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

“If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment