Excerpt from Volume I Meditation & The Work of Living)
bell hooks: bell hooks was an American writer, teacher, and cultural critic, 1952 to 2021, born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She took her pen name from her great-grandmother and wrote it in lowercase so readers would focus on her ideas rather than on her as a person. Across more than thirty books, she examined how race, class, and gender shape the way people see themselves and treat one another. In All About Love, she argued that love is not a feeling we fall into but a practice we choose, built from care, commitment, honesty, and responsibility, and that most of us were never taught how to do it. She refused to let comforting myths stand in for the truth about how people are raised, and she believed real change starts when we look honestly at what we learned and decide to live differently. Friedrich Nietzsche: Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher who challenged traditional religion, morality, and the comforting illusions people use to avoid life's difficulty. He argued that human beings must create meaning through strength, honesty, creativity, and the courage to face existence without false consolation. Jean-Paul Sartre: Jean-Paul Sartre was a twentieth-century French existentialist philosopher who argued that human beings are not born with a fixed essence or predetermined purpose. For Sartre, we are responsible for creating meaning through choice, action, and the willingness to face our freedom honestly. David Hume: David Hume was a Scottish philosopher from the 1700s known for his doubt of easy answers and his belief that real knowledge comes from experience, not from ideas we cannot test. He questioned religious claims, fixed ideas of the self, and many things people accept without evidence. Bertrand Russell: Bertrand Russell was a twentieth-century British philosopher, logician, and public intellectual who defended reason, skepticism, and intellectual clarity. He argued that beliefs should be examined carefully and supported by evidence rather than inherited authority, fear, or wishful thinking. Robert Sapolsky: Robert Sapolsky is an American neuroscientist and primatologist, born in 1957, who spent decades studying stress in baboons and in human beings. His work traces how chronic stress hormones damage the body and the brain over time, and how much of what we call personality is produced by biology, environment, and circumstance rather than chosen. He argues that free will does not exist at all, that every decision is the end product of causes reaching back before we were born. I do not share that conclusion. This entire series rests on the position that a regulated nervous system restores real choice, and I have watched it happen in myself and in other people. I include him because his account of what stress does to a body is the most rigorous I have read, and because a position worth holding should be able to survive the strongest argument against it. Richard Dawkins: Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and writer, born in 1941, best known for The Selfish Gene and for arguing that natural selection alone explains the complexity of life, with no guiding intelligence behind it. He is among the most prominent public critics of religious belief, holding that claims about the world should stand or fall on evidence. I do not share his conclusion about intent in the universe. I include him because he refuses to accept an answer simply because it comforts people, and that refusal is worth learning from even when I disagree.