Quotes About Awareness

note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]

I felt confused, to some degree, by everything—but in a delayed manner, in that I seemed to be repeatedly realizing that I felt confused, instead of feeling directly confused

He started to realize his body wasn't defective; rather, his society was damaging.

I made her admit she liked me. She likes me. But we're too alike. When you're with someone and neither of you can stop saying good things. Then you both get very aware that life will end soon. I think that's why we don't talk that much.

At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead

I knew guys got erections. I was perfectly prepared to deal with it. When the right guy and the right erection came along.

It's just not always that easy, right? To control what you think about. Who you think about.

In a sense, our darker moments and most upsetting feelings are an opportunity for spiritual growth and uncovering our natural wisdom, for waking up—if we choose to use them that way. If so, our deepest insights can emerge from working directly—with awareness—with our own difficulties.

Emotional fixations are like that—if you see them clearly, unflinchingly, for what they really are, you take the power away from them. They no longer control you. Confusion dawns as clarity.

Everything changes—an insight that can help free us from the pull of pleasure and the aversion to pain.

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

The key lies in staying with the experience through all its changes.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can be especially helpful while you're aware of strong emotions and thoughts, particularly for habitual thoughts and feelings, which can pull you into their reality.

Mental noting can also be a help when you need to focus your wandering, confused, or scattered mind.

you can use the mental note "rising, falling" to track the sensations of breathing as your abdomen rises and falls with each breath.

The noting should be like a whisper in the mind, not like a mantra, or word to focus on. Keep it very soft and light. As an aid to practice, mental noting can help to clearly acknowledge with precision what is actually happening.

other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.

In fact, less than one percent of all the information the mind takes in actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness;

mental noting may help you. Are you agitated? Note "agitation." Are you gripped in tension? Note "tension." Do you feel your pulse beating or your heart pounding? Just note it as such.

When we are free of self-concern or self-pity, free of inner preoccupations, compassion emerges as a spontaneous expression of our awareness

Equanimity is a profound quality of mindfulness that cultivates the ability to let go. With equanimity, we can acknowledge that things are as they are, even though we may wish otherwise.