Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

What we do, he said, is we sort of go through the motions of worrying for a bit until we get a vague sense we’ve made ourselves sufficiently miserable, and then we call it a day and do whatever we decided in the first two seconds.

ONE OF THE STRONGEST arguments I’ve heard against judging people is that we’re mainly a product of our time and place.

IN MAHAYANA BUDDHISM, the word sunyata is often translated as “emptiness,” but that’s intensely misleading. More helpful would be to say it’s an “emptiness of independent nature,”

There is no world without you, and there never was.

THERE’S A TERM, MAYA, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism that refers to the deceptive surface-nature of the material world—like a veil that covers up a hidden face.

Let it split, and you will find that it does not split, because you were the only one cutting it.

René Descartes, doubt is essential to our search for truth, because the ability to doubt is the evidence of a doubter’s true existence. Cogito, ergo sum.

Belief—not faith—is the enemy of doubt.

the chances of your precise genetic combination emerging from the primordial ooze. As calculated by biologist Ali Binazir, those odds are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th power.

To embrace the flow of life is, quite literally, the means and meaning of our existence.

Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment—stuff