Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.
An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity. One key is authenticity: parents acting as people, not as roles.
Before we choose our tools and technology, we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them more unobtainable.
By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.
Cultural transformation announces itself in sputtering fits and starts, sparked here and there by minor incidents, warmed by new ideas that may smolder for decades. In many different places, at different times, the kindling is laid for the real conflagration-the one that will consume the old landmarks and alter the landscape forever.
Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.
Government itself is an awesome strategy for avoiding pain and conflict. For a considerable price, it relieves us of responsibilities, performing acts that would be as unsavory for most of us as butchering our own beef. As our agent, the government can bomb and tax. As our agent, it can relieve us of the responsibilities once borne face to face by the community: caring for the young, the war-wounded, the aged, the handicapped. It extends our impersonal benevolence to the world's needy, relieving our collective conscience without uncomfortable first-hand involvement. It takes our power, our responsibility, our consciousness.
If we are to find our way across troubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia.
If we continue to believe as we have always believed, we will continue to act as we have always acted. If we continue to act as we have always acted, we will continue to get what we have always gotten.
It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear... It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.
Love is a context, not a behavior.
Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.
Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish.
Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.
New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding- great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.
No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by agreement or by emotional appeal.
Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.
Only that which is deeply felt can change us. Rational arguments alone cannot penetrate the layers of fear and conditioning that comprise our crippling belief system.
Our biggest failure is our failure to see patterns.
Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.
Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.
Risk always brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side; the relief of a conflict healed; the clarity when a paradox dissolves.
So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.
Sometimes in astronomy, a heavenly body has been virtually invisible until a single observer detects its presence and points it out to his colleagues, who then see it with increasing clarity. Perhaps a myriad of unknown senses are only awaiting our consciousness.
Spirituality is a kind of virgin wisdom, a knowing that comes prior to experience.
The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.
The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into normal consciousness.
The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.
The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.
The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others.
The other side of every fear is a freedom.
The person and society are yoked, like mind and body. Arguing which is more important is like debating whether oxygen or hydrogen is the more essential property of water.
The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.
Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.
Transformation is a journey without a final destination.
Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.
War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else.
We cannot leave the trap until we know we are in it.
We have two strategies for coping; the way of avoidance or the way of attention.
We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically.
Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.
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