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Buddhism is a practice, not a belief, and every Buddhist is, in some way, lay clergy — involved in the way a scientist is involved in his or her work, or in the way a writer's mind is involved in writing, present in the background, all the time.

— Francisco Varela The Emergent Self (1995)

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Buddhism

More quotes by Francisco Varela

The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.

Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980)

As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajña, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself.

The Embodied Mind (1991)

The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

The Embodied Mind (1991)

By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitutes it as a unity.

Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980)

I’m a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena

Varela (1990)

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In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism, demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process.

Keiji Nishitani

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth (2005)

Gay subject–subject consciousness is more compatible with Buddhist non‐duality than the hetero subject–object consciousness. It can be claimed, therefore, that Buddha Nature, and Buddhism itself, is queer.

Roger Corless

For 2500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and cause of happiness. which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Francisco Varela (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.