VS The Power of the Mind

Do Not Identify With The Body: Realize The True Self (Ramana Maharshi)

2013-01-11T17:00:00.000+08:00

"The birth of the ‘I’-thought is a person’s birth and its death is his death. After the ‘I’-thought has arisen, the wrong identification with the body arises. Identifying yourself with the body makes you falsely identify others also with their bodies. Just as your body was born and grows and will die, so you think the other also was born, grew and died. Did you think of your son before he was born? The thought came after his birth and continues even after his death. He is your son only insofar as you think of him. Where has he gone? To the source from which he sprang. So long as you continue to exist, he does too. But if you cease to identify yourself with the body and realise the true Self, this confusion will vanish. You are eternal and others also will be found to be eternal. Until this is realised there will always be grief due to false values which are caused by wrong knowledge and wrong identification."

— Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (2006)

Mind Is Mysterious And Has Myriad Appearances (Dalai Lama)

2013-01-10T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Mind is mysterious and has myriad appearances. It cannot be identified in the way external objects can. It has no shape, form or colour. This mere clear awareness is of the nature of experience and feeling. It is something like colored water—although the water is not of the same nature as the color, so long as they are mixed, the true color of the water is not obvious. Similarly, the mind does not have the nature of external objects such as physical form, and so forth. However the mind is so habituated to following the five sensory consciousnesses that it becomes almost indistinguishable from the physical form, shape, color and so forth, that it experiences."

— Dalai Lama, Stages of Meditation (2003)

The Way of Spiritual Transformation (Karlfried Graf Dürckheim)

2013-01-09T17:00:00.000+08:00

The Last Samurai (2003)

"The man, who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring...

Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns wholeheartedly to confront the world which threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened."

— Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise (1988)

Freedom of Religion and Belief (Baruch Spinoza)

2013-01-08T17:00:00.000+08:00

"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits...

— Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670)

PSYCHEDELICS (F. W. Hanley, M.D.)

2013-01-07T17:00:00.000+08:00

PSYCHEDELICS
(Hallucinogens)

Give me a button of wild peyote
To munch in my den at night,
That I may set my id afloat
In the country of queer delight.

So ho! it's off to the land of dreams
With never a stop or stay,
Where psychiatrists meet with fairy queens
To sing a foundelay.

Give me a flagon of mescaline
To wash o'er my mundane mind,
That I may feel like a schizophrene
Of the catatonic kind.

So hey! let in the vision of light
To banish banality,
Then will I surely catch a sight
Of the Real Reality.

Give me a chalice of lysergic
To quaff when day is done,
That I may get a perceptual kick
From my diencephalon.

So ho! let all resistance down
For a transcendental glance,
Past the superego's frosty frown
At the cosmic underpants.

Give me a pinch of psilocybin
To sprinkle in my beer,
That my psychopathic next-of-kin
May not seem quite so queer.

So hey! it's off for the visions bizarre
Past the ego boundary,
For a snort at the psychedelic bar
Of the new psychiatry.

— by F. W. Hanley, M.D.

To Attain The Good, We Must Ascend To The Highest State (Plotinus)

2013-01-04T17:00:00.000+08:00

“To attain the Good, we must ascend to the highest state and fixing our gaze thereon, lay aside the garments we donned when descending here below; just as, in the Mysteries, those who are admitted to penetrate into the inner recesses of the sanctuary, after having purified themselves, lay aside every garment and advance stark naked.”

— Plotinus, Enneads I, vi, 6.

We Are All Chained To Fortune: All Life Is Slavery (Seneca)

2013-01-03T17:00:00.000+08:00

"We are all chained to fortune: the chain of one is made of gold, and wide, while that of another is short and rusty. But what difference does it make? The same prison surrounds all of us, and even those who have bound others are bound themselves; unless perchance you think that a chain on the left side is lighter. Honors bind one man, wealth another; nobility oppresses some, humility others; some are held in subjection by an external power, while others obey the tyrant within; banishments keep some in one place, the priesthood others. All life is slavery. Therefore each one must accustom himself to his own condition and complain about it as little as possible, and lay hold of whatever good is to be found near him... Apply reason to difficulties; harsh circumstances can be softened, narrow limits can be widened, and burdensome things can be made to press less severely on those who bear them cleverly."

