James Pierce

The Standards: You wake up each morning perfectly at peace. Your life is exactly as you desire it to be. It is what you might call dynamically balanced—there are moving pieces, things you are heading towards and things you are leaving, but you have the feeling that everything is right where it should be. Your mind can become quiet at a moment’s notice. The instant you desire it, it becomes a reality. There is no ‘gap’. In fact much of your time is spent not thinking, but not because you actively seek this out. It is just where you happen to find yourself. You are completely free from desire. You have your preferences, yet you feel entirely unmoved by them. Your mind no longer fixates on objects with the intent of satisfying itself. You do not react emotionally to things. Emotions come as they always have, they are felt as they have always been, but they lack the overwhelming nature that once threw you off balance. You find your experience entirely absent of certain emotions like anger, anxiety, fear, or jealousy. The present moment is your closest companion. It is your natural resting place. So much so that you no longer see any significance in it, just as a fish sees no significance in water. It just is. You no longer have any compulsion to run from it. You move freely through life because you are not attached to anything. You take things as they come, and enjoy them for what they are rather than hating them for what they are not. You dive headfirst into your relationships without fear because you know that you could never be hurt. Life feels impersonal. There is no longer a ‘you’ at the center of it. There is no sense of self, no owner of ‘your’ experience. It is almost as if you are hollow, that beneath your skin there exists only a vast expanse of space, but it is a fullness rather than an emptiness. It is the feeling of being complete. If anything here does not feel perfectly true to you, is not reflected in your experience, you still have further left to go.

Life is so much better when you stop settling for what others think is reasonable.

A quiet life is a lot more appealing when your ego stops running the show. - @RealJamesPierce

@sammutgabi Thanks

Masterpiece.

Few things in life are more satisfying than reaching into the depths of your soul to share a piece of truth with someone, and then watching them take it to heart and allow themselves to be changed by it.

Pessimists always think they’re realists.

Worth a listen

Only do what you want, but choose your wants wisely.

AI turns every skill into a matter of taste.

Every time you misunderstand an emotion, your connection to life becomes a little less intimate.

The idea that you will reach some mythical state in which your mind becomes perfectly silent for the rest of your life is an absolute fiction. In fact it wouldn’t even be desirable. What you really want is to keep the useful functions of mind, of which there are many, and discard the rest.

Life is a skill game disguised as a roulette table.

I’m constantly in awe of how simple a good life really is. Get some coffee, go for a walk, read a good book. Happiness is low hanging fruit.

You save a lot of time when you stop going out of your way to help people that don’t want your help.

Enlightenment is tricky because no one can really tell you what it is. We use pointers, approximations like “non-duality” and “no-self”, but these terms aren’t meaningful in and of themselves. They’re more like directions than they are teachings. Perfect for someone wondering which turn to take, and useless to the people who haven’t even set foot on the road.

If you really want to lock in, ask grok to show you what your life would look like if you fail.

I’m taking on 3 new coaching clients this month. If you’re pursuing peace, a quiet mind, enlightenment Let’s talk. james-pierce.com/coaching

A lot of questions seem deep and complex prior to enlightenment, only to be seen as silly misunderstandings afterwards. The question of love without attachment is like this. Asking how one can love without being attached is a bit like asking how you can possibly run if you aren’t wearing a weighted vest. It only seems like a problem because you’ve been wearing the vest so long you don’t know what life will be like without it.

@thinktypewrite Worth it though.

The hard thing about building the life you want is that the world will constantly tell you you’re being unrealistic, that you’re asking for too much, that it just doesn’t work that way. And they have to say that, otherwise the regret would eat them alive. If you’re serious about building an uncommonly good life, you have to start answering only to yourself. Everything else draws you back towards the average.