Integrity and Positive Concern

1  Integrity is inherent

2 Positive concern is natural

3 Awareness of importance is personal

4 Happiness and unhappiness

5 Your sense of what’s positive

6 Caution, criticism

7 Regret, discretion

8 Awareness and ideas

9 Beliefs, metaphors and symbols

10 Opinions and conventions

11 Persuasion, influence

12 Conversation, courtesy

13 Conversing by telephone

14 Reading, streaming media

15 Hourly schedule, motor travel

16 Organized sports, conforming

17 Friendship and association

18 Traditions

19 Your important ideas

20 Personal memories

21 Feelings and thoughts

About the author

1 Integrity is inherent

1  Integrity and positive concern are natural qualities of your mind.

Your personal integrity is easy for you to understand and improve.

Your mind and relative freedom from confusion and suffering become visible whenever you're being the best person that you can be.

2 You need to intend to be the best person that you can be to be integrated and positive.

Being your best as you understand it and as well as you can is good enough.

Your sincere intention to be the best person that you can be is a reliable standard to help you to decide whether an idea is important to you or not.

3 You need to know that you share the same kinds of qualities and feelings with all other people.

Maintain the best relationships that you can with some people who intend to be the best person that they can be as you experience them.

You don’t need to depend on another person or association to maintain your integrity and positive concern.

2 Positive concern is natural

1 Positive concern develops naturally from being the best person that you can be. Positive concern is an expression of the inherently pure and positive potential of your mind and supports your integrity.

If you don't know that positive concern is a natural quality and expression of your mind then you might think that you need to learn how to be positive from another person or society.

Positive concerns that you experience only while you’re engaged in conventional relationships with other people don’t reliably help you to maintain your integrity.

2 Your integrity and positive concern improve through your awareness, understanding and conduct that's respectful and sensitive to your family, neighbors, friends and all other people. Your neighbors can include some people who live near you or who commute or attend classes or work or shop where you do or with whom you share recreation or entertainment.

You need to understand the ideas, beliefs and conventions that your family, neighbors and friends value as important and that they follow to some degrees.

If you don't understand the ideas, beliefs and conventions that your family, neighbors and friends value you might misunderstand, dislike and mistrust many qualities and good perspectives that those people express that could help to illuminate your awareness and relationships.

3 Some beliefs and conventions that your family and society value might conflict with your intention to be the best person that you can be. The natural appreciation and mutual understanding that you might enjoy with your family and society might sometimes be ignored or overruled.

If sincerity is dismissed as unimportant or harmful by some of your family or society you might think that you can sometimes dismiss sincerity as unimportant or harmful.

At the times when you don’t remember or intend to be the best person that you can be influential opinions and conventions of conduct can distract your awareness of the conduct of your mind and your sense of what’s positive.

4 Your most of all conventional thinking is not aware of the conduct of your mind and cannot reliably evaluate your experiences or relationships with other people. Don't value an idea or expression as reliably helpful for maintaining your integrity and positive concern based only on the idea or expression being eloquent or familiar.

You need to evaluate every idea that you think. Even when you don’t understand an idea as well as you wish to understand it you can always integrate or dismiss every idea that you think. When you become aware that you have not evaluated and integrated a particular idea with your important values or dismissed the idea from your thinking then you need to decide what you think about the idea as you understand it at the present time. Don’t express your thinking carelessly.

Maintaining doubt or postponing your decision about any contradictory ideas maintained in conflict in your thinking can result in experiencing a non-integrated mind.

3 Awareness of importance is personal

1 Awareness of importance is personal. Personal in this context means individual, unique.

Everyone is aware and understands an idea or experience individually. Or does not perceive or understand that idea well. Or does not understand that idea at all.

Even when you hear or read an idea that another person expressed your awareness of the importance of that idea is personal.

2 Your awareness is your personal experience of reality. Your awareness illuminates all of your experience to some degree.

Every experience of awareness is limitlessly beneficial.

Specific experiences of awareness are not comparable.

3 You experience awareness when you're at peace, in peace, free from anxiety or distractions and calmly aware of any thing or event.

You can improve your awareness by composing your mind, breath and body as well as you can.

Your inner peace and harmony allow your mind, feelings and body to be natural and to sense what's important and positive, beneficial, to you personally.

4 You experience awareness when you're grateful to another person for their kindness and when you respect another person for the benefit that they contribute to other people. And when you share friendship with another person. And when you pity another person's suffering or need and help them if you can.

Your awareness of the qualities and feelings that you share with some people helps you to appreciate the well-being of other people and to cooperate and to be beneficial to other people.

5 You experience awareness when you hear or consider an idea that’s important to you personally as you understand or experience it when you intend to be the best person that you can be.

When you hear or consider an idea when you’re careless or distracted you might not know whether the idea or concern is important to you personally or not.

6 Your awareness of your best thinking and priorities is internal, intangible.

  Another person can see only your external appearance and hear the words that you say. Your intention to be the best person that you can be cannot be perceived by another person. Another person cannot know whether you're being as integrated and positive as you can be at the present time or not.

The apparent or reputed qualities or power of another person cannot affect or overrule your emotions or thinking. Don’t be attracted or persuaded to fear.

7  Don't conform to another person or association to maintain your integrity and positive concern. Although you might depend on or cooperate with another person or association for some purposes or needs don't follow another person or association to maintain or improve your integrity and positive concern.

Anything that you experience most of all in your relationship with another person is not reliably beneficial for maintaining your integrity. If you rely on help from another person to maintain your integrity that will distract your awareness of the conduct of your mind and you might not be able to maintain your integrity.

If you depend unnecessarily on another person or association you might become preoccupied with imagining what another person might be thinking.

8 You can improve your awareness by being the best person that you can be.

When you’re being the best person that you can be you can evaluate new ideas and view your experience more clearly.

When you’re being the best person that you can be you can decide whether an idea is important to you personally or relatively not important.

9 Any ideas that you have already learned might contribute to your integrity and your sense of what’s positive or might not.

You don't need to know more about something than you already know to be the best person that you can be at the present time. Learning something because another person thinks that you need to learn it disregards that you’re inherently aware and able to decide what concerns are important to you personally.

You will become more aware of what's important to you personally as you continue to be the best person that you can be and maintain your awareness of what you already value as well as you can.

4 Happiness and unhappiness

1 Happiness is a natural quality and resource of everyone's mind and best thinking. Happiness and freedom from confusion and suffering are an outcome of the inherent, natural and positive qualities and actions of your mind, speech and body.

Unhappiness and suffering are an outcome of negative and obscuring actions and habits of your mind, speech and body.

  Within conditions of freedom from physical suffering the main cause of unhappiness is holding negative or unimportant thoughts in your mind or thinking.

2 Happiness arises naturally when you're in peace and harmony and when you're aware of the common good and as an effect of being the best person that you can be and doing positive actions of your mind, speech and body.

Happiness that you experience when you're in peace and harmony is a natural experience of the good that you inherently are and that you can experience more thoroughly.

Happiness that you experience when you're grateful for the care that you have received from other people and when you’re being kind and compassionate to other people is also a natural experience of the good that you inherently are and that you can mature.

Happiness that you experience when you prioritize your most important values and concerns is a natural experience of the good that you inherently are and a source of hope and confidence in your potential to become free from confusion and suffering.

  You'll be happy within most of your personal experiences and relationships with other people when you maintain awareness of your best vision and positive concerns and you'll experience less intense or prolonged unhappiness when you avoid doing negative actions.

3 Your personal happiness is the subject of the word happiness when the word is used in this text except when the word refers clearly to another person’s happiness. The word happiness in this text refers to one individual person’s feelings and experience.

Your feelings are experienced personally in your heart or mind. All of the pure and positive meanings of the word heart are included in the meaning of the word mind as it’s used in this text.

  Happiness and unhappiness feel or appear in the ways that they're experienced in each individual person's feelings and thoughts.

There's no shared awareness or common knowledge of anyone's feelings by another person.

4 Your innate, natural and wholesome experiences are most often accompanied by happiness and well-being and followed by happiness and well-being. Your happiness and well-being can help to illuminate your awareness and sense of what's positive.

You cannot reliably communicate your happiness or well-being to another person. Don't expect to be able to describe your happiness or well-being in words or other expressions that reliably communicate your experience to another person.

You don't need to think that you cannot be happy and well because you cannot describe your happiness and well-being in words or other expressions that are impressive or interesting to another person.

5 Happiness does not occur reliably as an effect of seeking happy experiences. You cannot reasonably expect to be happy just by wishing to be happy or by any efforts to become happy.

  Don't expect that feelings of happiness, satisfaction or fulfilled expectations will follow quickly from intending to be the best person that you can be.

  Some of your experiences won't be easy or pleasant even when you have intended to be the best person that you can be for a long time.

6  Everyone experiences unhappiness and suffering sometimes. Even when you intend to be the best person that you can be you'll still be subject to some latent and habitual emotionality and discursive thinking and you'll experience unhappiness and suffering sometimes.

If you hold thoughts of malice you’ll suffer anxiety. If you work for what you don’t need you won’t feel secure or content.

Unhappiness can also arise in your relationships with other people and in some environments and events.

It's not beneficial for maintaining or improving your integrity to occupy much of your thinking with suppositions about how you might be happy if some conditions were different.

7  Happiness and unhappiness are not always caused by recent influential actions of your mind, speech or body nor caused by knowable aspects of the relationships that you're experiencing at the present time.

Some traditions propose the idea that happy and fortunate experiences will follow as a result of your awareness and doing and reinforcing positive actions of your mind, speech and body and that happy and positive potentials will continue through your experience of dying and living again and through this process you can progress to a state of freedom from confusion and suffering.

The traditions propose the related idea that unhappy and unfortunate experiences will follow as a result of your ignorance and doing and reinforcing negative actions of your mind, speech and body and that unhappy and negative potentials will continue through your experience of dying and living again until they're purified by your awareness and doing and reinforcing positive actions of your mind, speech and body.

Your ordinary or conventional thinking might not accommodate those ideas although they contribute good perspectives that can help you to make your most important decisions.

Valuing those ideas can help to motivate you to be the best person that you can be and to avoid doing or reinforcing negative actions of your mind, speech or body.

8 Your experiences can be considered to be effects of previous actions of your mind, speech and body and your present awareness and perspectives. These can be considered to have developed during your previous lifetimes during which causes and conditions eventually brought together the experiences that you are familiar with now.

This is the way that things appear to work in the intervals of time that can be observed in daily life and this perspective clears your attention to make the best that you can of all of your experiences.

9 Whatever happens, when you cannot understand your experience or when you cannot see far or deeply into something so that what's happening or some concern is obstructing and overwhelming your well-being, choose the most meaningful and positive possibilities that you can see.

