Think, “I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal.” If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around you at all times.It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be enlightened to a certain degree every single day. There’s a great definition: “Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.” It means enlightenment isn’t something you achieve after thirty years of sitting on a mountaintop.This has got to change.” A lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment. It’s very hard to be in the present moment if you’re thinking, “I need to do this. Being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts.Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point in time. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. There is actually nothing but this moment. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time thinking about the future. It keeps you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. At any given time, when you’re walking down the street, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. Observation 2: The key is to live in the present moment. When you have internal silence, you are not thinking too much. In that absence of desire, you have internal silence, at least for a moment.The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. Or else my mind is in motion, moving toward the future or the past. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things. It’s about the absence of desire, especially for external things.It stops looking to the future to plan something. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past to regret something. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing.The idea that an external thing may bring you some kind of happiness and joy is delusional. Over and over, we say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get this thing,” whatever it is. The most fundamental mistake we make is all believing we’re going to be made happy by some external circumstance.We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in a web of desires.Observation 1: The problem is the way most of us think. What follows are excerpts from the book featuring the words and writings of Ravikant, which I’ve lighted edited and organized into three different categories of thought. And while he admits this approach won’t work for everyone, it works for him. He points out that for a lot of people, happiness means joy or bliss-but for him, it means peace. Ravikant asks us to look at our own definition of happiness. His basic premise can be summed up like this: “Happiness is there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.” As you might have surmised, we’re not going to discuss Ravikant’s guide to achieving wealth, which comprises the first half of the book, and will instead look at his thoughts on happiness.
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