Radical Compassion p.91

Especially when fear is intense, we’re afraid we’ll drown in it, be annihilated. So, to varying degrees, our primitive survival brain prompts us to cut off the raw emotional energy in our body; we bury or numb our feelings and preoccupy ourselves with thoughts. But when we pull away from fear and other painful emotions, we also pull away from our full presence and vitality. We pull away from our intelligence, creativity, and capacity for love.

Sometimes our unwillingness to experience our feelings shows up as depression. Sometimes it takes the form of chronic anxiety or irritation, with our muscles and posture tightening into what I often call “Worrier Pose.” It can appear as loneliness, restlessness, boredom, or a sense of operating on autopilot. And it often manifests as addictive behavior.

Whatever the expression, resisting fear puts us in a trance.

Tara Brach – Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN p.91

The Happiness Hypothesis p.133

His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Durkheim looked at the “degree of integration of religious society” and found that Protestants, who lived the least demanding religious lives at the time, had higher suicide rates than did Catholics; Jews, with the densest network of social and religious obligations, had the lowest. He examined the “degree of integration of domestic society”—the family—and found the same thing: People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less. Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives: “The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.”

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.133

The Doors of Perception p.23

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception Includes Heaven and Hell p.23

Aristotle p.51

It is, for Aristotle, only because man has a certain place in the world that there is any basis for relying on his judgements. Since nature is, for its part, a manifestation of rational structure, and man, for his part, is a being who by nature appreciates and understands rational structure, man can follow his own instincts and judgements in his quest to lay bare the rationality of nature. Here again we see what might be called an argument from the possibility of philosophy. Because man is by nature a systematic understander of the world, he can (more or less) rely on the systematic judgements he makes as he investigates the myriad phenomena of nature.

Jonathan Lear – Aristotle: The Desire to Understand p.51

The Happiness Hypothesis p.88

The most widely reported conclusion, from surveys done by psychologist Ed Diener, is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation. Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures. Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill. For example, as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction with life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common. Vast increases in gross domestic product led to improvements in the comforts of life—a larger home, more cars, televisions, and restaurant meals, better health and longer life—but these improvements became the normal conditions of life; all were adapted to and taken for granted, so they did not make people feel any happier or more satisfied.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.88

On Sacrifice p.61

The logic of this reading works as follows: God is actually the one who is obligated to provide for the poor. The destitute are his creatures, whom he brought into the world. When a person provides charity to the poor, he is in fact paying God’s debt. Charity is, therefore, like lending to God. The charity giver, by paying God’s debt, transforms his relationship to God from a debtor to a lender. In that act of giving, the giver reverses the relationship of dependence between himself and God, since the one who owes is considered a slave to the lender. Charity is thus described as enslaving God, shifting from a creditor to a debtor.

This reversal relates to the trauma of sacrifice in a complex fashion. As was explained above, sacrifice—korban—assumes that a person offers up a gift that might be rejected. It maintains an essential, hierarchical gap between giving and receiving. But in giving to the poor, no such gap exists. The poor person stretching forth his hand is not typically in a position to exercise his power of refusal; he must keep his hand outstretched to accept the offer of assistance. Since God is the one who has to feed the poor, however, the hand of the poor stands for God’s hand. Charity is an actual gift to God that he couldn’t refuse, because it is mediated through the hand of the desperate. A person binds God—his superior—to the gift cycle precisely by giving to a dependent—the poor.

This Talmudic position doesn’t aim at providing an incentive for charity; if this were the case, the poor might become a mere instrument in “forcing” God into a debtor status. The statement rather provides a description of what actually happens in giving; it doesn’t prescribe the aim of giving or the motivation for it. When someone gives out of compassion for the plight of the poor, he is entering a gift cycle that reverses the structure of the offering. Charity is preferred over sacrifice because it erases the abyss between giving and receiving without recourse to ritual, which minimizes individualization. What is more, this way of giving reverses the hierarchical order implied in the offering of a sacrifice; charity reverses God’s position from a lender to a borrower.

Moshe Halbertal – On Sacrifice p.61

The Poetry of Rilke p.79

LAMENT

O how far away and long gone

everything is.

I believe the star

whose brightness I take in

has been dead a thousand years.

I believe that in the boat

gliding by I heard

something fearful being said.

In the house a clock

just struck . . .

What house? . . .

I’d like to step out of my heart

and be under the great sky.

I’d like to pray.

And surely one of all those stars

must still exist.

I believe I’d know which one alone

has lasted, —

which one like a white city

stands at its light’s end in the sky . . .

Rainer Maria Rilke – The Poetry of Rilke (Ed. Edward Snow) p.79

The Poetry of Rilke p.83

AUTUMN DAY

Lord: it is time. Your summer was superb.

Lay your shadows on the sundials,

and in the meadows let the winds go free.

Command the last fruits to be full;

give them only two more southern days,

urge them on to completion and chase

the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house will never build one now.

Whoever is alone now will long remain so,

will stay awake, read books, write long letters

and wander restless back and forth

along the tree-lined streets, as the leaves drift down.

Rainer Maria Rilke – The Poetry of Rilke (Ed. Edward Snow) p.83

The Poetry of Rilke p.69

THE NEIGHBOR

Strange violin, do you follow me?

In how many distant cities before this did your lonely night speak to mine?

Do hundreds play you? Or is it only one?

Are there people in all the big cities

who without you would have long since

thrown themselves in the rivers?

And why does it always find me?

Why am I always the neighbor of those

who force you to sing out of fear

and say out loud: Life is heavier

than the weight of all things.

Rainer Maria Rilke – The Poetry of Rilke (Ed. Edward Snow) p.69

The Poetry of Rilke p.65

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I’d like to sing someone to sleep,

sit beside someone and be there.

I’d like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I’d like to be the one in the house

who knew: the night was cold.

And I’d like to hear every little stirring

in you, in the world, in the woods.

The clocks call to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below a last strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and they let you go

when a thing moves in the dark.

Rainer Maria Rilke – The Poetry of Rilke (Ed. Edward Snow) p.65