Sublime

La plupart des luxes et presque tout ce qu’on appelle le confort de l’existence sont non seulement des choses superflues, mais d’authentiques obstacles à l’élévation de l’humanité. Pour ce qui est du luxe et du confort, les plus sages ont toujours mené une vie plus simple et dépouillée que les pauvres. Les philosophes de l’Antiquité, chinois,

Quality #5: Your Presence Is Experienced as a Gift Another way of saying that you are enlightened is to say that you are a high-conscious person. Consciousness is both what you are aware of and what you accept. The more aware you are and the more you accept what you are aware of, the higher your consciousness level. When you are a high-conscious

Enlightenment. This intellectual movement began in the second half of the eighteenth century with many societies in the West embracing what Steven Pinker characterizes as four values: reason, science, humanism, and progress. According to Mokyr, the Enlightenment created a “culture of growth” that let both capitalism and technological progress

To be truly awake, to be enlightened, is to be free of all grasping—to be free of all points of view. That state is literally indescribable. We cannot conceptualize what that state of being is like. Up until that point, we can always conceptualize to some extent.

I define enlightenment as the recognition that the source of life within you is the source of life in everyone and everything else. We are all one thing expressing itself with infinite variety.

We have to kill off any notion we have that there is something to attain, something to hold on to, something special we can become once and for all. Enlightenment is not a “thing” we “get” from practice. Anything we think we’ve gotten—even if it’s made of gold—can only get in the way. Only when there is nothing and nobody left to obstruct it will

Rousseau was the least academic of modern philosophers and in many ways was the most influential. His thought marked the end of the Age of Reason. He propelled political and ethical thinking into new channels. His reforms revolutionized taste, first in music, then in the other arts. He had a profound impact on people’s way of life; he taught