80 Quotes by Robert Wright

This question goes way beyond my own little episodes of transcending overcaffeination and melancholy. It applies, in principle, to all negative feelings: fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance.

In which case, he was basically saying: ‘Look, if there is part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it.

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there’s more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles – some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as “divine” in some sense of the word?

There’s no doubt that meditation training has allowed some people to become essentially indifferent to what otherwise would have been unbearable pain.

Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of “savage” societies were “almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion.” Tylor wasn’t saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally “well-defined and praiseworthy.” It’s just that “these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion,” rather than on a religious foundation.