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             “The lizard brain is responsible for reproduction and anger and survival and fear. We’ve since built other brain material on top of that which gives us things like creativity, generosity, and connection. But the lizard brain, when it is activated, is brutal. That part of the brain takes over and says things like “‘I better not raise my hand because I might say the wrong thing and people will laugh at me. I better not reach out to that person and offer them...

       “The Renaissance, for the most part, was a really terrible period to be alive, and was, in fact, in a lot of ways worse than the Middle Ages. Bigger conflicts with higher casualties and more rapid circulation of diseases, among other phenomena, added up to a lower life expectancy. All of that was a result of the economy improving, technology advancing, society becoming more wealthy, the powerful within those societies becoming more powerful. When you make “progress”, when trade improves and more ships are coming in and travel is happening more, diseases...

           “What do we do in times like these? We’re glued to our newsfeed, continually catapulted into these media tunnels, looking for answers, for meaning, for understanding. Ricocheting like this, we are commonly subsumed by disruptive emotions. My friend called me and said, ‘not since 9/11 have I been trapped like this. I have been hypnotized by television and social media. I would wager money that productivity in major cities has decreased since he took office.’ What advice do you have for those of us eddying wildly in the media maelstrom, and how do...

“Not finding this nameless thing of a thousand names which we always sought, we have cultivated faith -- faith in a savior or ideal -- and faith invariably breeds violence. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behavior, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking become mechanical, our responses automatic. We are satisfied with the descriptions of others, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either...

"Curiosity is an impulse that just taps you on the shoulder very lightly and invites you to turn your head a quarter of an inch and look a little closer at something that has intrigued you. Curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves. And it's a very gentle friend, and a very forgiving friend, and a very constant one. Passion is not so constant, not so gentle, not so forgiving, and sometimes not so available. And so when we live in a world that has come to fetishize passion above all, there's a great...