If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalization is the first step to liberation.
You are what exists before all stories.
Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be cause by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power.
I love what I think, and I'm never tempted to believe it. Thoughts are like the wind or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. They're not personal, they don't belong to us, they just come and go. When they're met with understanding, they're friends.
In my experience, we don't make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn't personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.
If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren't true - whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them. How can you live in joy when you're believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness?
The Work reveals that what you think shouldn't have happened should have happened. It should happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn't mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle. No one wants their children to get sick, no one wants to be in a car accident; but when these things happen, how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them? We know better than to do that, yet we do it, because we don't know how to stop.
I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.
I happen to be a scientist. My background is in nuclear physics. I was a nuclear engineer. But I don't see any incompatibility at all with my religious faith and God the creator of everything and the incompatibility between when the earth was created as specified in the Bible. I don't see any incompatibility there because those that were interpreting God's overall message didn't know anything about modern-day science.
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.