Your intention to be the best person that you can be is a reliable standard to maintain your integrity and positive concern equally in circumstances of happiness and well-being and in circumstances of confusion and suffering.

Your intention to be positive can illuminate your memories, emotions and thinking and relationships with other people to some degrees.

10 Don't allow unhappiness or concern with a problem to become the subject of most of your thinking. You don't need to devote most of your attention to your own or another person's problem except in conditions of an emergency.

The word problem when it’s used in this text refers to an idea that persistently troubles your thinking or a concern that interferes with your freedom to apply your attention to a subject that you choose. None of the positive or creative meanings of the word problem are intended when the word is used in this text.

Don’t assume that you're maintaining positive concern when you're unhappy or concerned with a problem. Don't think fatalistically that you're obliged to be subject to unhappiness or a problem. Don't imagine that you'll see light at the end of a supposed tunnel, that a dawn of understanding and liberation of your mind will occur when you're not being the best person that you can be.

11 Unhappiness, anxiety or stress don't liberate anyone nor do they help anyone to value other people or even to be aware of other people.

You cannot learn conduct leading to happiness and well-being from experiencing unhappiness or a problem nor from preoccupation with or mentally entertaining the supposed permanence of a problem or suffering.

12 Don't think that unhappiness or a problem is somehow solid. The idea that your feelings, thoughts or mind are solid, material, or that there could be an unchangeable problem or suffering does not agree with your experience of the changing nature of your feelings and thinking.

  Unhappiness or concern with a problem as if it were a material condition won't help your thinking to be positive nor even suggest that you can think positively.

13 Don't cling to or dwell on an idea or concern that you view as most of all a problem as you experience it, even though you think that you’ll transform it somehow to be positive.

At the times when you cannot solve, dismiss or dispel a problem enough to restore some peace of mind and freedom to apply your attention to a subject that you choose, don't hold the problem in your mind or thinking for the purpose of becoming free from it except in conditions of an emergency.

  Don't do anything because you think that you cannot detach your emotions or thinking from that impulse or experience. Don't follow a subject with the motivation to be free from being influenced or affected by it. When you follow or pursue a subject or concern you’ll unavoidably be influenced and affected by it.

14   If you concentrate most of your attention on a problem you might obscure or obstruct your access to the clarity and illuminating potential of your mind.

When you cannot integrate an idea into the context of your values and important thinking or if a concern interferes with your freedom to apply your attention to a subject that you choose you can reasonably consider that the idea or concern is distracting from your values and important thinking.

If you don’t apply your attention to removing the confusion and suffering that you perceive in your mind or thinking the confusion and suffering might continue for a long time and appear endless. You might descend into states of deeper suffering due to the worsening effects of frustration and anger.

15   When you’re unhappy or concerned with a problem you can take refuge in awareness of your inherent worth and positive potential. Remember that your essential nature is absolutely good and that you can always improve.

This does not mean that you can reasonably or safely ignore a problem but you can intend to be the best person that you can be about that subject.

Then your unhappiness and problems will gradually appear less solid or permanent and you’ll have better understanding and perspectives regarding all of your experience.

5 Your sense of what’s positive

1 It’s important to learn about the results of doing positive actions of your mind, speech and body and the results of doing negative actions or you might hold mistaken views about what the results of doing positive actions will be and what the results of doing negative actions will be.

If you hold mistaken views about the effects of doing positive or negative actions you might not continue to do some positive actions that you already do, and you might not do some things that could be very beneficial because you don't know any better or you might do some negative actions because you don't care.

2 Positive actions cause positive effects. The word positive in this text means good and beneficial.

  Negative actions cause negative effects. The word negative in this text means ignorant and harmful.

Positive actions don’t ever cause negative effects.

Negative actions don’t ever cause positive effects.

3 You can concern your attention with negativity beneficially only about your own thought, speech or bodily action. If you concern your attention much with another person's negative conduct or appearance that will distract your awareness of the conduct of your own mind and your sense of what's positive.

Your own character and behavior include some faults and failings when you evaluate your conduct by the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you value as important. You accidentally ignore or disregard being the best person that you can be sometimes.

Additionally, conforming to scheduled routines, dependence on technology and material reasons for interacting with other people most of the time can distract you from being aware of the conduct of your mind. You can become insensitive to the common good that you share with other people.

4 You can evaluate all of your thinking and experience by the reliable standard of maintaining your awareness of your inherent, natural and wholesome values and your sense of what's positive as well as you can.

Don't think, speak or act bodily regarding any subject or concern below the standards of the thoughts that you have already learned that turn your mind toward integrity and positive concern.

You'd be prudent to evaluate your negative thought, speech and bodily actions only by the liberating perspectives that are described in the thoughts that you have already learned that turn your mind toward integrity and positive concern.

5 You won't reliably recognize and cease from doing a negative action by imagining what another person or some people might think about your action or appearance. Imagining what another person might think about your negative action can distract you from recognizing and ceasing from doing a negative action and restoring your integrity and positive concern.

Although another person or some people might disapprove and might attempt to interfere with your speech or other expression that they don’t like, imagining what another person might think about your action or appearance won't reliably help you to recognize and cease from doing a negative action.

When you maintain the most important rules of conduct that you have already learned the precepts that you observe will most often keep you from erring far from integrated conduct and will help you to remember how your integrity can be restored.

6 You need to consider your negative actions in the context of your inherent limitless value and positive potential.

Negative thought, speech and bodily actions have arisen from beginingless time within the ultimately pure state of your mind. And negative thoughts will continue to arise in your mind and be expressed and experienced until they diminish and ultimately cease as they’re purified by your inherent goodness and your positive thought, speech and bodily actions.

Your natural wish to be happy and your good intentions are an outcome and proof that you’re inherently good and that you can always improve.

7 You can consider your negative actions also in the context of your good intentions and habits. When you're devoted to maintaining your integrity your thinking is occupied most often with being the best person that you can be. You don't occupy most of your time in negative or casual thought, speech or bodily actions.

  When you're devoted to being the best person that you can be the intensity of your negative thinking, speech and bodily actions is most often small.

  And the negative actions that you do can be ceased more easily in your mind, speech and bodily conduct than they could be ceased if the negative actions were done in the context of most of all casual thought, speech and bodily actions.

8 Anyone does a negative action only because of being in a condition of ignorance.

  No one does a negative action with clear vision and foresight. No one would do a negative action if they knew that they will unavoidably experience confusion and suffering at a later time as a result of doing the negative action.

  You might sometimes view your experience from the condition and outlook of a powerfully influential emotion or opinion. You might not care sometimes to be the best person that you can be or to be kind.

9 Your negative actions or problems are not a sign of the sincerity -or not of your intention to be the best person that you can be at the times when you turn your mind toward integrity and positive concern.

  Your negative actions or problems are not a sign of your capability -or not to devote your mind, speech and body to thoroughly beneficial concerns.

  Your negative actions or problems are not a sign of the benefit -or not of your actions to improve your integrity at the times when you devote your mind, speech and body to improving your integrity.

10 Negative thought, speech and bodily actions are only harmful.

  There's no beneficial or controllable negative thinking or expression.

  “The only virtue of negativity is that the negativity can be ceased.” Kalu Rinpoche

11  You can intend to cease all the negative thought, speech and bodily actions that you recognize in your conduct.

  There's no allowable or safe interval of time between -becoming aware that you're doing a negative action and ceasing from doing it.

  Cease from doing any negative action that you recognize easily that you're doing and that you can cease easily from doing. Cease from doing all of the negative actions that you recognize easily that you're doing and that you can cease easily from doing.

12 Don't intentionally imagine an action that you have already learned that you should not do.

That something might be imaginable or thinkable is not a sufficient reason to hold that thought in your mind or thinking nor to express it through your speech or through an action of your body.

If you carelessly imagine destructive or absurd stories that can result in alternating valuing your integrity and positive concern sometimes and disregarding your integrity and positive concern at other times.

13  Don't be attentive to an idea that seems negative to you. You don't need to and you should not occupy your thinking much with an idea that seems to contradict or interfere with your awareness of the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you value and your sense of the common good that you share with other people.

Don’t be attracted or persuaded to devote your attention to a subject that confuses your sense of right from wrong.

Your best understanding of any subject can be experienced when you renounce being concerned with negative or casual views about the subject.

14 The experience of a thought arising in your mind or thinking should be distinguished from intending to hold or reinforce that thought in your mind or expressing it through your speech or bodily action.

Anything that you have already experienced and anything that you have ever heard about might possibly arise as a thought in your mind. That happens naturally to everyone a lot of the time. You cannot stop that from happening and it doesn't matter. You can ignore it.

When you don't hold or reinforce a thought or express it through your speech or bodily action the fact that you thought it briefly doesn't matter.

15 It’s not necessary or beneficial to hold negative feelings or ideas nor to express negative feelings or ideas to another person.

If you hold or express negative feelings or ideas you'll reinforce your negative thoughts and concerns. That will obscure your awareness of your well-being and your sense of what's positive and will interfere with all of your relationships.

16 Don't do any action of your mind, speech or body that you know you should not do, not even if you can easily think, or say or do the action.

Don't take a chance in doing anything that might cause harm to you or to another person, not even in apparently safe or familiar circumstances.

  The only negative actions that you do should be unconscious ones, never careless or calculated risks.

17  Don't knowingly approach the perimeters of how far you think that you can dare to do a negative action before the effects become too hazardous for you to tolerate.

Don't suppose that you can safely or controllably continue to do a negative action and remain within a safe perimeter of not -unknowingly or uncontrollably doing more negative actions of your mind, speech and body.

If you knowingly approach the perimeters of how far you think that you can dare to do a negative action you might forget your most important values and might lose your way.

18 Doing any negative action of your mind, speech or body can obscure or distract your awareness of the conduct of your mind and your sense of what's positive.

  Don't underestimate the immediate and potential harm to you or to another person that might be the result of doing any negative action however unimportant or small the negative action might seem to you or might seem to another person.

Any negative action that you do might possibly contribute to you doing more negative actions or might contribute to another person doing a negative action.

19  Even though you might think that a negative action is subtle don't think that it's not negative or not harmful.

Distinctions between subtle and coarse should not be mistaken to be distinctions between positive and negative.

Distinctions between subtle and coarse are conventions of familiarity and manners.

20 Don't value an idea as being reliably integrating or positive that can be thought or experienced only in the context of most of all negative or distracting concerns.

Regarding a positive subject that's accompanied by a negative subject as you experience or think about them, the positive subject should be distinguished and separated from the negative in your mind or thinking or the negative might seem to be important from being associated with the positive.

When you think about positive and negative subjects together you cannot be sure that the positive will illuminate your understanding of the negative. The negative might interfere with or overrule the benefit of comparing the positive and the negative.

