The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s long-term well-being.
Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about “facts” that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa’s reindeer.
The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just doesn’t seem as salient to us as it should. And, as Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing. Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth’s population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.
In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.
I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names – which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.
Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.
The promise of spiritual life – indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book – is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.
Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.
Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature – to say nothing of killing and dying for them – would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?
While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.
If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.
But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life.
Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.
Aceptar mantener un secreto es asumir una carga.
Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.
Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self”.
We can’t say, “Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we’re going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go... Don’t you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” However, that’s really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century.
Remaining open to the powers of conversation – to new evidence and better arguments – is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain – and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.