Quotes about Mind

This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

The mind is it's own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well.  I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new. 

The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent – across north America, across Africa, across Australia – defining states and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly impervious to the life of the land.

If I say that I live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in “British Colombia” or in “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false,” but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community – the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself – are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking – ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of light and its reflections.

By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each terrain, each bioregion, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams – all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

Freedom is a state of mind that each of us must discover for ourselves. In so doing, we will find that there is nothing that anyone in authority can do to make our world more peaceful orderly, or free. There are no institutional reforms, or ideologies, or more fashionable gurus to save us: such thinking only continues our sense of irresponsibility.

We seek integrity in our lives not by ending our inner contradictions – an act that would call into question our prior learning – but by deluding ourselves that our undesired qualities can be transferred to others, who we can then target for punishment. 

We live in conflict because our thinking is in conflict. We have organized ourselves into rigidly-defined categories based upon race, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, religion, economic interests, geography, and countless other identities, and vigorously defend the boundaries of such categories from those outside. Politics mobilizes such identities, promising each of these groups the coercive backing of the state to advance their interests.

The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.

Problems only exist in the human mind.

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can't really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.

Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.

Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

The mind's job is to validate what it thinks.

Inherent in the impulse to be free, is insecurity.  The impulse to be free comes from outside of the mind, and because of this, it makes the mind feel very insecure.  Most spiritual seekers move away from this insecurity by seeking and striving for a distant spiritual goal.  That’s how they avoid feeling insecure.

Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind's idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven. But freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of "a someone who is in control" is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.

The mental ability to concentrate is inherent to all; it is not extraordinary or mysterious. Meditation is not something that a Yogi has to teach you; you already have the ability to shut out thoughts.

To achieve that state of lasting happiness and absolute peace, we must first know how to calm the mind, to concentrate and go beyond the mind. By turning the mind's concentration inward, upon the self, we can deepen that experience of perfect concentration. This is the state of Meditation.

The universal speciality of the mind is to take amazing and extraordinary things and reduce them to the commonplace.

When the mind is attached to the senses, it cannot see beyond the limitations of the body of which it occupies; be it physical, astral or causal. Only when attached to the supreme Self, does that being become absolute in its limitlessness.