Achieving Goals In Silence Quotes

Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.

I am an ardent believer in universal happiness. I would like everyone in the world to have satisfying, fulfilling work, for everyone to earn enough to escape the menace of poverty, but I have no idea how to achieve such worthy goals. Therefore, I will pass over these matters in silence.

What do SJW’s want to achieve? Their goal is power and domination over the Western cultural narrative to manufacture a consensus that is aligned with their extreme far-left ideology. Since their ideas are so far removed from science, logic, and reason, this requires a complete control of information to disseminate their world view along with the complete silencing of those who contradict them. —“What Is A Social Justice Warrior?”, RooshV, October 6, 2014

To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . . [However] [d]o we want to live in a world that is safe? Do we want to push the homeless out of our cities and call that a victory over poverty? . . . Or do we want to do the very hard work of recognizing and addressing the actual causes of harm to women? Safety is a short-term goal and it is unsustainable. Eventually, the unaddressed causes will find new ways of manifesting themselves as problems. Pull up the dandelions all you want, but unless you dig up that whole goddamn root it's just going to keep showing back up.

Danger in modesty ― To adapt ourselves too early to the tasks, societies, everyday life and everyday work, in which chance has placed us, at a time when neither our strength nor our goal has yet entered our consciousness with the force of law; the all-too-early certainty of consciousness, comfortableness, sociability thus achieved, this premature resignation that insinuates itself into our feelings as a release from inner and outer unrest, pampers and holds one back in the most dangerous fashion. To learn to feel respect after the fashion of 'those like us,' as if we ourselves had no measure in us and no right to determine values; the effort to evaluate as others do, against the inner voice of our taste, which is also a form of conscience, becomes a terrible, subtle constraint: if there is not finally an explosion, with a sudden bursting asunder of all the bonds of love and morality, then such a spirit becomes withered, petty, effeminate, and factual. The opposite is bad enough, but better nonetheless: to suffer from one’s environment, from its praise as well as from its blame, wounded by it and festering inwardly without betraying the fact; to defend oneself with involuntary mistrust against its love, to learn silence, perhaps concealing it behind speech, to create for oneself nooks and undiscoverable solitudes for moments of relief, of tears, of sublime consolation ― until one is finally strong enough to say, 'what do I have to do with you?' and go one’s own way.

THE TEN MOST COMMON PROBLEMS Here are the ten most common problems in communications. Read the list. If any of them apply to you, the principles in this book will help you solve them. 1. Lack of initial rapport with listeners 2. Stiffness or woodenness in use of body 3. Presentation of material is intellectually oriented; speaker forgets to involve the audience emotionally 4. Speaker seems uncomfortable because of fear of failure 5. Poor use of eye contact and facial expression 6. Lack of humor 7. Speech direction and intent unclear due to improper  preparation 8. Inability to use silence for impact 9. Lack of energy, causing inappropriate pitch pattern, speech  rate, and volume 10. Use of boring language and lack of interesting material Various polls show that the ability to communicate well is ranked the number-one key to success by leaders in business, politics, and the professions. If you don’t communicate effectively, you may not die, like some POWs or neglected babies we mentioned earlier, but you also won’t live as fully as you should, nor will you achieve personal goals. This was a lesson drummed into me at a very early age.

My own theological views are those of an agnostic—one who doesn’t know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. As an agnostic, what impresses me first of all is the woeful limits of our human knowledge. I respect the power of reason, but I also respect those aspects of religious faith that are compassionate and consoling. Many people could not live their lives without the consolation of faith. The virtues of religion should not be dismissed lightly. The Christian testament has a beautiful phrase for our limited human understanding: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”13 Believers trust the biblical promise that all our questions will be answered when we meet God face-to-face in eternity. That promise is the heart of religious faith. For an agnostic, that promise is a reminder that our knowledge in this life is incomplete. We are well into the twenty-first century, and we marvel at the spectacular achievements of science. But science still does not know how the universe was created or how life began. The Book of Proverbs contains a warning that speaks to us in our uncertain state: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”14 Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the planet, or transforming the human race, are intoxicated with self-aggrandizing pride. As secular “redeemers,” a haughty spirit is their second nature. Consequently, they are deaf to this biblical wisdom. The secularists are confident that the nonexistence of God is a self-evident fact. It infuriates them that religionists (or “irrationalists,” as Bill Maher calls them) resist what they think is obviously, indisputably true. Believing they know a truth that cannot be known, and that others resist, they are prepared to use any means necessary to silence their opponents and achieve their goals.

