self Awareness. You can examine your scripts. Imagination. You can envision a better state. Conscience. Your inward sense of what is really right and what is wrong. And then independent will. The power to act on the other three. What powerful counselors. All of us have access to them. We're not a product of our past. We're a product of our chosen responses, to our past and to present circumstances, see. And through the use of those endowments you can bring about change in anything.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
We resist because first of all it takes personal work. You know it seems sometimes to me when I meet someone who's so resistant to every type of spiritual suggestion, that there's still a pay-off in their pain. There's still some pay-off. It's a myth that they carry around with them, and they impress people by convincing them that their victim story is interesting, whatever it is. That's why you don't convince people. You don't try to sell people on this stuff, because if they're still getting enough pay-off in their pain, they won't want to move off it. Fine. Most of us however, (all of us ultimately) but many of us can already speak of the experience of getting to the point where the greatest thing that could happen to you is that your own myth becomes boring. Your story is boring to you. The story of victimization and smallness. At a certain point, no matter what, the pain outweighs the gift of staying stuck. So, when you want to move forward you do move forward. You get off it when you want to. Just don't foster the illusion that God's up there deciding when to help you.
BERNIE SIEGEL
Well, Norman Vincent Peal talked about the power of positive thinking. I always worry about the term. I think Norman understood it. He grew up with a wonderful mother who said, "If God slams one door, further down the corridor another will be open." So he had a different view of the world. But what I worry about is a lot of people say, "Oh, you want me to think positively, okay, everything is fine." And they're not. I mean, they're putting on an act or performance and so the stuff is still going on. I like the word peace of mind. You are at peace knowing you can handle what comes and what is.
STEPHEN COVEY
Just imagine if I was a surgeon, the education that would go into my hands, into the nervous system, and how that connects with the brain and the knowledge base, and so forth.
What about the education of the conscience? The inward sense of a moral compass, see. That involves the totality of a person requiring much more discipline and rigorous and careful living. And serving until conscience becomes honed and sharp and sensitive and then it's like you live out of a different world.
So life becomes a true adventure. Kind of the inner journey in order to make the outward journey. And it probably starts with the outward needs to start with. So you have the desire for the inward journey then you go outside to meet that need.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
You move out of fear through one way only and that's through serious spiritual practice. You move out of fear through the constant practice of forgiveness. Through constant meditation. Through constant prayer and prayerfulness. Through constant devotion and dedication. Which is all in emotional discipline. Period.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
Most people have the idea that doing what's best for you is kind of a chore and it's boring. Western medicine has never developed the technologies to motivate people to do things for themselves that are actually profoundly enjoyable that can become addictions, literally healthy addictions that you're really addicted to joyfulness, health and vitality and life.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
Once again, we are responsible, to no one else for mining the gold in our own experience, which is to say, it is up to us to choose to seek the deeper drama of what's really happening with our life experience. All of which has to do with the universe constantly nudging us to become the men and women that we are capable of being.
|
