I was just listening to part of the Power of Now audiobook, and there was a Q&A that I found very profound. Essentially the questioner was contrasting Tolle's judgement of certain emotions as bad or negative with the idea of accepting your emotions, giving yourself permission to feel whatever you feel, not repressing or blaming yourself for them. I have heard the latter idea a lot from Buddhism, and have some sympathy for it, yet I am certainly not willing to withhold judgement about what emotions I want to feel and encounter in others.

I think that the answer embodied in Tolle's philosophy, and partly given in the segment, is simple, true and profound, so I'd like to describe it. The answer can mostly be derived from the simple truth that the past is immutable and we can only act in the present. (By past here, I'm including anything I just noticed about myself - so we can imagine a world consisting of alternating inputs and actions, and the input I just saw is considered the past, even though I've just noticed it.) The answer is to combine complete acceptance of the past and current state of the world with incredible empowerment to affect the future state of the world through present action.

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Patri's Second Motto: Give up all hope for a better yesterday, so that you can act more effectively for a better tomorrow.
[1] This does depend on empirical attributes of the human mind. If we were true behavior machines that learned solely based on the feedback of positive and negative emotions, then guilt and blame might be necessary for learning. Fortunately this turns out not to be the case. Negative emotions are not clear motivators - they can demotivate. They are not the only motivators - I may not have felt guilty for being an hour late to Day 2 of the $2500 NL at the WSOP, but I damn well want to try hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. And even when they motivate, the spillover effects of unhappiness and past-focus from self-blame tend to be larger than the gain from motivation.

[2] I use the Acceptance/Action dichotomy in this post because I'm exploring the distinction between those two, but Observation is critical enough that one might characterize the whole thing as a 3-step process: Observe, Accept, Act. In fact, with practice, Acceptance merges into Observation so that it becomes Observe -> Act, so Observation is actually more fundamental.

A great post from Zen Habits. Bitterness and resentment that the world isn't the way we wish is so easy to slip into, I find. But it isn't good for happiness, and it's pointless because there is nothing we can do about the world as it is now, or about human nature, or the nature of the universe. We can act to change the world, but such acts can only affect the future, not the present, and they are limited by the nature of the world.

I'm not sure I'm saying this clearly, but I'm trying to get at what I see as a subtle but important distinction between bemoaning the world today and imagining a better future. It's the difference between saying "I was so stupid to do ___" and "I'm going to try hard not to do ____ next time". Between "It's so awful that there are so many people living on a dollar a day!" and "I wonder if there is a better way to help people in the third world get out of the poverty trap?" Present or past vs. future, complaining vs. taking action.

I'm going to stop now, lest I slip into complaining about people missing this point :).

Here's a blog post, here's the website. I am working on something related: trying to notice anytime I am failing to accept reality, and changing my phrasing to be forward looking. Failing to accept reality means any time I wish the past or present to be different, or wish the future to be different without my taking any action to make it so.

"I should have gone to bed earlier last night." -> "I am going to make catching up on sleep more of a priority."
"I wish I had the energy to get work done" -> either go do some work, or think "It's nice to be able to relax and lie around."
"I wish Tovar wasn't so whiny." -> "I wonder why Tovar is so whiny? What can I do about it?"

I think there is some slight danger in under-beating up myself about mistakes (and thus under-incenting myself to do better in the future), but I think the vast majority of the effects of this are positive.

I'm actually pretty good about this in general - complaining w/o action, gossiping, etc. are not big parts of my mental life. But they are bigger than I'd like them to be. Especially as I've gotten more tired and stressed over the years of having sleep problems and being a parent, I think I've gotten into some bad mental habits related to complaining, so this is a sort of spring cleaning for my mind.

made the money. Also made a huge mistake - I heard last night that we would resume at 3pm, and didn't double-check. It was 2pm, and I missed almost an hour. The sick thing was, I was across the room in a live game. I thought the clock I saw was counting down until play started. Cost me like T14k ($7,000 real money). Ouch!

Anyway, I ain't complainin', I might have gone bust if I came on time. Instead, in my 1 hour back, I won medium pots with aces, kings, and AKs. For once, I'm happy about people playing slowly!

I've been reading "the power of now", and practicing mindfulness - awareness and acceptance of the present moment. I'm finding it very powerful. I'm not a big complainer or stress case, yet this practice has made me realize how much of my processor time is spent uselessly hoping, imagining, and remembering, as opposed to just taking life as it is.

I suspect I may become an annoying zealot about this, but man is it powerful! Master this and you will be a pillar of strength. I was already partway there, but I feel like I've leveled after reading and just trying the technique, even without much practice. Just trying to observe and describe my feelings, without judgement, and draw my awareness back to the present moment when it inevitably drifts.

Like I said, I feel zealoutry coming on :). I'm glad I'm schedule to finally take googles mindfulness class in July, I'd love more formal training.

My being late was a good example of something I was able to quickly let go, although ironically, it is possible that focusing on the present moment contributed to my not double-checking the schedul today. Ah well, still learning balance...