Brief Peeks Beyond Quotes

“materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Materialism represents an astonishing failure of the human intellect to see what’s right under its nose. It hides nature’s marvelous simplicity behind a veil of contrivance. Its continuing survival in face of the mounting odds of reason, evidence and direct experience requires constant and deliberate maintenance. Indeed, materialism serves powerful economic and political interests.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“[D]eep within, in a way that isn't self-reflective, there is that intuition that you aren't really this character you seem to be playing in this story.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“The mainstream metaphysics of materialism [legitimizes] the outrageous notion that unhappy people are simply malfunctioning biological robots.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Reality is far too diverse, broad, elusive, ambiguous and complex for us to pin down. Even the limited empirical data we do manage to collect can only be interpreted within the framework of a subjective paradigm. It is, therefore, not really neutral. But in our desperate search for closure and reassurance we confabulate entities and explanations to construct huge edifices of assumed truths. They make up the world we actually experience; a self-woven cocoon of stories, not facts.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Your belief is valuable currency, for the way you spend it sets the tone of your life.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“If we identify with our ego - a particular, dissociated set of ideas - we turn the universe at large, and even our own intrusive thoughts and unwanted feelings, into oppressive tyrants. They become external factors that constrain and coerce us. If, on the other hand, we identify not with particular dissociated ideas but with consciousness itself - with that whose excitations give rise to all thoughts and feelings - we attain unfathomable metaphysical free will. This arises not from the power of the ego to control the world, but from the realization that we are the world.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“You [are] the whole dream, not only a character within it.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Like the proverbial carrot hanging in front of the horse, the entire allure of wealth and status lies largely in not having them ... It is the achievement of success - the catching of the ghosts - that gives away the game.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Lost and afraid in a crowd of our own alienated facets turned other, we create a cultural narrative of pure projection to try to impose some order onto the chaos”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Projection is thus the amazing mental mechanism by which we create ‘the other’ out of ourselves, like Eve from Adam’s rib. It enables the magical rise of a second person from the first person, the ‘you’ from the ‘I.’ Through it, the ‘outside’ world becomes a mirror for the most hidden and unacknowledged aspects of our psyches, so we can, in essence, interact with ourselves by proxy. We get a chance to dance, unwittingly, with that which is repressed within us. It is easy to see how conducive this can be to personal growth, provided that, at the end, in one of those Oh-My-God moments, one recognizes one’s own projections.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“What is the world for if not to evoke and reflect back to us, as mirror, the obfuscated aspects of ourselves?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Human beings naturally long for wonder, transcendence, mental landscapes beyond the boundaries of ordinary life. Something in the human spirit shouts loudly that there is more to ourselves than the space-time confines of the body. This obfuscated part of our psyche demands lucid recognition of what it knows to be the true breadth and depth of our existence.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“entails.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“grasp”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture