Cards archive

Contemplation Is the ultimate culmination of all thought and action in a performance of reasoning that leisurely explores latent possibilities without the need to find answers.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

— Emerson 

May I allow myself the peace of solitude

And the only difference between pessimists and optimists is in the degree of their aversion to fear of failure and the intensity of their desire or appetite for success.

Are God and Nature then at strife, / That Nature lends such evil dreams? / So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life; / I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, / And gather dust and chaff, and call / To what I feel is Lord of all, / And faintly trust the larger hope.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

May I choose the serenity of equanimity

Imagination is mithyā (मिथ्या) —  distortion and fabrication. But there is no way that you can cut being off from the delusionality of being.

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in or in which he would like to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about. 

—G.K. Chesterton 


May I revel in imagination

When you fail to notice what you have failed to notice because you are busy trying not to notice what you don't want to notice thoughts are dulled and action is clumsy.

Instead of seeing without really seeing, we can stop to look. Instead of half-hearing sounds that irritate or please us, that either make some sense or just seem to be noise, we can listen to them all but at the same time be aware of listening to them.

—Peter Kingsley


May I notice what I have failed to notice

To hope is to see the futility of holding on to and reliving the failures of the past to cease the reflexive rumination of self-criticism from memories past.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops - at all - / And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - / And sore must be the storm - / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm - / I’ve heard it in the chillest land - / And on the strangest Sea - / Yet - never - in Extremity, / It asked a crumb - of me.

—Emily Dickinson


May I choose hope

To speak, read, breathe, think and act slowly is to admit helplessness and take the initiative of stepping aside to where you can help yourself.

Of people there was hurrying to & fro / Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam, / All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know / Whither he went, or whence he came, or why / He made one of the multitude, yet so / Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky / One of the million leaves of summer's bier.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

May I allow myself to slow down

Thoughts arise of their own volition, by the natural ebb and flow of sensations and revived memories of sensations. Receive their message and let them go.

And Welcome and entertain them all! / Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, / who violently sweep your house / empty of its furniture, / still, treat each guest honourably. / He may be clearing you out / for some new delight.

—Rumi

May I choose not to think my thoughts

Fear is a bewilderment, an uncertainty of self to face persons or situations. And faithlessness in yourself Invites the violence you fear.

There is a Fitting—a Dismay— / A Fitting—a Despair / ’Tis harder knowing it is Due / Than knowing it is Here. / They Trying on the Utmost / The Morning it is new / Is Terribler than wearing it / A whole existence through.

—Emily Dickinson

May I choose not to fear my fear

When thoughts are at odds with what they do or say they separate themselves as thinker and doer.

And what exists for thinking is the same as the cause of thought. For you won't find thinking without the being in which it is uttered. For there is nothing else and will be nothing else apart from being.
Poem of Parmenides [40]


May my actions be true to my thoughts

To not risk encountering pain is to risk it all in the arms of deceptive comfort, for its seductive illusion masks the pain of awareness

Consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness... the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.
Alan Watts