Material Stuff Doesn't Matter Quotes

When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits all sorts of molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules) on its way to Earth and bounces off them like a pinball. This is called scattering, which means that on a clear day, if you look at any part of the sky, the light you see has been bouncing around the atmosphere before coming into your eye. If all light was scattered equally, the sky would look white. But it doesn’t. The reason is that the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we see a blue one.

I do not believe you can have it all, or at least not at the same time in life. First of all, having is a possessive word. When we focus on having a baby, having a marriage, having a great and successful job, and having lots of material stuff we have lost touch with the most important part of life: being. Having a successful career and making lots of money that allows you to buy more stuff doesn’t help you to be more present for the ones we love: children, spouses, family, and friends. Intimacy requires time; giving up your role as a primary caregiver comes with sacrificing physical and emotional intimacy with your child.

Good point. There are definitely flaws in my nature and mistakes have been made, but I have observed that the more I have engaged with the transcendent, the more I have explored practices that are designed to alleviate the burden of materialism and individualism, the greater access I have to a feeling of serenity and freedom, the more I enjoy my work, the more I feel free. I think those techniques will work for anyone. I believe the techniques I have been taught to live drug-free, the methods I have used to improve my work and relationships, will work for anyone who uses them and will release anyone from any behavior or pattern that impedes happiness—not just obvious stuff like drug addiction, but less-obvious stuff like food addiction, spending addiction, or caring-too-much-what-other-people-think-of-you addiction. The stuff I learned in order to make me better at my job has taught me that my job doesn’t matter, that no individual job matters when compared to our common good. When we as individuals collectively access this frequency, we will realize that we have a shared destiny and that we can design a fair and rational system that does what it’s supposed to do: enhances the whole and respects the individual. Wu-Wei, Slingerland explained, is usually accessed when in a state of relaxed concentration in pursuit of a higher purpose.

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

Epiphenomenalism views the brain as the cause of all aspects of the mind, but because it holds that the physical world is causally closed-that is, that physical events can have only physical causes-it holds that the mind itself doesn't actually cause anything to happen that the brain hasn't already taken care of. It thus leaves us with a rather withered sort of mind, one in which consciousness is, at least in scientific terms, reduced to an impotent shadow of its former self. As a nonphysical phenomenon, it cannot act on the physical world. It cannot make stuff happen. It cannot, say, make an arm move. Epiphenomenalism holds that the brain is the cause of all the mental events in the mind but that the mind itself is not the cause of anything. Because it maintains that the causal arrow points in only one direction, from material to mental, this school denies the causal efficacy of mental states. It therefore finds itself right at home with the fundamental assumption of materialist science, certainly as applied to psychology and now neuroscience, that "mind does not move matter," as the neurologist C.J. Herrick wrote in 1956. Put another way, all physical action can be but the consequence of another physical action. The sense that will and other mental states can move matter-even the matter that makes up one's own body-is therefore, in the view of the epiphenomenalists, an illusion.

It doesn't matter the materials but what you do and how you interact. Relationships are the most important in the art of teaching. A school can have the most beautiful "stuff" but it's the care and commitment of a teacher. What matters most is a true teacher with the real stuff inside and helping others discover that real stuff inside themselves.

Information is a difference that can make a difference, truth (highest possible symmetry) is information that doesn't change and randomness (self referential noise) is a difference that doesn't make a difference. Truth lives in the macro world, the micro world is uncertain. Truth lives in the past, the future is uncertain. The micro future is formed into the macro past. Every engine takes advantage of a difference. Nature is lazy and everything takes the path of least action. Behavior is built up from a quantum of action in a field. Ratio may be the only thing that is discrete. Action creates the spacetime it inhabits, including the dimensions. As a particular force moves through scale, one force can overtake another, affecting the geometry of the dimensions at that particular scale. There is no fixed geometric grid. The structure of reality is a computational geometry that is fractal in nature. Gravity is a variation of scale. A region of space with less matter has denser time. A region of space with more matter has denser space, a pressure gradient. Information is not stuff it is relationships. The past is material, the future is possibility. Our models contain virtual partials and so we should be looking at virtual dimensions.

Dualism is the idea that mind and matter are completely different domains of reality. Mind is subjective, nonphysical, ethereal consciousness-related stuff, and matter is objective, hard physical stuff. This insight was promoted by French philosopher René Descartes. It exists in a slightly different form as Sankhya philosophy, which is regarded by many Indian scholars as the philosophical basis of yoga. In Sankhya there are two fundamental aspects of reality: prakrti and purusa. Prakrti is the evolving, changeable physical world familiar to science, whereas purusa is permanent, unchanging, pure consciousness-as-such. Unlike Descartes’s version of dualism, Sankhya maintains a tripartite model: matter, mind, and pure consciousness. Both matter and mind are considered prakrti, or part of the physical world. This is similar to the models developed by the modern neurosciences—the mind is a brain-mediated information processing machine. But the mind also enjoys awareness and consciousness. Thus in Sankhya philosophy the mind is the missing link between inanimate matter and conscious awareness. It is inseparably both at the same time. Yoga seeks to purify that link so the relationship between the physical world and consciousness becomes clearer. In the process of clarification, the undistracted mind begins to see the true relationships between matter and consciousness, and as a side effect of that insight, the siddhis arise. When the link is completely clear, enlightenment is said to occur. That’s the whole story of yoga in a nutshell. The problem with both dualistic or tripartite philosophies is this: How can radically different domains interact at all? This is why philosopher Christian De Quincey calls dualism a miracle. At least within Sankhya the mind is regarded as consisting of both matter and consciousness, but that too doesn’t cleanly solve the interaction problem. The next major idea about mind and matter is materialism, which asserts that everything that exists, including mind and consciousness, consists of matter and energy. This is the dominant philosophy of science today, and it asserts that there is nothing special about consciousness because it is simply due to activity in the brain. The problem with materialism is that no one has any (good) idea how the mindless physical brain can give rise to subjective experience. This impasse has led some philosophers to sidestep the problem by simply denying that subjective experience exists. Within that rather odd view, we’re all just zombies.

I’m thinking about all the questions the potential gift raises: Am I contributing clutter to a house that isn’t mine? Am I wasting my energy searching for a gift when I’m flying blind on what the kid likes? Am I just going through the motions of a cultural expectation that’s rooted in materialism and consumerism?

Materialism: The philosophical position that there is only one thing in the universe: stuff, matter. Anything other than matter is either reducible to matter, as thoughts are reducible to the matter of a brain doing its thing, or doesn’t exist, like the Tooth Fairy.