Meditation … puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become jus… - Sam Harris

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all — and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors — such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia — that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I’m wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us?

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph — not merely in the end but in every moment.

The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.