Mo Gawdat Quotes

The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace

We wear different masks and hide our reality from everyone, including ourselves. Our assumed identities becomes our whole lives, and we start to believe them—even more than others do.

is there anything ever under our total control? Yes, two things are: your actions and your attitude.

We view memories as archives of past events—of what has actually happened. But in reality, memories are nothing more than descriptions of what we think happened.

Get real. You are not the star of the movie. Most of what happens around you isn’t about you at all. There are infinite numbers of other movies. In those, if you feature at all, you’re just a supporting actor. It would really help your happiness if you started to look at your life that way.

Once the thought goes, the suffering disappears! When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you. It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy. But

Life, however, sometimes needs to give you a nudge in order to alter your path. It uses a bit of hardship to lead you to something good. In

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Be

What’s the best that can happen? That is the question to ask. What

It begins when you believe that you are the center of the universe, that good things happen because you’ve earned them and bad things happen just to annoy you. And that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Instead of containing them or enslaving them, we should be aiming higher: we should aim not to need to contain them at all. The best way to raise wonderful children is to be a wonderful parent.

If we managed to connect your brain to a bunch of flies so they could use all your intelligence to find the next pile of garbage, would you spend the rest of your life proudly serving their needs?

To reach the state of uninterrupted joy, you need to accept that everything in the physical world will eventually vanish and decay, but the real self will remain calm and unaffected. Connecting to that real self to see through the illusions of the physical world delivers the ultimate experience of peace and happiness.

Biologically speaking, feeling good plays an important role as part of our survival machine. Our brains use it to drive survival behaviors that do not relate to immediate threats. To achieve that, our brains flood our bodies with serotonin, oxytocin, and other feel-good chemicals during acts they want to encourage us to do more often.

For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time with a human fresh from the factory, an infant or toddler. Obviously, there’s a lot of crying and fussing associated with the start-up phase of little humans, but the fact is, as long as their most basic needs are met—no immediate hunger, no immediate fear, no scary isolation, no physical pain or enduring sleeplessness—they live in the moment, perfectly happy.

There is nothing more to lose; there is nothing more to fear. Eckhart Tolle says this is “to die before you die,” to live life knowing that because one day it’ll all be gone, there’s really nothing that you have, and so nothing you have to lose. Like

Our brains replay every painful memory from the past and every possible scary scenario from the future over and over, just like a complex computer simulation, in an attempt to scare us away from threats before they can happen and regardless of the probability of their happening at all.

What keeps us alive and propels us forward are our actions, not our fears. Fear, if anything, paralyzes us. It blurs our judgment and blocks us from making the best possible decisions. Fear of failure doesn’t drive our best performance. All it does is add anxiety. What truly drives us to success is our hard work. And you don’t need to be afraid to work hard.

If you can afford the brain cycles to worry about the future, then by definition, you have nothing to worry about right now. Right now, you’re okay. Many

What I realized was that I would never get to happiness as long as I held on to the idea that as soon as I do this or get that or reach this benchmark I’ll become happy. In

Take away that thought of what might happen in the future, and it won’t make you suffer.” In this very moment there is absolutely nothing wrong at all. Live

Everything is both good and bad. Or perhaps everything is neither.

We all come to this life as a blank canvas, to be scribbled upon by our environment.

Life is bound to deal you a few bad hands now and then. You don’t need to make a big deal out of every unexpected turn of events. Your path may be rerouted, but nothing is lost unless you decide to quit. Through it all, arm yourself with the right attitude. As Oscar Wilde said: “It is all going to be fine in the end. If it is not yet fine, then it is not yet the end.” Thriving

You are the observer. You are the one aware of all that is happening around you. I know it may sound disappointing, but you have never seen you. You are not to be seen. You are the one who sees. I

Many successful athletes, musicians, and entrepreneurs have achieved their success because they love what they do so much they become experts at it just because the activity itself makes them happy.

When you see the truth of your unfolding life and compare it to realistic expectations of how life actually unfolds, you will remove the reasons to be unhappy and realize, more often than not, that everything’s fine, and so you will feel happy.

If you take exactly the same steps, you will always reach exactly the same outcome regardless of your expectations, frustrations, pressures, or joy. The quality of your actions should not vary, and neither should your persistence in the face of challenges. I

death is the end of our physical form, but it is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Birth and death are the portals through which we come in and go out of this physical form, but life is independent of all that’s physical. Life observes the physical.

In contrast, unconditional love is felt but not understood. It’s genuinely built upon “I love” and nothing more—no reasons or preconditions, no expectations and no demands, and consequently no disappointments. No thoughts! This is the only form of true love. It’s rare to find, but it’s real.

It’s like living underwater while wearing heavy shoes. Everything around you is hazy, unfamiliar, and heavy. It’s hard to move or function naturally. You feel fatigued as you push against the viscosity of the water. You feel the pressure of the depth and the lack of oxygen to breathe. Your eyes burn with the salty water, but you keep trying to find your way, totally exhausted and performing below your best.

The same thing happens with the human default for happiness. Parental or societal pressure, belief systems, and unwarranted expectations come along and overwrite some of the original programming. The “you” who started out happily cooing in your crib, playing with your toes, gets caught up in a flurry of misconceptions and illusions. Happiness becomes a mysterious goal you seek but can’t quite grasp, rather than something simply there for you each morning when you open your eyes.

In a widely viewed documentary titled Singularity or Bust, Hugo de Garis, a renowned researcher in the field of AI and author of The Artilect War, speaks of this phenomenon. He says: In a sense, we are the problem. We’re creating artificial brains that will get smarter and smarter every year. And you can imagine, say twenty years from now, as that gap closes, millions will be asking questions like ‘Is that a good thing? Is that dangerous?’ I imagine a great debate starting to rage and, though you can’t be certain talking about the future, the scenario I see as the most probable is the worst. This time, we’re not talking about the survival of a country. This time, it’s the survival of us as a species. I see humanity splitting into two major philosophical groups, ideological groups. One group I call the cosmists, who will want to build these godlike, massively intelligent machines that will be immortal. For this group, this will be almost like a religion and that’s potentially very frightening. Now, the other group’s main motive will be fear. I call them the terrans. If you look at the Terminator movies, the essence of that movie is machines versus humans. This sounds like science fiction today but, at least for most of the techies, this idea is getting taken more and more seriously, because we’re getting closer and closer. If there’s a major war, with this kind of weaponry, it’ll be in the billions killed and that’s incredibly depressing. I’m glad I’m alive now. I’ll probably die peacefully in my bed. But I calculate that my grandkids will be caught up in this and I won’t. Thank God, I won’t see it. Each person is going to have to choose. It’s a binary decision, you build them or you don’t build them.

When nothing is certain - and nothing ever is - choose to be happy

Instead of feeling sad that he left, for the first time I felt happy that he came to visit in the first place.

When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you.

How could we go on doing what we need to do if we believe it is based on false assumptions? How could someone passionately engage in doing something if she believes it’s wrong? Everyone, even wrongdoers, need to somehow find logic to justify what they do.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

As a matter of fact, false knowledge is the underlying reason for most unhappiness.

By the time we find out that what we know is actually false, the equation is already dysfunctional and the suffering has already set in.

We defend what we know and get offended when it’s attacked.

Please think about that for a minute. Think of a few times when something you believed to be true surprised you by turning out to be the furthest thing from the truth.

You truly never know for sure.

Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Imagine that you need a root canal and the dentist offers you either (a) the standard procedure with a few days of recovery or (b) a root canal with additional bonus days of extensive excruciating pain. Why on earth would you ever choose (b)?

When you’re seeking modest improvement in what exists, you start working with the same tools and assumptions, the same mental framework on which the old technology is based. But when the challenge is to move ahead by a factor of ten, you start with a blank slate. When you commit to a moonshot, you fall in love with the problem, not the product. You commit to the mission before you even know that you have the ability to reach it. And you set audacious goals.

Now go ahead and tell me how the real you looks. Can you? Like the depth of the ocean, the real you is something you’ve never seen. Like radio waves, you don’t have the instrument to perceive it. More importantly, because of its nonphysical nature, it is not to be seen. Being seen is a characteristic only of the physical world.

You’ll never please everyone. Find those who like the real you and invite them closer. All others don’t matter to you.

Einstein further explained that the pull of gravity actually slows time down. So if you were an astronaut on a long interstellar trip and your spacecraft passed close to a black hole (where the gravitational force is massive), time would slow down significantly. When you got back to Earth you might have aged several years, but your spouse and your friends would have already lived into old age. We can observe this effect in a much smaller way right here on Earth. If you lived in Dubai on the top floor of Burj Khalifa, the world’s highest tower, time would pass slightly faster for you than it would for someone living on the ground floor, just because gravity affects each of you differently. While a variance like this is too small for the human body to detect, it’s measurable with today’s technology. It gets even more bizarre. The math indicates that in space-time, past, present, and future are all part of an integrated four-dimensional structure in which all of space and all of time exist perpetually.

