Best Of

@Jeroen said:
You certainly can’t mix-and-match approaches by different teachers

I’ve decided to pick a single book and teacher, and work with that for a more extended period. It seems to me the best way forward, to see where I am at on the spiritual path.

Considering all the spiritual books I have read and know about, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now has been the clearest and feels the most on my wavelength for an extended study. It has enough practical material to work with, and is culturally the least encumbered.

This also explains a bit more what makes victory so enticing in games, it is a property of the ego to want to be victorious, winning, celebrated. It is another reason why living in surrender is so difficult for the ego, and so important for the spiritual disciple.

“The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative.”
— Eckhart Tolle

This quote really made clear to me what it was about games that attracted me so much, it is a perfect representation of what the mind does: attack and defence, strategising, min-maxing, opportunism. I still have to be careful not to promote the strategising function of the mind into overall control, that temptation still exists for me.