Quotes about Perception

Thinking seems to constitute our "default setting" rather than awareness.

Here is Eliot, again from "Burnt Norton": Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time

Instead, we are living inside our own little narrative bubble of the moment, frequently misattributing cause and effect and therefore completely imprisoned in thoughts and emotions that are both inaccurate and misguided.

You westerners are the ones we can't understand. God has given you so much, you have been so blessed…why are so many people in your country so unhappy?

What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.

The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.

enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact...

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn't realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.