CreatedByEtan > CreatedByEtan's Quotes

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts

“We behave according to what we bring to the occasion.” Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, “whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.”
― Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles

“Here is the amazing thing: the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA. They are the same organism but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal.”
― Bruce H. Lipton, Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here

“Your brain is shaped by the realities of the world that you find yourself in, including the social world made by agreement among people. Your mind is a grand collaboration that you have no awareness of. Through construction, you perceive the world not in any objectively accurate sense but through the lens of your own needs, goals, and prior experience (as you did with the blobby bee). And you are not the pinnacle of evolution, just a very interesting sort of animal with some unique abilities.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
― Alan Watts

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Every single thing that touches your life, religious, socially and politically, must be an instrument of your liberation or you must throw it into the ashcan of history.”
― John Henrik Clarke

“This is another basis for my frequent claim, “You are an architect of your experience.” You are indeed partly responsible for your actions, even so-called emotional reactions that you experience as out of your control. It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions. You also bear some responsibility for others, because your actions shape other people’s concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation. Social reality implies that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a fluffy, let’s-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these ideas. Don’t be materialistic. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones. But I am asking you to take this one step further. When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.40”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or gratified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“I learned again and again in my life, until you get your own act together, you’re not ready for Big Love. What you’re ready for is one of those codependent relationships where you desperately need a partner.”
― Bruce H. Lipton, The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth

“The Shadow represents everything we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves that nonetheless impacts the way we behave.”
― Beatrice Chestnut, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“The science of epigenetics has also made it clear that there are two mechanisms by which organisms pass on hereditary information. Those two mechanisms provide a way for scientists to study both the contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) in human behavior. If you only focus on the blueprints, as scientists have been doing for decades, the influence of the environment is impossible to fathom. (Dennis 2003; Chakravarti and Little 2003)”
― Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Belief: Unleasing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles

“Anger is stereotypically normal for men because they are supposed to be aggressors. Women are supposed to be victims, and good victims shouldn’t become angry; they’re supposed to be afraid. Women are punished for expressing anger—they lose respect, pay, and perhaps even their jobs. Whenever I see a savvy male politician play the “angry bitch card” against a female opponent, I take it as an ironic sign that she must be really competent and powerful. (I have yet to meet a successful woman who hasn’t paid her dues as a “bitch” before she was accepted as a leader.)20 In courtrooms, angry women like Ms. Norman lose their liberty. In fact, in domestic violence cases, men who kill get shorter and lighter sentences, and are charged with less serious crimes, than are women who kill their intimate partners. A murderous husband is just acting like a stereotypical husband, but wives who kill are not acting like typical wives, and therefore they are rarely exonerated.21 Emotion stereotyping is even worse when the female victim of domestic violence is African American. The archetypal victim in American culture is fearful, passive, and helpless, but in African American communities, women sometimes violate this stereotype by defending themselves vigorously against their alleged batterers.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
― Alan Watts

“But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Judges infer all sorts of negative personality characteristics in angry female rape victims that they tend not to attribute to angry male crime victims. When a woman has been raped, for instance, judges (and juries and the police) expect to see her express grief on the witness stand, which tends to bring the rapist a heavier sentence. When a female victim expresses anger, judges evaluate her negatively. These judges are falling prey to another version of the “angry bitch” phenomenon. When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“A similar bout of affective realism gave birth to Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. This law permits the use of deadly force in self-defense if you reasonably believe you’re in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. A real-life incident was the catalyst for the law, but not in the way that you might think. Here’s how the story is usually told: In 2004, an elderly couple was asleep in their trailer home in Florida. An intruder tried to break in, so the husband, James Workman, grabbed a gun and shot him. Now here’s the true, tragic backstory: Workman’s trailer was in a hurricane-damaged area, and the man he shot was an employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The victim, Rodney Cox, was African American; Workman is white. Workman, mostly likely under the influence of affective realism, perceived that Cox meant him harm and opened fire on an innocent man. Nevertheless, the inaccurate first story became a primary justification for Florida’s law.47”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“One of our deepest unconscious patterns is the false belief that we already know ourselves well enough to understand why we think, feel, and act the way we do.”
― Beatrice Chestnut, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

“The concept of “Emotion” itself is an invention of the seventeenth century. Before that, scholars wrote about passions, sentiments, and other concepts that had somewhat different meanings.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain