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?
Tag: self
We truly become ourselves when we forget ourselves.
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.
…he won’t get to the root of his problem, because the root of his problem is himself, and he doesn’t know it.
— Anon
If I don’t know who I am, whatever I do to make the world better will only serve to make it worse. Herein the experience of remorse through which all must pass on the way to self-knowing.
Gnothi seauton
Self-continuity is a sparkling chain of mirages, of emptiness.
— Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche
One day I looked for my self and found nothing. Turning attention back on itself there was only wide open space – not a thing, but space for everything. If I am anything I am simply everything that is happening.
We tend to define ourselves and fashion our identities in opposition to other people instead of discovering who we really are in relationship with other people.
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
What’s here now? 