“Whenever someone asks me whether I believe in God, I simply have no idea what the question means.”
Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
“Consciousness is what happens when an organism encounters an environment. If an eye is struck by light reflected off a colored shape, then visual consciousness occurs. But as soon as the object passes out of the field of vision or one shuts one´s eyes, that consciousness ceases. This is true of every kind of consciousness.”
Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
“One evening at dusk, as I was returning to my room along a narrow path through the pine forest, carrying a blue plastic bucket slopping with water that I had just collected from a nearby source, I was abruptly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overpowering sense of the sheer strangeness of everything. It was as though I had been lifted onto the crest of a great wave that rose from the ocean of life itself, allowing me for the first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing. ´How´, I asked myself, ´can a person be unaware of this? How can anyone pass their life without responding to this? Why have I ot noticed this until now?´ I remember standing still, trembling and dumb, with tears in my eyes. Then I continued on my way before night fell.”
Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
