The idea that there will be something spiritual or subtle, some sort of consciousness that can escape the … - Stephen Batchelor

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When I was young, I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me, never since have I wasted any more time on tobacco. ”“After I die I shall return to earth as the doorkeeper of a bordello and I won't let a one of you in.

Stephen Batchelor

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 not very credible in the modern scientific worldview.

Brain, Collapse, Idea, Ideas, Spiritual

Same Author Quotes

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, but rather as a new engagement with life. He is offering us a relationship to the world that is more sensitized to suffering and the causes of suffering, and he gives rise to the possibility of another kind of culture, another kind of civilization.

Civilization, Gives, Life, Mystical Experiences, Offering, Suffering

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 in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.

Buddhist, Moment, Powerful, Stop, Teaching

A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.

Cultivates, Greed, Heart, Mind

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 of the world.

Anxiety, Conceptions, Experience, Frustration, Lying

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, Facing, Historical, Think, Thinking