L22 · Lens
Detached observation
Step back from thoughts and impressions and observe them as passing mental events without immediate identification or rash assent.
Use: Rumination, mental noise, intrusive worry, craving.
Boundary: Observation clarifies choice; it does not detach from moral responsibility.
Cues
Showing 12 of 12 cues
“For a start, don’t be carried away by [the impression’s] vividness, but say: Wait for me a bit, impression; let me take a look at you and what you are about, let me test you. Next, don’t let it lead you on by painting a picture of what comes next. Otherwise, it is off and away, taking you wherever it wishes. Instead, confront it with another impression, a fine and noble impression, and dismiss this foul one.”
“To find the ‘richest’ view [of the world], the one that seems truest to the world as a whole, in the sense that it resonates with our experience in the richest way, the imaginative exercise of inhabiting a number of points of view is required.”
“Experience ... shows beyond any doubt that patients can develop an amazing faculty of keen self-observation if they are bent on understanding their own problems.”
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
“No one is laughable who can laugh at himself.”
“If you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity. .you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge - a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity. Your attitude towards it will be that of the mineralogist who stumbles upon a very characteristic specimen of a mineral.”
“Attunement to self is best characterized by the image of free flow, the flowing into [awareness] of thoughts, desires, and emotions with no sense of censorship or management, together with a free-flowing access backwards towards their origins.”
“This state of inner attunement is not always joyful or serene ... Sometimes it involves feeling with devastating intensity the conflicts, the rages, the intimations of mortality we have been trying to deny ... Yearnings, rages, jealousies, dependencies, and estrangements can be safely lived through when the persons upon whom we might wrongly (or dangerously, or foolishly) unleash them are absent.”
“Realign your life toward getting done what reality sends that needs doing. In other words we advise you to focus more on purposeful behavior. Let the feelings take care of themselves. What I think you will find is that when you get good at doing what needs doing in your life, the feelings stop giving you such trouble. And even if your feelings become troublesome, when you are involved in constructive activity, they remain in perspective. Feelings cease to be the whole show.”
“The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all the shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.”
“Now a man should take away not only unnecessary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus superfluous acts will not follow after.”
“Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; ... to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest.”