Five Quotes by Lao Tzu That Could Change The Way You Think

Helpful Quotes 

 

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”

 

Photo by Hester Qiang on Unsplash

Leo Zeballos

Jan 24 · 6 min read

Lao Tzu was an ancient Chinese philosopher founder of Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy. It emphasizes doing what is natural and going with the “flow”. Little is truly known about Lao Tzu, but what we do know is that he wrote some of his wisdom in the text Tao Te Ching, a sacred Taoist text with writings from other philosophers too.

What strikes me the most is how these people, who lived thousands of years ago, already had figured out the core principles to a happy life. They faced different problems and circumstances than we do today, but their wisdom can still be applied to our lives and it has the potential to change the way we think about the world and ourselves.

Lao Tzu offers some profound lessons on how to live a happier life and achieve our goals.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

This quote touches on a fundamental part of personal improvement and growth.

Often, fear holds us back from trying something new. You might come up with several excuses to not get out of your comfort zone, like “I don’t have time” or “I’m fine just the way I am”.

But deep within you, you know you are afraid to take action because you don’t want to fail.

I get it. I feel like that too, and in the past, fear has stopped me from doing things I really wanted to do. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you decide to take action and see the long road of improving your life that waits ahead.

The good thing is, you don’t have to think about that long road or make a radical change in your life to see improvements. Instead, start taking small steps.

How to apply it:

Take small steps towards your dream life. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the important thing is to get started and start building momentum.

The key to success is consistency, so start adopting healthy habits to improve your life. There are a variety of healthy habits you can choose and you’ll want to stick to them to reap their benefits.

How do you do that?

Start by performing the easiest version of your desired habit.

• Want to read more books? Start by reading 5 pages a day
• Want to journal? Write down your thoughts for 5 minutes every day
• Want to be fit and healthy? Start going to the gym once a week or do exercises that require the minimum effort at home

Start small, then gradually increase the amount of time you spend on those habits.

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them — that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

Whenever things don’t go our way, we get frustrated and sometimes angry. It’s totally normal to feel this way and is even expected from you.

Personally, I don’t like change, especially when those changes trigger negative emotions. But the crude reality is that our lives are constantly changing and evolving. We have little control over the external world, so it makes sense to stop resisting these changes.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

I resisted changes in my life by dwelling on the past and focusing only on the negative side of them. If you act like that, you are going to feel unhappy and lost in your life.

How to apply it:

Let reality be reality. Adapt to the new changes and try to see the positive side in the long term. It’s okay to feel mad and grieve at first, depending on the type of change.

But don’t stay there for too long because it will get harder to get out of that negative state of mind. Negative emotions are inevitable. We all feel sad or stressed at some point in our lives because of a certain situation or event.

But you can’t let those emotions define you, what you need to do is interpret those emotions into positive feelings.

Ask yourself:

“What did I learn from this situation?”

“How can it benefit me in the future?”

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

Practicing gratitude is one of the best ways to feel happy with yourself and your life.

You need to have a positive image of yourself if you want to achieve your goals. And you also need to feel content with the things you have in the present.

Some people have more than others, but the mere fact that you can read this because you have a computer and an internet connection is something you need to be truly grateful for.

Gratitude has many benefits. One that I really like is that it improves your mental health and gives you more clarity. When you have a consistent gratitude practice, toxic emotions like frustration or resentment start to affect you less and less over time.

How to apply it:

Adopt a gratitude habit. There are many ways to do that. For example, every evening I think about three things I’m grateful for that day.

It can be anything, the point is that you need to feel genuinely grateful for them. Maybe you feel grateful for a movie you watched, for reading a chapter of your book, watching the sunset, or taking a walk. It helps to remember how those situations made you feel. Try to recreate them in your mind.

If you want to upgrade that practice, you can think about three things you are grateful for about yourself.

Maybe you liked how engaged you were in a conversation you had with someone, or maybe you are content because you trusted yourself to make a decision. Again, it can be anything, just remember to feel genuinely grateful about them.

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”

We’ve been taught that talkative and outgoing people are the ones that are successful in life. That’s why people often speak and say things without thinking about them.

People prefer to talk over listening because it’s human nature. We feel we are contributing more when we talk. And who wouldn’t like to contribute more to the world?

The problem is, we do not listen to understand, we listen to reply. We are eager to share our thoughts and opinions as soon as the other person stops talking. But there is so much you can learn when you just listen intentionally.

Besides, when you are a good listener, it makes the person who is speaking to you feel loved and worthy of being heard. They’ll want to be around you more.

