The principal enemy of mindfulness – or of any meditative practice – is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.
Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.
The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present.
It seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And.
Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do?
The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck – which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life.
What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.
Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.
Everything we want to accomplish – to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job – is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope.
A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.
Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion – even if I’m a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn’t exist, I’m still having an experience.
Chalmers: It’s awfully hard to define consciousness. But I’d start by saying that it’s the subjective experience of the mind and the world. It’s basically what it feels like, from the first-person point of view, to be thinking and perceiving and judging.
There’s something it’s like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that’s a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn’t feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they’re not conscious states of me, because there’s nothing it’s like for me to undergo those states.
I take seriously the idea that we’re in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it’s true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it’s not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it’s that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There’s a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.
Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design.
If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn’t real, then what you deny isn’t death but the significance of life.
The sea squirt – a very simple marine creature – swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia.
The closest thing in my life to a mistake of that magnitude was the marriage of my dear friend Liza to the Man Whose Name Shall Go Unmentioned.
My four-year-old son and I have little in common. Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time.
We know that trust is deeply rewarding and that deception and suspicion are two sides of the same coin. Research suggests that all forms of lying – including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others – are associated with less satisfying relationships.
An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl – even once in a million years – casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.