Home > Work > Different Vessels
1 " You probably won’t understand this precisely now, but knowledge and experience not only shapes people—it can also wall them off. Once they believe they have figured it all out, acquired a worldview and come to trust their choices to an overarching meta-narrative, anything which questions that set of operating premises is perceived as a nuisance—if not an outright threat. "
― , Different Vessels
2 " Apart from loss, what we really fear in death is not death itself but the gloomy thought of being bound up forever and ever in the dark. If it is true that we cease to exist upon death—who can say for sure?—then death is not something to be experienced. Dying perhaps, but not death itself. It is as though the entire world doesn’t exist and never has. Death would be precisely the same kind of experience as we had before our earliest memory. An unfathomable void beyond experience. So instead, when we recoil at the thought of death, when we really think it through this is really a fear of being trapped. And our animal instincts cannot stand for that. We recoil at being stuck in a cage and so naturally we react. Our heart races and we immediately seek escape "
3 " Life is about "
4 " We have good inclinations and bad inclinations. This isn’t a defect. It’s simply something fundamental to the universe. ‘I create light and I create darkness.’ The sooner we make peace with that and stop fighting against our own inclinations and instead recognize their need for direction, the sooner we can be our own shepherd. Direct the beast within. "
5 " Life is about continual change. Continual sacrifice. If you’re not dying, you’re not living. Resting comfortably in your present belief. That’s the true second death. "
