From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Another way to look at meditation is to view thinking itself as a waterfall, a cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

Any really good scientist is as much an artist as a scientist. All the interesting stuff is found on the edge between knowing and not knowing. I know that sounds like a meditation teacher speaking, but when you're in the laboratory, or you're theorizing about physics, you need to know what you know, but if you can't get out from under that, you won't be able to make that insightful, first-time connection that nobody else has seen before.

The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we're continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.

If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.