PHILOSOPHICAL QUOTES

You" are not a fixed, unchanging entity. Instead, you are an ever-changing information pattern that has the illusion of a stable self.

This information pattern called "you" changes continuously throughout life, as you grow up, yet retains a sense of continuity through stable memory networks in the brain that retain a small percentage of memories crucial to you.

When these networks disintegrate, as they inevitably do with death, the "you" that existed can never return.

And this is what they mean when they say the self is an illusion. :)
IF the self is an ILLUSION – There is no need for an eternal soul, that is "You" because You never truly existed in the first place!

Once we recognize our inescapable embeddedness in the living, organic ecosystem and our mutual interdependence with all other coexisting species, our sense of separate identity, so strenuously acquired and desperately maintained, recedes more into the background. Instead, the relationships, whether balanced or imbalanced, take the foreground and become the focus of concern. This is the perceptual basis for a new and ancient point of view: it is holistic and inclusive and inevitably accompanied by a sense of wonder and reverence.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live right now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live right now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?