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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Gray
Read between
February 15 - March 31, 2023
Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or produces immediate enjoyment, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.
Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed.
When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable. Thinking of happiness as a project, they look for fulfilment at some future time. The present slips by, and anxiety creeps in.
Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.
Belief is a habit of the body. If you want faith, act as if you have it already. The mind will soon follow. Practice will make your faith enduring.
The denial of death and the division of the human soul go together. Dreading anything that reminds them of their mortality, humans push much of their experience into an unconscious part of themselves. Life becomes a struggle to stay in the dark.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
The truth in the fiction of an individual nature is that the good life for each of us is not chosen but found. Even when they come from decisions we believe we have made, our experiences are not determined by us. The good life is not the life you want but one in which you are fulfilled. Stripped of metaphysics, this is Spinoza’s idea of conatus and the Taoist belief that we must follow the way within us.
The good life is not a life you might have led or may yet lead, but the life you already have. Here, cats can be our teachers, for they do not miss the lives they have not lived.
Cats show us that seeking after meaning is like the quest for happiness, a distraction. The meaning of life is a touch, a scent, which comes by chance and is gone before you know it.