But I had no need to suppose anything of the sort, she might well have disdained the use of her eyes to ascertain what her instinct must have adequately enough detected, for, throughout her service with me and my parents, fear, prudence, alertness and cunning had finally taught her that instinctive and almost divinatory knowledge of us that the sailor has of the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and if not the doctor then often the patient of the disease. All the knowledge she was in the habit of acquiring would have astounded anyone for as good a reason as the advanced state of certain areas of knowledge among the ancients, given the almost negligible means of information at their disposal (hers were no less so: a handful of chance remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our conversation at dinner, gleaned in passing by the butler and inaccurately transmitted to the staff quarters). Even her mistakes resulted, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, from a false conception of the world and from preconceived ideas rather than from an inadequacy of material resources... But if the drawbacks of her position as a servant had not prevented her from acquiring the learning indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal – the art of confounding us by communicating the results of her discoveries – the constraints on her time had been even more effective; here hindrance had not merely been content not to paralyse her enthusiasm, it had powerfully fired it. And of course Françoise neglected no auxiliary stimulant, like diction and attitude for instance. While she never believed anything we said to her when we wanted her to believe it, and since she accepted beyond a shadow of doubt the absurdest things anyone of her own status told her which might at the same time offend our views, in the same way that her manner of listening to our assertions pointed to her incredulity, so the tone she used to report (indirection enabling her to fling the most offensive insults at us with impunity) a cook’s account of threatening her employers and forcing any number of concessions out of them by treating them like dirt in public, indicated that she treated the story as gospel truth. Françoise even went so far as to add: ‘If I’d been the mistress, I’d have been very put out, I can tell you.’ However much, despite our initial dislike of the lady on the fourth floor, we might shrug our shoulders at this unedifying tale as if it were an unlikely fable, its teller knew just how to invest her tone with all the trenchant punch of the most unshakeable and infuriating confidence in what she was saying. But above all, just as writers, when their hands are tied by the tyranny of a monarch or of poetic convention, by the strict rules of prosody or state religion, often achieve a power of concentration they would not have done under a system of political freedom or literary anarchy, so Françoise, by not being free to respond to us in an explicit manner, spoke like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus.5 She knew how to contain everything she could not express directly in a sentence we could not denounce without casting aspersions on ourselves, in less than a sentence in fact, in a silence, in the way she placed an object.

To be conscious of unfreedom one must have a concept of what freedom and respect for life are. A person who has never experienced this as a child, who has only known hypocrisy, without ever having come across a single helping witness, does not demonstrate for freedom. Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter-arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.

37. Be Kind Enthusiasm, ability and aptitude all have to be on someone’s CV before I’ll take them into a life or death situation, but when I am putting a team together for an expedition, there’s one other quality I’m always looking out for - kindness. Expeditions into jungles or across deserts or raging oceans are never easy. However much we might romanticize the lives of explorers, when you are in the middle of an inflatable boat with 50-foot waves all around, you haven’t slept for three days, or you have been struggling with an injury in silence for a week, it is the little things that count. What you really want from the people you are with is that they are kind - to know that they are on your side when the chips are down. Let me give you a couple of examples: once you get above 25,000 feet (7,500 metres) on a mountain, and the temperature drops to minus 45°, if you don’t get a headache - the kind that grips your head like a nut in a pair of pliers - then you’re not human. Part of this is the altitude, part is the inevitable dehydration that comes from the thin air. So working hard 24/7 to keep hydrated is essential. The only way to get water, though, is to melt the ice. But at that height, at that temperature, melting enough snow and ice to drink can take hours. The good expedition member is the one who gives their buddies the first sip or the last swig of that precious water. In the extremes it is the little things that stand out. So try and look at all those sorts of moments as chances to distinguish yourself - and it is the kind, unselfish mountaineer who is loved and is often the real bedrock of a great team.

