My Rating: 5/5

• I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.
• You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time.
• When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
• the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.’

• Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.
• ‘Art’ when it is opposed to ‘Science’ is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.
• keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get.
• the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.
• Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.
• It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.
• Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.
• The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity.
• One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyana, mispronounced in Chinese as ‘Chan’ and again mispronounced in Japanese as ‘Zen.’
• Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than ‘laziness,’ is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don’t need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle.
• The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that it’s peace of mind you’re after and not just a fixed machine.
• Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take.
• Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do.
• Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility,
• The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.
• The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things.
• The term logos, the root word of ‘logic,’ refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world.
• Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.

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