21 Don’t carelessly join a positive idea to a negative idea just because that positive idea can be associated with that negative idea conventionally or casually.

Don’t think or talk about a negative idea unless the negative idea might interfere with a positive concern that you’re considering.

Comparing or contrasting a positive idea with a negative idea unnecessarily can distort your vision of the positive idea and might impede or obstruct the benefits of a positive concern.

22 When a positive action is accompanied by a negative action, such as when you help another person but you speak harshly to them, the positive action that you do will cause positive effects and the negative action that you do will cause negative effects.

Positive intention does not cancel or compensate for negative speech or negative physical action although your positive intention causes positive effects in your personal development.

Being the best person that you can be and all of your positive actions purify and reduce the effects of your negative actions but it’s not possible to know how long the purifying will need to continue.

23 No one has a material accumulation or permanence of negativity that anyone can beneficially examine to see if it has become smaller or that anyone can safely inquire into for a theoretical or intellectual acquaintance with it. Don't expect that a negative concern or problem can be reduced or remedied by obtaining some kind of control, possession or grasp of the subject or concern.

You cannot beneficially confront a negative concern or problem. Don't attempt to apply thoughts about integrity and positive concern to a negative concern or problem, as if someone or something were able to confront and resist a negative concern or problem.

  Don't expect that integrity and positive concern can be fashioned into a material or conceptual force or power that can be controlled to confront and overcome an imagined solid problem.

24 Whatever you have not done or experienced that you intended to do or wanted to experience don't do anything that you have already learned that you should not do.

  If you're impatient to obtain a particular benefit or to achieve a particular project you might develop craving and become exasperated and you might do negative actions of your thought, speech or body influenced by artificial urgency, spite or unconcern.

  Don't permit yourself to harbor negative thought or to express negative speech or manners, supposing that because you maintain your integrity sometimes and have developed some positive qualities, or because another person approves of your conduct or influence, that some of your negative thinking or expression is not harmful or is an allowable ornament of your personality. Or that the integrity that you experience sometimes transforms your negative actions to be -not negative.

25   You might become preoccupied with thoughts of negative actions that you remember or heard about and you might imagine negative effects of the actions. A negative thought or concern with apparent negativity might expand to become a large obstacle to your awareness of your limitless inner value and being the best person that you can be regarding that subject or concern.

If you don't solve, dismiss or dispel a negative concern or problem as you experience or think about it by applying your best understanding to the concern then you might think that the concern or problem needs to be solved, explained or overcome in the terms of another person or convention that contradicts and cancels some of your values and understanding.

You might become subject to another person or convention that explains or controls aspects of your experience that you cannot understand or control.

26 Don't intentionally or knowingly hold or reinforce a negative thought, tendency or habit that you recognize in your mind or thinking. You don't need to allow a negative thought, tendency or habit to remain in your mind or thinking.

Don't expect that merely the passage of time such as a period of months or years ensures that a tendency to do a particular negative action won't arise again in your mind and potential conduct. A negative thought, tendency or habit might arise repeatedly and become more influential if you don't remove a negative thought, tendency or habit that you perceive in your mind or thinking. You might think a negative thought, or speak negatively or do a negative bodily action repeatedly.

The recognition or awareness that your calm, vision or kindness is distracted by habits and effects of your passion, aggression or ignorance is not sufficient to turn your mind toward integrity while you continue in the negative, distracted or disinterested conduct of your mind or thinking.

27 You don’t need to recognize a negative habit or tendency of your mind, speech or body for your sincere intention to maintain your integrity and positive concern to progressively remove the habit or tendency from your mind, speech and bodily conduct.

When you cease from doing a particular negative action of your mind, speech or body and you devote your mind, speech and body to maintaining and improving your integrity then any tendency or potential that remains in your personality to do that negative action again might not hinder maintaining and improving your integrity and positive concern.

28 Don't imagine that you'll immediately enjoy integrated vision and positive perspectives regarding your experience at the moment when you cease from doing a negative action of your mind, speech or body.

  After you have done a negative action of your mind, speech or body you might experience confusion regarding any subject or concern, and you might not enjoy integrated vision and positive perspectives regarding your experience until some time has passed, until you have restored your best vision and positive perspectives.

  You might need to re-direct your attention repeatedly to view your experience with your best vision and positive perspectives until some time has passed after you have done a negative action.

29 If you want to have more self-control or autonomy to do or experience something positive, or to not do or not experience something negative, reduce your concern with whatever you don’t need to have or don’t need to experience and it will be replaced with improved awareness and confidence.

  Maintaining integrated and positive conduct of your mind, speech and body, as you understand it and as well as you can, is sufficient for you to develop beneficial qualities and relationships and to diminish harmful actions, habits and potentials.

  The result of maintaining your integrity and positive concern will be that your negative thought, speech and bodily actions will gradually diminish and negative experiences will gradually diminish in your relationships with other people. All of your thoughts, expression and experience will become progressively more understandable and beneficial.

30 Your awareness and sense of what’s positive are always accompanied by hope.

  Hope is personal awareness of your inherent limitless value and positive potential.

  Don’t add anything to the method that you practice to improve your awareness.

6 Caution, criticism

1 Everyone is integrated and positive sometimes. Everyone intends to be the best person that they can be sometimes.

Everyone is aware and positive regarding countless aspects of their feelings, thoughts and relationships with other people much of the time. Everyone understands some other people's feelings and thinking and communicates reasonably to some degrees to obtain what they need and to cooperate with other people and to pursue goals.

No one is ignorant to the extreme of being more impulsive or habitual than aware and resourceful most of the time. No one does most of all negative actions for a long time because too many things would go wrong.

2 You should know that someone who appears to be potentially harmful might be harmful. Don't ignore anything that seems obvious to you. Maintain all of the appropriate cautions.

While you maintain all of the appropriate cautions, maintain your awareness of that person's inherent goodness in your own mind and thinking.

 Don't maintain a relationship with someone who you think that you need to forgive or tolerate for something that they did or appeared to do or appear to still do now. Don’t ever talk about it.

3 There’s no beneficial idea that's most of all critical of someone or a group of people except in conditions of immediate danger.

Don't expect that criticizing something will reliably improve anyone's awareness and sense of what's positive.

Don't intentionally or knowingly hold critical ideas about the speech, action or appearance of someone or a group of people. Similarly, don't think much about what another person or a group of people might think critically about you.

4  If you hold critical ideas about someone or a group of people, or if you think much about what another person or a group of people might think critically about you, then you won't be able to recognize some of your own negative thought, speech and bodily conduct, and you won't be able to recognize some positive feelings and thinking that you might share with a person or association that you criticize.

  If you don't dismiss or dispel critical ideas about the speech, action or appearance of someone or a group of people, you might develop a tendency or habit of thinking critically and emotions of anger might be reinforced in your mind.

Your thinking might become preoccupied with criticism and anger against anyone and against any group of people and you might express negative speech and actions uncontrollably. And you might become subject to confusion, fears and misfortune.

5 Don’t expect to divine the value of everything that you observe or hear about. Value in this context means virtue, goodness.

You might disrespect someone because of nearly any difference of their conduct or appearance from your customs or preferences. You might doubt or deny that they’re being the best person that they can be or that they’re aware and kind.

There are differences in some of the customs and manners that express values between people in different societies, conditions and times. When you perceive a difference in someone's conduct from your vision of goodness and sense of what's positive, consider that the other person might view their conduct differently from how you view it. A difference from your values or preference that you perceive in the conduct or appearance of another person might be an expression of their values, as they understand or experience it. A contrast or exception to some of your familiar ideas or manners might not be incompatible with your important values.

6  You don't need to think much about someone whose conduct appears to differ from your values or manners.

Don't think much about someone who expresses criticism of integrity and positive concern as you understand them. Or expresses distrust that you intend to be the best person you can be. Or expresses criticism of your relatives or friends.

You don't need to maintain a relationship with someone if it hurts your feelings or disagrees with your important thinking, but don't slight or disparage anyone.

7 Regret, discretion

1 Vision does not disturb calm or harmony. Vision in this context means awareness of your inherent limitless value and positive potential.

Harmony in this context means harmless and cordial interactions between people.

Repentance is vision, recognition and regret of your own negative action and is experienced internally. Repentance does not increase or improve by expressing it to anyone. Don't imagine that expressing regret will cancel all of the negative effects.

2 When you think that something you did was disrespectful and destructive you need to recognize the gravity of that disrespect and destructiveness, even though other actions that you do are good.

Don't think that you interfered with or distracted another person by anything that you felt or thought about them. Don't apologize to someone for anything that you felt or thought about them that you did not express in your speech or bodily conduct.

Don't talk about the negative feelings or thoughts that you experience sometimes in your mind.

3 When you think that you're interfering with or distracting someone as they might experience your conduct or influence, stop doing whatever you think is interfering with or distracting them.

 Then apologize to the person who you interfered with or distracted if you think that apologizing to them won't cause them more interference or distraction.

  Apologize immediately or as soon as possible, completely, in very few, precise words.

4  Express regret positively. Don't repeat negative words or describe negative actions. You can say that you sincerely regret that you said or expressed something that was disrespectful or destructive. The person who you express regret to might know what you regret.

  Apologize only to the person who you think you interfered with or distracted. If you interfered with or distracted someone in the sight or hearing of another person, you'd be prudent to acknowledge the interference or distraction that you caused to the other person who saw or heard it if you think that acknowledging it to them won't cause more interference or distraction.

  After you've apologized for interfering with or distracting someone, don't talk about that subject any more.

5 Don't identify with your reputation for having done a negative action.

  Don't try to modify anyone's reputation in your talking or other expression.

  Don't try to show contrition. If you demonstrate contrition for having done a negative action anyone who hears about it might become preoccupied with negative thinking.

6  Proving your repentance to another person is impossible because repentance is internal.

  It’s natural for you to become sad when you think about a negative action.

Don't try to show that you're not sad when you think about a negative action because you'll appear to not care.

7 Don't avoidably describe a negative action, fault or failing. Don't think that anyone could benefit from thinking about a negative action.

  A negative action that’s described will be imagined and might be expressed by anyone who hears about it. Anyone who hears about a negative action might react in some way that's potential in their feelings or thinking.

  If you describe a negative action you might become the subject of someone's dislike and anger.

8  Don't intend to hold a negative memory in your mind or thinking. You cannot reliably think positively while you intend to hold the memory of a negative action that anyone did in the past.

  You don't need to hold a negative memory in your mind. If you think that someone was mistaken in the past you can acknowledge that and then stop thinking about it anymore.

If you intend to hold a negative memory in your mind you might diminish and lose your freedom from confusion and suffering.

