Thinking never belongs in the Now

To think is to remove the mind from the Now, the present.

The thinking is therefore the absent.

Only meditative-existential you can be in the Now.

You can say, that meditation is a quality of the Now.

In meditation - the passive listening presence - there therefore doesn´t exist any problems, only facts.

You only understand in the Now – not tomorrow and not yesterday – always in the Now.

In this way understanding is timeless.

You can't understand the next life and next year.

To think is to remove the mind from the Now.

To have your identity in an absence is to have your identity in your country

To have your identity in an absence is to have your identity in your country, your furniture, your images, your ambitions, your respectability, your race, your peculiarities and prejudices, your obsessions.

Through all this Man wants to discover truth, God, reality.

And because Man doesn´t know how he shall disentangle from all this, he invents something, an outside power, or he gives life a special meaning.

But this is precisely unreality and falsehood.

As a Life Artist can you ask the next question: whether Man ever can change radically?

As Life Artist can you ask the next question: whether Man ever can change radically, essentially, existential, so that he can observe the world anew, with other eyes, with another heart, a completely other mind, no longer filled with hatred, resistance, racism, but a mind, which is extraordinary clear and which possesses a mighty energy, that gives life back to the present, opens the heart and fills the existence with vitality, urge to live and joy of life?

It is not self-assertion when you do something, because you love to do it

It is not self-assertion when you do something, because you love to do it.

When you write and paint – not because you want prestige, but because you love to write and paint – it is assuredly not self-assertion.

Self-assertion occurs when you compare yourself with other writers or artists, when you want to distance them.

This would be the will to power, and the will to power is self-assertion.

But it is not self-assertion, when you do something, because you really love to do it.

This is passion. And passion is love.

The essence in being outside time is eternal present and is not able to be thought

If you choose to be in the thoughts you either are ahead in the future or behind in the past.

You either think about the past in memories, sorrows, traumatic bindings, bad conscience, associations etc., or you think about the future in plans, hopes, longings, wishes, conjectures, worries.

Totally seen then the thinking´s past and future produces the images in time, a perspective on yourself and the world, the source of unreality and absence.

The essence in being outside time is eternal present and is not able to be thought.

It is memory - which always grows and increases - you must give up

What you as a Life Artist must study, understand and neutralize, is the Ego´s time-binding characteristic, which identify itself with the memories.

Strong demands, especially the lustful, is about achieving something for the Ego, and it is the memories, which gives ”me and my” an identified continuation.

The thinking, which always is in motion, always streaming, becomes, when it identifies itself with me and my, time-binding, and gives identified continuation to memory, to the Ego.

It is this memory - which always grows and increases - you must give up.

Why do humans assume so many things?

Why do humans assume so many things?

In philosophical counseling you seek to make a voyage of discovery, and investigate without knowing anything; a voyage of discovery into yourself without knowing what is good or evil, right or wrong, what there ought to be, or what there should be, only making this journey without any pack.

If you see the self-contradictory in an ideal, then the actual thing that you see it, is a rational action

If you see the self-contradictory in an ideal, then the actual thing that you see it, is a rational action.

To be the contradiction present is therefore to clean the mind for the contradiction, and this is to act.

Meditation, or art of life, is to empty out the mind completely

The content of the mind is a product of time, of that which usually is called development and cultivation; it is a product of thousand experiences, a gigantic accumulation of knowledge, of memories; therefore an aspect of Man as a historical being.

The mind is in that degree loaded with the past.

The past is based on the images in time, both the personal, collective and universal images; the reservoir, from where we get all our belief and knowledge.

All knowledge originates from the past, all experience is the past, and all memory is the accumulated result of thousand experiences – this is the known, your perspective.

When it is seen, that the mind must be silent, then the mind actually becomes silent

When it is seen, that the mind must be silent, then the mind actually becomes silent

When you realize the truth that it is only the silent mind, which can see clearly, yes, then your mind strangely enough becomes silent.

It is as seeing a danger and avoiding it.

Because when it is seen, that the mind must be completely silent, then the mind actually becomes silent.

And if it then can listen without interpretations, without that your prejudices intervene in order to distort – listens as you perhaps listen to a bird, which sings, without commenting and giving a name.

There is no being if there is a struggle for becoming something

A radical transformation only takes place in the present, in that to be in the Now.

But there is no being if there is a struggle for becoming something.

The struggle for becoming something, the will to power, is the absent, and herein there is resistance and denial, desire and resignation.

It is fairly obvious, that there is conflict in the world because there is ruling discord in ourselves

It is fairly obvious, that there is conflict in the world because there is ruling discord in ourselves; a discord which shows itself outwards in society, in the Ego´s, and the other´s, activity.

