Quotes About Awareness

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

Prayerful paying attention is not scrunching up our willpower and tightening our focus, but simply opening our self to what we encounter. This makes it much more an act of release than effort. We release any attempt to control attention and instead allow it to be absorbed by our present experience.

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.

Ultimately, attachments are ways of coping with the feelings of vulnerability, shame and inadequacy that lie at the core of our false ways of being. Like Adam and Eve, our first response to our awareness of nakedness is to grab whatever is closest and quickly cover our nakedness. We hide behind the fig leaves of our false self.

Thomas Merton warns, "There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with reality."1 The truly spiritual life is not an escape from reality but a total commitment to it.

But God wants something better than fig leaves for us. God wants us to be aware of our helplessness so we can know that we need Divine help. God's deepest desire for us is to replace our fig leaves with garments of durability and beauty (Genesis 3:21).

While other people's excessive attachments and personal falsity often seem glaringly apparent, it is never easy to know the lies of our own life.

The things that bother us most about others—our pet peeves—also point toward falsity in our own self. The speck that bothers me in the life of someone else is almost always the log in my own eye (Matthew 7:3).

The human capacity for self-deception is astounding. This is taught by Scripture (Jeremiah 17:9) and confirmed by psychology. Some people are highly skilled in deceiving others. However, their duplicity pales in comparison with the endlessly creative ways in which each and every one of us deceives our self.

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

This disconnection of being and doing represents a misalignment of our souls that clouds our presence to ourselves and others.

Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation.

Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.

Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God. For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God.

The way of the true self is always the way of humility. Pride and arrogance move us toward our false self, but humility and love allow us to live the truth of our being.

Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.

By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).

Good ideas in psychology usually have an oddly familiar quality, and the moment we encounter them we feel certain that we once came close to thinking the same thing ourselves and simply failed to write it down.

At any moment, you and I are aware of little more than what's on the screen of our consciousness. But beneath the surface, unconscious information processing occurs simultaneously on many parallel tracks.

The stronger your grasp of every second of your life, including the paradoxical experience at the bottom of the spectrum, the stronger you are.

Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.11

Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to guide us. But we don't experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it.

This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless.

If only non-hypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none. (60)