Quotes About Introspection

His normal state was silence.

hereafter, is see that you do not identify your self with them.

The "mind" is nothing but "thoughts"; and behind every thought, there is the primary thought, which is the I-thought.

So long as "mind" survives, "religion" will also exist. But no religion will persist in the silence that results from looking within. It is the ego that comes up, in the form of saying, "my religion should be embraced by all.

Freedom from desire is the essential pre-requisite; find out the root of desires, the source from whence they proceed

Talks With Ramana alone,

Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking. —Marcus Aurelius

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.

In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.

We think we're better than average at not being biased in thinking that we're better than average.

He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: "The sound is just the sound. It's me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won't annoy me. . . . If I don't go out and bother the sound, it's not going to bother me.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

When you're feeling either very good or very bad about yourself, it probably means that a large body of evidence is being hidden from view. The most truthful times come between the extremes.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

If I let go of that feeling and cease to identify with it—in other words, take a step toward the interior version of the not-self experience—I'm rejecting natural selection's insistence that I consider myself special. Take that, natural selection!

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

We wouldn't spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.

associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much less fixed identity, than we think.

I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.

Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.

One reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the "default mode network." This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we're doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it's wandering.

We are ultimately alone in that we are ultimately responsible for ourselves.

No mire lo que hagan los demás. No se le importe un pepino de lo que opine el prójimo. Sea usted, usted mismo sobre todas las cosas, sobre el bien y el mal, sobre el placer y sobre el dolor, sobre la vida y la muerte. Usted y usted. Nada más. Y será fuerte como un demonio entonces.