Waking Up: A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion Quotes
"Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others."
"Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind."
"If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won't enjoy any of it."
"Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now."
"How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives."
"Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently."
"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times... The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
"True mastery might require special talent and a lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a genuine transformation in one’s perception of the world is within reach for most of us."
"The true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize—and it does, in fact, encompass many of the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves."
"Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not."
"Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself."
"The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought."
"Being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming."
"The feeling that we call 'I' is itself the product of thought."
"The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment."
"Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is."
"The illusion of the self is one that consciousness itself cannot dispel."
"The answer is obvious, unless one happens to be a young child or a person suffering from autism."
"We recognize that other people are (or can be) aware of us."
"Explaining the burglar’s behavior requires a higher level of cognition."
"This more primitive judgment would seem to be TOM at its most fundamental."
"Our encounters with other people constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation."
"The primitive impression that another creature is aware of us seems to be the point at which TOM is relevant to the sense of self."
"What is this feeling that obliges you to immediately look away or to begin speaking?"
"Without the attribution of awareness to others, you have no sense of being looked at in the first place."
"Movies and television magically transform the primordial context of face-to-face encounters."
"The discovery of 'mirror neurons' offers some support for the idea that the senses of self and other may emerge from the same circuitry in the brain."
"An awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s own."
"Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves?"
"The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction."
"The sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion."
"The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds."
"Mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation decrease activity in the DMN."
"Stress, especially early in life, alters brain structure."
"Mindfulness improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels."
"The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self."
"It is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves."
"Human beings have ingested plant-based psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on these compounds did not begin until the 1950s."
"Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary."
"Everything we take ourselves to be at the level of our subjectivity—our memories and emotions, our capacity for language, the very thoughts and impulses that give rise to our behavior—depends upon distinct processes that are spread out over the whole of the brain."
"The sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects—the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience—is an illusion."
"Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known."
"If science ever established the existence of ghosts or reincarnation or any other phenomenon that placed the human mind (in whole or in part) outside the brain, physicalism would be dead."
"The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for."
"Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life."
"Consciousness itself is divisible—as we saw in the case of split-brain patients—and even in an intact brain consciousness is blind to most of what the mind is doing."
"There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity."
"Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time."
"I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
"When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist."
"If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him."
"He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me."