Sam Harris: Thieves Entering an Empty House

The hour of meditation in the morning is useless unless the rest of your day is somewhat like that hour of meditation in the morning.

It seems to me that there's a very happy asymmetry in what happens to emotion the more truly mindful you become. The asymmetry is that negative emotion, like hatred or anger, really is predicated on a kind of lack of awareness and lack of understanding of specific things. And the more aware and cognizant you become of those things, the more starkly negative reactions begin to erode, certainly the half-life of them gets cut way down.

Mindfulness... is not a matter of blocking thoughts or hoping to get rid of thoughts; it's breaking the identification with thought, noticing thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness and not feeling that there's a thinker in addition to the next arising thought ... You're not authoring your thoughts; they're just appearing quite on their own.

There's an image in the Tibetan teachings that, in the end, thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house—nothing for them to steal.

Even if anger was totally warranted in the moment, nine times out of ten, it's best to used as a signal of the salience of the situation, ethically or emotionally. But then, it's far better to no longer be angry just to resolve the situation. To continue to speak and act from the impetus of anger is, in almost every case, made less effective in actually solving your problems.

[H.W.L. Poonja's] basic message was consciousness is already free ... Your mind is already the mind of the Buddha; you just have to recognize that. And you can either recognize that right now or not. You're only ever going to recognize that now. There's no future time when you're going to be better placed to do that.

I don't know what the connection is between successful meditation and sleep, but I believe... there's at least one paper suggesting that it's actually inversely correlated, which is to say that the better you get at meditating, the worse you get at sleeping.