Quotes About Mind

The mind's goal is not to get at the truth but to fulfill our needs, and like a computer with very specific programming, the mind's interpretations are based on what's already known or believed.

We become attached to our beliefs, to our roles and traits, and also to the strategies needed for maintaining all this. We rarely acknowledge that all our mental, emotional, and perceptual activities are processes, and that they're there to serve a specific purpose. We're so busy identifying with mind's conceptual mechanisms that we lose touch with what's real. It is not hard to see, then, how self becomes confused with the mind.

when the mind serves "the self" it is actually serving something of its own making—a conceptual self.

Whatever we think of as "self" we will protect and maintain. If it's a conceptual self, and likely it is, then we end up with mind protecting mind.

When self becomes confused with mind, and mind becomes seen as the self, the mind's self-serving activities end up creating an experience of reality that is entirely self-referential.

Remember, mind has no interest in what's true—its job is to keep you alive while maintaining an identifiable sense of self. To do this, it not only creates and identifies with physical and mental-emotional activities, it also builds on past experience and any previously established conceptual identity. You're still alive and you're still you, so mind will naturally protect and promote all the beliefs behind the activities that keep you that way.

The original function of mind is to do a job, the essence of which is to keep you alive and successfully being you.

It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.

So many vague, as yet unanswered ponderings in my mind about social interactions became clear and moved into that happy, "situation now understood" part of the mind.

For Anselm there are three levels of existence. The first, and lowest, level is that which exists only in the mind (for instance, a unicorn). The second refers to those things that exist both in the mind and in reality (such as a horse). The third level is that which exists in reality but which cannot be contained in the mind (i.e. God). It is this third level of existence that has often been overlooked by the Church, and yet it is here that we find God.

God thinks. You think. God wills. You will. God feels. You feel.

Attaining a state of flow can be quite rare because there are many barriers to freeing our minds. Csikszentmihalyi identifies negative forms of perfectionism, fear, self-doubt, and self-censoring as primary obstacles to flow.

It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.

The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

Unfortunately, a superabundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

If you're going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it's well furnished.

Look around your house and find an item you've tried to discard before but just couldn't. Examine it and think about letting it go. What other thoughts arise? Does your mind struggle to stop you from getting rid of this item? Remember: You really don't have to obey your mind's command to hang on to it.

After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one's mind even at today's rudimentary levels of connectivity. The "transactive memory system" called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn't come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

What do you think vision is?" she asked him. "You don't see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn't even exist outside your own head. Vision's just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you're going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.