Our images of life are filled with contradictions; that is to say: the Ego with its competitive lust and anxiety, and the other, which can be the ideal about living without conflict.

Herein there are a lot of mutual contradictory wishes, goals and initiatives.

If we are aware of this tension, we can in ourselves see how mutual contradictory desires, opposite assumptions, ideas and goals, move in separately directions.

When the thinking in philosophical sense projects itself as the past and the future, the mind is becoming absent

The thought is necessary on some levels, but when the thinking in philosophical sense projects itself as the past and the future, and produces anxiety as well as secureness, the mind is becoming absent, and the inevitable result hereof is unreality, emptiness, boredom and ennui.

So in philosophical sense the thought must rest, so that the anxiety in existential sense can stop.

The clarifying function in philosophical counseling is pointing towards a self-forgetful dimension

The clarifying function in philosophical counseling is pointing towards a self-forgetful dimension, the wholeness of the observer and the observed.

It goes beyond the intra-psychic, and claims that it is in the self-forgetful dimension that the real formation happens.

Rather than personal development, you here focus on human/spiritual growth as a wholeness.

The thought-activity is a process towards reaching conclusions, and therefore the thought is never free

The Ego is memory, the many conclusions; and the thought is the reaction of the memory.

The thought-activity is in this way always a line of conclusions, or the process towards reaching conclusions, and therefore the thought is never free, it isolates itself.

It might sound as a cognition-psychological exercise, but it is all based on time and its images.

That which is finished is subject for renewal, while that which continues is of time

Our common everyday thinking is a self-producing way of thinking, it is the whole of the mind´s stream of words, images, feelings, sensations, intuitions, inner monologues, comments, logical reasoning, memories, plans, etc. etc.,  - which all are about becoming something and achieving something, and which therefore is controlled by the will to power.

This way of thinking is not renewing itself, but is repeating the same themes again and again, because it is not completed, not finished.

It is the eternal recurrence of the same, where you preserve the thoughts in a linguistic form.

The experience of the meeting in the unreal life is characterized by, that emptiness and loss slide in between

Where the experience of the meeting in the unreal life is characterized by, that emptiness and loss slide in between, and create reflections, displacement and darkness, then the experience of the meeting in the real life is characterised by fulfilment, middle and light.

Shortly said: by creation itself.

There is only real thinking, when there isn´t any reaction from the memory

We are ceasing being creative, when we imitate, when we as natural beings only reacts on the bases of memories.

Answers from the memory are usually called thinking.

But such thinking is only reactions from those preconceived conceptions, which are memory.

It is only a reaction in the brain and not real thinking.

There is only real thinking, when there isn´t any reaction from the memory.

In this awake and passionate emptiness there is creation.

And when you are in this condition all stimuli and demands of life vanish.

The whole of life is contained in each moment

As Kierkegaard said, then the moment is the atom of eternity.

Every moment is a challenge, something new, a unique presence, an eternal Thou, who speaks to us, and calls for us.

There is a crisis in the human life, when it meets the challenge in an incomplete way, when it doesn't listen.

It is absent in its historical background.

But we don´t want to see this as a crisis, and we close our eyes in order to escape from it.

That way we progressively become blind, and the crisis increases.

Why do we not commit suicide in a meaningless world devoid of both faith in reason and faith in God?

Why do we not commit suicide in a meaningless world devoid of both faith in reason and faith in God?

What will you as a Life Artist do when you ask this question?

It can´t be asked by people, who have arranged themselves comfortably with familiar ideals, with a bit of money, and which are extremely respectable and mediocre.

If people of that kind at all ask questions, then they interpret them from their personal need of satisfaction.

But because this is a highly human, common problem, which affects all of life, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, why do we then live in this monotonous, meaningless way, go to the office, work in a laboratory or in a factory in forty years, put a few children in the world, bring them up after absurd precepts, and then die?

The quality of compassion and love must come to expression in different kinds of bodily activity

The quality of compassion and love must come to expression in different kinds of bodily activity.

Already from we are quite young we ought to work in the garden, learn to do carpentry, paint, write poems, weave, take care of an animal etc.

And through the senses – we must observe the trees, the mountains, the richness of the Earth, the poverty humans have created in the world.

And we must listen to classical music, bird song, the murmur from a stream.

Self-assertion is a kind of self-interest, where everything turns around the Ego

Self-assertion is a vice.

Self-assertion is a kind of self-interest, where everything turns around the Ego, and therefore makes the mind mediocre.

To live in a world, which is controlled by self-assertion, without being self-assertive, means, truly, to love something for its own sake, without seeking a reward, a result; but this is very difficult, because the whole world, all your friends, your relatives, struggle to achieve something, to accomplish something, to become something.