Imagine that the whole universe is squeezed into one train: every galaxy, star, and planet and every grain of sand and living being. This train sets off on a journey, not from one city to the next but rather on a journey through time. As a passenger on that train, you can move anywhere you choose, but you can’t change the train’s direction or speed, which is restricted to a track that is the arrow of time. You just go for the ride with no control over its position or orientation, hopping from a slice of “now” to the next along the time dimension.

To make a judgment you need to compare a current observation to one you’ve made in the past. To be anxious you need to think about the future and anticipate that it’ll be worse than the present. To be bored you need to long for a state other than what’s happening in the present. To be ashamed you need to re-create a moment that no longer exists. To be unhappy you need to focus on what you want that you don’t yet have. With the exception of pain, no one ever suffered from what was going on in the present moment.

We think fear is a sign of weakness. It makes us feel vulnerable. We act strong, puff out our chests, and hide our fears. We practice our disguise so long that we believe it. Think about it, though: when is a puffer fish fully puffed? Being puffed isn’t a sign that it is brave but a sign that it is afraid, very afraid.

Think about it: If you can afford the brain cycles to worry about the future, then by definition, you have nothing to worry about right now.

One last time life threw me into the center of the arena to face my biggest horror. The pain was unbearable. It still is, but in the process life wiped away my last fear. There is nothing more that can be taken away. With that one last move on the chessboard, I win, or perhaps I lose. Either way, there will never be another fear.

All of life is here and now. So why do most of us live there and then instead?

This is the reason relationships suffer: they’re built on conditional love in an ever-changing world. Expectations of beauty, entertainment value, physical pleasure, and other forms of expectation have become preconditions for love. When the lover changes, the expectations are missed and the fairy tale turns into a nightmare. Unconditional love, on the other hand, withstands every change.

Even if they beg and plead, don’t turn back. Three chances are more than enough. Assertiveness will save your life and will also help teach them to treat their other friends better.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle pushes this strangeness further and proves that our own act of observation changes the reality of the world we observe. The uncertainty principle suggests that the physical world—the world all around us—is observer-dependent. Without an observer, in other words, everything would remain a wave of endless probabilities. You and I and every other life-form are not a product of the physical world; it is a product of us, because by observing it, we make the physical world what it is.

Now please consider the following: How different is your life on this earth from a video game? If your physical form—the avatar you use to navigate the physical world—is not the real you, then what difference does it make if you face a few challenges on the way?

Our universe is so complex that we often get lost in the details. Even Einstein admitted the limitations to our understanding: “[Looking at creation] we are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

We humans, unlike the machines we make, constantly question the design. We think it should have been better. Our biggest disagreement with the designer, and the reason many reject the concept, is rooted in the disapproval of the way he behaves.

Our universe is the product of masterful design. The designer doesn’t run the show; the equations he designed do.

The true intelligence of the machines will be built by you and me.

Eliminate the six illusions, fix the seven blind spots—and stop trying to escape—and you’ll reach happiness more often than not.

Like any conversation, your inner speech has an effect on you. How can it not? That continual internal dialogue can either raise us up or bring us crashing down. I know mine certainly does—Alice here. That dialogue lowers your stress levels when positive or increases them when negative. It boosts your confidence if supportive or knocks it if critical.

I know damn well that raising children is never easy. I know there will be lots of long nights when I’ll have to stay awake worrying, lots of mistakes that I will make on the path and even some disappointments that I will have to live with as they make a few of their own mistakes. I know that sometimes they will shout at me in anger, that sometimes they will think I’m an old fart or an idiot who doesn’t know much and is not fit for their new world, and in that judgement, they will be spot on. I will never match their intelligence, knowledge or speed. Just as every father dreams for his children to do better than he has, they will surpass me. Their successes will dwarf mine and they will blaze forward to do much bigger and better things as they prove they are better than me, and my ego will not be hurt. Instead, I will watch in awe and be full of pride as they fix the mistakes of my generation. I will love them through it all as a good father loves his smelly, noisy, expensive, freedom-limiting, commitment-bringing, defiance-prone, respect-deficient, purpose-defining children. I will love them with no expectations of return but with one hope – that they will grow up to be the best and happiest they can ever be and that – well, that they will love me back, because isn’t that what it’s all about? One hug or one silly mug that says ‘The World’s Best Father’ after all those years. That would be awesome. It would be all that I hope for. That would make my whole life worth living. And like a good parent, I will love all my children equally

Love follows the same law: true love can’t be destroyed; it just changes from one form to another. Because of that conservation, the love that you inject into a system morphs and then comes back to you from where you least expect it. Actually, it does one better than energy: it attracts the love of all beings to you. Like a savings account, the more love you deposit, the more it grows and multiplies so that when it’s time for you to withdraw, even more will be there for you.

