Mindaugas Orlovas

“It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being. One of the few occasions on which at last modern man might be able to grasp the enormity of existence is in the contemplation of death. Yet this is just what we ignore. It is a commonplace that while the Victorians did not talk about sex, they were open about death; we do not talk about death, but are clinically explicit about sex. Unfortunately for us, being open about something robs it of its power, while hiding increases it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Pride and arrogance, believing we know it all, are the opposite of the religious disposition of humility, reverence and compassion. And without them, neither we, nor the whole far greater, astonishing, living world, over which for better or worse we now have the power we so much craved, can thrive. It is pride that will destroy us, and quickly. With so much going for us, rising educational standards, better healthcare, public welfare and humane and stable government, what could be against us? We ourselves. Pride was always considered the greatest of the 'seven deadly sins', and it may in the past have proved difficult for many to see why. But the evidence is all around us now; and it is there in the epic narrative of one of the greatest poems of our Language, Paradise Lost, for all to read.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God. In a speech given in 1983, he repeated: 'If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again; men have forgotten God.' More than this, a positive 'hatred of God', he thought was the principal driving force behind the philosophy and psychology of Marxism-Leninism: 'militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The hatred of God is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, one more and more evident in out time - and not just in political philosophies, but in the vox pop of media scientists. Lucifer - 'the Bright' - cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he.”
― Iain McGilchrist

“Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: 'The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it.' In the Analects of Confucius it sis written: 'The Master said, does Heaven speak?' Famously Lao Tzu tells us that 'the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao'. In the Eastern tradition, then, there are many such statements of the impossibility of capturing the source of all things in language.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World