“Remember: As long as there's any part of yourself that believes you need your gaslighter to feel better about yourself, to boost your confidence, or to bolster your sense of who you are in the world, you'll be leaving yourself open for gaslighting.”
Source: The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life
“You can't have financial freedom when you can't tame your desire to have more stuff in your life. You are a hoarder in the making.”
“I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soulless and insane. I would rather be an insect ... a bee or a butterfly ... and float in dim dreams among the wild-flowers of summer than be a man and feel the horrible and ghastly wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world.”
“In many situations, empathy is the most wonderful quality I can think of: the balm that makes sorrow bearable, the gift that multiplies joy.”
Source: The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life
“The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.”
Source: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
“There is no such thing as an objective truth, it's all subjective. Unless the brain finds a way to observe the universe, independent of the brain, every truth is subjective truth.”
Source: Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was
“Much of our reasoning about human life and other beings on this planet now rests on the theory of natural selection. Most educated people believe (at least vaguely) in the scientific principle that the living organisms on earth have evolved over billions of years from other organisms that were unlike them, and are now mostly extinct. When this story is told of humanity, it wholly eliminates the role of personal meaning and human intentions in the development of societies and the lives of individuals. The ‘master molecule’ of the gene, falsely endowed with an autonomous power, is most often used to explain personal desires, intentions, and actions. The term ‘gene’ or ‘adaptation’ has replaced intention, purpose, and meaning in most psychological accounts of the ways in which people thrive or fail to thrive in their everyday lives. All of our struggles—such as finding a mate or becoming a compassionate person—can now be recast in terms of their supposed ‘advantages’ of leaving the greatest number of offspring.”
Source: Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy
“Dogen maintains that self and other are ultimately interdependent; the self does not exist prior to, or outside of, the other; we only have the possibility of experiencing self or other through relationship.”
Source: Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy
“The abandonment of civilized values exposes us collectively to possession by the worst elements of the Shadow.”
Source: Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self
“Memory is the fabric upon which time is carved.”
Source: Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was