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind (A letter to Serenus as translated in Tranquillity of Mind and Providence by William Bell Langsdorf)

Fairy Tales Tell Universal Truths (Gopi Krishna)

2013-01-02T17:00:00.000+08:00

Photo: "Pinocchio Wishes Upon a Star" by Thomas Kinkade

“Fairy tales tell universal truths; they are archetypal accounts of how the personality meets and overcomes its own dangers. They speak in the language of symbols directly to the soul. The fairy tale is not a substitution for reality but is a necessary nourishment for the world of psychic reality.”

— Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy In Man (1970)

Why Do People In Anger Shout At Each Other?

2013-01-01T17:00:00.000+08:00

Photo: Anger by Tuhin Subhra Dey

A Hindu saint who was visiting river Ganges to take bath found a group of family members on the banks, shouting in anger at each other. He turned to his disciples smiled and asked. ‘Why do people in anger shout at each other?’

The disciples thought for a while, one of them said, ‘Because we lose our calm, we shout.’

‘But, why should you shout when the other person is just next to you? You can as well tell him what you have to say in a soft manner.’ asked the saint.

The disciples gave some other answers but none satisfied the other disciples.

Finally the saint explained, ‘When two people are angry at each other, their hearts distance a lot. To cover that distance they must shout to be able to hear each other. The angrier they are, the stronger they will have to shout to hear each other to cover that great distance. What happens when two people fall in love? They don’t shout at each other but talk softly, because their hearts are very close. The distance between them is either non-existent or very small. When they love each other even more, what happens? They do not speak, only whisper and they get even closer to each other in their love. Finally they even need not whisper, they only look at each other and that’s all. That is how close two people are when they love each other.’

He looked at his disciples and said, ‘So when you argue do not let your hearts get distant, Do not say words that distance each other more, Or else there will come a day when the distance is so great that you will not find the path to return.’

— author unknown

The Exercise of Free Will (Jean-Paul Sartre)

2012-12-31T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Characterizations of Existentialism (1944)

Who We Are In The Quiet Center (John C. Lilly)

2012-12-28T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Each one of us is far greater, far more advanced, far more consciously aware, far more intelligent than we conceive of our Selves as being. Within each of us is a central low pressure place —a Quiet Center— in which we can learn to live eternally. Just outside of this quiet center is a cyclone, the rotating storm of your ego, competing with other egos in a furious high-velocity circular dance.

In the quiet center, we are untouched by the cyclone, but as we leave it, the roar of the rotating wind deafens as we join the frenzied dance of our ever more busy lives. Our centered thinking-feeling-being, our Satori, is in the quiet center, not outside in the busy world. Our pushed-pulled-driven states, our anti-Satori modes of functioning, our self-created hell, is outside the quiet center. When in the quiet center, we are off the wheel of karma, outside the busy details and dramas of life, rising to join the Creators of the Universe—the Creators of us. Here we find that we have created Them who are Us."

— John C. Lilly, The Quiet Center: Isolation and Spirit (2003)

What Is True Compassion? (Buddhaghosa)

2012-12-27T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Compassion is characterized as promoting the aspect of allaying suffering. Its function resides in not bearing others' suffering. It is manifested as non-cruelty. Its proximate cause is to see helplessness in those overwhelmed by suffering. It succeeds when it makes cruelty subside and it fails when it produces sorrow."

— Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification)

Mythological Symbols (Joseph Campbell)

2012-12-26T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. The light-world modes of experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological prehistory of our species. Even in the life-course of the individual, the opening of the eyes to light occurs only after all the main miracles have been accomplished of the building of a living body of already functioning organs, each with its inherent aim, none of these aims either educed from, or as yet even known to, reason; while in the larger course and context of the evolution of life itself from the silence of primordial seas, of which the taste still runs in our blood, the opening of the eyes occurred only after the first principle of all organic being ("Now I'll eat you; now you eat me!") had been operative for so many hundreds of millions of centuries that it could not then, and cannot now, be undone—though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us to regret the monstrous game."

— Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (1968)

Great Men, Expectation, Meditation, Love, and Levitation (John C. Lilly)

2012-12-25T17:00:00.000+08:00

Is there really such a thing as a great man?

Are we not all microbes on a mud-ball rotating around a Type-G star two-thirds of the way from galactic center to the indefinite edge, in one small galaxy in the universe of galaxies — so what is a great man, what is a messiah, an avatar, an enlightened one?

In the microbe’s imagination, there is a theory that he is not a microbe. His theory says, “There are beings, greater than I, of which I am a part. All I must do is realize my true self, see my soul, realize my Atman, join Universal Mind, become one with God, be spread throughout the Universe, tune in on the Infinite, transform the clay to the Divine, live and think right, and join God and the Angels.”

