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“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.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Smith and Denton reporting on the spiritual lives of American teenagers found a common belief that, as they wryly put it, God was 'something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist', who was availabe on demand but undemanding. This has been popularly characterised as 'benign whateverism'. Its core is that we should try to be nice, kind, respectful and responsible, and by doing so achieve a state of 'feeling good, happy, secure, at peace.' Worse things might certainly be believed; but this is not enough to support a civilisation, inspire great art, induce fidelity, inculcate sanctity, motivate self-sacrifice, or lead us to insights into the nature of existence.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“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.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged - even admired - in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame. And that can't help but make a difference to how we behave.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new 'improvements' in order to fuel demand. it is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society's survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
Mindaugas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mindaugas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
104 books
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45 friends
49 books
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72 friends
1 book
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19 friends
1 book
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2 friends
150 books
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47 friends
1,418 books
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88 friends
81 books
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11 friends
51 books
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33 friends
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