More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’
anatta, which basically says that people don’t have eternal souls. Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment.
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’”
that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is,
The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering.
When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.
What is your cause for hope?”
Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
