Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

They really make sex into such a horrible thing and how terrible anything related to sex is, but isn't that why we're all here? We wouldn't be here at all if two people in our past hadn't been horny for each other, that's how it works. So we can't continue unless people keep being horny for each other, that's just the way it is.

I was living in Japan at the time, Shoko Asahara was an important figure and you could say his name and people would immediately know who you were talking about but since being back in America I've realized most people don't know who he is, which I find odd because he was far worse than Charles Manson. He killed many more people than Manson and was actually trying to kill thousands but wasn't careful enough in his process.

Now however, we have contraception and it's mostly reliable so you can have sex without that happening. So then you start vilifying the act of sex itself. I don't think Buddhism has ever done that necessarily, or at least I'm not aware of Buddhism taking the stance that Christianity often has which says that sex itself is a kind of evil act, which is a really weird idea.

I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.

But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.