Michael Taft > Quotes

“The answer is simple: it’s not the world that is boring and repetitive, it’s your mind that is boring and repetitive. Your”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics

“Most of us live in a state of perpetual “could be better.” We’re so used to having control over every little parameter of our lives that we cannot focus on what’s going right, only on what’s going wrong. That’s the viewpoint we always seem to be coming from, and it means that we are perpetually unsatisfied, unhappy, disappointed, and ungrateful.”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics

“It’s crucial to remember that your attention is one of the most precious capacities you possess.”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics

“I always say that “half of who you are is other people,” meaning that the beliefs, attitudes, and biases of the people around you gradually become your own.”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics

“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.”
― Michael Taft, Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept

“This definition, which sounds like the opposite of Brahman being the whole universe, is actually identical to brahman being the whole universe, because—in this way of looking at it—everything in the phenomenal universe is an illusion, including your separate self.”
― Michael Taft, Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept

“Albert Einstein once said, “a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics