Quotes About Consciousness

To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

You sit here for days saying, this is a strange business. You're the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.

Zen has no business with ideas.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

There is an economy in your mind

Living an environmentally responsible lifestyle can seem like a Scrooge-like list of don'ts. Don't take that flight, don't buy that car, don't eat those blueberries flown in from somewhere far-flung.

When you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.

Even in the limo, I buckle my seatbelt. I got that seatbelt on before the car moves.

Transcendental meditation is like a car, a vehicle that allows you to go within. It's a mental technique.

The self driving car is not self-aware. It's just driving; it's not thinking.

I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.

Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

We could say that the word mindfulness is pointing to being one with our experience, not dissociating, being right there when our hand touches the doorknob or the telephone rings or feelings of all kinds arise. The

Labeling our thoughts during meditation practice is a powerful support that reconnects us with the fresh, open, unbiased dimension of our mind.

we cannot be in the present and run our story lines at the same time!

When we become aware that we are thinking, we say to ourselves, "thinking," with an unbiased attitude and with tremendous gentleness. Then we return our focus to the breath. We regard the thoughts as bubbles and the labeling like touching them with a feather. There's just this light touch—"thinking"—and they dissolve back into the space.

Be fully present. Feel your heart. And engage the next moment without an agenda.

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.

being right on the spot nails us. It nails us right to the point of time and space that we are in. When we stop there and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer.

the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same.

by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment.