Quotes About Awareness

In Buddhism, consciousness is central because all phenomena are realized to be mere appearances to consciousness that have no independent existence.

Samsara is not out there, but rather in the way that we experience our environment. To target it precisely, samsara is in the quality of our minds. Our minds are not functioning in accord with reality, and therein lies the problem.

Solitary meditation doesn't cause mental imbalances, but uncovers them.

The sequence between shamatha and vipashyana makes perfect sense: first refine your powers of attention, then use them to explore and purify the mind, which can be directly examined only through first-person observation.

The mind that reaches out to other people, to the environment, to provide what it seems to lack itself, is a mind that is ignorant of its own resources for peace and happiness.

According to the general Buddhist view, the whole of sa?s?ra, with its myriad pleasant and miserable realms, is a prison. But from the perspective of pristine awareness, all of sa?s?ra and nirv??a is equally suffused by the primordial purity of the Great Perfection.

It is best not to silence the mind with a crushing blow of our will.

I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

Normally, the mind involuntarily superimposes a sense of solidity on our perceptions of visual objects, even though the eyes are not designed to detect this tactile characteristic.

Let go of any conceptual associations you have regarding visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments...Your likes and dislikes...Just be present with the shapes and colors...focusing on them with bare attention.

Settling your mind in its natural state entails releasing all grasping, grasping onto the future, and the past, grasping onto cogitations about the present. Letting your awareness rest in its own place, naturally luminous and still.

There's no one-to-one correspondence between outer events and our inner emotional states.

When attention is impaired, it detracts from everything we do, and when it is well focused, it enhances everything we do.

Within Tibetan Buddhism, shamatha practice maps on to the nine stages of attentional development wherein thoughts gradually subside as concentrative power is increased to the point at which one can effortlessly maintain single-pointed focus on a chosen object for at least four hours. The accomplishment of shamatha is accompanied by a powerful experience of bliss, luminosity, and stillness.

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.

A trip to a Central American jungle to watch how Indians behave near a bridge won't make you see either the jungle or the bridge or the Indians if you believe that the civilization you were born into is the only one that counts. Go and look around with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong.

vio un par de pies frente a sí. Calzaban

As a beam of sunlight sent through a room will at once reveal numberless motes floating in the air of the room, so a ray of Divine love let into the heart will immediately make visible to us a cloud of imperfections of which we were before entirely unaware.

Truth is a spiral staircase. What looks true on one level may not be true on the next higher level. A complete vision must extend vertically as well as horizontally; not only seeing the parts in relation to one another but embracing the different planes.

He envied her, sensing that she lived each day as if it was her last.

He noticed her eyes were a rich, warm brown, the same color as his favorite horse. "Yes?" He realized he'd been staring. At least he had the sense not to voice his thoughts. He doubted she would appreciate her eye color being compared to that of his horse's hide even if it was his favorite.

Sarika couldn't always tell if a manic high or a depressive low was sneaking up on her.

landscape effectively is one of the biggest challenges in our modern lives. When you set up too many Context Prompts, they can actually have the opposite effect—you become desensitized and fail to heed the prompt. You end up not hearing notification dings and not seeing sticky notes. It's like living next to train tracks—at first the noise of a train is deafening, then . . . what train?