Quotes About Consciousness

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one's progress.

When those aspects that have been unconsciously refused are returned, when they are made conscious, accepted, tolerated, or integrated, the self can then be at one, the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears, and the force of compassion is automatically unleashed.

It's not what she is thinking that matters, it's how she relates to her thoughts that will make all the difference.

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person's awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Intuitions are not to be ignored, John. They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.

I said that I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn't clever. That was just being observant.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

You look around and it occurs to you that this isn't real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn't matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can't remember where the present is and how to get back there.

And this means that time is a mystery,not even a thing,and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is,exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert,except that you can't see the desert because it's not a thing

Y cuando miramos las cosas pensamos que estamos simplemente mirándolas desde nuestros ojos como si mirásemos a través de pequeñas ventanas y que hay una persona dentro de nuestra cabeza, pero no es así. Estamos mirando una pantalla dentro de nuestra cabeza, como la pantalla de un ordenador.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

Anywhere - and, it follows, nowhere - can be a place. As long as we are there, to think and talk, to listen and respond. The world, once conscious of itself in the form of human making, is a vast concert hall. What sounds there is not the divine music of celestial spheres, as the ancient Greek mathematicians believed, but the sound of one human after another issuing the daily plea: to be heard, to be understood, to be accommodated.

Good habits are hard to form and easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form and hard to live with. Pay attention. Be aware . If we don't consciously form good ones, we will unconsciously form bad ones.

quiet pain that comes from not honoring what we know to be true, even if all we know to be true are the questions we are asking.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real.

Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.

Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.

over time, staying real becomes the work of keeping our actions in the world connected to the truth of our inner being, allowing our True Self to see the light of day.

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. —SENG-TS'AN

Live slow enough and there is only the beginning of time.

Sometimes,I open a book I wrote. Reading the words, they seem to have come from some hidden recess of my mind, far from my waking self, from another mysterious realm. It's a mystery to me. It's the magic of the mind.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.