None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.
Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed – but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
It is always now.
In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a genuine relationship with him to be nonexistent.
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience.
In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.
I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
You are not in control of your mind – because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.
People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs – that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions – the more consequential the lie.
In a world of true abundance you shouldn’t have to work to justify your life.
The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand – that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment – is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself.
Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. “Islamophobia” is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it.
Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.
People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.
I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.
Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.