Quotes About Perception

These kids could have starred in a social media campaign for vasectomies.

She opened the aluminum screen door and shook his hand. Something about his unhandsome face made him seem trustworthy.

Where is the end of seeing, of hearing, of thinking, of knowing?

The emphasis in meditation is very much on undistracted awareness: not thinking about things, not analyzing, not getting lost in the story, but just seeing the nature of what is happening in the mind. Careful, accurate observation of the moment's reality is the key to the whole process.

Consciousness is not a thing that exists, but an event that occurs.

Because these moods and mind states are so amorphous and generalized, we often sink into them and become identified with them, and they become the unconscious filter on experience. At these times, we're looking at the world through colored glasses.

The perception of solidity also comes from observing things from a distance. When we look at an ordinary object like a chair or a table, it appears quite solid. Yet if we put that same object under a powerful microscope, whole new worlds emerge. When we look at trees from a distance, we just see an undifferentiated mass of color. But as we get closer, we can distinguish individual leaves, and even the small distinct parts of the leaves.

Memory is a class of thoughts which takes as its object something already experienced.

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad thing come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

Some people think the longer you can sit, the wiser you must be. I have seen chickens sitting on their nests for days on end. Wisdom comes from being mindful at all times."3

We see that each experience is simply just what it is, and that the "I" and "mine" are extra.

the five aggregates" (khandhas, in Pali) of experience: material elements, feelings, perceptions, formations, and consciousness.

Whenever we are mindful of a physical sensation — hardness, softness, pressure, vibration, heat, cold, lightness, heaviness — we are contemplating the first aggregate.

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, expressed it well: Live, you say, in the present; Live only in the present. But I don't want the present. I want reality; . . . I only want reality, things without time present.3 And the Buddha

To realize that boredom does not come from the object of our attention but rather from the quality of our attention is truly a transforming insight.

this quintessential Zen statement: "There is no right and no wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong.

A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

This is not a breathing exercise; it is an exercise in awareness.

We rarely see that "past" and "future" are happening right now. All that there is, is an unfolding of present moments. We have created these concepts to serve a useful purpose, but by taking the ideas to be the reality, by not understanding that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we find ourselves burdened by worries and regrets about the past and anxieties of anticipation about what has not yet happened.

And in the context of the five aggregates, sa?k?r? refers specifically to all the mental factors that arise in different combinations with each moment of consciousness, except feeling and perception, which were singled out as aggregates because of their unique importance.

When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is "man" or "woman" except as an idea, a concept?

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.