465 Quotes About Metaphysics

I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.

There is an actual and palpable hierarchy of emotional, mental and physiological intensity that corresponds to the actual capacities and limitations of human beings. In other words, there does exist a real and definable scale of suffering, and of joy.

Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.

The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).

True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.

The matter of the Eastern philosophers is not the "matter" of the Western metaphysicians.

Our ability to retain a happy and untroubled outlook does not just come from negating bad outlooks collectively, but from correcting specific, particular ones individually.

We find many friends when we are down and out. People swarm around with proclamations of, 'Oh, how dreadful. How terrible.' They may as well be saying, 'Thank you so much for making me feel better about myself and my life. You have more problems than me and are more pathetic.' Yet, when we enter the path of healing, there will be few standing there to wish us well, in case we find it.

In some ways, discovering that our physical universe is formed in a completely different way to what we thought is a bit like someone in a Star Trek Holodeck program suddenly seeing a bit of the actual spaceship and questioning their own sense of ‘what is real?