Quotes About Consciousness

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.

Without the words, without the repetitive thoughts, the emotions don't last longer than one and a half minutes.

do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all.

a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

IN the morning when you wake up, reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, think over what you've done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion.

When my children were teenagers, I took them to meet the Sixteenth Karmapa. As they weren't Buddhists, I asked His Holiness to say something that didn't require any understanding of the dharma. Without hesitating, he told them: "You are going to die; and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind.

In Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society.

The experience of labeling your thoughts "thinking" also, over time, becomes much more vivid.

You say to yourself, "Thinking," and as you're saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don't repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as "thinking" very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go.

Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts "thinking," come back to the present moment, acknowledge what's going on in our minds.

Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs—whether it's our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation—to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That's not considered to be a problem; the point is to see it.

meditation isn't about getting rid of thoughts—you'll think forever.

We can't control what's going to happen but we can grow in awareness of what is happening.

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along

Every time you're willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you're sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious.

It's up to you how to use your life. It doesn't mean that you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself.

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive.

The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we're not built to eat a lot of meat.

You can not have an argument with a fully conscious person.