Quotes About Awareness

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience.

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else.

Chalmers: It's awfully hard to define consciousness. But I'd start by saying that it's the subjective experience of the mind and the world. It's basically what it feels like, from the first-person point of view, to be thinking and perceiving and judging.

There's something it's like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that's a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me, because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states.

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.

The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness -- rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.

the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.

Dzogchen masters.

One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do.

Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

The practice of recognizing nondual awareness is called trekchod, which means "cutting through" in Tibetan, as in cutting a string cleanly so that both ends fall away. Once one has cut it, there is no doubt that it has been cut. I recommend that you demand the same clarity of your meditation practice.

I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.

You can accept what is in the present moment even while working to change it.

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking

Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.

There's certainly no unchanging self that is carried through from one moment to the next. Its a processes; it's not a thing. You're a verb more than you're a noun (from the point of view of neuroscience).

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every moment.