9 You can relate all of your experience to the thoughts that turn your mind toward integrity and positive concern.

Being the best person that you can be and practicing a reliable method to improve your integrity will liberate and enlighten your experience as much as possible and you’ll experience improved calmness and clarity of your mind and thinking.

8 Awareness and ideas

1 Awareness is inherent, natural and wholesome. Your awareness is nurtured and matures in your experience of receiving kindness and care from your family, neighbors, friends and other people and by you intending to be the best person that you can be and learning how to cooperate with other people and how to help other people.

You’re aware whenever you appreciate and respect even when there’s no idea in your mind.

Your experiences that illuminate your awareness are your happiest experiences.

2 You can become more aware through understanding the meanings of ideas that illuminate your awareness and that describe the positive potentials of your experience.

The ideas that illuminate your awareness and that describe the positive potentials of your experience are your most important ideas.

Every inherent, natural and wholesome idea that you value illuminates many aspects of your understanding and experience.

3 The ideas that you have already learned in your relationships with your family, neighbors, friends and other people are experienced as pleasant by the whole range of your physical senses.

These ideas include wishes to accomplish simple needs and cautions regarding hazards to your well-being.

These ideas are your most reliable standards to test the value of all of the new ideas and experiences that you encounter.

4 Everyone receives some benefits and learns some of the values and conventions of their culture and society. Everyone meets people who express goodness and kindness and there are opportunities to learn good ideas and positive conduct in every family and society.

Everyone follows an education in some arts and sciences to some degrees to learn how other people think and feel and to experience what they want and to achieve projects and to help other people.

Everyone’s intention to cultivate excellence in any positive concern as they understand or experience it illuminates many aspects of their personal experience.

5 Everyone experiences unique causes and conditions and so each individual is aware of inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns and allows them to illuminate their thinking and expression more or less, to different degrees. During the early years of their life someone might have been deprived of natural affection and interest in their feelings and thinking in their relationships with their family and other people that nurture and mature awareness of inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns.

Whether someone was deprived of those benefits in the early years of their life or not, someone might not be interested in allowing awareness to illuminate their thinking and experience much or at all.

Someone might not know any better until they experience inner peace and better habits of thinking and more beneficial friends.

6 Your personal understanding determines the meaning of every idea that you think. Whatever you think an idea means is the meaning of that idea to you and determines how that idea will influence your conduct.

There’s no commonly understood meaning of any idea because although you might have learned what some people think an idea means you cannot reliably know how another person understands an idea or how important an idea is to another person.

The meanings of an idea are not so diverse that it's impossible to describe anything because you can learn ideas by hearing and reading them and you can express and share ideas and find mutual understanding and agreement with other people.

7 It's inherent in the limitless potential, natural clarity and unimpeded awareness of the mind itself that you can decide how important an idea is as you understand or experience it and that you can disregard an idea that interferes with your awareness of your well-being and sense of what's positive or that appears to conflict with the ideas that are already important to you.

An idea that interferes with your awareness of your well-being and sense of what's positive is not beneficial to you. Don't value an idea or concern as important to you personally that confuses or obstructs your awareness of the ideas that are already important to you.

Don't rely on or reinforce an idea or concern that you already know can misdirect your thinking to negative or unimportant concerns.

8 During the early years of your life you might have been subject to some insistent education or training that was permitted by a tradition or privilege or not. You might have been taught some ideas that hindered loving kindness and intelligence from nurturing and maturing your awareness.

Now that you have become an adult you can disregard other people's ideas in your own thinking without expressing disagreement or protest.

You can become more aware of what’s important to you personally. You can develop and mature.

9 You need to maintain the standards of conduct of your mind, speech and body and regarding your relationships with other people that you have already learned to maintain your integrity. Don't ignore or disregard the standards of integrity and positive concern that you have already learned that help you to maintain and renew your integrity.

If you think that the most important benefit of understanding the meanings of words is that words can help you to obtain some happiness and to achieve some material projects then you might underestimate the value of understanding the meanings of the words that you hear and think.

Then you might not use your ability to understand ideas to improve your awareness and experience.

10 An idea can be an aspect of your personal wisdom even though you learned it from another person.

Don't value an idea as important to you personally that belongs to another person or a particular group of people as you understand or experience it. If you hold another person's idea then you’ll be influenced by that idea in ways that you cannot understand or control.

All the ideas that you value are beneficial in the ways that they help you to be aware.

9 Beliefs, metaphors and symbols

1 Some of your important ideas are beliefs. A belief as the word is used here is an idea that was created by a person and that you value because illuminates your awareness as you understand or experience it.

You experience the benefits of a belief when the belief illuminates your awareness of your inherent qualities and positive potentials.

A belief that illuminates your awareness does not need to be supported by other ideas and you don't need to describe the benefits.

2 A belief can be represented by a metaphor or a symbol.

A metaphor is a word or phrase that someone decided or learned can represent a particular idea that's not communicated in the plain and simple meaning of the word or phrase. To learn the metaphoric meaning of a word or phrase you need to learn the information that describes what the metaphor is intended to mean. An analogy can express a metaphor.

A symbol is an object, shape or sound that someone decided or learned can represent a particular idea that's not an obvious purpose of the object, shape or sound. To learn the symbolic meaning of an object, shape or sound you need to learn the information that describes what the symbol is intended to mean. A gesture can express a symbol.

3 A belief as the word is used here is an idea that you understand or experience personally however another person or a particular group of people might understand or experience it.

Because your belief illuminates your awareness your belief is always free. Your belief cannot be compelled or obliged.

The opinion that believing is ignorant does not cancel the illuminating meaning of belief that’s described here.

4 Nearly everyone expresses awareness and harmony to some degrees most of the time. Some people express exemplary awareness and kindness. All of these positive expressions resonate through all of the dimensions of their influence.

These expressions might be valued as examples of awareness, harmony and kindness.

The same expressions might be represented as beliefs, metaphors and symbols.

5 You learn beliefs most often by hearing or reading about them. You can learn beliefs also by experiencing beauty and the arts.

Experiencing a belief illuminates your awareness.

No one believes insincerely or superficially.

6 Everyone learns and values a belief to different degrees. Or does not learn about that belief or does not value it.

You create some of your beliefs by valuing some of your personal experiences.

You might value a belief consciously or unconsciously.

7 You can experience beauty as illuminating as belief can be when the experience is authentic and positive.

Your experience of beauty might involve your feelings or might be serene.

Although you value your personal experiences of beauty a popular subject of beauty that’s not illuminating to you might not be beautiful as you experience it.

8 A belief can be illuminating or distracting.

If you think much about how another person might experience a particular belief that belief might not be illuminating to you but might be most of all distracting.

A belief might seem to represent or cancel any of the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas that you already value.

9 Don't avoidably rely on a belief to maintain your awareness and sense of what's positive.

A belief that might illuminate your awareness when you’re being the best person that you can be might obscure or obstruct your awareness and distort your sense of what's positive when you don't intend to be the best person that you can be or when you’re careless.

When you think or communicate in the terms of a belief at the times when you’re not being the best person that you can be the illuminating potential of that belief might be overruled by an influential opinion or convention.

10 Although your inherent, natural and wholesome ideas are experienced by the whole range of your physical senses your beliefs are not experienced by the whole range of your physical senses. So your beliefs are not reliable standards to evaluate the new ideas and experiences that you encounter.

If you feature or reinforce a belief regarding an important or urgent concern you might ignore your inherent qualities and potential and you might think that nothing that you decide can improve your experience or that you need to depend on help from another person.

Or you might identify with authority or power and you might express your views or will at any cost.

11 The following ideas describe a personal belief. These ideas describe my childhood belief in the gentle Jesus being actually near me and how I can imagine being in the presence of Jesus in the present time.

I imagine that I’m with Jesus in a country place beside a lake when he’s teaching his Beatitudes. He taught in simple language in the country.

It’s easy for me to imagine that I see him near me if I want him to be. He appears translucent like the reflection of the moon on still water.

I experience him as the presence of God. The expression of ultimate good and positive potential. A natural and completely kind person. He said that I and my father are one. My father loves you like he loves me.

I imagine that he’s sensitively attentive to my well-being and the well-being of all others with loving kindness. He said I have called you my friends.

He said follow me. I understand that he meant that I should follow what he taught in his Beatitudes and his example.

He said my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I will give you rest.

He said my grace is sufficient for all your needs. He told many parables that describe how negative ideas about anyone interfere with experiencing his grace.

Behaving personally in the way that the Beatitudes describe is necessary and sufficient.

He said father forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.

He showed that loving kindness endures suffering and still radiates loving kindness.

He said that a pure heart will see God. My confidence in him being near me does not need more ideas than these.

His teaching and example inspire me to be the best person that I can be as I understand it and as well as I can.

Neither history or time interfere with experiencing his presence in a moment of simple trust or sincere prayer.

I don’t need to imagine that I see him. He said I will never leave you or forsake you.

12 You don't need to learn more beliefs than you already have to understand important ideas and to mature your inherent qualities and potentials.

You can intend to clarify or sublime the beliefs that you perceive in your mind and thinking into awareness of your inherent, natural and wholesome qualities and potentials as well as you can.

However much you value a particular belief as being beneficial to you personally don’t use a belief to describe yourself.

10 Opinions and conventions

1 Some of your ideas are the opinions and demands of other people regarding your conduct or appearance that govern your experience to some degrees. The words opinion and convention as they’re used in this text refer to another person's opinion or demand regarding your conduct or appearance that affects you so that you conform to it. The opinion might be an idea that another person or a group of people demand that you should think or should not think. Or a word that you should say or should not say. Or a physical action that you should do or should not do.

Some ideas are featured and expressing disinterest in them is disapproved or forbidden in every society.

An opinion or convention as the words are used here is an idea or a manner of conduct that you understand or experience personally however another person or a group of people might understand or experience it. The ideas that an opinion might be an expression of another person's knowledge or ignorance or that an opinion needs to be accompanied by sufficient evidence to be trustworthy or needs to be accompanied by sufficient reason to be fair don't invalidate the meanings of the words opinion and convention as the words are used here.

2 Most of your opinions and manners are learned by conforming to the ideas and manners of people who you don't know and through the influence of your formal education and entertainment.

Everyone is subject to a particular opinion or demand regarding their conduct or appearance more or less to different degrees of obligation and conforming. Or is not subject to that particular opinion or demand at all.

Some of your opinions and manners are formed by your own preferences and habits.

3 There’s a popular opinion that you can improve another person’s well-being reliably by providing for their material benefit or by promoting particular ideas for them to learn. A material or creative aspect of another person’s experience is reported to be lacking and is argued to be necessary. Don't suppose that someone needs help from another person based on blame or expectation regarding some aspect their conduct or appearance.

