Quotes About Mind

El último gran intento de liberar a la conciencia del dominio de los impulsos y del control social fue el psicoanálisis;

Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy.

como Freud señaló, los dos tiranos que luchan por el control de la mente son el Inconsciente y el Superyó, el primero es un criado de los genes y el segundo un lacayo de la sociedad (ambos representan el "Otro").

Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far.

The optimists claim that through the course of evolution the nervous system has become adept at "chunking" bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expanded. Simple functions like adding a column of numbers or driving a car grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We

Inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention.

The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind. It is almost immeasurably huge, and most of it is hostilely empty and cold.

it is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.

One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. To

one begins to harvest the genuine rewards of living. But it is not by abandoning ourselves to instinctual desires that we become free of social controls. We must also become independent from the dictates of the body, and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there. As long as we obey the socially conditioned stimulus-response patterns that exploit our biological inclinations, we are controlled from the outside.

The "battle" is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention.

In other words, with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage.

The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.

a yogi disciplines his mind to ignore pain that ordinary people would have no choice but to let into their awareness; similarly he can ignore the insistent claims of hunger or sexual arousal that most people would be helpless to resist. The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. [...] To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.

el más alto bien, que llamaba alegría, y frecuentemente confianza, es una mente desprovista de temor». En otras palabras, disfrutó de la vida porque había aprendido a controlar su conciencia. Demócrito no fue ni el primer ni el último pensador que se perdió en el flujo de la mente. Frecuentemente

But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious "leisure" time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.

when attention is not focused on a goal, the mind typically begins to be filled with disjointed and depressing thoughts.

The normal condition of the mind is chaos. Only when involved in a goal-directed activity does it acquire order and positive moods.

Athletes know well that to improve performance beyond a certain point they must learn to discipline their minds.

If one does not use the mind to its fullest, then good feelings fulfill just a fraction of the potential we possess.

what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don't have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won't end up being any good.