Everything has meaning; nothing is old, nothing is charred, nothing is recurrence, because reality is never old

The human being who doesn´t require anything, who doesn´t strive after goals, who doesn´t seek a result with all what this is implying, such a human being is in an ongoing condition of experience.

Since everything is in movement, everything has meaning; nothing is old, nothing is charred, nothing is recurrence, because reality is never old.

The challenge never ends, because every moment in life is a challenge

The challenge never ends, because every moment in life is a challenge.

Challenge and reaction is life itself.

Life is, and must be, a line of challenges and reactions.

The challenge doesn´t direct itself after the desires and dislikes of Man, or after his special wishes, but it takes different forms to different times.

And if Man had the ability to meet a challenge completely and directly, there would be no problems.

The mind, which in the awaken state functions after images, continues this in dreams while it is sleeping

The mind, which in the awaken state, in the day-time, functions after the images of life in which it is brought up - the conscious mind with all its daily activities - continues these activities in dreams while it is sleeping.

These activities consist in thoughts, feelings, sensations, arrangements, modifications, plans, comments, memories, image formations, and all the daily worries, misgivings, annoyances and demands, which are connected with this, because you from the thinking´s past or future make the Now´s facts into an problem. 

War is about things, and our social and moral values are based on things

When it is so important to understand the right relationship with the things, then this is because they have an all-important meaning for most people.

War is about things, and our social and moral values are based on things.

We will not be able to understand reality, unless we understand the complicated process of the will to power.

All motives, intentions, desires, pleasures, misgivings, inspirations, longings, expectations, sorrows, joys, are a movement in the thinking

All motives, intensions, desires, pleasures, misgivings, inspirations, longings, expectations, sorrows, joys, are within the area of consciousness, but all this is a movement in the thinking.

What we mean about consciousness, is in this way, on a superficial level of the mind, clearly enough the thinking´s process.

As long as there is a desire of becoming something, there will be anxiety

In order to understand what you are, the duality-conflict must cease, because the negative response – to become something - is to deny the understanding of what you are.

If you as a Life Artist want to understand for instance haughtiness, you must not try to become the opposite, you must not become yourself absent in the effort of becoming something else, because this creates anxiety.

When the anxiety is removed you can be yourself present.

But it will be anxiety, and therefore absence, as long as there is a desire of becoming something.

What is death?

So what is death?

How can you find out without that it only is a belief you adopt?

Is it possible to be death present in passive listening, not another's death, but your own death?

It demands that you don't identify yourself with something, what of course is very difficult.

Most of us identify ourselves with our furniture, with our house, with our wife or husband, with our government, with our country, with the image we have of ourselves, and we identify ourselves with something greater – the world-image, which perhaps is a tribal feeling that expands to embrace the nation; or you identify yourself with a special property, a special image.

What happens if you don’t identify yourself with all this?

Creative emptiness is the condition where the mind is completely released from your perspective

Creative emptiness is the condition where the mind is completely released from your perspective, from images of any kind, and the ideas, symbols and conceptions, which are their manifestations.

The known has stepped aside for the benefit of the unknown, the beauty of creation.

Everything is new, unnamed, unformed, non-linguistic presence.

The mind is pure, fresh, young, innocent; completely open and receiving.

The mind is awake and the heart is open, awareness and love in one.

And in this creative emptiness reality and truth can be discovered, or received, it is one and same.

A complete development of the body is a necessity; a thing, we all the time must lay us in mind

It is not only the clarity of the mind, the reason, and the emotional sensitivity, we must develop, also a complete development of the body is a necessity; a thing, we all the time must lay us in mind.

Because if the body isn´t healthy and strong, it will inevitably distort the thought, and contribute to insensibility.

This is beyond any doubt, wherefore we don´t have to discuss it in details.

It is absolutely required that the body is healthy, that it gets the right food and enough rest.

If the senses aren´t awake, then the body will hinder the complete development of Man.

In order to understand yourself you must understand that Man is an inviolable whole

In order to understand yourself you must understand that Man is an inviolable whole, not only a determined being, as for instance a society being with his particular assigned job: a worker, a citizen, a consumer, or a political being, right wing or leftist, or a religious being, Christian, Moslem, Jew, - but a complete whole in which an interaction and a reciprocity takes place.

Most of us see in the relationship, in the mirror, what we want to see, but we don´t see the real

The relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself.

This mirror can either distort or expose the truth about yourself.

Most of us see in the relationship, in the mirror, what we preferably want to see, but we don´t see that, which is real.

We like to condemn, justify, compare, or escape, and rather live in the past or the future, than to see the relations in which we are in the moment.

