Patrick Page

“Edith’s survival and, far beyond that, her transcendence of the horrors she endured are depicted in her book The Choice. What choice could she mean? Certainly not the choice of when and where she was born, or what befell those closest to her. Rather, she found a way to exercise the only agency she had, which lay in her own point of view and emotional attitude toward the unchangeable past. Here she explains how, decades later, she forgave Hitler himself. This happened at Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, the location of the Führer’s residence from 1933 onward. “It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of our past,” she writes. “So I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing that part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting mental and emotional energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is.”[2] We could say that she came to “choose” her past, not in the sense of liking or condoning it, but by simply letting it be.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn’t know it is just a thought.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The moment you get strongly identified, you lose your perspective on life! Ideas of good and bad, right and wrong are all your mental constructs. They have nothing to do with life as such. What was considered to be moral a hundred years ago is intolerable today. What you think is very good, your children despise. Your ideas of good and bad are just a certain level of prejudice against life. The moment you get identified with your limited ideas of morality you become completely twisted. Your intellect functions around these identifications in such a way that you never see the world as it is. If you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is. One of the biggest problems in the world today is that right from a person’s childhood, an inflexible system of morality has been imposed on the mind. Whatever you consider good, you naturally get identified with it. Whatever you consider bad, you are naturally repelled by. This attraction and aversion is the basis of all strong identification. The nature of your mind is that whatever you are averse to dominates it. Moralists and preachers have for generations told humanity to eschew “evil thoughts.” That is a surefire strategy to achieve the reverse! Now, if you try to resist that supposedly “evil thought,” it becomes a full-time job. There is nothing else going on in your head. The idea of moral superiority has been the source of too many inhuman acts to be ignored. Most people who believe they are virtuous are hard to live with. Besides, they spend most of their lives trying to avoid what they consider “wrong” or “sinful.” That usually means they are constantly thinking about it. Avoiding something is not freedom from it. Such morality is based on exclusion. Spirituality, on the other hand, is born of inclusion”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“To her credit, my wife will not allow me to get away with pinning the entire blame for my arrivals-gate hissy fit on Nazis and fascists and infant trauma. Yes, the backstory merits compassion and understanding—and she has given me an abundance of both—but there comes a point when “Hitler made me do it” won’t fly. Responsibility can and must be taken.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture