Tag: awareness

Thoughts arise and fall as flowers live and wilt. Stars fade over eons in the night sky and clouds pass and change.

Everything is changing all the time. Thoughts come and go. But who is thinking them?

— Who is aware?

It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.

This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.

All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.

We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.

Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.

They weren’t different because they weren’t.

The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.

Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.

Yes.

Stillness, the open awareness of what simply is, would appear to be all that is needed: only to give up all of our effort and striving, and quite plainly and naturally rest in the vast openness of what is – which is all we ever were or could be. It really is that simple.

Simple presence

No one chooses what to like or dislike. All that arises preconceptually, and then we call the conscious coming to awareness of those preconceptual brain states ‘me’.

— Robert Saltzman