“Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.”

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 8

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some…" by Sam Harris?

Sam Harris photo

Sam Harris151

American author, philosopher and neuroscientist 1967

Related quotes

“In the most basic sense, imaginization invites a way of thinking. It encourages us to become our own theorists and to feel comfortable about acting on the basis our insights. It invites us to develop a skill that I believe we all have, even though we may not realize that this is the case. By recognizing this, and thinking creatively and intelligently about ourselves and our situations, we can 'push the envelope' on our realities and reshape them positively.”

Gareth Morgan (1943) Organizational theorist

Source: Imaginization (1993), p. 16, as cited in: Colin M. Beard, ‎John Peter Wilson (2006), Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and and Trainers. p. 272

“Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought. It is for this reason and in this sense that philosophy is about the world.”

Michael Dummett (1925–2011) British academic and philosopher

Dummett, M. A. E. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991.

“The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 23, “A Sunday Sermon” (p. 339)

“Manipulation is what we do when we feel we cannot meet our needs directly, so instead we try to meet them in round about ways. We try to influence others to do what we want them to do so our needs are met. This is particularly prevalent today when the need that is not met is emotional.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“In fact, the whole idea of illusion seems to make sense only if we accept the reality of the illusory experience as an experience and question only what it seems to be telling us about the outside world. Optical illusions do really hapen. What they can’t do is provide accurate measurements of the outside world. The idea of having, so to speak, two successive layers of illusion here is unworkable.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 27.

“We demand that sex speak the truth […] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”

Neil Gaiman book American Gods

Source: American Gods (2001), Ch. 6

“Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness… Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality

“We may have learned to fly like birds and swim like fish, but we have forgotten how to live like human beings. It seems we have to relearn that skill. How can we do this? It is only possible if we learn about ourselves. We have to subject ourselves to self-analysis. Why? Because it is not outer space, not the wind, not the ocean, not the seasons, nature or animals that are the cause of this world’s problems, but we human beings—our minds.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Practice Spiritual Values & Save the World (2013)

Related topics