"There's a lot more going on in your brain and your body than you can ever be aware of. And yet, most people identify themselves with this little flash-lit area of consciousness."

~ Rae Armantrout 

"We're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality."

~ Anil Seth

"My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private."

~ Billy Collins

"We know that you're made up of trillions of little things made from more little things that are constantly changing. Together, all those little things are not static, but dynamic." 

"An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others. A harassed or angry parent. The menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down. The words of a schoolyard bully or teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalize the unhelpful voices, because at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodge in our own way of thinking." 

~ The School of Life

Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.

~ Albert Huffstickler

How still we became,
witness and thing seen

~ Dorothy Walters

i’ll run the risk
of being intimate with brokenness.

~ Sleeping At Last

What it is telling you is that what you perceive is really a whole bunch of information processing that is going on in the brain moment-by-moment and you can disrupt it.

"The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time."

~ Antonio Damasio

"In this mode of consciousness, the most supremely banal transforms into the most supremely baffling and awe-inducing. That which is most obvious and taken for granted is simultaneously that which is most mysterious and astonishing."

~ Brian Maniscalco

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

All I have is all I need
And all I need is here now

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood here now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?
Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
we share a birthdate?

~ Wisława Szymborska

"When you feel the sting of separation inside, simply turn inwardly and intuitively around one hundred and eighty degrees and there will be your innocence, your beauty, your completeness. It may seem impossible, but give it a try until you reconnect with what in truth you never lost."

~ Adyashanti

"A lot of the poetic discipline boils down to getting tired of yourself, and I really believe that. When you get tired of yourself, then you change." 

~ David Whyte

"That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember."

~ Ted Hughes

Without a clue, no place to go...

~ Lee van Laer

"The only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is."

~ Bill Murray

nodus tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore