All Stephen Batchelor Quotes
- ...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… Dependent
- 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… 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… Aftershock
- This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle. Body
- 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… Agnosticism
- Our conceptions of the world affect our perceptions of the world which, in turn, condition the way we subsequently conceive the world. Affect
- 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… Anxiety
- 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… Billion
- 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… Body
- Living from our deepest understanding requires an enormous effort, especially when it goes against the stream of our instinctually programmed perceptions of the world. Deepest
- Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity. Buddhism
- 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,… Another Kind
- 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… Balm
- 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… Causation
- 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… Alien
- 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… Authority
- 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… Challenge
- 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… Accept
- 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… Attempts
- Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the… Assumption