spoiler visualizarAna 13/03/2022
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1. In Italian there is a seldom-used tense called the passato remoto, the remote past. You use this tense when you are discussing things in the far, far distant past, things that happened so long ago they have no personal impact whatsoever on you anymore—for example, ancient history. (destaque ou posição 1390-1392)
2. I said. “You’re an Aquarius! I’ve dated enough Aquarians to know that they are trouble.” (destaque ou posição 1468-1469)
3. I teach her my favorite Italian word—attraversiamo (“let’s cross over”)—and we backtrack nervously out of there. (destaque ou posição 1546-1547)
4. Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union.” It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. (destaque ou posição 1820-1823)
5. A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means “darkness,” the second means “light.” Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something called mantravirya: “The potency of the enlightened consciousness.” You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state of grace. (destaque ou posição 1860-1864)
6. The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe: 1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry. 2. To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of the universe. 3. To have found a living spiritual master. (destaque ou posição 1872-1875)
7. Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the way. There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the divine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. (destaque ou posição 1989-1991)
8. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. (destaque ou posição 1999-2000)
9. The other day a monk told me, “The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.” (destaque ou posição 2122-2124)
10. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. (destaque ou posição 2249-2252)
11. Faith is a way of saying, “Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.” There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith”—because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t. (destaque ou posição 2656-2659)
12. There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please . . . give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please . . . buy a ticket.” (destaque ou posição 2673-2676)
13. Richard from Texas brought it to my attention recently, when I was complaining about my inability to stop brooding. He said, “Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.” (destaque ou posição 2693-2697)
14. A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means “one who lives at the border.” In ancient times this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not one of the villagers anymore—not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent—not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. (destaque ou posição 3090-3095)
15. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. (destaque ou posição 3453-3454)
16. [...] most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world. (destaque ou posição 3902-3903)
17. I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments. (Destaque ou posição 3903-3910)
18. I asked Ketut, my old medicine man, “What do you know about romance?” He said, “What is this, romance?” “Never mind.” “No—what it is? What this word means?” “Romance.” I defined. “Women and men in love. Or sometimes men and men in love, or women and women in love. Kissing and sex and marriage—all that stuff.” (destaque ou posição 4184-4187)