Life isn’t even a participant—the game is yours. We’re each handed a set of cards—some good, and some not so good. Keep focused on the bad ones, and you’ll be stuck blaming the game. Use the good ones, and things become better: your hand changes and you move forward.

Everything is both good and bad. Or perhaps everything is neither. Even at the individual level, with the passage of time nothing is all bad. How often did something in your own life start out as bad but turn out to be good?

Knowledge is the fuel of civilization. But at the same time, our conviction that we truly know causes us to suffer. It’s the ultimate ignorance.

Entertain the idea that what you’ve spent your entire life learning may not be entirely true. Knowledge is in no way a prerequisite to happiness. Your default state before you had any knowledge was happiness. As a matter of fact, false knowledge is the underlying reason for most unhappiness.

Every moment of your life is neither all good nor all bad. When you clear your thoughts and see beyond the Illusion of Knowledge, you will realize that what Shakespeare wisely said is true: “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

What happened to the joyful, calm infant who simply enjoyed the moment with whatever it had to offer? Gone. Swamped by the constant urge to define an ever-evolving identity. Things

The egoless child is still calmly sitting inside each of us. Buried in layers over layers of lies, egos, and personas. Happy nonetheless. Waiting to be found. Let

Trying constantly to get approval for your chosen image is a losing battle because the real you isn’t what the ego pretends to be. This makes us unhappy since we’re always searching for the next thing to make the image complete in the hope that people will believe that’s who we are.

You’ll never please everyone. Find those who like the real you and invite them closer. All others don’t matter to you. Ali

If you’re the supporting actor in thousands of movies but the star of only one, how much of a superstar does that make you? Have

Your movie is just one of many entangled movies. Billions, in fact! You live in a complex web of connections. Every single day, every step you take and every move you make impacts—even if in small ways—the life of everyone around you and perhaps occasionally the life of everything on this planet. This happens while every step any of them takes might affect you.

you had been in that capsule long enough, you’d eventually have felt hungry, thirsty, and tired. But those are markers of biological time. You still wouldn’t have known exactly how much time had elapsed according to the clock, because mechanical time is purely a human construct. Ancient

in space-time, past, present, and future are all part of an integrated four-dimensional structure in which all of space and all of time exist perpetually. Imagine

the more you know about time, the more you’ll appreciate that in reality it’s nothing like we think it is. Time as we generally accept it is an immersive illusion that has very little to do with what it really is or how it behaves. The time we think we know doesn’t exist (as you saw in the capsule experiment). Nothing about the way we individually experience time is absolute.

Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present. Now

Unfortunately for happiness, your brain is sold on the idea that the next moment is more important than the one we’re in. On the other hand, the moment that already passed by is more familiar—and therefore perhaps more comfortable—than this one right now. These biases of the brain are what move us all too easily into a state of confusion, ruminating on the past or bracing for an imagined future while neglecting to pause and live in the present, even though the present is all there really is. When we’re focused on the past or the future, we’re living in our thoughts, and not in reality. The

Shockingly, the accuracy of most knowledge—even scientific knowledge—suffers because we ignore unknown unknowns.

From time to time we may all face a hardship that is inescapable. If there’s nothing you can do to change your current circumstance, then cancel the surrounding environment out of your Happiness Equation and solve the equation by using the rest of your life. When

And yet—and I expect I’m not the first person you’ve heard tell this tale—the “mo’ money” I made, the more miserable I became. Which led me to simply work harder and buy more toys on the misguided assumption that, sooner or later, all this effort was going to pay off and I’d find the pot of gold—happiness—thought to lie at the end of the high-achievement rainbow. I’d become a hamster on what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill.” The more you get, the more you want. The more you strive, the more reasons you discover for striving. One

unhappiness. It

where

achieved

Doing

behaves

Ironic

If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts? Of course! This is what happens all the time already. When

all

change

It all begins when you accept the thought passing through your head as absolute truth. The longer you hold on to this thought, the more you prolong the pain. The

grand Illusions submerge us in confusion and hinder our ability to make sense of the world. Life becomes a struggle. Most attempts to solve the Happiness Equation fail because we use illusions as inputs, unable to see the world for what it is, and we wonder why life has to be so cruel. When

If there is one thing that will change your life forever, it is recognizing that the voice talking to you is not you! Think

Thought engages to add an extra layer of protection when the brain plans ahead to keep you away from possible danger.

you tell your brain what to do, not the other way around. Just as you are now instructing your brain to focus on the words on this page, you can always tell it what to focus on. You just need to take charge and act like the boss.