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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Reactiveness

 

 

"Their thinking, the content of their mind, is of course conditioned by the past: their upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all their mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that they identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself." Eckhart Tolle

 

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Reactiveness

 

 

 

 

Reactiveness vs. Reactivity: Reactiveness is a state or condition of being reactive. Reactivity is responsiveness to stimuli.

Reactivity vs. Proactivity: Reactivity responds to stimuli, is acted upon, led, and controlled by environment. Proactivity initiates, controls environment, leads, acts before being acting upon.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Have the courage to act instead of react.”

Henry David Thoreau: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

Stephen R. Covey: “People who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.”

William Hutchison Murray: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

Emily Dickinson: “Forever is composed of nows.”

Constance Friday: “Make hay all the time, not only while the sun shines.”

Theodore Roosevelt: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”

 

 

"[Success is] not being tense, but ready... not being set, but flexible... it is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come..." Bruce Lee

 

 

When someone hurts or betrays us, how can we forgive in a deep sense, how can we regain an unblemished, pristine image of that person?

Allow me to draw our attention to an extremely important concept introduced in Krishnamurti's lecture of Jan 15, 1964.

He speaks of the unsullied mind, undefiled and unblemished mind. This is a mind, he says, spotless and unpolluted, that is not burdened by sordid images of the past.

And, of course, the most troublesome example here is how we view others. We see them, or might bring them to mind, and immediately recall some insult, a slighting, an infraction.

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Editor's last word:

Some of the above quotations imply that the proper choice is always some form of "doing." But this is wrong. See the essay.