YOU VS YOU – MORNING MOTIVATION | Motivational Speech 2020
you need to decide at some point in your
life whether you’re more in love with
what you know or what you don’t know you
know when people tend to be in love with
what they don’t because you don’t want
to have that shaken and challenged and
it’s not surprising but the problem with
that is is that you don’t know enough
unless everything is going perfectly for
you and everything around you you set an
order perfectly it’s like your ignorance
outweighs your knowledge it’s like so
you should make friends with what you
don’t know stop doing the things that
you know are wrong that you could stop
doing so it’s it’s a fairly it’s a
fairly limited attempt first of all
we’re not going to say that you know
what the good is or what the truth is in
any ultimate sense but we will presume
that there are things that you’re doing
that for one reason another you know are
not in your best interests there’s
something about them that you just know
you should stop there are kind of
self-evident to you other things you’re
gonna be doubtful about you’re not gonna
know which way is up and which way is
down but there are things that you’re
doing that you know you shouldn’t do now
some of those you won’t stop doing for
whatever reason you don’t have the
discipline or maybe there’s a secondary
payoff or you don’t believe it’s
necessary or it’s too much of a
sacrifice or you’re angry or resentful
or or afraid who knows
so forget about those for now but
there’s another subset that you could
stop doing it might be little thing well
that’s fine stop doing it you see what
happens and what will happen is your
vision will clear a little bit and then
something else will pop up in your field
of apprehension that you will also know
you should stop doing and that you could
stop doing because you’ve strengthened
yourself a bit by stopping doing the
particular stupid thing that you were
doing before that just puts you together
a little bit more and you could do that
repeatedly for for an indefinite period
of time and you know that doesn’t
necessarily mean that you’re going to
ever be able to formulate a clear and
final picture of what constitutes the
truth and the good but it does mean that
you’ll be able to continually move away
from what’s untruth and what’s bad and
you know well that’s not a bad to start
now most of us do our best not to think
about death but but there’s always part
of our minds that knows
this can’t go on forever we part of us
always knows that we’re just a doctor’s
visit away or a phone call away from
being starkly reminded with with the
fact of our own mortality or of those
closest to us now I’m sure many of you
in this room have experienced this in
some form you must know how uncanny it
is to suddenly be thrown out of the
normal course of your life and just be
given the full time job of not dying or
caring for someone who is but the one
thing people tend to realize at moments
like this is that they wasted a lot of
time when life was normal it’s not just
what they not just what they did with
their time it’s not just that they spent
too much time working or more
compulsively checking email it’s that
they they cared about the wrong things
they regret what they cared about their
attention was bound up in petty concerns
a year after year when life was normal
and this is a paradox of course because
we all know this epiphany is coming but
don’t you know this is coming don’t you
know that there’s gonna come a day when
you’ll be sick or someone close to you
will die and you’ll look back on the
kinds of things that captured your
attention and you’ll think what was I
doing you know this and yet if you’re
like most people you’ll spend most of
your time in life tacitly presuming
you’ll live forever watching a bad movie
for the fourth time
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or or bickering with your spouse these
things only make sense in light of
eternity now then let’s go back to the
fundamental assumption that all people
and this also includes all beings
whatsoever but we’re talking mainly of
course about human beings all people are
manifestation disguises of the total
reality behind this cosmos and that if
that is so there are not any mistakes in
the world when you look at patterns on
the phone of the breaking waves on the
seashore you look at the outlines of
mountain the grain and wood and the
markings on marble you notice that it
never makes an aesthetic mistake no also
when you study plants and you go into
their relationships with each other and
with insects the fact that these
so-called diseases of plants are the
full life of some other kind of organism
having a ball and you see this complex
the interrelated world and you realize
that it all hangs together that
everything outside the human world is a
system of balances where you couldn’t
have really any form of life without the
others going on to there have to be
friends and there have to be enemies
because if there aren’t enemies the
friends get too prosperous and they kill
themselves by their excessive exuberant
so they are constantly being pruned by
various kinds of enemies pieces and what
is when you got down there and I suppose
you identified yourself with a certain
plant you would thoroughly object to if
you were a lettuce to the snails eating
you up and also a person who gets
identified with lettuces you see say
someone who grows lettuces for his
living
gets mad at the snails but actually I
lettuces need snails because there would
be too many lettuces if there weren’t
snails and those lettuces would choke
each other now of course the human being
comes in and starts organizing the
lettuces see so that the seeds don’t
propagate in the usual way because he
puts them out in rows and that’s a
different kind of a scene and so he
objects to the snails but that’s because
he’s looking at the problem of lettuces
from a partisan point of view and it’s
quite right that he should do so what he
may not see because he’s taken the side
of lettuces against snails he fails to
see that conflict at one level is health
at another just as conflict going on
between microorganisms in your
bloodstream is absolutely essential to
the health of your organism as a whole
but you don’t you’re not aware of that
conflict going on because conscious
attention doesn’t need ordinarily to
focus upon it and so you don’t get
involved and you’re not anxious about
what party is winning and what party is
losing they’re keeping up a kind of
balance now then to take this a step
further we are all amazingly involved in
the process of being human and playing
our game and taking our side and
therefore our victories and defeats our
sicknesses and our Health’s are things
we get mighty partisan about and
therefore we cannot see that human
behavior is just like everything else
it never makes a mistake only it’s never
making a mistake
must include the feeling that mistakes
can be made
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