Quotes About Awareness

in this house, speaking and thinking

Everything should collect something...it just made you feel more alive and connected to the world.

It goes by so fast. But when your kids are little and the days seem like they are forty-eight hours long, you just can't see that. And everyone with grown kids tells you they grow up in the blink of an eye and will be out of college and on with their lives before you know it. And young parents listen but never really believe it.' She paused. 'Until it happens to them.

Being alive and living were also two distinct things

The only thing potentially worse than not being able to see the forest for the trees is not being able to see the trees because of the forest. —Anonymous

You were walking stiffly when you came in. Bone ache is a classic symptom." He pointed to her forehead. "And it's cold outside but your head is sweating. Another classic. And you've crossed and uncrossed your legs five times in the brief time you've been sitting there. Bladder problems. Another symptom.

Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed.

You can't change the feeling but you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two

You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.

the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for 'a description of the world as it is'. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man's approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.

if there is listening through a "listener," then we are not listening.

Q: Are you saying that thought has a kind of possessive quality which stays, gets stuck, and then becomes habitual? And we don't see this? Bohm: I think that whenever we repeat something it gradually becomes a habit, and we get less and less aware of it. If you brush your teeth every morning, you probably hardly notice how you're doing it. It just goes by itself. Our thought does the same thing, and so do our feelings. That's a key point.

the subtle but crucial role of our general forms of thinking in sustaining fragmentation and in defeating our deepest urges toward wholeness or integrity.

violence doesn't stop merely by saying, 'we'll act based on love', because that can become just an idea that gets absorbed into the system.

Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that's the point. Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption. But that's done non-verbally. Do you see what I mean? To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can't describe.

However, as indicated earlier, truth and falsity have actually, like relevance and irrelevance, to be seen from moment to moment, in an act of perception in a very high order.

it must also be realized that a paradigm has the power to keep a whole community of scientists working on a more or less common area. In a sense, it could be taken as an unconscious or tacit form of consent. At first sight, the paradigm would be of obvious use to the scientific community. However, it also exacts a price in that the mind is kept within certain fixed channels that deepen with time until an individual scientist is no longer aware of his or her limited position.

What is essential here is that the act of creative perception in the form of a metaphor is basically similar in all these fields, in that it involves an extremely perceptive state of intense passion and high energy that dissolves the excessively rigidly held assumptions in the tacit infrastructure of commonly accepted knowledge.

Make the best of every moment. We're not evolving. We're not going anywhere.

Tomorrow belongs to those who hear it coming.

Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows, for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then. We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at a sword we ourselves forged, and know, with absolute certainty, it is real...

As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave . . . an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

So if it appears that my argument supports the necessity of lawyers, please accept that I say it with reluctant awareness that things would be worse without them.