3D: Daily Dose of Discernment: 2006

This book is a collection of sayings for each day of the year, originally created in 2006, but the quotations remain appropriate and relevant for any year. The sayings cover various topics important to your emotional health, including: psychotherapy, psychology, philosophy, psychological skills, General Semantics, Eastern psychology, Eastern philosophy, meditation, flow, identity.

You will discover sayings useful to understanding Eastern thought and General Semantics. The agreement between General Semantics and Eastern philosophy is profound and illuminating, and understanding that agreement will deepen your understanding of both. For instance, the expressions "The description is not the described" and "The thought is not the thing" are found in both Eastern philosophy and General Semantics. Both systems arrive at reality as nonverbal, silent, and beyond comprehension with thought, despite the fact that one is spiritual and the other is atheistic. That two entirely different approaches arrive at the same ultimate conclusions is exciting and enlightening to truth seekers who honor convergence.

You will find the sayings herein amusing, helpful, interesting, and thought-provoking. Many of the sayings are like Zen koans: If you sit with them, they reveal the "other side", free of words. Many of the sayings are open to multiple interpretations.

Some of the sayings share the selfsame insight, phrased differently. Why do this? Such variation helps you see past the simpler surface meanings to reach the deeper felt experiences. A slight change in wording often allows people to drop their minds long enough to hear something fresh. One person's "That's obvious" is another person's "Aha!" moment.

Let the sayings pass that don't open to you. Focus on the sayings that bring stillness, and you will get results. Listen beyond the words. Rather than think the sayings through, feel them through. Sense the music behind the words rather than think about their meanings. Manage to touch the energy behind the words, and your heart will be touched.

Pithy sayings can be either personally meaningless or instantly helpful. Often the best results come from sayings or aphorisms after they have grown slowly in the garden of your mind. In time, ideas you initially reject can grow to have more meaning. Aphorisms that make no sense today can suddenly reveal themselves to you years later. Some sayings can follow and teach you for a lifetime. For example, "Drink from your own well" has taught many again and again.

Making yourself contemplate a saying you do not understand can reveal much about your thinking styles. Is the coldness coming from the saying or your own lack of openness? The best approach is to feel your way to the inside meat of a saying.

This book uses the word change both in the psychological sense and in the layman's sense. Change is considered an impossibility for psychological entities, like thoughts, feelings, and sensations. However, sometimes this book recommends change or describes how to change, using change in the layman's sense: change being the transformation into something else (which is wrong for psychological usage) or being a switching to something else (which is right for psychological usage). You do not change your dog into a cat. You can change from having a dog to having a cat. You change your shirt by switching to a different shirt, not by mutating your current shirt into another shirt. Switch, not change. Change can also be used in the sense of turning, shifting, transferring, or redirecting, not evolving. More discussion on change can be found in Attitude Is All You Need! Second Edition