Of course, since he is only a microbe on a mud-ball, why not have fun with the supergame, Microbial?

A group of microbes say to one another, “We are great. We have found a great man. The great man tells us how to realize our true nature, how to be enlightened. He tells us we are each great and He will show us the way to shed microbial illusions of being a microbe.”

“Join up — here’s the path, follow my lead — I have the Truth — but you must have discipline — my discipline. The Universal Law, through me, is revealed. Expectate, through me. Meditate — here’s how. Love and levitate, as I did.”

— John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, p.113 (1985)

The "True Men" of Old (Chuang Tzu)

2012-12-24T17:00:00.000+08:00

"The True Men of old knew nothing either of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no joy; the exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they went and came. They did not forget what their beginning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be. They accepted their life and rejoiced in it; they forgot all fear of death and returned to their state before life. Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Tao, and of all attempts by means of the Human to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who are called True Men. Being such, their minds were free from all thought; their demeanor was still and unmoved; their foreheads beamed simplicity. Whatever coldness came from them was like that of autumn; whatever warmth came from them was like that of spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to what we see in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things what was suitable, and no one could know how far their action would go."

— Chuang Tzu, Book VI, Part I. Section VI. 2-3; translation by James Legge

The Perspective With Which We See The World (Douglas Adams)

2012-12-21T17:00:00.000+08:00

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Gallileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out - and this took a long, long, long time to sink in - that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours."

— Douglas Adams, Speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, (1998)

Karmic Patterns In Dreams (Chogyal Namkhai Norbu)

2012-12-20T17:00:00.000+08:00

"In addition to those dreams reflecting karma from our current life, karmic dreams can also be linked to our past lives. For instance, if someone murdered me in a past life, I may still in this life have dreams of being murdered. It is not true that what we dream is always about our experiences from this life. If an event is very weighty, then you may feel it life after life. When you sleep very deeply, you may create a perfect potential for past karma to manifest within your dreams.

If you merely have heavy tension, it may repeat in your dreams. For example, when you are a child and someone makes a problem for you it could repeat in your dreams. Or, if today I have a problem with someone, it may repeat tonight in my dream. The principle is that if you have heavy tension, and you sleep deeply, the tension tends to repeat. This is one kind of dream, a karmic dream of bhakshas. Bhakshas means traces of something left. For example, if there is an empty bottle which once contained perfume, you can still smell the trace of perfume. That is bhakshas."

— Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (1992)

Negative Emotions Depend on Identification (P. D. Ouspensky)

2012-12-18T17:00:00.000+08:00

"People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has."

— P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)

Peter Dimianovich Ouspensky (1878 – 1947), a.k.a. Piotr Dimianovich Ouspenskii, was a Russian mystic philosopher and a student/expositor of the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to mid-20th century who developed a method for awakening one's higher consciousness. According to Gurdjieff's principles, his method is different from that of the fakir, monk or yogi, so Ouspensky used the term "The Fourth Way" to describe it.

After Ouspensky broke away from Gurdjieff, he taught "The Fourth Way" to his students based on his own understanding of it. Shortly after his death in 1947, his two most popular works were published: The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution and In Search of the Miraculous. The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution is a book that describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity. Ouspensky focuses on the study of what man's evolution means, what he may become, and the question of whether there are special conditions necessary to achieve it.

Dreams and Who We Really Are (Stephen LaBerge)

2012-12-16T17:00:00.000+08:00

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

"Who we really are is not necessarily the same as who we believe ourselves to be. We are not who we think we are in our dreams (or indeed while awake). You can readily observe this fact for yourself in your next lucid dream. Ask yourself about the nature of each thing you find in your lucid dream. For example, you may be sitting at a dream table, with your feet on the dream floor. And yes, that’s a dream shoe, on a dream foot, part of a dream body, so this must be a dream me. All you need to do is to reflect on your situation in a lucid dream and you see that the person you appear to be in the dream cannot be who you really are: it is only an image, a mental model of your self, or to use the Freudian term, your “ego.”

Seeing that the ego cannot be who you really are makes it easier to stop identifying with it. Once you no longer identify with your ego, you are freer to change it. Simply recognizing that the ego is a simplified model of the self gives you a more accurate model of the self, and makes it more difficult for you to mistake the map for the territory."

— Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990)

Take Sex Away From People Then Hand Them A Scapegoat To Hate (Robert A. Heinlein)

2012-12-14T17:00:00.000+08:00

"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

— Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100 (1953)

All Personal Life is Misery (Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

2012-12-12T17:00:00.000+08:00

"To him who possesses discernment, all personal life is misery, because it ever waxes and wanes, is ever afflicted with restlessness, makes ever new dynamic impresses in the mind; and because all its activities war with each other."

The whole life of the psychic self is misery, because it ever waxes and wanes; because birth brings inevitable death; because there is no expectation without its shadow, fear. The life of the psychic self is misery, because it is afflicted with restlessness; so that he who has much, finds not satisfaction, but rather the whetted hunger for more. The fire is not quenched by pouring oil on it; so desire is not quenched by the satisfaction of desire. Again, the life of the psychic self is misery, because it makes ever new dynamic impresses in the mind; because a desire satisfied is but the seed from which springs the desire to find like satisfaction again. The appetite comes in eating, as the proverb says, and grows by what it feeds on. And the psychic self, torn with conflicting desires, is ever the house divided against itself, which must surely fall.

— Book II, Sutra 15 from The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual Man, An Interpretation By Charles Johnston (1912)

Intellect Is To Emotion As Our Clothes Are To Our Bodies (Alfred North Whitehead)

2012-12-10T12:00:00.000+08:00

"Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies."

— Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

As I look back at my past, I remember certain times when I allowed my actions to be dictated either completely by my heart or completely by my head. Whenever my heart took the steering wheel, I seldom thought carefully about my decisions. I only did two things as far as my welfare was concerned: I either distanced myself from the things that I bothered me and attached myself to those things that I thought would make me happy. This got me in trouble most of the time because I always perceived things based on how they would make me feel. It was always about me, me, and me. Everything else was trivial.

In times when my head dominated the decision-making process, on the other hand, things went out of control less frequently than they did when my heart was in charge, but I noticed that I always derived less meaning and value from the outcome. We learn more from things that happen to us in real life, you see, so when you always calculate your moves and leave no room for error, that takes the thrill out of every experience. Life then becomes dull and boring and you become indifferent to the people around you.

Life is a work in progress, but I eventually managed to sort things out. I learned that to be able to live a balanced life, one should learn how to keep the chaotic dictates of the heart and the orderly rules of the head in harmony. Reminds me of a line from a film called the Little Buddha: "To learn is to change. The path to Enlightenment is in the Middle Way. It is the line between all opposite extremes." Cheesy, perhaps, but it makes perfect sense to me. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but don't allow yourself to become insane by making too many of them all at once either.

Anyway, Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician, logician and philosopher who contributed significantly to twentieth-century logic, philosophy of science and metaphysics. Together with Bertrand Russell, he authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica. He also wrote the metaphysical treatise entitled Process and Reality. Here's a nice review of Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead for those of you who are interested.

Mind-Created Visions During Meditation (Acharn Thawee Baladhammo)

2012-12-08T12:00:00.000+08:00

Q: "Sometimes during sitting, perception of white light appears, sometimes one sees green and yellow colour, one sees many pictures, buildings, people, religious objects or monks. At times one sees skeletons, ugly and horrifying pictures. How shall one note these?"

A: "These objects arising in the mind are produced by concentration. They arise at a time when the mind is very tranquil. They are mind-created visions, imaginations. Sometimes these objects are very clear, sometimes they are dim; it depends on samadhi. If samadhi is very powerful, one will see them very distinctly. When a picture or nimitta appears, note 'seeing, seeing' until that light or colour or image vanishes. Then go back again to note the Rising-Falling of the abdomen. If one notes them but they do not vanish, this is because of upadana (attachment) which develops a liking for these things. Then the nimitta, colours, light or various pictures appear again and again. One must increase sati in noting and letting go. If they don't vanish, pay no attention and go back to the Rising - Falling or note other objects; those pictures will disappear by themselves."

— Acharn Thawee Baladhammo, Practicing Insight On Your Own: A Handbook for Vipassana-kammatthana

In Buddhism, students are usually encouraged to make every effort to attain the states of Jhana wherein concentration is greatly increased to a level of sharpness unattainable in the ordinary state of consciousness. They do this by practicing different techniques, one of which is Sati or Mindfulness. In the states of Jhana, one is able to witness the essential nature of the object of meditation (such as the breath) and consciousness is released from the confines of the intellect. Nevertheless, there are preparatory stages that one has to enter before reaching the very first stage of Jhana. It is during these stages that a student will encounter different kinds of nimittas or "signs," which help them determine the level of concentration they have attained.