How to apply it:

You probably already know how to apply this one. Listen more and speak less.

Whenever you are having a conversation with someone, try to focus all your attention on what they are saying. Ask them questions about how they feel and their motivations.

Don’t interrupt. Wait until that person is done talking before you respond. Over time, you will realize how much more rewarding it is to listen rather than speaking whatever comes to your mind.

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”

For many years l cared too much about what other people thought about me. It’s normal to care about the opinion of other people. Sometimes, we need to care about what other people think, otherwise we’d do whatever we want and probably be disliked by everyone.

It becomes a problem when you start to obsessively care about what other people think about you.

You try to impress people, show them how amazing you are and before you know it, you’ll hide your authentic self, you’ll make decisions only to please others and you stop living your life in the way you want it.

How to apply it:

I know it might sound cliche, but be yourself.

Embrace your weirdness. That’s what makes you unique and stand out. Don’t be afraid to do things or think differently from others and take decisions most people won’t approve of.

As long as it doesn’t hurt you and other people and that’s what makes you happy, do it. No one knows you better than you do, so stop trying to please or caring what other people think about you.

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Leo Zeballos

A student of life. Writing about personal growth and mental clarity. Let's chat: leozeballos8@gmail.com

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Science as We Know It Can’t Explain Consciousness – but a Revolution Is Coming

Our Minds 

 

One day there will be a science of consciousness, but it won’t look like science does now.

 

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.

The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem. One reason is that consciousness is unobservable. You can’t look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. If we were just going off what we can observe from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating consciousness at all.

Of course, scientists are used to dealing with unobservables. Electrons, for example, are too small to be seen. But scientists postulate unobservable entities in order to explain what we observe, such as lightning or vapour trails in cloud chambers. But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing to be explained cannot be observed. We know that consciousness exists not through experiments but through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

Only you can experience your emotions. Photo by Olga Danylenko.

So how can science ever explain it? When we are dealing with the data of observation, we can do experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this methodology breaks down. The best scientists are able to do is to correlate unobservable experiences with observable processes, by and relying on their reports regarding their private conscious experiences.

By this method, we can establish, for example, that the invisible feeling of hunger is correlated with visible activity in the brain’s hypothalamus. But the accumulation of such correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness. What we ultimately want is to explain why conscious experiences are correlated with brain activity. Why is it that such activity in the hypothalamus comes along with a feeling of hunger?

In fact, we should not be surprised that our standard scientific method struggles to deal with consciousness. As I explore in my new book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, modern science was explicitly designed to exclude consciousness.

Before the “father of modern science” Galileo Galilei, scientists believed that the physical world was filled with qualities, such as colours and smells. But Galileo wanted a purely quantitative science of the physical world, and he therefore proposed that these qualities were not really in the physical world but in consciousness, which he stipulated was outside of the domain of science.

This worldview forms the backdrop of science to this day. And so long as we work within it, the best we can do is to establish correlations between the quantitative brain processes we can see and the qualitative experiences that we can’t, with no way of explaining why they go together.

Mind is Matter

I believe there is a way forward, an approach that’s rooted in work from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington. Their starting point was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is.

This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour – attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call “the intrinsic nature of matter”, how matter is in and of itself.

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view – physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

The result is a type of “panpsychism” – an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the “new wave” of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter – nothing spiritual or supernatural – but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside”, in terms of its behaviour, but matter “from the inside” is constituted of forms of consciousness.

This means that mind is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness. Before you write that off, consider this. Consciousness can vary in complexity. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of a human being, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there may be a point where consciousness suddenly switches off – but it’s also possible that it just fades but never disappears completely, meaning even an electron has a tiny element of consciousness.

What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits in to our scientific story.

While our current scientific approach offers no theory at all – only correlations – the traditional alternative of claiming that consciousness is in the soul leads to a profligate picture of nature in which mind and body are distinct. Panpsychism avoids both of these extremes, and this is why some of our leading neuroscientists are now embracing it as the best framework for building a science of consciousness.

I am optimistic that we will one day have a science of consciousness, but it won’t be science as we know it today. Nothing less than a revolution is called for, and it’s already on its way.

Philip Goff is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University.

The Purpose of Your Life Is to Choose a Lifestyle

Life's Purpose 

 

 

Your choice doesn’t make you a bad person either.

Tim Denning

 

 

Sep 30 ·

 

 

Thanks to Simon Migaj for sharing their work on Unsplash.

