The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
You are a soul that is temporarily utilizing your body.
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me.
I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.
When I think of God I feel like an ant crawling into a computer.
From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.
We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.
We get 80 years, maybe at the most 100. Trillions of years in eternity. This life is preparation for the next. This is the warm-up back, this is the dress rehearsal, this is the get ready, this is the first lap around the track before the real race begins because it is in eternity.
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
What good is money to you if you're going to die? It's not often that money can save someone's life.
One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to recognize that death is no more extraordinary than birth. When they say it's the end of everything they don't seem to recognize that we came from somewhere and it would be very, very strange indeed to suppose that we're not going somewhere.
Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.
The afterlife is whatever a soul wishes or believes it to be.
What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering." (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.)
Heaven and hell are not geographical, they are psychological, they are your psychology.
Life is beautiful and living is pain.
We see the universe the way it is because we exist.
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.
Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.