Naturally responsible parents provide all that they think their children need physically and need to learn as well as they can. Being subject to another person’s influence or following another person’s ideas don’t reliably improve any adult person’s well-being except in some kinds of emergencies.

The idea that you can reliably improve another person’s well-being by providing material benefit or by promoting particular ideas can overrule your awareness and thinking and can justify that you disregard the awareness and feelings of other people.

4 You need to learn new ideas and procedures continually when you live in a changing society.

Maintain awareness of your important thinking and priorities as well as you can whenever you need devote your attention to learning or managing a material or abstract concern.

No material or abstract concern is anyone's most important thinking or priority except in an emergency.

5 Regarding your education and entertainment you'll experience diminishing awareness and control of your well-being and sense of what's positive if you disregard your integrity and positive concern even temporarily.

If you follow stories that describe negative conduct or events without pity for all who suffered and also pity for all who appeared negative you'll reinforce negative thinking even though you don't mean to.

Disregarding the harm of holding negative opinions is a common mistake that obscures everyone’s awareness and sense of what's positive to some degrees most of the time.

6 You might be confident that you can understand your experience whenever you intend to understand your experience. You might be able to find integrating and positive perspectives regarding your experience most of the time when you intend to understand your experience. And you might be confident that some of the people who you know can help you to understand your experience if you ask them for guidance or advice.

You might none the less spend long intervals of time relatively unaware of your important ideas and priorities.

At the times when you’re thinking most of all conventionally or casually you might conform your conduct and appearance to the opinions and demands of people who you don’t know and the influence of movies and social media or that you made up.

7 You might sometimes be overwhelmed by more information than you can integrate into the field of what you already understand or than you can disregard or set aside. You might experience an imagined atmosphere of proposed opinions and demands regarding your conduct and appearance that you're accustomed to accept as unavoidable.

Any idea that’s important to you might overrule any other idea that’s important to you when you don’t decide which idea is the most important to your thinking and conduct personally in the present moment.

Any idea that you hold as an opinion might hinder loving kindness and intelligence from illuminating your awareness.

8 You might hold an opinion or follow a convention consciously or unconsciously.

Your opinions and manners that are formed by your own preferences and habits and the opinions and manners that you share with some of your family, neighbors and friends might be beneficial to you personally or not. Your opinions and manners that you learned from your education and entertainment might overwhelm your awareness and sense of what's positive.

You can diminish the influence of other people’s ideas that you hold in your mind or thinking. You will need to follow less syndicated news, entertainment and fashion motivated shopping.

11 Persuasion, influence

1 An idea that’s a product of persuasion joins a negative idea or concern to a positive idea or concern to achieve an intended purpose.

Persuasion might suggest that something resembles another thing so that one will be valued as if it were the same as the other or might insist that the name of something positive should be joined by analogy to a particular subject or concern. Persuasion might promote a project by telling a story of positive and negative information woven together with history and entertainment or might brand something as the property of a specific person or a particular group of people.

Persuasion can be expressed in words or manners or through something designed or manufactured.

2 Some ideas are intended to introduce doubt into your awareness of what’s good and important to you. Some ideas propose that you should not trust your understanding of your experience.

The idea that you need to be schooled in the most important ideas by people who don’t know you disregards how everyone is born and cared for and disrespects your inherent awareness and the positive concerns that you already share with your family, neighbors and friends.

You're not obliged to test or challenge your values and important ideas by introducing critical or alternative ideas to compete against your important ideas and priorities. You won't have many important ideas and priorities left if you apply yourself to testing, challenging or discrediting them.

3 Obliging someone to express their feelings or thinking is rule.

You're not obliged to show and tell all that you feel and think in manners that are agreeable to someone who's observing you or who wants to know something about you. If you devote much effort to developing a personality that you can express to everyone then you might think that nothing is important that you cannot express agreeably or profitably to other people.

Consenting to obey can seem to be free but even the best aspects of submission are inseparable from fear. Fear blinds awareness so that conforming can seem to be necessary.

4 Recorded history and entertainment are commonly misused to describe some people and manners of conduct critically or carelessly. Some people, governments and media devote effort to describe some people destructively. Hurtful ideas are commonly expressed about some people and manners of conduct or appearance.

Some people are publicised as an example of permanent bad character and potential harm to all other people although no one like that really exists.

  Don't consent or submit to art or performance that demands your attention or disregards your feelings as you experience it. Fiction and edited media combine provocative and suggestive ideas with special effects that might overwhelm your feelings and awareness.

5 Holding other people’s ideas in your mind or thinking by your consent or submission or by resisting them can perpetuate your subjection to ideas that originated in other people's thinking and that disregard your well-being.

You might forget that the ideas that are promoted are other people's ideas. You might consent or submit to follow some ideas or manners of conduct that are promoted. Or you might resist that you're not allowed to disagree with or disregard other people's ideas and you might become preoccupied with judgment.

Thinking about anyone or any manner of conduct or appearance carelessly or too much can obscure or obstruct your awareness of your inherent, natural and wholesome qualities and positive potential.

6 An idea that’s a product of persuasion can be mistaken for awareness but it doesn’t help to understand new ideas and experiences like awareness does and it obstructs or obscures awareness.

An idea that’s a product of persuasion can be mistaken for a belief but you cannot distill or contemplate it so that it will become knowledge like a belief can become. An idea that’s a product of persuasion might include beliefs, metaphors and symbols but the illuminating potentials of beliefs are not reliably experienced in persuasion.

An idea that’s a product of persuasion can be mistaken for an opinion but you cannot describe it precisely enough to examine or discuss it and improve or dismiss it like you can with an opinion or convention. An idea that’s a product of persuasion might affirm or resist any other ideas.

7 An idea that’s a product of persuasion can influence your thinking, speech and conduct in ways that you cannot understand or control.

Although you might be aware that an idea that’s a product of persuasion is not reliable when you consider it, when the idea is repeated often in your hearing and experience you might become accustomed to tolerating it and become influenced by it.

When you’re overwhelmed by many different ideas that you don’t integrate or disregard then persuasion can obstruct or obscure your awareness and can replace your beliefs and familiar conventions.

8 Compelling and troubling ideas that are products of persuasion can accumulate in your experience and perceptions. The influence of persuasion in broadcast news, entertainment and casual conversations can result in you developing habits of thinking and relating to other people in the language and manners of persuasion.

You might become addicted to stimulation or to a particular state of mind or to a state of calmness without awareness.

Being the best person that you can be and remembering the ideas that illuminate your awareness and the values that you share with some of your family, neighbors and friends can protect you from being overwhelmed by persuasion.

9 You don’t need to wonder for a long time whether an idea is a product of persuasion or if an idea that you think is persuasion is really your misunderstanding.

You can dismiss or dispel persuasion as you understand or experience it. Persuasion is not necessary or helpful to understand or experience good.

All of the positive potentials of an idea will endure when you dismiss or dispel the negative aspects of the idea as you understand or experience it.

12 Conversation, courtesy

1 You need to express your best thinking and feelings to develop mutual understanding and friendship with another person and especially to get to know the best of one another. Expressing your best thinking about a subject is the only way that another person can know how well you understand the subject.

You can usually understand the meaning of the words that you hear when you converse with another person in a language that you understand. When you can ask the other person to clarify the meaning of something that they said and they will try to clarify it that exchange of ideas with another person is a conversation.

When you’re listening to another person talking but you cannot ask them to clarify the meaning of something that they said then you're not engaged in a conversation with the other person. You're listening.

2 The plain meaning of a word is always the most important meaning of the word. All of the additional meanings of a word are relevant to some degrees or not.

Intend that primarily the plain meaning of every word that you hear and consider will influence your thinking and expression.

You can sometimes diminish your attention to the precise meanings of words in poetry and music and appreciate the range of their suggested meanings and the feelings that their rhythms and melodies evoke in you personally. You need to trust that their influence in your thinking and feelings won’t cause you to experience confusion or suffering.

3 You might need to exchange greetings and polite remarks sometimes to signal that you're reasonable and cooperative and the exchange can be positive when you engage in it with sincerity and self-restraint. Being casual or unconcerned does not allow you to disregard the manners of courtesy that are relevant to you in the present circumstances.

Although you might wish to appear that you’re a good person and it's worth your best efforts to be reasonable all of the time you cannot imagine what another person might feel or think about how you appear to them. Every word that you say and everything that you seem to express can be perceived in ways that you cannot imagine by someone who does not know you well.

Whatever another person thinks that you mean can be thought about you.

4 You need to know that you’re not obliged to talk about any particular subject or idea. Personal expression is always a personal choice.

When you converse with more than one person at the same time the ideas that you try to describe to everyone might not be understandable to anyone and your manner might not be agreeable. It’s difficult to develop mutual understanding with someone when your conversations with them are obliged to be accompanied by another person.

Don't talk much about any subject.

5 You'll miss many of the benefits of conversation if you disregard your own best manners of sincere and modest courtesy.

Respect everyone and be kind because everyone is inherently good and has limitless positive potential. Your respect for someone resonates with their awareness and self-respect and contributes to their happiness.

Words and manners of courtesy that are not necessary distract mutual understanding.

6 Conventions of courtesy don't reliably allow important ideas to be clearly and precisely discussed. Conventions of courtesy can forbid that someone express ideas that another person does not want to be expressed.

Don't introduce or discuss an important subject when manners of courtesy must be observed. If you introduce an important subject in circumstances when another person is not able to consider the subject appropriately you might appear to be desperate. Merely mentioning a controversial subject can be mistaken to indicate that you support it or condemn it.

If an important or urgent subject is introduced to you by someone who you don't know then respond with your best understanding and humility. Your best response might not be understandable and might appear negative.

7 If you hear much news or conversation, or read more than you can use or set aside, then any words that you hear and ideas that you think might seem to not mean anything. Nearly any idea can seem to represent, include or cancel nearly any other idea in casual conversation, fiction and persuasion.

You cannot talk in a careless or casual way about any subject and avoid expressing idle talk. If you talk about values or society at the times when you're not being the best person that you can be then you might be expressing most of all your emotions and opinions even though your expression might be tolerated or popular.

  Don't express an idea that you imagine that another person might think or say or that you imagine that another person wants or expects to hear you express. Don't rely on manners of speech or relationship that you learned from the arts or entertainment.

8 If you think that speaking the truth doesn’t matter you won’t be confident that your good decisions improve everything.

If you lie you won’t trust what other people say. If you lie about trivial things the important things that you say won’t be trusted. Don't try to affect how you think someone might respond to an idea that you want to express because you might obscure the idea or misrepresent it.

Don’t converse much with someone who you seriously disagree with or you'll accidentally say things that you don't sincerely think. If you think much about someone who you seriously disagree with you'll uncontrollably fear or imitate their thinking as you imagine it.