The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often psychopaths. Building a society around these goals is masochistic. It shuts down any desire for self-knowledge because the truth of our lives is unpleasant. We fill the spiritual vacuum with endless activities, entertainment, and nonstop electronic hallucinations. We flee from silence and contemplation. We are determined to avoid facing what we have become.

I asked [Nick Maounis]: “What’s the main goal of your career?” He thought about it deeply in silence and then answered: “To be a billionaire. And also to own a sports team.” Sadly, Maounis never achieved either goal because Amaranth famously imploded the following year.

Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.

Work hard in the silence to achieve your goals and levels. Because we are not the same with a good heart, some don't love you for who you're, and how you're. But success will show them everything, guide you and connect you with them later.

You are somewhere you don't want to be, with people who make you feel uncomfortable, who you think do not like you; you certainly dislike some of them. They are ambitious and confident, with their own agendas and their own scores to settle. Pause for a moment. Take a deep breath. Remember why you are here and what you want to achieve. Remember what your goals are. In order to achieve these, you have to spend time with people, but it doesn't mean you have to like them, be liked by them or even attempt to be like them. Imagine your cat is sitting on your lap and you are stroking his ears. Just wait for your moment, take another deep breath and say the minimum you need to say to make your point. Then shut up.

What a God can achieve?" Rap yelled, wishing he could bear to look upon Them so he could pull faces. "Healing babies, relieving famines, stopping wars? Oh, very worthy! But who made the babies sick in the first place? Who blighted the crops and started the wars? When prayers are answered You expect thanks. When things go wrong anyway, that is because we mortals are wicked. You have the game stacked so You can score in both goals, can't you? The nice things are Your blessings, and the bad things are our sins. What do You do the rest of the time, when You're not answering prayers? You go around making trouble, and I don't know whether it's just for Your own amusement or to humble us so You can —" "silence!" He

The silence between the lines is where the people speak their true intent.

Wear a smile in the face of ridicule, wear silence in the face of praise.

True Meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True Meditation is effortless stillness, abidance as primordial being. True Meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focusing on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning. In True Meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In True Meditation the emphasis is on being awareness—not on being aware of objects, but on resting as conscious being itself. In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience. As you gently relax into awareness, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition. As you effortlessly rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive habit of control, contraction, and identification. Awareness returns to its natural condition of conscious being, absolute unmanifest potential—the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

Man builds his life on sand. That is why everything he tries to do fail. His life does not have a foundation in the eternal. His life is built on the momentary. And when one house built on sand collapses; he starts to build another house.  We never seem to learn anything. When one desire is frustrated, we immediately jump to another desire.  To desire means to go against the whole. Not to desire means to relax with the whole. it means to have no desire of one's own and to go with the whole. It means that whatsoever the whole wills is my will. I am not trying to achieve any individual goal.  The moment you try to achieve an individual goal, you are in trouble, because we are not separate from the whole. We have to learn to be be part of life, existence.  It is because of our individual goals that every day becomes a frustration. The seeker of truth has to build his house on a rock, which is only found in meditation. Meditation isa state of no-thought, no desire and no dreams. Then each moment will be a joy, because you are no more. Meditation means to know that we are no tseparate from life.  We are part of an infinite continent, which we can call God, truth, the ultimate, the absolute or the whole.  

