Quotes from Robert Wright

Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw." In that sense, he observed, "our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.

No tienes que buscar el amor; tan solo has de buscar y encontrar todas las barreras internas que has erigido para ocultarlo».

At the dawn of organic sentience

lo cierto es que en cierto modo quiero que me sigan sacando de quicio, pues no me gustaría llegar tan lejos en la búsqueda del nirvana como para perder este espíritu de lucha. Si la iluminación total significa dejar de hacer juicios de valor de cualquier tipo y dejar de esforzarse por cambiar las cosas, entonces no contéis conmigo2.

Y tal vez eso es lo que es el «yo», lo que «tú» eres, una vez que se abandona la idea de yo: un tipo de forma de conciencia purificada.

status is a resource.39 If status expands your access to food or sex, then it makes sense to seek status in the abstract, just as it makes sense to seek money even though you can't eat it.

We wouldn't spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.

anger has a "poisoned root and honeyed tip.

The mindfulness meditation I've done has been within a particular school of meditation known as Vipassana (pronounced vih PAW suh nuh). Vipassana is an ancient word that denotes clear vision and is usually translated as "insight.

impermanence.

three marks of existence

The keen sensitivity with which people detect the flaws of their rivals is one of nature's wonders. It takes a Herculean effort to control this tendency consciously, and the effort must be repeated on a regular basis.... Honesty of evaluation is simply beyond the reach of most mortals.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

This may sound paradoxical: one can, from a Darwinism vantage point, advise sexual restraint for women, roughly echoing traditional moral exhortation, while at the same time decrying the moral censure of women who don't take the advice. But you might as well get used to the paradox, for it's part of a more general Darwinism slant on morality.

According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine,' selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from their point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism.

No doubt the world's shamans have run the gamut from true believer to calculating fraud, and no doubt many true beliefs have been peppered by doubt. But so it is in other spiritual traditions, too. There are deeply religious Christian ministers who urge the congregation to pray for the ill even though they personally doubt that God uses opinion polls to decide who lives and who dies.

WRITER: But tell me before you go. What was the worst thing about being down here? AGNES: Just existing. Knowing my sight was blurred by my eyes, my hearing dulled by my ears, and my bright thought trapped in the grey maze of a brain. Have you seen a brain?

Kedyko?vek ?udia pociÃ…Â¥ujú prítomnosÃ…Â¥ záhadnej a mohutnej sily, chcú uveriÃ…Â¥, že sa nájde spôsob, ako jej porozumieÃ…Â¥. Pokia? sa vám podarí ich presved?iÃ…Â¥, že ste k?ú?om k jej pochopeniu, môžete dosiahnuÃ…Â¥ vysoké postavenie.

According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine,' selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems.

Here's an embarrassing irony: nothing so arouses tribalistic animosities in me as people who support policies that, in my view, tend to arouse tribalistic animosities.

In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the unnatural position of meeting someone who knows little or nothing about us. That can add a little pressure to the occasion, and it may add more if your mother was prone to saying "You get only one chance to make a good first impression!" You may find yourself scanning the person for feedback so intensively that you start seeing things that aren't there.

associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much less fixed identity, than we think.

lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural -not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires what, for lack of a better term, we can call an act of will.