Quotes About Consciousness

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can be especially helpful while you're aware of strong emotions and thoughts, particularly for habitual thoughts and feelings, which can pull you into their reality.

other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.

In fact, less than one percent of all the information the mind takes in actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness;

We start to regulate an upsetting emotion the moment we become aware of it.

we are consciously aware of only a tiny portion of our perceptions and actions. To us, that small compartment appears to fill our whole mental cabinet.

simply noting the disturbance may be enough to dislodge it from the mind.

Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means "simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] 'thinking' is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.

Mindfulness gives us breathing space from this conditioning.

Bringing an automatic habit into awareness in order to change it is a crucial step.

But once we become aware that the sequence is starting, we can consciously and intentionally initiate a different, more constructive response.

Bringing mindfulness to the moment, she was able to step back enough to ask herself, "Do I want to make this real?" That gave her a chance to answer herself, "No"—and she would drop it.

Opening up a space in her mind gave her more choice in the moment.

recognize them as mere thoughts, seeing them as well-worn ruts in the mind: "Oh, I'm having those thoughts again." As we recognize them for what they are, we break their tyranny in the mind.

Thoughts have no power except the power we give them.

Realizing that these thoughts are just projections of the mind helps counter the disturbing emotions they provoke.

Thoughts have no solidity, but merely the appearance of solidity because of the power we give them.

If you stay mindful as thoughts appear in your awareness, they reveal their empty nature and eventually dissolve. Let them vanish on their own, without adding to them in any way.

Mindfulness is a meditative awareness that cultivates the capacity to see things just as they are from moment to moment

A mental state can last for but a moment, until another state rises to the top of the mind's hierarchy, or it can become a habitual frame of mind.

get to a point where we've observed our mind long enough to become more aware of its repetitive cycles, playing the same tapes over and over, in endless variations.

There is no fixed, solid, permanent self—just a series of changing patterns of experience.

Instead of being swept away and captured by a thought or feeling, mindfulness steadily observes those thoughts and feelings as they come and go.

Recognizing, for instance, "Oh, I'm having those-feelings again," or "Here come my schema thoughts," gives us the freedom to wake from the schema trance.