Alright, Captain Stan,” I said as I grabbed a slip of parchment. “Stealth destruction is your primary operative, which means none of my weapons are ideal. Lucky for you, though, I was onto something before that last channeling gem mysteriously killed itself.” Stan made a point of avoiding my gaze as he focused intently on the blank page in front of us, and I snorted as I began sketching out the elemental degree mapping. Then I drew the beginnings of a rune Dragir had helped me balance when I stopped by House Quyn about the rockets, and when I finished the last line, I shifted the paper to present it to Stan. “This is an altered form of the fireball rune I’ve been using for the 1911s,” I explained. “According to Dragir, this seventeenth degree will counter the flash of the flames, so while they’ll still be burning, they won’t give off a blaze. I have no idea how that’s supposed to work, but we’ll have to see when we do our first trial run. This line that intersects both the sixty-fourth and eleventh degrees is the silencing method we’re going with. Ideally, not even a crackle will give you away. Initially, I was gonna make you a fun little flamethrower, but--” Stan nodded vigorously as he rubbed his hands together, and I sent him an apologetic smirk. “I don’t think it’s gonna work, though,” I continued, and the little metal man deflated. “I know, but your intelligence last night got me thinking, and despite how powerful this rune will be, it doesn’t change the fact that tiny elemental degree lines tend to be less powerful. Using a weapon your size, you could be standing there all day trying to burn up one engraving with an exterior flame attack. Now that we know you’re up against foot-tall defensive runes, though, I’ve decided we need to pack a bigger punch straight into your target without running out the clock. Ideally, these burns should be able to carry on with the same strength while Solana books it to the next target, and one jet of enchanted flames doesn’t accomplish that.” Stan could see the logic, and I could tell he was trying not to look too bummed out about the flamethrower. “I think you’ll like our alternative option, though,” I assured him, “because I already have a highly effective way of achieving our goal, and if this balance of silencing elements works as it should, then it logically follows that its properties would transfer to whatever it’s being channeled through. For example, a bullet.” Now, Stan slowly looked up at me, and I sent him an evil grin. “That’s right, buddy,” I confirmed. “It’s miniature gun time.” The little metal man shot to his feet, and the way he exalted like a maniac with his arms out wide and his head thrown back made me wonder if this was his version of a villainous laugh. Then he started gunning down every scrap of metal in the shop with his invisible guns, and I briefly questioned if I was making a poor decision.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. 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. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. 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. 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.

The temple drum is as big as a barrel, and it sits on a tall wooden platform. When you play it, you stand in front, facing the stretched hide, trying to control your breathing, which is jumping all over the place because you are so nervous. The priests and nuns are chanting by the big altar, and you listen for your cue, which is getting closer and closer. Then, at just the right moment, you take a big breath, raise your sticks, draw back your arms, and You have to get the timing just right, and even though I was scared to make a mistake in front of all those people, I think I did a pretty good job. I really like drumming. While I’m doing it, I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I’m serious. When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.

I really like drumming. While I'm doing it, I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I'm serious. When you're beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.

Most people’s minds are awash in a buzz of thoughts, worries, and desires. From that splintered mental state, which is reinforced by the necessities of daily life, samadhi sounds like a vacation to a Valiumscented fantasy island. Work, commuting, and chronic television violence are very effective at smothering the equanimity and silence necessary to develop and sustain samadhi. That’s why when one seriously practices yoga at a traditional ashram (retreat center), there are no mundane distractions. No television, radio, iPod, cell phone, Internet, sugar, caffeine, spicy foods, clocks, and in some cases, no talking. The ecstasy associated with the experience of samadhi might sound superficially similar to the momentary high achieved by smoking crack or shooting heroin. But while narcotics can blast the mind into a euphoric stupor, it doesn’t take long before that route becomes horrifically grim, to say nothing of fleeting and a considerable drain on society. By contrast, the mind trained to sustain samadhi is focused, calm, and crystal clear, and the accompanying happiness doesn’t fade or cost anything (other than maintaining a lifestyle that is probably much simpler than most Westerners are willing to adopt). The modern sophisticate has been taught to associate claims about “bliss” and “ecstasy” as starry-eyed New Age pabulum, or as a sign of taking one too many psychedelic drugs. But this is indeed the serious aspiration of yoga practice. It may not be simple to achieve this goal today, but nor was it all that easy even when Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. Still, the sages insist it is achievable, and both history and contemporary examples confirm that it is possible. These people smile and laugh too much. They burst with radiant health and generosity. We are suspicious of them. They’ve been transformed out of the ordinary, and it shows.

I had temporarily lost my way and then found it again, but I failed to understand that coming off the pre-ordained track of my life might have been what I really needed. I have learned that sometimes those moments of chaos, when life careers off the rails, hold important messages about things we need to change in our existence – and the rigid expectations that we, and others, have of us that we need to challenge – before it is too late. If we address these, we can start to move forward once more, towards achieving our own goals. If we choose the goals ourselves, we have a better chance of success.