Sabrina

“Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives. To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

“Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends far beyond sports or artistic performance.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“THE ACTIONS THAT accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“In another sense, however, contemporary secularism has new and distinct features, the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its commitment to rationality and evidence, for instance, means that it’s unusually open to modification around the edges, although—as with any value system worth its salt—the core values like human rights or freedom are in principle non-negotiable. The flip side to this openness is a somewhat disorienting minimalism: liberalism is about as stripped down as a value system can be and still function. Most of its injunctions are negative. Do not violate human rights, do not restrict people’s freedom of expression, do not allow the strong to oppress the weak. As long as you are careful to steer clear of committing genocide or being oppressively prejudiced, however, secular liberalism then doesn’t have a lot to say about what you should be doing. Besides vaguely sacred communal rituals such as listening to NPR, reading the New York Times, or buying locally sourced organic vegetables, secular liberals are not given much guidance on how to actually live their lives. And this vacuum has to be filled by something—avoiding human rights abuses still leaves a lot of hours in the day.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity