Quotes About Awareness

Facts don't change. How we see them does.

Lucy stiffened. As annoyed as she was with Toby, she didn't appreciate hearing him addressed as "boy." Either Big Mike didn't know or didn't care how offensive that appellation was to African American males, regardless of their age. If her brother, Andre, had been around, Big Mike would have gotten a big lesson in racial sensitivity.

Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.

There are moments. You will know them.

If you let words go buzzing out of your mouth like bees, she always told me, they will come back and sting you.

Those moments that we remember. The tiniest moments or parts of a moment - a tap of a nail against a mug or the sound of a man swallowing, or how the sweeping beam finds the kitchen walls and then leaves them. We count the seconds, he and I.

Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker: the longer we leave it on, the more pressure we build up. Sooner or later, that pressure is bound to pop the lid, and we have an emotional crisis.

Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are. - Marianne Williamson

It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.

There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.

Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?

An altered state of consciousness simply means any state of awareness that is different from our normal waking state. When we daydream or dream at night, we are in an altered state. We can also get into an altered state by using meditations, hypnosis and exercises like jogging or yoga. Using drugs or alcohol can also produce an altered state, but in a less healthy way.

If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?

This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

At the center of/ all my sorrows/ I have felt a presence/ that was not mine alone.

It is funny how time goes so slow one day, sometimes for a whole season or a whole year, and then it's like a fast-forward button is pressed, and where did time go? How could you move no closer to the life you dreamed for yourself?

On the delusional theory of consciousness

One of the benefits of TM, Agatha had said, was that it enabled you to be "alone with your thoughts." But as I quickly discovered, a lot of my thoughts were not anything I wanted to be alone with.

I haven't been that happy since I became conscious for the first time, you know, when I became aware of myself and got so uncomfortable and everything.

I will pretend I do not have those feelings and eventually they will die from neglect.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to change reality. I know this. Completely. And yet. And. Yet.

Equanimity is based on the knowledge that everything changes and will always change and that is okay. We find equanimity only by paying close attention to what is happening in the moment.

It was beginning to occur to me that I was a little too in love with stereotypes and preconceptions.