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Which is fine if we anticipate it, but demoralizing if we don’t. “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.” In bringing back ecstatic insights, it’s critical that we calibrate the difference between the reach-out-and-touch-it immediacy of the “deep now” with the frustratingly incremental unfolding of the day-to-day. As Zebulon Pike learned the hard way, at high elevations, objects in the mirror are sometimes much farther away than they appear. Remember: It’s not about Now.
Stealing Fire
Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal
Anyway, the main point these meditation teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them. And that reception, it seems, is the part of the process Goldstein had observed with much more objectivity and clarity than I’d been able to muster—the part when the thoughts enter conscious awareness, the part when they “bubble up.”
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
“Yeah, I’d say it’s a little different from that, but not far different. I don’t identify with anything. I mean, there’s nobody here to identify with me or with anyone else. It’s just an empty, still presence here [inside my body], which is there [beyond my body].” I said, “So the problem with saying you identify with everyone is that first word, you.” “Exactly, because there’s no you there to do the identifying.” How can he talk this way—so paradoxically, and in a language that isn’t fully Buddhist or fully Hindu? Well, as for the paradox part, as I suggested near the outset of this book, if you don’t like paradox, maybe Eastern philosophy isn’t for you. (And, as I also suggested, neither is quantum physics.)
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
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