José M.

“The Emerald tablet (Tabula smaragdina) by Hermes Trismegistus, which became the basic tenet of esoteric systems such as Tantra, Kabbalah, or the Hermetic tradition, confirms these observations with its message: “as above so below” or “as without, so within.” Each of us is a microcosm containing, in some mysterious way, the entire universe.”
― Stanislav Grof, The Way of the Psychonaut Volume One: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys

“The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.”
― Robert Wright , Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about “getting in touch with your feelings” and “not making judgments.” And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings—anger, love, sorrow, joy—with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments—that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like. Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights. So what “not making judgments” ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what “getting in touch with your feelings” ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment