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7d698f5
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most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level of happiness until their children leave home.
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Sam Harris |
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4f0aebe
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As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we've been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and ..
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Sam Harris |
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cded848
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Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as Alexander's campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom they called "gymnosophists." It is often said that the thinking of these yogis greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father of Greek skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho's teachings had much in common with Buddhism. But his con..
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Sam Harris |
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d606e15
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How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out.
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Sam Harris |
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2f91051
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Nothing is more sacred than the facts.
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Sam Harris |
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169bc4f
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It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like 'self conscious' when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.
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Sam Harris |
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ae48813
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Tres millones de almas podran morir de hambre o ser asesinadas en el Congo sin apenas reaccion por parte de nuestros medios de comunicacion. Pero si una princesa muere en un accidente de coche, la cuarta parte de la poblacion de la Tierra cae postrada de dolor. Quiza seamos incapaces de sentir lo que deberiamos sentir para cambiar nuestro mundo.
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Sam Harris |
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5fbbcd7
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Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere.
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Sam Harris |
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31d7d38
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In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.
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Sam Harris |
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5dc1cb8
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You're not from around here, are you?" asked the room service girl. "No," I replied. "That's why I'm staying at a hotel . . ."
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Sam Harris |
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04956c1
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Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures--and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.
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Sam Harris |
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c3bd03b
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We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
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Sam Harris |
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afe4bee
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We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
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Sam Harris |
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cb0351b
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Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by th..
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politics
reality
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Sam Harris |
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603e3f6
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What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It
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Sam Harris |
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a940184
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Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self--the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience--is an illusion. The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider"
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Sam Harris |
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2777a8e
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The principal enemy of mindfulness--or of any meditative practice--is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.
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Sam Harris |
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744765e
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Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, for instance, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want--and to be spared offensive cartoons in the meantime.
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Sam Harris |
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b5870fe
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Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others - How did you get that bruise? - would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing. Telling the truth can also reveal ways in wh..
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growth
honesty
integrity
lies
lying
mental-health
transparency
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Sam Harris |
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95c03b0
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The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable.
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Sam Harris |
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7d17191
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If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.
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meditation
science
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Sam Harris |
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b9d3e67
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Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.
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Sam Harris |
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fabba3b
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Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.
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Sam Harris |
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f3c382f
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A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders. Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with in..
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Sam Harris |
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99849a4
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Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics--by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is
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Sam Harris |
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b129d89
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In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute ..
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Sam Harris |
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0e4447e
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Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can't get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon--and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a f..
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Sam Harris |
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7bd8cce
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Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin--which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a ..
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Sam Harris |
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36ee1c0
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We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn't exist.
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Sam Harris |
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33e053e
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I don't always communicate the truth in the way that I want to--but one of the strengths of telling the truth is that it remains open for elaboration. If what you say in the heat of the moment isn't quite right, you can amend it. I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest.
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Sam Harris |
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c4abcd0
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Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry.
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Sam Harris |
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e68fcaf
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The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.
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Sam Harris |
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6527cee
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Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next--a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please--your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it."
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Sam Harris |
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973f830
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It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of "better" we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness."
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Sam Harris |
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75f18ad
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Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
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Sam Harris |
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195ce4e
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Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer."
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Sam Harris |
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3391c8b
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most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore..
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Sam Harris |
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6b2a07e
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Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature--to say nothing of killing and dying for them--would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?
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Sam Harris |
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ffbeaae
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I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn't sim..
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Sam Harris |
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3f60cfb
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A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care the..
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Sam Harris |
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25d7007
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The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
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Sam Harris |
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256839d
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Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.
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Sam Harris |
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3b49b14
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We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain--and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running
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Sam Harris |
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0b4f827
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Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.
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Sam Harris |