We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.
Despair is good. Despair can be the nadir of one life and the starting point of an ascent into another, better one.
If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread, but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give to us.
We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.
A scar is not always a flaw. Sometimes a scar may be redemption inscribed in the flesh, a memorial to something endured, to something lost.
We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.
What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?
Let me ask you, if Bannon leaves the White House, he resigns or is fired, and then starts and goes back to Breitbart or goes on TV and radio every night and starts down-talking Trump, is it gonna convince to you abandon Trump? It won't. But apparently there's people inside the White House who think that Bannon has that power. That nobody else, only Trump and Bannon could actually destroy the Trump connection with his base.
I say a few good things about Canada in the book, you know. Americans are weird, though. We refuse to look at other countries. Start with Canadians - I want to think you aren't that different, so why can't we do our incarceration policies more like Canada? If we still had a 1970 level of incarceration which was the same as Canada's then and now, I never would have written this.
I first went into samadhi when I was 19. I was meditating in the mountains and had been meditating on a daily basis for several years. Suddenly there was no time or space or life or death or myself or the Universe. I was absorbed in light.
I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.