Quotes About Awareness

The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives

An open stance makes it possible for a person to be objective, to be aware of alternative possibilities, to feel a part of the surrounding world.

that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life

This simple truth—that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life—has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist.

In other words, with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage.

The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.

Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.

a yogi disciplines his mind to ignore pain that ordinary people would have no choice but to let into their awareness; similarly he can ignore the insistent claims of hunger or sexual arousal that most people would be helpless to resist. The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen.

attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities.

In any case, an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.

Information enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. [...] To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.

A similar distinction is that between discovered life themes, when a person writes the script for her actions out of personal experience and awareness of choice; and accepted life themes, when a person simply takes on a predetermined role from a script written long ago by others. Both

Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.

Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it in, in fact, what determines the content and quality of life.

But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious "leisure" time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.

Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It

This fact brings us to the second condition that affects whether an optimal experience will occur or not: an individual's ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.

It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.

You can drive a car all your life without knowing how the engine works, because the goal of driving is to get from one place to the next, regardless how it's done. But to live without understanding how we think, why we feel the way we feel, what directs our actions is to miss what is most important in life, which is the experience itself.

The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used.