To know more about the practice, check out Practicing Insight On Your Own: A Handbook for Vipassana-kammatthana by Acharn Thawee Baladhammo. To know more about nimittas (signs), check out The Mystery of the Breath Nimitta.

Attachment Leads To Suffering (Bhagavad Gita)

2012-12-06T12:00:00.000+08:00

“Persons thinking of material objects get interested towards them. From interest, arises desire and if that desire is unfulfilled there arises anger. From anger arises delusion, which causes ignorance. Due to ignorance, the person loses memory and at then the intelligence is lost. When intelligence is lost, everything is lost and such a person is completely ruined.”

— Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 62-63

Gollum (a.k.a. Sméagol), the man in the image above, is a perfect example of a person within whom the daimonic aspect has apparently gone haywire. Here's a funny diagnosis of Gollum's condition.

Seriously, however, if you are in the business of knowing your true SELF (to avoid hating hobbitses or for whatever reason), then you must definitely get familiar with these three states of mind: desire, anger, and delusion. The Gita is not a Buddhist text, I know, but Buddhists refer to these states of mind as the three poisons or the three unwholesome roots, and there's a reason for that. These three mental states are said to be the fundamental causes of all the suffering that exists in this world.

Desire may refer to our attachment to anything that we think will give us pleasure or happiness. It can take the form of greed, selfishness, lust, craving, grasping, longing, discontent, etc. When we are not mindful of the sensory objects that we allow to enter our heads, they can sometimes turn into desires which feed on our energy. Before you know it, these desires have gained enough strength to completely control all your actions.

Anger or hatred may refer to our reaction towards anything that makes us feel unpleasant or uncomfortable. When a desire is unfulfilled, as the Gita states, anger or hatred is sure to arise. This may take the form of disgust, aversion, resentment, dislike, repulsion, rage, violence etc.

Delusion refers to our wrong views about reality. While most of us believe that the world is real, our Hindu and Buddhist friends generally see it as Māyā, which translates as “illusion.” Basically speaking, there is nothing that we can find in this world that is truly permanent or "real" in the absolute sense. Hence, there is nothing in this world that is worthy of being desired. This is the nature of reality, and not understanding this is what they refer to as ignorance.

Just keep in mind that if you keep on feeding the three poisons, they will grow, consume you, and eventually lead you to your own demise. Mindfulness is the key. Hence, always pay attention to your thoughts. Now give me back my precious, sneaky little hobbitses.

All-embracingness: The Task of The Human-hearted Man (Mo Tzu)

2012-12-04T12:00:00.000+08:00

"The task of the human-hearted man is to procure benefits for the world and to eliminate its calamities. Now among all the current calamities of the world, which are the greatest? I say that attacks on small states by large ones, disturbances of small houses by large ones, oppression of the weak by the strong, misuse of the few by the many, deception of the simple by the cunning, and disdain toward the humble by the honored; these are the misfortunes of the world... When we come to think about the causes of all these calamities, how have they arisen? Have they arisen out of love of others and benefiting others? We must reply that they have not. Rather we should say that they have arisen out of hate of others and injuring others. If we classify those in the world who hate others and injure others, shall we call them "discriminating: or "all-embracing"? We must say that they are "discriminating." So, then, is not "mutual discrimination" the cause of the major calamities of the world? Therefore the principle of discrimination is wrong. But whoever criticizes others must have something to substitute for what he criticizes. Therefore, I say: 'Substitute for discrimination all-embracingness.'"

— Mo Tzu, translation from Fung Yu-lan: A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948)

Mo Tzu or Mozi was a philosopher who lived during the Hundred Schools of Thought period (early Warring States Period) in China. He was the founder of the school of Mohism, a philosophical school which developed about the same time as Confucianism and Taoism. Mo Tzu endorsed self-reflection, practicality, asceticism/renunciation and self-restraint rather than obedience to ritual. He taught that we often learn about the world through our hardships. Thus, if we reflect on our own successes and failures, we can arrive at true self-knowledge.

Fung Yu-Lan or Feng Youlan was a Chinese philosopher and one of the key figures that reintroduced the study of Chinese philosophy in the modern era. In 1948, he wrote A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, which is a short version of his classic 1934 book A History of Chinese Philosophy. Both these books expound on the various philosophical schools in China such as Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Neo-Taosim, Neo-Confucianism, etc., and also serve as historical accounts of Chinese thought from the third millennium sage-kings to the 1911 overthrow of the oldest monarchical system in the world.