Quotes About Consciousness

I was always a liar. But one thing I failed to realize about being a liar is that you know when you are deceiving someone else, but when you deceive yourself you believe you are telling the truth.

I could see everything she said as if it were a wall painting inside the cave of my own skull.

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

Spiritual practice is not a mindless repetition of ritual or prayer. It works through consciously realizing the law of cause and effect. Perhaps we can sense the potential of awakening in ourselves, but we must also see that it doesn't happen by itself. How we act, how we relate to ourselves, to our bodies, to the people around us, to our work, creates the kind of world we live in, creates our very freedom.

The suffering and happiness in our world, both individual and collective, depend on our consciousness.

Our life is shaped and determined by our thoughts. Usually we are only half conscious of the way thoughts direct our life; we are lost in thoughts as if they are reality. We take our own mental creations quite seriously, endorsing them without reservation.

With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.

the midst of these forces with his heart open and his mind clear until he could see to the depths of human consciousness, until he discovered a place of peace at the center of them all. This was his enlightenment, the discovery of nirvana, the freeing of his heart from entanglement in all the conditions of the world.

We note feelings and find that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and find that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds.

You will begin to see desire's impermanent nature, and you will also realize that you do not have to act on every thought or desire. You will learn that you can choose from the many possibilities of how to respond to desire when it arises, and you can discover a new kind of freedom, where you do not have to follow your desires, but can choose to behave in new ways in response to your desires.

You may have heard of "out-of-the-body experiences," full of lights and visions. A true spiritual path demands something more challenging, what could be called an "in-the-body experience." We must connect to our body, to our feelings, to our life just now, if we are to awaken.

teaching that states of consciousness are far more crucial than outer circumstances.

Through awareness of the body, we remember who we truly are.

what Buddhist writers call the clear open sky of awareness. It is empty like space, but unlike space it is sentient; it knows experience. In its true state, consciousness is simply this knowing

We grieve for our past traumas and present fears, for all of the feelings we never dared experience consciously.

you must be present to win.

the reality of experience is an ever-changing river. Direct perception drops beneath the names of things to show us their ephemeral, mysterious nature. When we bring our attention to the direct perception of experience, we become more alive and free.

James Joyce described this relationship in the line, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

When we live in our thoughts of the past and future, everything seems distant, hurried, or unfulfilled.

When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound at our ears, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, "The between is ringing." The sound of the bell is here to be heard everywhere—in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

In low levels of consciousness it is unwise to believe, trust or follow our thinking

Our consciousness can only give us an experience of our thinking.

Although many people can be your helper, no one should be closer to you than your own consciousness.