Educators From The United States

"Father, Father Abraham, To-day look on us from above; On us, the offspring of thy faith, The children of thy Christ-like love."

"You sang far better than you knew; the songs That for your listeners’ hungry hearts sufficed Still live,—but more than this to you belongs: You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ."

"Whose starward eye Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, “Nobody knows de trouble I see”?"

"O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?"

"How would you have us, as we are? Or sinking 'neath the load we bear? Our eyes fixed forward on a star? Or gazing empty at despair?"

"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic."

"The glory of the day was in her face, The beauty of the night was in her eyes."

"Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst."

"Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules."

"I love what the poet Marvin Bell has suggested about writing-Read something, then write something. Read something else, then write something else. It's all connected, it's always been connected. Let one activity inform the other. Streams of language exchanging their powers."

"Logic is a carpet laid over an abyss."

"(By moving) I'm making sounds on the drums of spacetime"… "Space itself wobbles and rumbles like a drum... Black holes can bang on spacetime like mallets on a drum."

"The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along."

"The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness."

"There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters."

"Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind."

"Topology and number theory are my faves."

"It might seem limited to impose our human perception to try to deduce the grandest cosmic code. But we are the product of the universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of the cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance."

"People used to try to hijack quantum mechanics and its inherent mystery to cast a cloud around determinism, in the hope that free will could survive modern physics. But that never worked very well. Since when does random chance equal free will? The only salvation for volition is a soul and faith and you’re not allowed to ask me about that."

"While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us."

"As we walk the path of Refuge Recovery, we gradually uncover a loving heart."

"If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time."

"The next step in the process of liberation is to break this chain reaction of suffering whenever life is unpleasant and feeling content only when life is pleasurable."

"Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out."

"Sitting still is a pain in the ass."

"Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience."

"The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for."

"Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom."

"The Dalai Lama is rumored to have said that being able to have sex without any attachment would take the level of attainment of being able to eat either chocolate cake or dog shit without any preference between the two."

"With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion."

"Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others."

"Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world."

"The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires."

"Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present."

"Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion."

"The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content."

"The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart."

"The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution."

"I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it."

"It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment."

"Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever."

"Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant."

"We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure."

"We could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of our love than ourselves."

"We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering."

"Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion."

"The cause of our suffering has always been our reaction to the thoughts, feelings, cravings, and circumstances of our lives. The cause of our addictions has always been the indulgence in the behaviors or substances."

"The men in the laboratory [...] cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all.[...] The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper.[...] What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions."

"The primal and perennial work of social organization is not to fix the bounds of behavior as permanent lines, which would make all evolutionary process impossible, but to retrieve the vital balance every time some act, public or private, has upset it."

"In a work of art, however modest, the peculiar character of life is always reflected in the fact that it has no parts which keep their qualitative identity in isolation. In the simplest design, the virtual constituents are indivisible, and inalienable from the whole."