Quotes About Reality

She wished she could swap her days for her nights, her reality for her dreams.

The idea of love was always easier than the practice of it.

It matters what's true. - Ann Druyan

By the time I reached school, I was shaking. I felt as if my entire world had warped and twisted like a funhouse mirror. Nothing was the same as it had been a month ago.

I looked at my watch. 2:30. I really should go back to sleep soon or I'd be a basket case at school tomorrow, I thought, but I was avoiding nightmares of my own. I had them pretty often, more often than Courtenay did. I knew they weren't real, I knew they wouldn't hurt me, but they still scared me to death.

There are going to be some things in life that you can't change.

It's over. I can't believe it. Back to boring old life.

As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence.

But one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self. Accomplishing this can be elusive enough. If I've met a person who has done so perfectly, I am unaware of it.

in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.

Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self.

In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.

The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control.

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion.

Mentir es alzar una frontera entre la verdad en la que vivimos y la percepción que los demás tienen de nosotros.

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one's beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one's beliefs about the world are true.

Cessation is believed to be a direct insight into an unconditioned reality (Pali: Nibb?na; Sanskrit: Nirvana) that lies behind all manifest phenomena.

Unfortunately, expressing such criticism places the nonbeliever at the margins of society. By merely being in touch with reality, he appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

Not even in the right ballpark"? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I," and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.