Quotes About Mind

Take a good look at your mind. Examine it closely. The first thing you will come to know is that the mind has become the master - not you and not your soul! The mind says: Do this! And you do it! If you don't the mind creates problems. It become sad, and the sadness of the mind becomes your sadness. If you do as it says you get nowhere, for the mind is blind. Where can you reach by obeying the mind! The is unconsciousness. If you listen to it you reach nowhere.

The world cannot hold onto you, for the world is not sentient. The world doesn't have a mind nor does it have desires; it is only your mind's objectivisation. It is your own mind's play which imagines that an object-call it the mind or whatever-can hold onto you. It is the idea you have of who you are that is holding onto its own fearful projections as the mind. Leave all of this and remain as the pure, joyous Self.

Meditation simply means a discipline that makes you capable of being aloof and detached from your mind. So even if the mind is sick, your consciousness is never sick. Even if your mind is going crazy, you are just witnessing it. Mind is only a machine. You are not. Meditation is the experience: "I am not my body, not my mind - I am the witness of it all." This experience, this transcendental experience, immensely transforms the whole situation. Many things which were driving you crazy simply drop away.

If you are an enemy to your own mind, other people have to become enemies too, sooner or later. Until you understand, until you can love the thoughts that appear in your mind, then you can love the rest of us. You work with the projector -the mind - not the projected world. I can't really love you until I question the mind that thinks it sees you outside itself . . .

What you call the psychic being is the mind of the vital. The heart is the seat of this mind. And this mind is the essence of the senses. It receives things from outside, acts upon things that are outside - knows, gives consent, takes interest in them. But this mind cannot be the Ishwara, but it is the knower, the giver of the consent.

The mind is key. If anything should be considered a god, so to speak, it is the mind, not money. A healthy positive mind is the utmost priority. But if we were to reverse the order of these priorities, what would happen? I find it hard to imagine how a person with great wealth, bad health, no friends, and no peace of mind could feel even slightly happy.

A mind in control is always better than a mind out of control. For one thing, a controlled mind can learn much better and go much further than a chaotic one. A person with a steady-state mind has the potential to exit this life with a much greater understanding than someone who is continually learning and forgetting, gaining and misplacing knowledge.

Remember the word bodhichitta, because Atisha says the whole effort of religion, the whole science of religion, is nothing but an endeavor to create bodhichitta, buddha-consciousness: a mind which functions as a no-mind, a mind which dreams no more, thinks no more, a mind which is just awareness, pure awareness.

The first step of gratitude is to see the gift...if you are in the middle of difficulties and problems, how can you feel gratitude? You've got to fight to find the gift even in the difficulty...when you shift your perspective from the perspective of the mind because life will never make sense to your mind...mind is very logical and life is not. In order for life to make sense you've got to be out of your mind and you've got to be into your soul. When you begin to see life from the perspective of your soul then even in the midst of the worst of it you can see the gift.

There is an incredible power & intelligence witin you that is constantly responding to your thoughts and words. As you learn to control your mind by the conscious choice of thoughts, you align yourself with this power. Do not think that your mind is in control. You are in control of your mind. You use your mind. You can stop thinking those old thoughts.

Your mind creates everything. Your conscious mind has much greater power than you can ever imagine. Your mind can create blessings or disasters, can heal or harm, can bring abundance or absence. It is up to your mind whether the world looks hopeful or hopeless.

When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.

These tenses-past, present and future-are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future. Past is that which is no longer before you. Future is that which is not yet before you. And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past.

We don't have to remain in this radically destructive mind-set and institutional-set. We can change, and the natural order of things could emerge in all of our societal organizations-government, commerce, religion-it's right there, waiting to happen. I often tell people that every mind is like a room in an old house, stuffed with very old furniture. Take any space in your mind and empty it of your old conceptions and new ones will rush in, good or bad. So change is more a getting rid of rather than an adding to or an acquiring.

We do not have to wait for future discoveries in connection with the powers of the human mind for evidence that the mind is the greatest force known to mankind. We know, now, that any idea, aim or purpose that is fixed in the mind and held there with a will to achieve or attain its physical or material equivalent, puts into motion powers that cannot be conquered.

