Self-awareness is value-free. It isn’t scary. It doesn’t imply that you will subject yourself to needless pain.
You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway.
A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness.
Muhammad is more human, more self-doubting, even self-tortured at times. His story is full of adventure, intrigue, betrayal.
The fear of death comes from limited awareness.
So many things happen for every event, and if you try to manipulate it, it means you are struggling against the whole universe, and that’s just silly.
Consciousness conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes the activity of the body.
I grew up with a lot of Muslim friends, and the whole idea of revelation has been a lifelong interest of mine.
In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit.
Your immune cells are like a circulating nervous system. Your nervous system in fact is a circulating nervous system. It thinks. It’s conscious.
Every spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection. It’s not unique to Christianity.
My father was a doctor, an army cardiologist.
Religions take donations and don’t pay taxes.
Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.
The masculine energy was about survival. The male was the hunter who risked his life and had to be in the fight-flight mode.
We Americans sit at the head of the banquet table, as we have done for a century. Our standard of living is luxurious by any measure.
When I was growing up, I went to an Irish-Christian missionary school.
No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can’t find the point where these molecules became conscious.
And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.