9 Don't try to describe another person's feelings or thinking. Don’t avoidably describe someone in terms of their appearance as if they could be perceived well enough by only the physical senses. The important aspects of someone might be disregarded in the ideas that you casually think about them. Petty disapprovals of another person’s appearance or expression that you might possibly think that you don’t dismiss every time but casually reinforce can ruin any of your relationships.

Don't avoidably describe someone in terms of their relationship with another person because that might disregard their feelings and thinking and might disregard the feelings and thinking of the other person.

Don't try to express good by describing something bad. Your good reason won't be visible to another person. It will just be disappointing.

10 Don't use foolish or shocking words or exaggerate to emphasize the importance of something that you want to say. Don’t test anyone’s affection for you or tolerance by saying wicked or mean things. Don’t try to embarrass or shame someone to help them. Courtesy and kindness are not suspended by humor. Anyone needs to be confident that someone who’s criticising them likes them well enough. No friendship can endure much criticism.

Don't intend to surprise or evoke urgency or ridicule or challenge another person's ideas or influence.

Don’t try to express humility by disparaging yourself. Someone might think that the disparaging that you express is what you think that they think about you or what you think about them and they’ll become sad.

13 Conversing by telephone

1 When you converse by telephone you’re conversing with someone who's not physically present with you where you are. Because the person who you’re conversing with is physically absent from you if you converse about a subject that you feel emotionally your feelings will flow out of touch with your physical experience of being where you are. Then you won’t be able to evaluate your thinking reliably by referring your thinking to the whole range of your physical senses.

2 When you converse by telephone you might oblige someone to listen to much of what you want to say before they can respond. That's too slow for anyone's feelings and thinking. The dominance of whoever's talking and submission to them until they pause or can be interrupted might not happen if you were physically present together but the limitations of the telephone demand it. Because conventional manners of courtesy require that one person defer to the other when you talk on the telephone you might suppose that the other person is agreeing with you as long as they don’t protest that something that you said is disappointing or unacceptable. But the conversation might not communicate either person's feelings or what either person wanted to express.

3 Exchanging text with someone on your phone or the internet is similar to conversing by telephone if either person is expected to respond immediately.

4 Seeing one another’s face electronically while you’re talking on your phone or the internet might help to communicate with someone who you already know. But don’t trust talking on the telephone to develop friendship or to discuss any difficulty.

5 It’s often necessary to talk with someone by phone briefly to agree when and where to meet with them or do something. Express only your best thinking as simply and precisely as you can. Don’t discuss or comment on anything unnecessarily.

6 You’d be prudent to talk on the phone minimally even with someone who you see in person regularly.

14 Reading, streaming media

1 You can usually understand the meanings of the words that you read in a language that you understand. You might understand the ideas that seem to be similar to the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you already share with some of your family, neighbors and friends. Or you might understand the ideas after you have considered them for a while.

Some of the ideas that you read might be composed of structures of educated thinking and conventions of conduct and conditions that are not familiar to you. Then you might not understand the meanings of some of the ideas until you learn the structures of thinking or follow the conduct and experience the conditions that are needed to understand the ideas.

2 You can usually understand the meanings of the words that you read on an electronic screen as easily as you can understand the meanings of the words that you read on a page when the words continue to be visible on the screen as long as you need to understand the words. And when you can scroll the text back any time to read a preceding part of it again. Similarly you can usually understand the meanings of the words that you hear in an audio recording as easily as you can understand the meanings of any words that you hear when you can pause the recording as long as you need to understand the words. And when you can scroll the recording back any time to listen to a preceding part of it again.

3 You might understand the meanings of the words that you hear on streaming media such as the news, videos and movies or you might not. You might understand the ideas that are expressed on streaming media that seem be similar to the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you already share with some of your family, neighbors and friends. Or you might understand the ideas after you have considered them for a while. But you don't have the time.

The experience of streaming media is similar to the experience of dreams. You imagine a realistic experience and you think that you understand the ideas that are expressed. But you cannot understand anything reliably that you experience on streaming media because you don't experience streaming media with the whole range of your physical senses. And you don't have enough time to consider the meanings of the words.

If you follow much news or commercial entertainment or if you talk a lot casually many ideas that are products of persuasion might influence and confuse your thinking until you find relief in calm and confidence in your personal understanding.

4 You can beneficially follow broadcasters and podcasters who express positive views and kindness and who seem to understand what they’re describing. But don’t avoidably listen to reporters or commentators who express disrespect of other people even when they seem to understand what they’re describing.

Ideas that are expressed disrespectfully or unkindly are not reliably true or helpful.

15 Hourly schedule, motor travel

1 Your awareness of your well-being and the choices that you make every day are natural experiences that you can integrate with your important ideas and priorities. Maintaining awareness of your well-being and harmonizing all of your experiences as well as you can improves your well-being and helps you to realize your important concerns.

Conforming to hourly scheduled routines is commonly thought to be responsible behavior and is impossible to avoid when you share normal experiences with other people. Conforming to scheduled routines demands that your planning harmonize with the concerns of many other people every day.

These comments are not intended to deny the importance of time, natural rhythms and the durations of experiences in everyone's days and lifetime. These comments are intended to caution that hours are not a value. The series of sixty minute hours is a machine measurement of time that’s a practical standard for science. But hours are an artificial and mean standard for cooperation with other people.

Every concern that's subject to an hourly schedule is influenced in ways that no one can understand or control. Conforming to an hourly schedule disregards everyone's feelings and overrules important concerns.

2 When you travel by motor vehicle the foundations of firmness and stillness beneath your body are replaced by abnormal velocities and centrifugal forces. And your control of the position of your body is replaced by an obliged and passive position of your body.

Those experiences overwhelm the natural motion and rest of energy in your body so that you experience anxiety unavoidably. Even when it’s not probable that you'll experience an accident. And even when you're not conscious of being in motion. And even though you're accustomed to travelling by motor vehicle.

  All of you thinking and conversation will be influenced by a sense of urgency. You might experience fears that you experienced previously or heard about, even though you have already learned that you don't need to experience those fears personally.

Pleasant scenery, recorded music, conversation or competition that you experience while you ride in a motor vehicle, or a special place, comfort food, shared experience or a video that you experience after riding in a motor vehicle might seem to relieve the anxiety. But they might only add compensating or compatible feelings to the experience of riding in a motor vehicle. Even the sounds of motor traffic and machinery cause tensions and anxiety.

Your personal wisdom and sensitivity to other people might be severely dulled after you have travelled by motor vehicle until you find relief in calm and rest. The habits that you develop to maintain your calm and clarity within the influence of motor travel and machinery are important and necessary. Constantly refresh your awareness and priorities.

16 Organized sports, conforming

1 Your motivation to achieve competence and excellence in any positive concern is beneficial. Your efforts to achieve worthy goals might include beneficial aspects of comparison that stimulate wholesome effort and set standards. But comparison that disregards or overrules anyone’s well-being is harmful.

Competition is a normal urge or impulse that’s commonly employed to assist or resist a wide variety of concerns. The competition that's promoted in technologically connected societies is modeled on military training, education and entertainment and stimulates public interest in artificial concerns and projects.

2 Organized sports feature and compare particular athletic, learning and cooperating abilities of all of the players and the featured skills are tested in scheduled games between the highest ranking players or teams. All of the players are urged to surpass the recorded achievements of all of the preceding players. Someone following organized sports might remember details of the achievements of several players through several years of games.

Organized sports are promoted as beneficial for developing physical fitness, fairness and good character in those who compete and for developing fairness and good character in those who follow the sports by attending the games or who watch the games on broadcast media. Wearing sport clothing or a symbol of sport is a sign that you follow sports or that you’re a good member of society.

The popularity of organized sports profits from the qualities of the players and the fans although the players are valued primarily for their contribution to the sport.

3 Commercial publicity promotes fictions of rivalry and antagonism between the players and also between the fans of organized sports. Names and symbols are branded to represent the competing teams and to reinforce loyalties and conflicts.

If you compete or follow organized sports you might imagine rules of membership in a team and compete or follow another person or conform to routines or devote your efforts to realizing other people's plans.

You might think that you’re obliged to follow elaborate courses of education to be competitive with people who you don’t know in your learning, material possessions and appearance. You might dread that you’ll fail to show enough success or enough devotion to competition. Constantly adapting to different schedules leaves only a little time that’s not scheduled when you might naturally restore your inner peace and awareness of your important concerns.

4 These comments are not intended to deny that you might experience many benefits from competing or following organized sports. These comments are intended to caution that in addition to the many benefits that you might experience you might also experience some confusion and suffering as a result of competing or following organized sports.

Your resolve to cultivate excellence through competing or following organized sports can illuminate many aspects of your personal experience. Your personal experience that’s positive resonates positive effects in the experiences of many other people.

Your intention to be the best person that you can be or not is essential to how much you might become a better person from competing or following organized sports or might not.

17 Friendship and association

1 There are people who express wisdom and kindness in every family and society. Appreciating the good that they contribute and remembering them gratefully can inspire you to be the best person that you can be.

Inspiration and friendship resonate with your innate wisdom and kindness.

2 Maintain awareness of your personal well-being and modesty in all of your relationships with other people. This will help you to avoid a variety of mistakes and will allow the other person to maintain their awareness of their personal well-being and sense of what's positive in their relationship with you.

You need to be the best person that you can be to maintain awareness of your values and to view your experience clearly.

When you consider that there’s much that can influence every circumstance that you can’t expect to know maintaining your awareness of the conduct of your mind is the most knowable and controllable aspect of your experience.

3 Any of your speech and bodily actions might or might not involve your relationship with another person.

Don’t intentionally say or express anything in any other way that might cause unhappiness, confusion or suffering to anyone.

If you carelessly or casually influence another person they might become confused and react impulsively to the condition that you caused.

4 You cannot reasonably expect to cause another person to be happy although you can always wish that they be happy.

The most reliable cause of happiness is being the best person that you can be as you understand it and as well as you can.

You cannot reasonably expect to cause another person to be the best person that they can be.

5 Any liking that you feel toward another person can help you to perceive their feelings and to develop friendship with them.

Experiencing happiness with another person can be mistaken for perceiving their feelings and can be mistaken for developing friendship with them. Sharing experiences with another person does not reliably help you to perceive their feelings or to develop friendship with them.

Sharing a similar idea, interest or concern with another person can be mistaken for sharing similar values and priorities with them. Don't suppose that you definitely understand what another person said or appeared to express or how important the subject is to them.

6 To become acquainted with someone who you don't know you need to learn some of the ideas that the other person thinks are most important. Similarly to become acquainted with a group of people you need to learn some of the ideas that the group of people thinks are most important. Important ideas include the concerns that someone or group of people thinks are urgent and their priorities.

