Quotes About Awareness

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.

The Irish proverb quoted at the beginning — If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut — contains profound pragmatic wisdom. Maybe most people are shrewd enough to understand that, and the reports that get into books like this are a small, very small, cross-section of the Chaos that is actually going on around us. Maybe.

When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable. To not be intimate with our past—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its originating factors—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present

Where feeling is reaction, emotion is adaptation. So feeling is an instantaneous, nonreflective (there's no time for reflection!) arising, but emotion is all about how we handle that feeling.

CULTIVATING NOT-KNOWING Though not-knowing is natural to us and not all that unfamiliar—as when we wordlessly resonate and interact with the radiant presence emanating through a baby's eyes—the capacity for it gets easily pushed into the background by our conditioned knowing.

When you thought about it, silence was rarely silent. Silence was the small noises you heard when the larger noises disappeared.

if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault.

Mary Lou Buckman and I sat in the first booth, and I, mindful of Wild Bill Hickok, sat facing the door.

Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures.

Susan smiled the smile she always smiled when you knew she hadn't the slightest interest in what you were saying, and she knew it, and she knew you knew it.

Since when do you and I talk about the world," she said. "The world is what it is." "Yeah, I know." "Not only do you know, you've helped me to know." "Good to be useful," I said. "What has always made me respect you, even in the bad times, was your ability to look out at the world and see what's there. Not what you'd like to see, or even what you need to see, but simply what's there.

Theory is no substitute for information," Susan said.

me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.

You need to be able to hear the truth, he thought. You can't hear the truth, you got nowhere to start.

One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. - from The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

Talk about not knowing other people—why, when you came right down to it, you didn't even know yourself!

There are times when you must stop analyzing and depend on your emotions.

Evil exists everywhere. Sometimes I think our limited senses are designed to protect us from awareness of its presence. We trust them to provide us with knowledge but it may be that they block out realization of horrors we cannot bear.

That was the most important thing. He had to stop talking to himself. He had to get back that calm feeling agan. He had to face reality. And what was reality?

Funny, Sam told himself, how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.

once you admitted to yourself that you didn't really know how another person's mind operated, then you came up against the ultimate admission—anything was possible.

Talk about not knowing other people—why, when you came right down to it, you didn't even know yourself!

Time is counted, not by hours, but by heart-beats.