Quotes About Perception

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

In this way, clear seeing also means clear hearing, clear smelling, clear tasting, clear touching, and clear knowing, which would include knowing what's on your mind, and therefore knowing both what you are thinking and what emotions are visiting, and therefore feeling what you are feeling, grounded in the body, whether it be fear or anger or sadness, frustration, irritation, impatience, annoyance, satisfaction, empathy, compassion, happiness, or anything else.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts…. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake." If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.

When you begin to question the narrative of yourself and inquire as to who is even doing all of this talking inside your own head, you may come to realize that you have no idea!

is that if you are aware of what is happening, you are "doing it right," no matter what is happening.

Thinking seems to constitute our "default setting" rather than awareness.

Here is Eliot, again from "Burnt Norton": Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Instead, we are living inside our own little narrative bubble of the moment, frequently misattributing cause and effect and therefore completely imprisoned in thoughts and emotions that are both inaccurate and misguided.

Too often our unexamined and deluded story-lines become self-fulfilling prophecies. We can always marshal any evidence we want in support of a particular view, and then believe it even if it is patently not true. This is delusion.

I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.

One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . .

I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.

I don't think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws.

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.* ANTHONY STORR, FEET OF CLAY

Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story….[R]ather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. It

But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a "slag heap"—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a "serious" climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world's highest mountain.

We're disinclined to believe that someone who's an attentive student or a congenial athlete could also be a serial rapist.

As Katie J. M. Baker observed in her Jezebel article, "In Missoula…drunk guys who may have 'made mistakes' nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.

drunk guys who may have 'made mistakes' nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not." Compounding

You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

The world didn't always sound right when it was first explained.