The ideas that appear to resemble the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you already share with some of your family, neighbors and friends are the ideas that you can recognize most easily as agreeable and beneficial in the words and other expressions of another person. Sharing similar family values and social conventions and important ideas with another person can help you to communicate thoroughly and to develop friendship with them.

Don't underestimate the difficulties of communicating thoroughly with another person when you don't share similar family values and social conventions and important ideas.

7 You can understand and engage with your society relatively easily when most of your society’s conventions are compatible with your family values and your most important concerns and when you’re being the best person that you can be in that experience.

Don’t expect to understand or to engage with your society easily if many of your society’s conventions are not compatible with the values that you share with your family and friends and your most important concerns even when you’re being the best person that you can be as you understand it and as well as you can.

If many of your society’s conventions are not compatible with the values that you share with your family and friends and your most important concerns don’t expect to understand the positive contributions of your society’s conventions of justice and governance.

8 Don’t think much about an idea or concern that’s not compatible with your family and social values and your priorities.

If you share a particular idea or concern with another person or a group of people that you think will help to develop friendship with them more reliably than by sharing similar family values, social conventions and priorities, that idea or concern might obstruct or obscure your awareness of some of the important ideas that you already value.

  You might hold an opinion that permits you to not be the best person that you can be, for example the opinion that your ideas are superior or that it doesn’t matter that you criticize unnecessarily or unkindly.

9 Don’t expect that your relationship with another person will develop in the same ways that most other people’s relationships develop if some aspect of your personal reputation is unusual because whoever hears about the unusual aspect of your reputation will become distracted unavoidably.

You’re not obliged to express anything that might cause unhappiness to anyone. Consider any possibilities before introducing yourself unnecessarily.

Conduct yourself so that everyone who you meet and everyone who thinks about you will consider some of the values that you intend to share with them.

10 Ideals and optimism about other people’s feelings and thinking don't help to develop understanding or friendship.

No one can know whether another person is maintaining their integrity and important values or not.

Don't expect that someone who shares your society or tradition will share the integrating values of your society or the inner values of your tradition as you understand them in their relationship with you.

11 Don't conform your appearance to resemble how you think that another person wishes or expects you to appear.

Trying to please another person does not reliably express respect or kindness to them.

Manners of courtesy don't reliably communicate respect or kindness. Don't rely on the expressions of your eyes or face or the motions of your hands or body to communicate with another person. If you appear to signal something and the signal is misunderstood that can distract another person and influence their feelings and thinking.

12 Giving or receiving a gift or service don’t reliably signify or result in any particular feeling, idea or experience. Your wish to help another person is positive but you cannot foresee some of the effects of your influence. Naturally your family, neighbors and friends will expect you to exchange cooperation and help. Maintain harmony with everyone as well as you can.

To maintain awareness of your priorities and to be worthy of anyone’s trust you need to keep your attention as free as possible most of the time. Avoid planning with another person that’s attached to a schedule.

You’re not obliged to converse with another person at random times except in an emergency.

13 For the purpose of developing and maintaining friendship you don't need to know what another person is doing that you can't already see or that you don't already know. Don't ask anyone to tell you something about them or about another person.

  Don't inquire in your imagination or in a conversation into what another person is trying or needs to say. That might be trying to describe a more emotional or discursive condition than the other person can express in words or than the other person is experiencing.

Listen to what another person says however they express it and consider the meaning of what they say as well as you understand it. Don't listen to much information about anyone.

14 Don't avoidably compare someone with another person or avoidably compare a group of people with another group of people not even privately in your thoughts. Don't think that your ideas resulting from your comparisons of people are reliable.

Neither educated or popular comparisons of people are helpful for you to maintain awareness of another person’s inherent, natural and wholesome qualities and potentials.

Of course you might compare someone appropriately sometimes in your thoughts. But you might compare the same person prejudicially at other times unintentionally and unaware.

15 You cannot share natural affection or good counsel with someone if you judge, compete or don't care much about the other person or if the other person judges, competes or doesn't care much about you.

The good that you might share with another person will be obscured or obstructed if you think much about negative or unfamiliar aspects of their conduct or appearance.

Whatever you think about someone don't deny that they're inherently worthy of your best understanding and harmlessness. You might not appear reasonable or harmless when you're preoccupied with anyone's fault or blame.

16 You might suppose that some ideas that you want to express will be more interesting or persuasive due to the influence of some parts of your personal environment.

Some parts of your personal environment that are not conventional might distract someone who does not know you from relying on how they feel and think about you. Someone might be influenced by some aspects of your personal environment to develop mistaken ideas about you. Someone might think that something that they see in your personal environment is evidence that you’re trying to show that you’re superior. Or someone might think that what you say is contradicted by the evidence of things beyond your understanding or control that they think that they see in your personal environment.

If some parts of your personal environment are not conventional your personal environment might be distracting or contemptible to someone who’s not a member of your family or your friend.

17  When you intend to maintain your integrity you become less concerned about your social status and you might neglect to maintain some aspects of your conventional appearance.

You appearing to not work to develop your personal projects and to improve your social prestige might seem to be unreasonable to someone who thinks that expressing personality and preference are necessary for good character and responsible participation in society. To someone who knows you relatively well your speech and actions that show that you intend to be the best person that you can be might help to compensate for you appearing to neglect some conventional concerns.

You appearing to not appreciate other peoples’ projects to increase their information, activities or prosperity might be misunderstood to show that you don’t care about other peoples’ concerns. To someone who knows you relatively well, your speech and actions that show that you care about other people’s feelings and best thinking might help to compensate for you being misunderstood to not care about other people’s concerns.

18  Don't overrule your feelings or thinking about your relationship with another person with any ideals or expectations about the relationship or experience.

 Insufficient mutual respect is an unfavorable condition for communication. If you're preoccupied with thoughts about your apparent faults or ignorance in your relationship with another person you might not be resonating enough mutual respect. You'd be prudent to withdraw from that relationship emotionally and physically as soon as you can.

Of course you could be wrong, but you could be right. Don't ever talk about it.

18 Traditions

1 Traditions of learning integrity are accessible in every culture and society.

Most of the people who share a tradition of learning integrity follow the tradition with varying degrees of concern with their personal integrity, more or less at different times. Many important values might be observed by the people who share a tradition and society.

The benefit that most people gain from a particular tradition might appear to be gained by learning and maturing in association with a particular group of people, although the most important benefit of everyone’s concern with integrity is internal, not visible to another person.

2  The most meaningful purpose of following a tradition of learning integrity is to develop your awareness of the nature and beneficial conduct of your mind.

  Your awareness and understanding most often guide you reliably when you intend to be the best person that you can be, as you understand it and as well as you can. You can also be guided by the values of your society that instruct everyone to maintain their integrity and positive concern.

Your inherent, pure, indestructible essence and limitless positive potential will become increasingly accessible to you when you’re devoted to being the best person that you can be, as you understand it and as well as you can. You will become more aware of the nature and beneficial conduct of your mind and you will gradually perceive more of your experience in this perspective. You will also encounter people who will help you to understand your most important concerns.

3 Any of the difficulties of association with another person or a group of people might distract or obstruct your awareness of the meaningful purpose of following a tradition of learning integrity. Personal opinions and suppositions about other people’s feelings and thinking and different conventions of expression and sharing influence everyone’s experience of other people.

Particular ways of thinking and conduct are customary among every group of people because of the ways that some things were previously viewed and done or not done by influential members of the group. Also influential members of a group can oblige that some things be done or not done by other members of the group.

Don’t think much about a tradition that disapproves of being calm, kind or confident. Don’t be embarrassed to be as calm, kind and confident as you might experience and appear.

4 You have probably been taught that reliable help to understand your most important concerns cannot be found. When you want to learn about the nature and beneficial conduct of your mind for the purpose of becoming liberated from confusion and suffering you will find the advice and guidance that you need.

A qualified lama is a reliable source of information about the nature of the mind itself, and karma, and how you can progress in your awareness and conduct toward improvement. Inherent, natural and liberating instruction that can progressively enlighten your vision is accessible due to the uninterrupted continuity of liberating instruction, devoted practice and accomplishment since the time of the enlightened Buddha until now.

Renew your awareness by doing the practice that you have already learned can help to integrate your mind, speech and body as early as possible every day. Don’t add anything to the method that you practice to experience your best vision. Whenever you remember your best ideas you improve your awareness of your experience and how you can improve it.

5 You can be more aware of the integrating values of your society and the inner practice of your tradition when you don’t feature or reinforce an emotional, discursive or conventional aspect of an important or urgent concern.

It’s not reliably beneficial concern with a tradition of learning integrity that you develop or reinforce distracting ideas regarding the personality or interests of other members of the tradition.

A manner of participation with a tradition that interferes with your awareness of the purpose of your concern with the tradition or that disregards your personal freedom and inner peace is not reliably beneficial.

6 Participate modestly in gatherings and minimize community experiences of a tradition of learning integrity. Engage in your tradition of learning integrity internally in every way that you can.

Don’t disregard any values that you have already learned can help you to maintain your integrity and positive concern.

Some beginner’s values and manners of good conduct are beneficial through all the stages of development to maturity in every society and tradition.

7 Don't avoidably demonstrate or criticize authority or membership. Be careful with someone who does even when they don't mean it.

Don't reinforce thoughts about rule or power. Pride distorts vision of goodness and sense of what's positive. No one has a privilege to harm or interfere with another person.

If you talk about authority, misfortune or anyone's fault it won't be clear whether you're kind or not.

8 Some of the conventions of a tradition of learning integrity might seem to be more relevant to other people as you understand or experience them than relevant to you learning how to improve your integrity, so you might disregard some aspects of a tradition that you value that don’t seem to help you to improve your integrity and positive concern.

Although you might disregard some aspects of a tradition that you value, your sincere intention to be the best person that you can be as you understand it and as well as you can is always your most reliable standard to evaluate all the ideas and experiences that you encounter.

In time you’ll meet people who have learning and experience in the tradition that you value who will help you to benefit from the tradition.

9 Mutual understanding and friendship might not develop or endure between some people.

Anyone’s expressions of devotion might be mistaken by another person to be efforts to gain some advantage or privilege.

Expressing your sincere intention to be the best person that you can be and kind does not ensure that you’ll be perceived by another person as sincere or kind. If your reputation describes that you intend to be thoroughly good you need to know that someone might suppose that your faults are worse than other people’s faults. Similarly if your reputation describes that you intend to be thoroughly kind someone might suppose that you don’t judge your own faults severely enough and they might imagine your faults. Rumors of your faults might result in the development of opinions that your conduct or reputation might offend someone or damage the reputation of a group of people and some people might exclude you from their society or association.

