Quotes About Awareness

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE

The traveler sees what he sees," wrote G. K. Chesterton in the 1920s, "the tourist sees what he has come to see.

so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.

They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value.

Most people are on the world, not in it—having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. —JOHN MUIR, THE WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR

In this way, "seeing" as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

We see as we are," said

We see as we are," said the Buddha

Most people are on the world, not in it—having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

Nevertheless, it's important, even on a personal level, to not just look at things as we travel but to see things for what they are.

It is not speech which we should want to know: we should want to know the speaker. It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer. It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer. It is not the mind which we should want to know: WE SHOULD KNOW THE THINKER. —FROM THE KAUSHITAKI UPANISHAD

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.

It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

namely that man does not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills his potentialities only as he in his own consciousness plans and chooses.

the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

When a culture is caught in the profound convulsions of a transitional period, the individuals in the society understandably suffer spiritual and emotional upheaval; and finding that the accepted mores and ways of thought no longer yield security, they tend to sink into dogmatism and conformism, giving up awareness, or are forced to strive for a heightened self-consciousness by which to become aware of their existence with new conviction and on new bases.

But in another respect man is very different from the rest of nature. He possesses consciousness of himself; his sense of personal identity distinguishes him from the rest of the living or nonliving things. And nature cares not a fig for man's personal