The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.
The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.
For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Theology differs from science in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our understanding of reality.
Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything. You are sitting and seeing something moving in front of you, and then your mind goes into a trance. You are completely there. It's a real great art; it's not only a business. It's to open the mind, to understand this mystery within reality. This is why we need it.
As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.
Why does merely attempting to understand Reality so often seem to lead to going insane?
We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
The limits of my language mark the limits of my world.
See John Stuart Mill {618823} for a related earlier quotation.
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
People at large are becoming more aware that there is much more to reality and to themselves than what meets the eye.
We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.
Reality is always extraordinary.
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.
When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out... On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality.