“Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.”

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jon Kabat-Zinn 27
American academic 1944

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“But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected.”

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Context: The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

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“There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.”

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Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 90

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