Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

It’s a uniquely human urge, to leave the drudgery of where you are now for a bound-to-be-gratifying arrival somewhere, anywhere else. Animals don’t have this problem. Have you ever seen a hedgehog on an existential quest? Have you ever known a fish to be restlessly yearning? It’s a human dysfunction. You’re looking for something, and you don’t know what it is. But you’ll know it when you find it, right? Sure you will.

How do you know you want enlightenment if you don’t know what it is? And the paradox, of course, is that you can’t get to it, not as long as you’re trying to get anywhere. It doesn’t do any good to stay here, and it doesn’t do any good to leave. You can’t improve your situation. There is, quite literally, nowhere in the world you can go.

The dustbin of history is strewn with loudly principled folks who reversed themselves, abruptly, when the situation hit home.

ONE OF THE STRONGEST arguments I’ve heard against judging people is that we’re mainly a product of our time and place. If you were a Founding Father or a sixth-century BCE Babylonian, you would have probably owned slaves. Don’t feel too bad about it.

Why is everyone afraid of dying then? — They aren’t really, Tom. They’re just clinging to life. There’s a big difference. — Is there? — We cling because we don’t have faith in anything else. It’s choosing the devil you know. No one actually wants to live forever.

we still don’t know how our universe began, or if it ever did. And you can’t end a world that never started. Just like you can’t divert a trolley that never ran, on tracks that were never laid, from the path of a victim who was never born.

Who was the first, unmoved mover who caused the chain of existence? If God created the universe, who created God? Where’s the bottom turtle, if it’s turtles all the way down?

There’s really nothing larger in this whole universe than the improbability of your own existence, and yet here you are.

If the dreamer dreams all dreams, from which one does he wake?

most of us are ashamed of our own bodies and our innate human desires, which we never asked for by the way, because we live in a society that commands our conformity to arbitrary standards of modesty, which is the definition of a social prison.

We’ve mistaken the map for the territory. Such is our spiritual predicament,

Something something "People who worship the Bible but fail to live it"