Quotes About Awareness

We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been "Not much." In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an "I" or a "me"—vanished.

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

How could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?

consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

What you are calling "I" is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

It is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves and, in this way, to become better able to contribute to the well-being of others.

our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering.

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. It is all that can be seen and that which does the seeing. No matter how far you have traveled from the place of your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring consciousness and its changes. Why not do so directly?

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness.

The realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.

we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of our attention.

In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a paradox:we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however, that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component of our experience that we call I cannot be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way.

passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment.

you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things...haven't you noticed.

The first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are. But if you persist in your practice, you will eventually get a taste of real concentration and begin to see thoughts themselves as mere appearances arising in a wider field of consciousness.

Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you.