Juan Pablo

“Once Luang Por Chah was going to visit a branch monastery down near the Cambodian border. The road through the hills down to the borderlands was very twisting and precipitous. Luang Por Chah was in the front of the little pickup truck with a young Western monk and the driver, while there were a few other monks on the benches in the back.

The Western monk soon realized that the driver was extremely reckless, and he became convinced the driver had a death wish. They were haring around the steep mountain roads, with enormous drops and blind corners, screeching
around one bend after another. The monk sat there the whole time thinking, ‘We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!’ and he kept looking over to Ajahn Chah to see if he was reacting, and whether he was going to ask the driver to slow down. Instead Ajahn Chah sat there quite calmly looking out of the windscreen and didn’t say a thing.

To the young monk’s amazement they got through the hills safely and arrived at their destination. When they got there Ajahn Chah turned around to him with a big grin and said, ‘Scary ride, huh?”
― Ajahn Amaro, The Breakthrough

“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo

“If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening “at the same moment,” the correct answer would be: “It’s a question that doesn’t make sense, because there is no such thing as ‘the same moment’ definable in the universe.” The “present of the universe” is meaningless.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

“When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics