Best Of

"Our original Buddha-Nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any trace of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy-and that is all. Enter deeply in it by awakening to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught besides. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva's progress toward Buddhahood, one by one, when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature that has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all. You will come to look upon those aeons of work and achievement as no better than unreal actions performed in a dream. That is why the Tathagata [the Buddha] said: I truly attained nothing from complete, unexcelled Enlightenment."

• Huang Po

In secular Sufism Idries Shah talks a lot about unloading. Where we are so clever and already 'knowing' that we have to unload.

Zen explains it this way, in a story often repeated:

A professor went to visit Nan-in, a Zen master, to ask him about Zen. Nan-in kindly welcomed him and began to make tea. He filled the professor’s teacup full and then continued pouring the tea, overflowing the cup.

The professor exclaimed — “Stop! The cup is already full, no more will go in!”

Nan-in responded: “Like this cup, your mind is already full of ideas and opinions. There is no room for anything new. To understand Zen, you must first empty your cup — open your mind and free it from preconceived notions.”

As Epictetus once said,
“You can’t learn that which you think you already know.”

"More tea, Vicar?" - 'All Gas and Gaitors' TV series

Perhaps all we can do is talk about what helps us on our path, what has made us successful in striving for inner peace, clarity, and kindness. In the hope that perhaps we inspire someone else to try one of our techniques.

Awareness has helped me on the path , that is, through meditation one gradually becomes aware of being aware of becoming aware. Which gives thought breathing space(aka timeout) between thoughts becoming wholesome or unwholesome actions...

"Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object.
It is empty, and so can contain everything, including thought. It is boundless. And, amazingly, it is intrinsically knowing."

And
"Every moment is a moment of events and no moment passes by without an event...One can not notice a moment without noticing events taking place in that moment...Therefore the moment one tries to pay bare attention to is the present moment !"

I've found meditation helps to stop the mind from becoming tied up in (k)nots

I think this is an area where our similarities diverge. I'm very much not about ideals, but balance and integration. I see winning as yang energy and the other as yin energy. Regarding winning, if you look at it in terms of comparison with others, yes there are only a few at the top. If you look at it in terms of comparison with yourself, then anyone can "win", external vs internal. I also don't generally look at it as a zero sum competition, though I recognize that much of the world does. My attitude in general is much more process oriented than goal oriented, just worry about doing the things that improve your mind and life, let the outcomes take care of themselves.

I’m not sure there even is a superior way, given that we all seem to walk our own paths 🙏