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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt.

Death is the opposite of birth.

The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.

to grasp at an individual level, it becomes clearer when you consider

If the triggers for happy moments are so ordinary and so accessible, why does “finding” happiness remain such a big challenge for so many people? And why, when we “find” it, does it so easily slip away?

the benefits of a dictatorship: Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let one percent of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.

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.

You truly never know for sure.

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

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.

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

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

In the 1930s, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed that inner speech is accompanied by tiny muscular movements in the larynx. Based on this, he argued that inner speech developed through the internalization of out-loud speech. In the 1990s, neuroscientists confirmed his view; they used neuroimaging to demonstrate that areas of the brain such as the left inferior frontal gyrus, which are active when we speak out loud, are also active during inner speech. That voice inside your head truly is your brain talking, even though you’re the only one who can hear it.

One of the most fascinating is the experience shared by Anita Moorjani, author of Dying to Be Me.

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.

This very human set of survival skills is partly why we’re still here while so many other species are not. We’re able to take control—or at least believe that we’re in control—while the best other beings can do is to react appropriately when the trouble starts. Since

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

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.

achieved

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 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

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

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

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.

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. And because what we think is always distorted by our brain’s blind spots, it’s often not true.

Anything that inhibits our ability to be in touch with the truth also inhibits our ability to solve for happy. When we label, we collapse the diverse possibilities of how events actually are into an approximation at best—a snap judgment that might not reflect the truth.

Compare our modern lifestyle with the past and you’ll understand why life has become so stressful. Although harsher, life then was much simpler; that’s because the emotions of our ancestors were more in harmony with the norms of the animal kingdom.

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

Doing

behaves

Choose the one thing it can process at a time to be something other than thought. Flood it with signals from the physical world so it stops living in its own little bubble. Each filter you remove gives your brain something to process and reduces its ability to engage in useless thoughts. This

what you suffer when you stay in fear is almost always more damaging than facing your fear.

Emotions make us human, but when we

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.

unhappiness. It

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.

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.

Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present. Now

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?

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.

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

You are not your thoughts and not your body.

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

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

Every time you examine your thoughts you’ll notice that whatever you’re upset about is rooted in a past you cannot change or a future that may turn out to be completely different from what you expect. You may as well let the past or the future go and do your best at whatever you’re doing now.

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

where

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

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

Life is now and now is amazing.

Anything you ever observed isn’t you, and everything that has ever changed in your constant presence isn’t you either. If

Brain time, however, tends to get caught up in thoughts about the past and the future. It gets lost in endless—and unlikely—scenarios of how an event in the future might turn out. Brain time obsesses over past events that didn’t turn out the way you hoped they would. Thoughts in brain time tend to jump from one to the next. They don’t lead to a specific action, and like dreams, they’re formless.

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.

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

Through it all, we humans continue to assume that we possess the ultimate knowledge. We behave as if we, the smartest beings on the planet, know it all. We reject any possibility that something could be missing, let alone wrong. The

I realized that I knew very little compared with all that is out there to know. I knew so little, in fact, that it felt as if I knew nothing at all. Luckily, my eagerness to learn overpowered my ego’s desire to be right. This revelation gave me a deep sense of joy as I relinquished the endless struggle to defend my view and just enjoyed the journey of endless learning.

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

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.

My recommended technique to shut up that quacking duck is to flood it with things that it can’t think about, evaluate, or judge—things it can only observe.