Quotes About Awareness

If we knew how many species we've already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

Quando a mente aprende a enxergar nossas sensações tais como elas são — ou seja, vibrações efêmeras e inexpressivas —, perdemos o interesse em persegui-las. Pois qual o sentido de correr atrás de algo que desaparece tão rápido quanto surge?

Talvez se mais pessoas estivessem cientes da Primeira e da Segunda Onda de Extinção, seriam menos indiferentes à Terceira Onda, da qual fazem parte. Se soubéssemos quantas espécies já erradicamos, poderíamos ser mais motivados a proteger as que ainda sobrevivem.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need to at least carefully investigate our favorite sources of information—be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network, or a person.

People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.

how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb.

Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences.

At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: 'Know thyself!' The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.*

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We

mundane feelings of heat and itching are every bit as mysterious as feelings of rapture or cosmic oneness.

What's the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn't contribute something to the global exchange of information?

If you feel like running down the street crying 'The apocalypse is upon us!', try telling yourself 'No, it's not that. Truth is, I just don't understand what's going on in the world.

If mosquitoes buzzed in our ears and disturbed our sleep, we knew how to kill the mosquitoes; but if a thought buzzed in our mind and kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought.

Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures. This is especially true of history. Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they'd be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of.

An application called Deadline goes a step further, informing you how many years of life you have left, given your current habits.

Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives.

zipper's operation. Most people had no idea.2 This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed "the knowledge illusion." We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

If] you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind [...]. People ask 'Who am I?' and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

One of them is the Nayaka people, who live in the tropical forests of south India. The anthropologist Danny Naveh, who studied the Nayaka for several years, reports that when a Nayaka walking in the jungle encounters a dangerous animal such as a tiger, snake or elephant, he or she might address the animal and say: 'You live in the forest. I too live here in the forest. You came here to eat, and I too came here to

The most important thing I realised was that the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind. When I want something and it doesn't happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.

Cómo pudieron los expertos no apreciar que los niños tienen necesidades emocionales, y que su salud mental y física depende de cubrir estas necesidades tanto como las de alimento, refugio y medicinas?

Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them – and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbours – they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully.

It and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.