Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement – the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding.
What you really want for yourself is always trying to break through, just as a cooling breeze flows through an open window on a hot day. Your part is to open the windows of your mind.
A cheery relaxation is man’s natural state, just as nature itself is relaxed. A waterfall is concerned only with being itself, not with doing something it considers waterfall-like.
All we have to do is to receive what we are given…We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.
An obvious fact about negative feelings is often overlooked. They are caused by us, not by exterior happenings. An outside event presents the challenge, but we react to it. So we must attend to the way we take things, not to the things themselves.
