“I find a naturalistic understanding of human nature to be indispensable to leading a wise and mature life, and it is often exhilarating. Wisdom consists in appreciating the preciousness and finiteness of our own existence, and therefore not squandering it; of being cognizant of what makes people everywhere tick, and therefore enhancing happiness and minimizing suffering; of being alert to limitations and flaws in our own judgments and decisions and passions, and thereby doing our best to circumvent them. The exhilaration comes from understanding that we are a part of natural world; that deep mysteries can be explained; and that the world -- including our own mental lives -- can be intelligible, rather than a source of superstition and ignorance. Yes, mortality sucks, but given that it exists, I'd rather know that than be kept in a childlike state of delusion.”

“The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.”

“The central importance of entering worlds other than our own lies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that our own world is also a cultural construct. By experiencing other worlds, then, we see our own for what it is and are thereby enabled also to see fleetingly what the real world, the one between our own cultural construct and those other worlds, must in fact be like.”

“Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.”

“There are no ordinary people. The blur or everyday reality has created a world in which most of us have forgotten our unique and sacred existence...it is [our] true self, once discovered, that enables us to understand more clearly the nature of our world, and our own existence.”

“Engagement, and its relationship to the accumulation and processing of information, is a little-studied phenomenon, representing as it does, individual skills rather than those that can be measured in a group of people. Currently, our understanding and measurement of human intellectual capacity is oriented toward group skills and toward activities that can be elicited on command, regardless of the state of engagement. Indeed, being able to engage one's focus on the questions of the examiner, rather than on one's own interest, is the primary measure of test-taking ability, and test-taking ability is the primary measure of intelligence. When we find that animals do not do well when compared to people in this way, we must not assume that we have really measured their intellect. Perhaps we have measured only our own limited ability to engage them.”