A Quote by George Saunders
I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
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My aim is to advocate that we make this mental switch in respect of our attitudes and practices towards a very large group of beings: members of species other than our own - or, as we popularly though misleadingly call them, animals. In other words, I am urging that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.
The human being is that space in which the comprehensive compassion that pervades the universe from the very beginning now begins to surface --within consciousness. (As compared with the natural displays of compassion by other creatures that is not necessarily 'within consciousness. ') That's the only difference. We didn't create compassion, but it's flowing through us-or it could. The phase change that we're in seems, to me, to depend upon that comprehensive compassion unfurling in the human species.
As we face the headwinds of our troubled and turbulent times, let us always be inspired by the legacy of Kofi Annan - and guided by the knowledge that he will continue speaking to us, urging us on toward the goals to which he dedicated his life and truly moved our world.
When a person is in a miserable situation, then, yes, it is difficult to develop genuine compassion toward others. That's why I find it difficult to say to poor people, "Please have compassion toward millionaires." That's not easy.
I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction - indeed, it's a key part of a great deal of science fiction.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn't been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do, to the benefit of us all.
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Live with compassion. Work with compassion. Die with compassion. Meditate with compassion. Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, experience them with compassion.
When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?
What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.
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