Quotes About Consciousness

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

You may have heard the old story, usually attributed to a Native American elder, meant to illuminate the power of attention. A grandfather (occasionally it's a grandmother) imparting a life lesson to his grandson tells him, I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, fearful, envious, resentful, deceitful. The other wolf is loving, compassionate, generous, truthful, and serene. The grandson asks which wolf will win the fight. The grandfather answers, The one I feed.

These four qualities are among the most beautiful and powerful states of consciousness we can experience. Together they are called in Pali, the language spoken by the Buddha, the brahma-viharas. Brahma means "heavenly." Vihara means "abode" or "home." By practicing these meditations, we establish love (Pali, metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha) as our home.

Training attention through meditation opens our eyes.

When we bring deep awareness to whatever's bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.

We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again

Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look.

Connecting to your breath when thoughts or images arise is like spotting a friend in a crowd: you don't have to shove everyone else aside or order them to go away; you just direct your attention, your enthusiasm, your interest toward your friend. 'Oh,' you think, 'there's my friend in that crowd. Oh, there's my breath, among those thoughts and feelings and sensations.

Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded.

What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.

You can access the forces of mindfulness and lovingkindness at any moment, without anyone knowing you're doing it. You don't have to walk excruciatingly slowly down the streets of a major metropolis alarming everyone around you (in fact, please don't);

The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind.

Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.

We cultivate mindfulness to help us distinguish the actual experience from the story we tell ourselves.

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

Man is characterized by a number of things - one of 'em is he is the only animal that knows he's going to die someday.

Do you know of the uncertainty principle, Marjorie?" "I am educated," she snorted, very much annoyed with him. "Then you know that with very small things, we cannot both know where they are and what they are doing. The act of observing them always changes what they are doing. Perhaps God does not look at us individually because to do so would interrupt our work, interfere with our free will….

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,' she used to say. 'Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.

Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep