Quotes About Self-awareness

As I got to know him, I learned that Paul had a continuous "tape" playing in his head that degraded everything. He once described this process as, "…it's like a demon sits on my shoulder and continually ridicules me.

People who are self-denying and selfless have little to offer to others.

realizing it, most people become deadened to their emotions. Early in their lives they turn their backs on themselves, their real desires and wants, and substitute self-nourishing habits and fantasies that only serve to deaden them. They

She is 25. Whereas Pauline at forty undresses in the darkness and drapes herself languorously with a sheet or towel, Blanche stretches naked on her back under the electric light, her left knee raised, her right foot resting on it, examining her wriggling toes. She flings out her arm and flicks ash in the vague direction of the ashtray.

I would wish it on no one to be me. Only I am capable of being myself. To know so much, to have seen so much, and To say nothing, just about nothing.

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

The sage is not unconscious; he is fully aware of the Self.

Freedom from desire is the essential pre-requisite; find out the root of desires, the source from whence they proceed

If you realize you are without form, that you are unlimited, what is there to be seen apart [a "separate" body]? There is no connection, during sleep, with the body, the senses, and the mind: on waking up, you identify yourself with them. All that you have to do, hereafter, is see that you do not identify your self with them.

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

We think we're better than average at not being biased in thinking that we're better than average.

realizing you're not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

Certainly the prefrontal cortex is an important thing; I'm as proud of mine as the next guy.

happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

In which case, he was basically saying: 'Look, if there is part of you that isn't under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it.

RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment

According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly. What's more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, "Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

the thoughts are arising, and there's a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it's not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there's this very strong habitual identification. This is how we've lived our lives, and it takes practice to try and break this conditioning- to be mindful of the thought, rather than be lost in it.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

If I let go of that feeling and cease to identify with it—in other words, take a step toward the interior version of the not-self experience—I'm rejecting natural selection's insistence that I consider myself special. Take that, natural selection!

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.