Quotes About Awareness

In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

I don't believe I exist, and soon I won't. I am a time being about to expire.

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

You can feel life completely by taking it away

She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.

Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.

There's nothing like realizing that you don't have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life.

Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience

In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.

when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, Thanks, toilet, and it felt pretty natural.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn't know it.

It's probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn't mean it's not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

At one extreme...the hours seemed to aggregate and sell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme when her attention was disengaged and fractured she experienced time at its most granular wherein moments hung around like particles diffused and suspended and standing in water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focussed but vast and time felt like a limpid pool ringed by sunlit ferns.

I whispered Now! ... Now! ... Now! ... over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

You know how sometimes a thought can feel like it's outside your head, but you know it's really inside? Well, the voices weren't my thoughts. They were outside. They were different.

Did he hear her? If he had opened his eyes just then, he would have seen his wife's lovely face hanging over him like a pale moon.

Somewhere D?gen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don't remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience. Even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weight and shape, this is only an illusion. Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways.