Quotes About Awareness

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded.

Perfectly stay in the natural flow, There is no other concentration. Perfectly realize the natural state, There is no other wisdom.

What makes an action positive or negative? Not how it looks, not whether it is big or small, but it is the positive or negative motivation that is behind it. No matter how many teachings that you have heard, to be motivated by ordinary concerns, such as a desire for greatness, fame or whatever, is not the way of the true Dharma.

most learning, including language learning, starts with declarative knowledge, that is, knowledge that we are aware of having, for example, a grammar rule. The hypothesis is that, through practice, declarative knowledge may become procedural knowledge, or the ability to use the knowledge. With continued practice, the procedural knowledge can become automatized and the learner may forget having learned it first as declarative knowledge.

Richard Schmidt (1990, 2001) proposed the noticing hypothesis, suggesting that nothing is learned unless it has been 'noticed'. Noticing does not itself result in acquisition, but it is the essential starting point. From this perspective, comprehensible input does not lead to growth in language knowledge unless the learner becomes aware of a particular language feature.

learners sometimes fail to notice certain language forms—grammatical morphemes, vocabulary words, syntactic patterns, pragmatic features—when their focus is on understanding meaning.

Children lose contact with their parents, and vice versa, when there is no present living moment in the family. You change careers, go traveling, play extreme sports, get plastic surgery, drive fast cars, take exotic holidays, or redecorate the house, constantly seeking presence. These strategies might work for an hour, a day, or a year, but they will not solve your inner deadness.

We all know that one of the most successful ways to stop pain and presence is to drink or use other drugs. The reason that drunks are dangerous and boring is that they are not there with you, but are lost in another world. Driving when drunk is destructive because you are not present to the road and the traffic around you. You are not in a place of survival and your inability to survive could harm others.

Know how to recognize a meaningful experience when we see it.

One in four girls will experience sexual abuse by the time she is sixteen, and 48 percent of all rapes involve a young woman under the age of eighteen. It's not surprising then, that in a society where sexual abuse of young women is rampant, many women never share their stories. They remain hidden and invisible.

I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.

Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly.

What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

You don't see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.

I clawed through a thick web of the culture's consciousness that I hadn't known existed.

My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.