Quotes from Stephen Batchelor

It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.

Erotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles- the trappings of religion- confuse as much as they help.

The idea that there will be something spiritual or subtle, some sort of consciousness that can escape the collapse of the body and brain, is not very credible in the modern scientific worldview.

In taking life for granted, we fail to notice it.

In taking the everyday details of life for granted, we fail to appreciate the extraordinary fact that we are conscious at all.

...inner spiritual transformation is just as dependent upon the effect of our economic life upon the world as transformations in the world are dependent upon spiritual re-orientation.

This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.

p. 62 ...meditation… exposes a contradiction between the sort of person we wish to be and the kind of person we are. Restlessness and lethargy are ways of evading the discomfort of this contradiction.

In pride we consciously elevate our own standing and concerns and look down upon others as essentially inferior.

Many centuries after the Buddha, the Chinese Chan (Zen) patriarch Yunmen (c. 860–949) was asked: "What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?" Yunmen replied: "An appropriate statement."6 For Yunmen, what counts is whether your words and deeds are an appropriate response to the situation at hand, not whether they accord with an abstract truth.

Religious interpretations invariably reduce complexity to uniformity while elevating matter-of-factness to holiness.

Wisdom that neglects method leads to excessive introversion and an inability to effectively communicate with others. Method without wisdom can produce well-intentioned but naive and superficial acts of altruism that alleviate merely the symptoms of suffering without tackling the root cause of the problem.

A person who is asleep is either lost in deep unconsciousness or absorbed in a dream. Metaphorically, this was how the Buddha must have seen both his previous self as well as everyone else he had known: they either were blind to the questions of existence or sought consolation from them in metaphysical or religious fantasies.

We perceive the world in a particular way and confidently expect it to conform to its appearance. But we fail to recognize that certain aspects of the 'reality' that appear to us are nothing but figments of our own imagination. In this confusion a conflict ensues between the world as it is and the world as we believe it to be. And the more we insist on our infallibility, the more frustrated we become as the actual world again and again stubbornly refuses to live up to our expectations.

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. Awareness begins with remembering what we tend to forget. Drifting through life on a cushioned surge of impulses is but one of many strategies of forgetting. Not only do we forget to remember, we forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas.

you only set out to prove what you have already decided to believe.

I was more concerned with refining my sense of the sheer mysteriousness of life so that it infused each moment of my waking existence, thereby serving as a ground from which to respond more openly and vitally to whatever occurred.

Great doubt—great awakening; Little doubt—little awakening; No doubt—no awakening.

Habitually, as we anxiously flee from the responsibility of our existence as a whole, we place our hope in the particular objects and situations of the world. This, however, fails to provide us with a secure refuge and our initial anxiety asserts itself again.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now. Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.

Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created. Whether it be an ego, a nation-state, or a religious belief, the result is the same. The distortion severs such things from their embeddedness in the complexities, fluidities, and ambiguities of the world and make them appear as simple, fixed, and unambiguous entities with the power to condemn or save us.

The discourses that make up the different Nik?yas are all regarded as buddhavacana, but not all of them are spoken by Gotama. The "word of the Buddha," therefore, refers to whatever is well said, to any utterance that accords with and supports the practice of the dharma, irrespective of who utters it.