If we are to feel the positive feelings of love, happiness, trust, and gratitude, we periodically also have to feel anger, sadness, fear, and sorrow.
~ John Gray
The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it.
Over the past two hundred years philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error -the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.
The Buddha promised release from something we all understand: suffering. By contrast, no one can say what was the original sin, and no one understands how the suffering of Christ can redeem it.
History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers , but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.
The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.
What you feel, you can heal.
Histories of morality are rarely written in order to inform the reader.
The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind. But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. meditation may give us a fresher view of things but cannot uncover them as they are in themselves.
Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history . Pogroms are as old as Christendom , but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. (..) Scientific fundamentalism claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of the truth. But to represent science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.
Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire.(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices.
In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability.
Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth- and to be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals. (...) There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution.(...) Among humans, the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves: 'we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better'. A lover who promises eternal fidelity s more likely to be believed if he believes his promise himself; he is no more likely to keep his promise.(...) In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage.
Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.
When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.
A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood.
All men and women have an equal need for love. When these needs are not fulfilled it is easy to have our feelings hurt, for which we blame our partner.
Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.