10 Don’t blame anyone for your difficulties in maintaining harmony in some relationships. If you experience disappointments in some of your relationships you need to know that some people are attached to their accustomed manner of participation in their society or tradition and might disregard some values of their society or tradition to avoid imagined problems or criticisms of them or their group. Don’t expect that any particular member of a group can remedy that you might be excluded by some people who share your society or tradition.

Don’t maintain a relationship with someone who expresses that they seriously dislike something about you or that they need to forgive you for something that they’re thinking about you. Don’t express formal or cordial submission or protest.

Maintain friendships with people with whom you enjoy good will and harmony. Participate modestly in association with people who share your values when you can participate beneficially.

19 Your important ideas

1 The ideas that describe inherent, natural and wholesome awareness to you personally are your most important ideas. These ideas are learned in your experience of receiving kindness and care from your family, neighbors and friends and by you intending to be the best person that you can be and learning how to cooperate with other people and help other people.

These ideas are experienced by the whole range of your physical senses. They’re your most reliable descriptions of reality and importance and your best standards to test the value of all the new ideas and experiences that you encounter.

You experience awareness and understanding most of the time without needing to think any particular ideas. You can cultivate confidence in your awareness and understanding of any positive concern.

2 Remembering your important ideas and priorities can help to integrate your thoughts, memories and experiences.

  You can write your insights and best thinking in a personal journal. Use plain and simple words. The plain meaning of a word might bring many ideas to your awareness that are included in its meaning or benefits as you understand or experience it.

Every word should feature the most integrating and positive aspect of the subject that it represents as you understand or experience it.

3 You can describe an idea that's integrated in your understanding or experience of it in a word or a few words that any nearly other person could understand. This is not intended to suggest that you describe the idea to another person but only that you can test your understanding of an idea privately by that method.

If you understand an idea or remember an experience imprecisely or carelessly you’ll be able to describe it in mostly conventional words or terms. You might not recognize your own idea or experience described in conventional words.

You can write your most important ideas in a relatively small number of words. How many words you write is not important. You can always add or remove ideas.

4 Don't write a word that needs that you think more ideas about it in addition to the ideas that come to your awareness immediately when you read or remember the word. Write another word to remember another idea. Later you might replace a word with another word that represents an idea better.

You can easily express something that’s important to you in your own words when you’re not trying to express it to another person.

Any word that you choose and any idea that you describe does not need to include anything that appears negative to you. Don’t describe a negative condition in which your awareness might have improved. Your list of important ideas does not need to explain anything.

5 Don't expect to be able to describe your most important thinking to someone who you don't know.

You might not be able to maintain awareness of your important ideas and priorities if you try to describe your most important thinking to someone who you don't know. You might become preoccupied with imagining what the other person might think about what you describe.

You might substitute an idea that you want to remember with another idea that you imagine that another person might think. Then you might not remember an idea that you want to remember.

6 You can read your list of important ideas sometimes to remember the ideas and priorities that help you to maintain your integrity and positive concern.

It can be beneficial to describe your best thinking to some of the people who you know with whom you share important ideas, wishes and concerns. Their responses to the ideas that you describe can help to improve your understanding.

Remembering any of your important ideas can help you to find your way back to being the best person that you can be when you have been relatively casual or unconcerned.

20 Personal memories

1 The following ideas are intended to help you to benefit from your education and personal memories. Education in this context means something that you think that you learned from what occured in the past. Memory in this context refers to something that you remember that you experienced personally at some time in the past.

When you remember something that you experienced in the past you can try to discern whether you were being the best person that you could be in that experience –or not.

And you can try to remember what you thought that it meant to be the best person that you could be at that time.

2 To help you to remember what you thought that it meant to be the best person that you could be at some time in the past, you can write a list of subjects or concerns that illuminated your awareness as you understood or experienced them at that time. You can include subjects or concerns that illuminate your awareness at the present time even though many of your present concerns did not illuminate your experience in the past.

There is an immense variety of subjects or concerns that might illuminate your awareness:

Health, well-being, expression, events, environment

Family, neighbors, friends, society

Music, poetry, conversation, arts, celebrations

Agriculture, engineering, commerce, earning

Culture, classics, constitution, responsibility, governance

Reason, logic, principles, trust, clarity

When you remember something that you experienced in the past you can try to remember what relevant subjects or concerns might have illuminated your awareness at that time.

When you combine your memory of something that you experienced in the past with the relevant subjects or concerns that might have illuminated your awareness at that time, you might discern whether you were being the best person that you could be in that experience –or not.

Your awareness of the illuminating potential of a subject or concern might have been obscured or obstructed at the times when you were not being the best person that you could be.

3 Awareness in your relationship with another person can be experienced in respecting the other person and can be improved by maturing in kindness in all of your relationships with other people.

To evaluate how respectful you were -or were not in a particular experience with another person in the past, you can try to remember if you were respectful of the other person in the ways that you thought it meant to be respectful at that time. When you combine your memory of your experience with another person with the relevant subjects or concerns that might have illuminated your awareness at that time, you might discern how respectful of the other person you were -or were not in a particular experience.

Your respect for another person some of the time did not ensure that you were respectful of them in a particular experience that you remember.

You can improve your understanding of your experiences in the past when you don’t feature or intend to remember a negative idea about anyone.

4 You can write a list of the historical persons, concerns and events that are most important to you, beginning from the earliest times until the present and from one geographical, cultural and national area to another, approximately, to where you live now and your experience at the present time.

You can write the name of a virtue or value that you associate with someone or a concern or event that you listed beside the name of that person, concern or event in your list.

Additionally, separate from your list of important historical persons, concerns and associated values, you can write a list of the most important individual persons, concerns and experiences in your life from your birth until the present time.

Don’t list anyone or anything that’s most of all negative as you feel or think about it. If you list anyone or anything that’s negative to you the list won’t be beneficial to you. You don’t need to list a subject that’s negative to you for your list to be sufficiently complete and beneficial to you.

Your lists should not be intended to remind you how to explain something to another person or intended for another person to read. If you list something to remind you how to explain it to another person or for another person to read your list won’t be beneficial to you.

Your lists don’t need to be long to be sufficiently complete and beneficial to you. You can add to your lists or rearrange or remove any part of them anytime.

5 Your lists can help you to remember many positive concerns that you’ve learned and can help you to integrate your memories of experiences in the past and your understanding of them at the present time.

When a memory that you considered in the ways described here returns to your awareness at some future time it might be accompanied by some insight and less confusion and suffering. After you have considered your memories in these ways for a while your memories will return to your awareness accompanied by some insight and less confusion and suffering.

Don’t imagine someone criticising you for negative actions, faults or failings in the past. Your preoccupation with something that another person might think about you can distract you from becoming more aware of your conduct and improving yourself.

You cannot improve your experience thoroughly as long as you hold negative ideas about anyone.

Your insight that you were not the best person that you could be in a particular experience in the past can awaken your hope and strengthen your confidence in your potential to improve.

Being the best person that you can be naturally improves your awareness and experience.

[This chapter is being written.]

21 Feelings and thoughts

1 Anything that you have ever experienced or heard about, and anything that you can imagine, can possibly arise as a feeling or thought in your mind.

You can evaluate all of your feelings and thoughts by the standards of the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you already value.

It's not beneficial to follow or deplore your negative feelings or thoughts.

2 Your feelings and thoughts are personal and private. No other person is able to know what you feel or think.

Don't express your feelings or thoughts carelessly.

It's not beneficial to imagine that anything that you feel or think can be observed or judged by another person.

3 Liking and disliking are part of everyone's feelings and thoughts about other people, to some degrees, however someone might intend or wish to experience other people.

It's not disrespectful, insulting or harmful to anyone that you feel or think that someone does not like you, or that you don't like someone or something.

Don't exaggerate the effect of a moment or glimpse of a feeling or thought.

4 You can view your liking and disliking as information that you won't allow to be influential until you evaluate it by the inherent, natural and wholesome ideas, wishes and concerns that you already value.

Don't hold any liking or disliking that you become aware of as a subject of your attention any longer than you need to evaluate it by the standards of your important ideas and priorities.

You can trust your liking that does not impede your awareness of your well-being and sense of what's positive, as you understand or experience it, but you need to be careful regarding any hazard to your well-being or conflict with your important ideas and priorities that is suggested by your disliking.

5 Your liking and disliking don't need to stop happening for them to not distract or harm you. Your liking and disliking can be aspects of your personal wisdom when you evaluate your feelings and thoughts by the standards of your important ideas and priorities.

The inherent, natural and wholesome qualities and potentials of your mind, combined with your intention to be the best person that you can be and the benefits of progressive learning from your personal experience, can evaluate the liking and disliking that arise in your mind. Also, some of the people who you already know, who share your important ideas, wishes and concerns, can help you to evaluate your experience if you ask them for guidance or advice.

Don't expect your feelings and thoughts to be aspects of your personal wisdom when you don't intend to evaluate your feelings and thoughts by your important ideas and priorities.

6 Much of your liking and disliking is not personal if you follow much news or commercial entertainment or fashion motivated shopping.

If you follow much news or entertainment or fashion it's hard for you to know which of your liking and disliking is personal, and which of your liking and disliking is an opinion or convention that you learned from your interactions with people who you don't know and from communicating with people who you know by electronic media.

As you diminish conversing casually and relinquish concerns that conflict with your important ideas or distract from your priorities, you can become more aware of your important ideas and priorities and you can experience improved well-being and more harmonious relationships with other people.

7 Maintain your awareness as well as you can. As early as possible every day compose your mind, breath and body and renew your memory of your most important ideas and priorities.

As often as you can remember renew your intention to be the best person that you can be and be kind.

About the author

This text is written by Tyndale Martin. I was born in 1944 in Toronto, Canada, to sincere and generous parents from whom I received a good upbringing in a Biblical tradition and country life. During the early years our family lived a few miles from Orillia in northern Ontario then on the shore of Lake of Two Mountains a few miles from Vaudreuil village in rural Quebec. Since 1963 I have been living in Montreal. For a while I followed some classical arts, poetry and social ideals. I received a B.A. in History from McGill University in 1969. The Korean Zen master Samu Sunim tutored me in the postural architecture of zazen in 1968. In 1971 the Tibetan Lama Kalu Rinpoche gave me instruction in finding and maintaining calmness, improving vision and the nature and beneficial conduct of the mind. I devoted my time to practicing the instruction that I received from these kind teachers as well as I was able.

This is my journal of important ideas. The ideas described in this text include some that I was taught and some that I learned by applying what I was taught to my personal experience. I dedicate these thoughts to the happiness of each one of my dear family and all of my friends who shared our best understanding of the ideas described in this text. I thank everyone who showed me the vision that some of these ideas describe. I hope that everyone who reads or hears these ideas will find happiness and inner peace.

The text contains some unclear thinking that I intend to improve as well as I can.

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