Whatever experiences we may come across in our spiritual journey we are not any of those experiences but rather the one who is witnessing them, the pure awareness cognizing them without thought.
Whereas cognitive constraints on negative emotions can reduce distress, freeing positive emotions from such constraints can enhance religious experience.
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it's often more difficult to repress the emotional component.
Danny Snyder: Did you observe these experiences? Ralph Ferguson: Ye, ye, ye, yes. Danny Snyder: Did you more then *observe* these experiences?
[first lines] Tarek Fahd, Häftling Nr. 77: [voiceover, reading newspaper ad] Test subjects wanted. Earn 4000 marks for a 14-day experiment in a simulated prison.
Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train. I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I t...
It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he is an artist in divining a great deal from the little that he h...
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediari...
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as ...
Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparati...
Many Christians assume that we can just experience God in a personal relationship apart from doctrine, but that’s impossible. You cannot experience God without knowing who he is, what he has done, and who you are in relation to him. Even our most b...
Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense liv...
I thought we stopped using grunts as guinea pigs decades ago. Even the Nazis didn't run medical experiments on their own troops in combat. This book explodes like a grenade in the Pentagon's privy. Red it and weep; better yet, get mad." Col. David H....
You need nothing more than the experience you are having right now. It is enough. It is plenty. It is perfect just as it is. It was designed for you, given to you for your experience. All you have to do, and all you have ever had to do is accept this...
[last lines] Nachrichtensprecher: [voiceover - spoiler] The tragic outcome: two dead, three injured, among them project leader Professor Klaus Thon. Clearly, the experiment went out of control after two days. The district attorney is investigating tw...
You and I live at a moment of history that is simultaneously terrible and wonderful. Terrible because of the condition of the society in which we are destined to live out our lives. Wonderful because of the unprecedented opportunities to make a diffe...
Author wonders whether God's proclamation of His natural mastery when appearing to Job might be about restoring a sense of wonder to world-weary man as much as humbling him.
When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.
I was still searching for someone to blame for my suffering. I really wanted someone to transfer my hate to, so that I could stop hating myself.
You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.
If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.