 

 

Attacking other people’s lifestyles is a terrible decision.

It has become common. There’s a lot of people on social media who are angry and are attacking lifestyles and the people who select different ones. This is ridiculous.

Focus on the lifestyle you want to choose for yourself rather than attack other people’s lifestyles and believe that only one type of lifestyle is good (a shallow form of hell).

Entrepreneurs are not all evil capitalist monkeys. (Steve Jobs was a genius and a terrible human being all in the same sentence.) Not everybody who enjoys self-help is a terrible human being. Not everything about politics is bad. Not all things about money make you entitled, privileged, or selfish.

The purpose of your life is to consciously choose a lifestyle that works for you.

This might seem odd. Why would the purpose of your life be to choose a lifestyle and not something more grandiose or full of stoic wisdom like a meaning for your life?

The reason is because the concept of a lifestyle determines everything that follows. Lifestyle is a container to put your ideas about life in and find a way to thrive.

Your lifestyle is made up of:

• Your beliefs
• The work you choose to do
• Your hobbies
• Who you spend time with
• How you see the world
• How you earn a living
• Whether you start a business or not
• Where you choose to live
• Your family life
• The balance between work vs. playtime

My lifestyle looks like this: time to do whatever I want, very little possessions, plenty of travel, a positive outlook on the world, grueling hard work, writing about life/self improvement/personal finance/business, one romantic relationship, a piece of sh*t Honda Civic, good friends, great classic hits, no mental illness, and a lot of love and respect towards other people.

You can’t copy and paste my lifestyle and be happy.

A lifestyle is a formula.

See Other People’s Lifestyle as Inspiration for Your Own

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all lifestyle, even though that’s what is often preached by self improvement gods.

You can do and be anything you want. You can do you and not apologize for it. Rather than tear apart other people’s lifestyles, which solves nothing, you can become a lifestyle scientist. You can read about other people’s lifestyles as inspiration for your own.

You can take what works from one person’s lifestyle and discard the rest.

Types of lifestyles:

• Becoming an entrepreneur
• Get a good education and get a good job
• Make money online
• Minimalist vs. Consumer
• A life of kindness and working for not-for-profits
• Create a side hustle or be a passive income badass
• A life lived on social media where you document what happens to you
• The everything is broken and the world is burning. State problems. Say the world is coming to an end. Give into chaos. Think money or business is evil. That’s all a lifestyle too.

Lifestyle Design Works

You spend time designing your dream home or designing and executing on a piece of art. Why couldn’t you design your life?

Lifestyle design is where you don’t let your circumstances determine your lifestyle. Lifestyle design is where you set goals towards the lifestyle you want. The key is to be happy with the lifestyle you currently have in the process, so you’re not forever chasing rainbows that lead towards a lifestyle you never get time to enjoy.

Designing your life is a back-of-the-envelope task. It will constantly change. You will design your life to be one way and then as the plan unfolds you will decide that certain parts need to change.

Lifestyle design isn’t a 5 year plan corporate slide deck that assumes a black swan event like a health crisis will never happen.

Lifestyle design can be as simple as writing down how you want to earn a living, what your hobbies will be, how you’ll spend your money, who you will spend your time with, what you will believe, how you will act, where you will live, and how much time you dedicate towards your family.

Rough estimates are fine because lifestyle design isn’t an exact science.

You Can Choose a “Hybrid Lifestyle”

My lifestyle is what I call a Hybrid Lifestyle. I work a 9–5 job and am a part-time entrepreneur who loves to write.

I have taken three traditional lifestyles and combined them. Society tells us these three lifestyles can’t go together but I’ve chosen to edit that part out. You too can choose a hybrid lifestyle that defies the norms.

The key to lifestyle design is to remove “absolutes” to be happy. For example, I’m vegan and sometimes eat dairy to be a badass.

It pays to question your lifestyle regularly and break the rules. A lifestyle is a blueprint, not an absolute piece of perfect art that can never ever change.

Final Thought

Lifestyles create a lot of arguments. Move on from arguments and choose the lifestyle which suits you. Shaming people for the lifestyle they choose doesn’t help anybody. You do you.

I empower you to create your lifestyle as soon as possible. Otherwise somebody else, typically a corporation with a well-known logo, will do it for you — or even a bad boss who needs you to be a slave so they can buy their lifestyle off the luxury shelves of Monaco while high-fiving James Bond.

The purpose of your life is to design your lifestyle how you want, so you can be happy and find meaning in your life.

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