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

Remember, intelligence is not part of the mind. Intellect is, but intelligence is not; hence, the intellectual is full of mind but in life he behaves very unintelligently. He has a certain expertise, he is trained intellectually to, do a certain thing, his mind is functioning like a computer. But life is not one-dimensional, you cannot exhaust it in one expertise; it is multi-dimensional.

Heaven and hell are not geographical. If you go in search of them you will never find them anywhere. They are within you, they are psychological. The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. We always go on looking for everything outside because to be inwards is very difficult. We are outgoing. If somebody says there is a god, we look at the sky. Somewhere, sitting there, will be the divine person.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.

We deal with our mind from morning until evening. This mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. We should do everything we can to improve outer circumstances - remedying poverty, inequalities, conflicts, and so on - while also doing our best to achieve a state of mind that give us the inner resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.

Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else.

Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time. One or the other must dominate. It is your responsibility to make sure that positive emotions constitute the dominating influence of your mind. Here the law of HABIT will come to your aid. Form the habit of applying and using the positive emotions! Eventually, they will dominate your mind so completely, that the negatives cannot enter it.

Meditation is the study of making the mind still. As your mind becomes still, a power enters you. This power transmogrifies your mind, it escalates your evolution and you begin to cycle through many incarnations in one lifetime.

All Buddhas and ordinary people are just one mind. This mind is beyond all measurements, names, oppositions: this very being is it; as soon as you stir your mind you turn away from it.

God illumines the mind and shines within it. One cannot know God by means of the mind. One can but turn the mind inwards and merge it in God.

How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. "It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow." "Where do the lead?" "To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere." I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall. "Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.

Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind; and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.

. . . when the nature of mind is introduced by a master, it is just too simple for us to believe. Our ordinary mind tells us this cannot be, there must be something more to it than this. It must surely be more "glorious", with light blazing in space around us, angels with flowing golden hair swooping down to meet us, and a deep Wizard of Oz voice announcing, "Now you have been introduced to the nature of your mind." There is no such drama.

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow-never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.

An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind. It is not satisfied with explanation, with conclusions. Nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

The problem is not yours - it is your mind's only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.

Mind alone is the cause of the bondage or freedom of the soul. By the attachment of the mind to the world we become bound; by the devotion of the mind to God presence within as the Soul of every soul, we become free.

Bring your mind to noble silence. Unify your mind in noble silence. Concentrate your mind in noble silence... Enter into rapture and pleasure born of silence derived of concentration and awareness that is free from thought and fabrication.

Happiness is in the mind and the mind is the universe. Your mind is the universe, not just this physical universe that you perceive through your senses.

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it....Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.

Without meditation, and without a relationship to your mind, you fail to use the power of the mind. You fail to rely on your self. You complicate your approach. You do not use the beautiful designs given to you by birthright in this body, that link the effectiveness of body, mind, soul and you.

Zen is mind-less activity, that is, Mind-ful activity, and it may often be advisable to emphasize the mind, and say, Take care of the thoughts and the actions will take care of themselves.

Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating. Love is beyond the mind because it is always new. Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old. So the mind is a modifier, a reactor; a renovator, but it cannot create the new.

I say yes to the hot bath and the sandwich - to getting ourselves into the best possible mental shape to identify and then fight the necessary fights from the best possible mind-state: calm, loving, affectionate, precise. Not pushovers but also not zealots. With the idea in mind that "our enemies" are not our enemies; they might seem like that in their present form but that form can morph. We really are large, and really do contain multitudes. But I think it all has to start with a kindly presence of mind, and the aspiration to affection for others.

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive. To know and to will are two operations of the human mind. Discerning, judging, deliberating are acts of the human mind.

That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody's mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit.

You ever go up to the tee and say, 'Don't hit it left, don't hit it right'? That's your conscious mind. My body knows how to play golf. I've trained it to do that. It's just a matter of keeping my conscious mind out of it.