truth(1/3)
Do not mix truth and beauty
We humans are tempted to equate beauty with truth. If something is beautiful, we reason, then it’s more than likely true, right? Wrong. Dr. Sollereder makes a solid argument that beauty is not a reliable indicator for truth. She writes, 💬 Historically, many beautiful, simple, and elegant ideas in science were wrong. Johannes Kepler thought the orbital distance of the six (known) planets were related to the Platonic solids. It is a lovely, attractive idea, but wrong.…
The monastery is a school in which we learn from God how to be happy
The monastery is a school—a school in which we learn from God how to be happy. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love. What has to be healed in us is our true nature, made in the likeness of God. What we have to learn is love. The healing and the learning are the same thing, for at the very core of our essence we are constituted in God’s likeness by our freedom, and the exercise of that freedom is nothing else but the exercise of disinterested love—the love of God for His own sake, because He is God.…
The intellect is only theoretically independent of desire
I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda.
The more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.