“There is a profound Buddhist doctrine that speaks of a great river that flows through all of reality. Once you have found yourself, there is no more cause for action. The river picks you up and carries you along forever after. In other words, effort from the personal level, the kind of effort all of us are used to in daily life, becomes pointless after a certain point. This includes mental effort. Once you become self-aware, you realize that the flow of life needs no analysis or control, because it’s all you. The great river only seems to pick you up. Actually, you have picked yourself up — not as an isolated person, but as a phenomenon of the cosmos. No one gave you the job of steering the river. You can enjoy the ride and observe the scenery.”

I like that. I found it in a book by Deepak Chopra (“Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul”). I’m not recommending the book (you’ll read it if you’re supposed to). But this is where I jot done some of the lines and passages that I want to remember or find again.

Wisdom isn’t something you learn, it’s something you become

Real change requires a relaxed, natural attitude.

Live as if you have all the time in the world.

Your soul can wait as long as it takes.

Boundaries are made of frozen awareness.

Letting go is the path to everything.

The real you has no agenda.

There is no such thing as a meaningless experience.

Only when time disappears is there enough.

Grace isn’t a shower of cool water or white light. Rather, you will simply be yourself. Grace brings in the real you to fill the space once occupied by the mind’s churning.

You fit into a plan that cannot be imagined in advance. It has no rigid guidelines, no fixed boundaries, and no predictable outcome. The plan is made up as it goes along, and it depends on the participation of each and every person.

The divine plan doesn’t need you to unfold. But if you turn away, it won’t unfold through you.

Freedom is the ultimate goal. You don’t win by getting to the end; you win by finding a new game the instant the old one is over.

To the extent that you cling, life will continue to bring even more things to control.

Think of an ant that has learned to read. It is the world’s most intelligent ant, but it’s still quite small, so it reads a book by crawling from one word to the next. The plot of the book is completely linear from the ant’s perspective, so it would be amazed to know that you –a much bigger creature– can approach the book as a whole, and you can dip into it wherever you want, read the end before the beginning, sample high spots, or select only what interests you. You can do all those things because the linear is only one mode of many in approaching a book. The same is true of life.