From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Pleasure has limits, it's fleeting, we habituate to it quickly and get bored of it. You can only experience pleasure against a backdrop of pain, difficulty, or struggle. We allocate pain and pleasure; we balance them out in clever ways.
The more we recognize that we are the ocean and the waves represent different aspects of our being, the less any individual wave of difficulty will consume, overwhelm, or define us.
We're outnumbered by bacteria 1.3:1, we're slightly more bacteria than we are human. We're also stardust. We are also 60% water, and that water in our bodies is billions of years old; it's been the clouds, the bottom of the sea, waves, streams and everything in the cycle. At an atomic level, 98% of the hydrogen in our bodies came from the bigbang. We're incredibly ancient beings, perhaps we should see ourselves as aliens!
Our number one instinct is survival, followed by reproduction. People started to realise that if they took care of themselves, they would live longer, have better sex and have healthier children.
What stands out in the tapestry of human behaviour is our identity as storytelling beings, inherently non-rational, often organising our societies around peculiar beliefs. We've evolved within what they term a 'social cage' – a set of rigid rules and beliefs adherence to which determines our belonging to a group.
Once you recognise that, you can take any situation and interpret it in a way that makes it enjoyable. You no longer have to chase after certain outcomes or fear others. Whatever happens, happens.
When you have children, you have to ask yourself what the world will look like in the next 80-100 years, because people get that old these days if everything goes well. Last but not least, as a father I see it as my responsibility to think about my actions and my motives.
I'm 65 years old, and one of the things that amazes me is the number of people who work to get to a certain level of success in showbusiness, and then quit to go play golf?! There is nothing else I would want to do in this world.
We must never confuse the pipe with the content. Today, we are fascinated by the pipe and nobody thinks of what is within. There is a pipe full of intelligence, and a pipe full of shit. You have to choose the good one, not the fascinating one.
Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.
In higher states of consciousness, we also lose our fear of death. The transcendent you is not in time. Only thought exists in time… only perception exists in time…
I don't think we can love God more than our greatest good. I think He is our greatest good. I don't think we can desire Him more than happiness. I think that ultimately, He is our happiness.