In this way the present, as Pascal said, only becomes used by the past as a passage to the future, and therefore the relationship – which is something that is in the moment, and not in past and future – becomes meaningless, wherefore there arises unreality and absence.

Why has Man always created a conflict in himself and in the relationship with the others?

Why has Man always created a conflict in himself and in the relationship with others  - and consequently violence, and the hope about achieving something through violence?

Man has tied himself to a way of life, which leads to war, and yet he at the same time wants peace and freedom; but it is peace and freedom exclusively as an idea, an ideology.

And at the same time Man is historical limited by everything he does.

The new is never there, because you always meet the new with the old

Since we meet any challenge from the past´s conditions – and because the challenge always is new – our reaction to the challenge will each time be utterly insufficient, and from this comes the contradiction, the conflict, and all the sorrow, distress and misery, we have inherited.

You shall not renounce the world, because you can´t live in isolation

As a Life Artist you must try to find a process, which can help you to understand yourself, and it is not a process, which will isolate you.

You shall not renounce the world, because you can´t live in isolation.

To be is to be in connection with others, and it is neither possible, nor required, to live in isolation.

The reason why there are conflicts, distress and misery, is that our relationship with the surrounding world is not right; our world might be very narrow, but if we can change our relationship with others, precisely in this narrow world, we will start a process, which spreads like rings in water.

Where absence weaves images, presence releases the mind for images

Where absence weaves images, presence releases the mind for images.

This is very simple.

If you become thoroughly present in passive listening when you for instance are angry, then it is not absence, which allows the past to push itself in and create reflections, and disturbing the actual sensation of the immediate anger.

The philosophical counselor is no authority, no teacher or guru

The philosophical counselor must suggest the guest not just to accept what he himself says, since he is no authority, no teacher or guru.

If he was a guru, then the guest would be his disciple, and in his quality of disciple the guest would, in philosophical sense, destroy both himself and the counselor.

The past or the future sucks life out of the present

You can either be absent in the bygone or the coming time.

The past or the future sucks life out of the present.

Memories, plans or projects are transformed into reality, while reality becomes emptiness.

The thought makes ifself independent in relation with your reality, and it becomes the whole of reality.

The unreality in this consists in, that you then only really exists in the hope about a richer future, or in the dream about a lost past.

The consciousness can´t be separated from a human´s actions

The consciousness can´t be separated from a human´s actions.

But often the consciousness keeps itself outside them, so that it can achieve a feeling of continuation and endurance.

And it is especially this isolating process - the Ego - which the Life Artist is seeking to understand.

Self-knowledge is the virtue of art of life.

Dreams are a sign of that there is disturbance, discord between the thought and the conduct of life

When there no dreams are, then the consciousness can enter deeper and deeper down into itself; that is to say: into life itself.

Dreams are a sign of that there is disturbance, discord between the thought and the conduct of life, that there is displacement between the thinker and life itself.

But when there no disturbances and displacement are, and the body during the sleep is very calm, when the mind is quiet, you will, when you wake up, find, that you haven´t dreamt, but that a renewal has taken place, a renewal, which constantly takes place, because there all the time is ending.

This renewal is the creation, the source of life, because you in the silence rest in the middle of life itself.

Far the most people confuse their perspective with reality

When the mind is quiet you begin to gain discrimination, the ability to discriminate between the known and the unknown.

The known is your perspective on yourself and the world, it is your self-image and world-image, which originate from the images of time.

The perspective distorts reality, because everything you see, is your own perspective, the known, the image.

You don´t see reality itself, truth or the unknown.

Far the most people confuse their perspective with reality, the description with the described, the word with the thing, the map with the landscape.

As a Life Artist you must study the whole structure of the thinking

As a Life Artist you must study the whole structure of the thinking, and see what place the thought has, see where it isn´t a necessity, and only then you will discover, that the mind functions in a reasonable way, both when the thought isn´t active, and when the thought has to be active.

Any decision, which is defined by a choice, exposes a person, who is confused

Any decision, which is defined by a choice, exposes a person, who is confused, who is unreal and absent, who places himself outside and creates reflections, displacements and darkness.

A person who is in the middle of his own existence, experiences on the contrary a presence of something obvious, something the individual has a clear understanding of.

Such a person´s mind doesn´t choose, there is only the power of action and decisiveness.

The lack of clarity, and therefore reason, arises when there is a division between the observer and the observed, and there slide emptiness and loss in between.

To see and feel without dividing, choosing, ruling and controlling, is the act of love

This act, to see and feel without dividing, choosing, ruling and controlling, is the act of love.

The ethical life is this act, and all life is this act.

The real life is the being where you are one with yourself, with life and love.

You are in the middle of the stream of life.