On passions

"All the urges of the passions express vital natural impulses, and it is the animal in us which gives rise to them. The wise man is conscious of them, he knows how to give them their true name and to make use of them as you direct your donkey. But the wise man is rare, and egoism finds a thousand reasons for giving those impulses legitimate motives and flattering names. The human passions are life impulses which have been perverted... and so skillfully perverted that it is very difficult to discover, beneath their complications, the almost divine power which is their source."

De Lubicz, quoted by Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, chapter "Cookbook for a sacred life", section "Karma Yoga".

Happiness

"He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts."

Samuel Johnson, quoted by Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, chapter "Cookbook for a sacred life", section "Drop out / cop out".

Let it go

"By letting it go it all gets done
The world is won by those who let it go.
But when you try and try
The world is then beyond the winning."

Quotation from Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) by Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, chapter "Cook-book for a sacred life".

It is a bit the same with girls!...

Karma

"The best I can tell you about karma is:
if you are pure spirit, you are not matter!...
You are that eternal spirit...
If each of us is that very old being...
and not this young body, or this body that is going through this life...
Why don't we remember?
Why don't we remember it all??
Why can't we read the entire Akashic record??

• Because of our attachments to the physical plane or reality...
  
• Because of the power of our identification with our own body-senses and thoughts."
  

Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, brown pages.

Inner fire

"If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will [be] no inner struggle, in him, no "friction", no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him - he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole."

Ouspensky, quoted by Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, brown pages.

Naked

"As they say in the Sikh religion - once you realize God knows everything, you're free. I had been through many years of psychoanalysis and still I had managed to keep private places in my head - I wouldn't say they were big, labeled categories, but they were certain attitudes or feelings that were still very private. And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that."

Ram Dass, Remember: Be Here Now, chapter "Ashtanga Yoga".

Simplicity again

"It is my experience that it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again."

E. F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful.

See also this post.

From a scientific perspective, I like this viewpoint, and I am always trying to understand what I observe with some explanatory mechanisms based on simple principles. But I am aware that it is also dangerous to go too far in this direction, and that the simple theoretical principles are most often valid only under strong assumptions that are never satisfied in reality, so that their explanatory power is questionable and the possibility that what I observed was the result of something else must at least remain open.

From a philosophical perspective, I dislike this viewpoint, which would lead to a meaningless world where everything is deterministic and we are just complex machines without souls. I prefer the holistic philosophies of people like Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle.