Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures—none lives so long as man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity! If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night's dream. We cannot live forever in this world; why should we wait for ugliness to over take us? The longer man lives, the more shame he endures. To die, at the latest, before one reaches forty, is the least unattractive. Once a man passes that age, he desires (with no sense of shame over his appearance) to mingle in the company of others. In his sunset years he dotes on his grandchildren, and prays for long life so that he may see them prosper. His preoccupation with worldly desires grows ever deeper, and gradually he loses all
sensitivity to the beauty of things, a lamentable state of affairs.

*from ESSAYS IN IDLENESS by The Surezuregusa of Kenko. Translated by Donald Keene

*Taken from a booklet I shared with clients when I worked with people struggling with mental health and addiction issues.

Let’s start with a fact: What you choose to think is what you will feel and what you feel is how you will act. If you think this way on a daily basis and therefore feel this way on a daily basis, eventually your body becomes addicted to this feeling and begins to crave it.
 
Knowing that your thoughts have a profound effect on your emotions is a primary ingredient to every recovery success story of people just like you and from all walks of life.  I urge you to invest yourself in this knowledge.  Read it, know it, memorize it if you must.  I can assure you that it will produce profound and amazing results in all facets of your life.

With the majority of people I have worked with, one consistent response when presenting this idea is, “But I can’t change how I think.  This is who I am, like it or leave it.”  It doesn’t matter whether or not I or anyone else likes or dislikes it.  What should matter to you is how it makes YOU feel. More importantly, you CAN change how you think. It has been proven by science to be a fact.  Here’s how it works:

Inside your brain, there is a tiny chemical factory called the hypothalamus.  It may be tiny, but it is one of the most productive chemical factories in production on the planet! The hypothalamus produces chemicals called peptides.  These peptides are created to duplicate specific emotions, such as: joy, sadness, excitement, fear, relaxation, stress, anger or depression.
 
From the hypothalamus, the peptides are sent to the pituitary gland and then out into the blood stream which contains anywhere from twenty to thirty trillion cells. Each cell has receptor sites.  The peptides dock onto the receptor sites, taking control of the cell, and eventually creating new cells with more receptor sites ready and waiting for that particular type of peptide.

Be the master of your mind rather than mastered by it.

Whatever state of mind has you calm, centered, quiet, and aware - this should be your mental posture.
Whether you are in motion or at rest, maintain your mental posture at all times, steady as she goes, regardless of the task at hand. The ineffable teaching of all teachings resides within this. -md

* Read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Interesting blog post by Brian Thompson.  Excerpt below.

Within each thing, are many things.

It’s a sublime and enlightened teaching of non-duality that is clearly expressed through the following verse:

“This is, because that is.
This is not, because that is not.
This ceases to be, because that ceases to be.”
When we apply this teaching into our lives, we gain deeper insight into the true nature of things. We begin to understand that nothing is an island unto itself. No thing is separate all on its own, and that no thing is completely self-contained or self-reliant. Everything that is, exists solely because of other events that have also co-arisen. All things are dependent upon cause and effect. This is true not only for our physical actions, but so too with all of our mental formations and the emotional happenings within our mind.

It's never just one thing.  Nothing arises from itself alone.

Neither exists without the other.  Together, they are one whole.