Stephen Batchelor Quotes

40 quotes in 907 categories

• ...inner spiritual transformation is just as dependent upon the effect of our economic life upon the world as transformations in the world are dependent upon…
• The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along…
• Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless. Even with the ardent desire to be aware and alert in…
• This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.
• This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily…
• Our conceptions of the world affect our perceptions of the world which, in turn, condition the way we subsequently conceive the world.
• The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions…
• It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in…
• The idea that there will be something spiritual or subtle, some sort of consciousness that can escape the collapse of the body and brain, is…
• Living from our deepest understanding requires an enormous effort, especially when it goes against the stream of our instinctually programmed perceptions of the world.
• Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.
• So the Buddha is presenting awakening not as a single mystical experience that may come upon us at some meditation, some private moment of transcendence,…
• I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying…
• As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of…
• To preserve the integrity of the tradition, we have to distinguish between what is central to that integrity and what is peripheral. We have to…
• The individuation of dharma practice occurs whenever priority is given to the resolution of a personal existential dilemma over the need to conform to the…
• Each time the dharma moved into a different civilization or historical period, it faced a twofold challenge: to maintain its integrity as an internally coherent…
• We can be consicous of how we tend to ignore or escape anguish rather than understand and accept it. We can be aware that even…
• Expectations of goals and rewards (such as Enlightenment) are recognized for what they are: last-ditch attempts by the ghostly self to subvert the process to…
• Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the…

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