Mind

"Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension... The new earth arises as more and more people discover that their main purpose in life is to bring the light of consciousness into this world and so use whatever they do as a vehicle for consciousness... Awakened consciousness then takes over from ego and begins to run your life. You may then find that an activity that you have been engaged in for a long time naturally begins to expand into something much bigger when it becomes empowered by consciousness."

"If a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work. If you don't like the word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt."

"“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the biblical prophet (Revelation 21:1). The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven – the awakened consciousness. The earth – external reality – is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening."

"See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness."

"Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet."

"Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity."

"It may be relevant here to recall gratefully a fraternal correction I was kindly offered by the Archimandrite Ambrosius of the Greek Orthodox Church. After listening to a lecture I delivered at Oxford University some years ago, he gently chided me (in private, not in public) for not perceiving the difference between the brand of Hellenism affecting Western theology that had absorbed the philosophical thought of ancient Greece, and the Hellenism of Eastern Orthodox theology which had assimilated the spiritual praxis of their non-Christian ancestors. Mulling over this critical observation of his, I came to understand why our scholastic tradition has not given importance to what Greek Orthodox spirituality has named nepsis (vigilance), which is its own technical term for mindfulness."

"Mindfulness, though so highly praised and capable of such great achievements, is not at all a “mystical” state, beyond the ken and reach of the average person. It is, on the contrary, something quite simple and common, and very familiar to us."

"Life is a collection of moments. Mindfulness is beautification of the moments."

"Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. p.83"

"Mindfulness is present-moment awareness. It takes place in the here and now. It is the observance of what is happening right now, in the present. It stays forever in the present, perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of passing time."

"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness."

"Life is a dance. Mindfulness is witnessing that dance."

"There is, monks, this one way to the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and distress, for the disappearance of pain and sadness, for the gaining of the right path, for the realization of Nibbāna :—that is to say, the four foundations of mindfulness."

"It is more important that we should remember God than that we should breathe."

"Mind is a flexible mirror, adjust it, to see a better world."

"Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for sati is “bare attention.” It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis that is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process."

"Mindfulness is not chasing the moment but beautifying the moment."

"The movement of Nature is twofold, higher and lower, or, as we may choose to term it, divine and undivine. The distinction exists indeed for practical purposes only; for there is nothing that is not divine, and in a larger view it is as meaningless, verbally, as the distinction between natural and supernatural, for all things that are are natural. All things are in Nature and all things are in God. But, for practical purposes, there is a real distinction. The lower Nature, that which we know and are and must remain so long as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and division, is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego; but the higher Nature, that to which we aspire, acts by unification and transcendence of limitation, is of the nature of Knowledge and culminates in the life divine."

"By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. ...I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. ...We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable."

"Neither in deductive nor inductive reasoning can we add a tittle to our implicit knowledge, which is like that contained in an unread book or a sealed letter. ...Reasoning explicates or brings to conscious possession what was before unconscious. It does not create, nor does it destroy, but it transmutes and throws the same matter into a new form."

"I maintain, as against Mr. Jevons, that many of our inductive inferences have all the certainty of which human knowledge is capable. ...Still, it must be confessed that all our inferences from the present to the future are, in one sense, hypothetical, the hypothesis being that the circumstances on which the laws themselves depend will continue to be the same as now, that is, in the present case, that the constitution of nature, in its most general features, will remain unchanged; or, to put it in still another form, that the same causes will continue to produce the same effects. What would happen if this expectation were ever frustrated, it is absolutely impossible for us to say, so completely is it assumed in all our plans and reasonings."

"There is... no special uncertainty attaching to the truths arrived at by induction. They are, indeed, like all other truths, relative to the present constitution of nature and the present constitution of the human mind, but this is a limitation to which all our knowledge alike is subject, and which it is vain for us to attempt to transcend."

"Inductive reasoning corresponds to probabilistic, uncertain, approximate reasoning, and as such, it corresponds to everyday reasoning. ...induction is related to, and it could be argued, is central to, a number of other cognitive activities, including categorization, similarity judgement, probability judgement, and decision making. ...Because so much of people's reasoning is actually inductive reasoning, and because there is such a rich data set associated with induction, and because induction is related to other central cognitive activities, it is possible to find out a lot about not only reasoning but cognition more generally by studying induction."

"Induction, I maintain, may or may not employ hypothesis, but what is essential to it is the inference from the particular to the general, from the known to the unknown, and the nature of this inference it is impossible to represent adequately by reference to the forms of deduction."

"It will seem a little paradoxical to ascribe a great importance to observations even in that part of the mathematical sciences which is usually called Pure Mathematics, since the current opinion is that observations are restricted to physical objects that make impression on the senses. As we must refer the numbers to the pure intellect alone, we can hardly understand how observations and quasi-experiments can be of use in investigating the nature of numbers. Yet, in fact, as I shall show here with very good reasons, the properties of the numbers known today have been mostly discovered by observation, and discovered long before their truth has been confirmed by rigid demonstrations. There are many properties of the numbers with which we are well acquainted, but which we are not yet able to prove; only observations have led us to their knowledge. Hence we see that in the theory of numbers, which is still very imperfect, we can place our highest hopes in observations; they will lead us continually to new properties which we shall endeavor to prove afterwards. The kind of knowledge which is supported only by observations and is not yet proved must be carefully distinguished from the truth; it is gained by induction, as we usually say. Yet we have seen cases in which mere induction led to error. Therefore, we should take great care not to accept as true such properties of the numbers which we have discovered by observation and which are supported by induction alone. Indeed, we should use such discovery as an opportunity to investigate more exactly the properties discovered and to prove or disprove them; in both cases we may learn something useful."

"My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. In the case of induction (including induction by falsification) this means demonstrating how well the counterinductive procedure can be supported by argument."

"Of the three great skeptics I interviewed, Popper was the first to make his mark. His philosophy stemmed from his effort to distinguish pseudoscience, such as Marxism or astrology or Freudian psychology, from genuine science, such as Einstein's theory of relativity. The latter, Popper decided, was testable; it made predictions about the world that could be empirically checked. The logical positivists had said as much. But Popper denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove a theory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations. One never knows if one's observations have been sufficient; the next observation might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can never prove a theory but can only disprove, or falsify it. Popper often bragged that he had "killed" logical positivism with this argument."

"Counter-induction is... both a fact—science could not exist without it—and a legitimate and much needed move in the game of science."

"Inductive reasoning is reasoning from particular facts to a general law, or proposition, called the conclusion. Inductive reasoning is synthetic; that is, it builds up the law (the proposition) by giving particular instances in which that law is true. It is by inductive reasoning that we have established most of our laws in the natural sciences. We have proved the proposition, Wild geese fly south in winter, by inductive reasoning, for we have noted particular instances, and from the particular facts we have reasoned to the proposition."

"By scientific thought we mean the application of past experience to new circumstances by means of an observed order of events. By saying that this order of events is exact we mean that it is exact enough to correct experiments by, but we do not mean that it is theoretically or absolutely exact, because we do not know. The process of inference [is] in itself an assumption of uniformity, and... as the known exactness of the uniformity became greater, the stringency of the inference increased. By saying that the order of events is reasonable we do not mean that everything has a purpose, or that everything can be explained, or that everything has a cause; for neither of these is true. But we mean that to every reasonable question there is an intelligible answer, which either we or posterity may know by the exercise of scientific thought."

"Induction... proposes to have to do with things; and, as a mode or principle of argumentation, it may perhaps be correctly defined as a process of reasoning from particulars to a general: a method which requires a scrupulous, accurate, and comprehensive examination of all the cases which come within the range of the subject of inquiry, and from these instances infers the great axiomatic truth, or the universal and invariable law, in which they are found to meet, and which they will be always found to obey. ...This is unquestionably the nature of the principle of induction as proposed by Lord Bacon. Its useful and successful application, however, to the various departments of knowledge,—and there is scarcely any department to which, under suitable modifications, it may not be advantageously applied,—requires much care, attention, and assiduous patience."

"[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction."

"In a certain sense all knowledge is inductive. We can only learn the laws and relations of things in nature by observing those things. But the knowledge gained from the senses is knowledge only of particular facts, and we require some process of reasoning by which we may collect out of the facts the laws obeyed by them. Experience gives us the materials of knowledge: induction digests those materials, and yields us general knowledge. When we possess such knowledge, in the form of general propositions and natural laws, we can usefully apply the reverse process of deduction to ascertain the exact information required at any moment. In its ultimate foundation, then, all knowledge is inductive—in the sense that it is derived by a certain inductive reasoning from the facts of experience."

"The mistake frequently committed... has its origin in the vague and erroneous definition usually given of the inductive process... the method of induction... is indeed the only process of reasoning whereby it is possible to pass, at will, and in a given direction, beyond the boundaries of our knowledge."

"[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight... induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized."

"There is no inductive method which could lead to the fundamental concepts of physics. Failure to understand this fact constituted the basic philosophical error of so many investigators of the nineteenth century. It was probably the reason why the molecular theory, and Maxwell's theory were able to establish themselves only at a relatively late date. Logical thinking is necessarily deductive; it is based upon hypothetical concepts and axioms. How can we hope to choose the latter in such a manner as to justify us in expecting success as a consequence?"

"These..., standing on the ground of inductive argument, place in our hands means to attain a certain end, of which there can be no doubt: whether we shall use them aright for the cure of disease, does not lie within the province of inductive reasoning."

"I shall endeavor to show that induction is really the inverse process of deduction."

"The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...[I]f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great[er] chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... [a] small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all."

"What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in one's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness."

"Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by deductive reasoning... In the main, words are cues rather than clues."

"It is the authority of the less general case, which most commonly prevails, inasmuch as it generally precedes the interpretation of the more general case in the order of investigation, and is more immediately and more essentially connected with the first principles of the science. Assuming therefore the correctness of the interpretation of the less general case, it is by an inductive process of reasoning only, that we pass from it to the interpretation of the more general case, and the existence of one does not determine, in the mathematical sense of the term, the existence of the other: but it is the necessary connection which exists between the interpretation of the more general result and those which are subordinate to it, which makes it so important to examine and ascertain the latter..."

"The distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning is thus: In deductive reasoning the process is from the whole to the parts; in inductive reasoning, on the other hand, the process is from the parts to the whole."

"As an interpreter of nature... Leibnitz stands in no comparison with Newton. His general views in physics were vague and unsatisfactory; he had no great value for inductive reasoning; it was not the way of arriving at truth which he was accustomed to take; and hence, to the greatest physical discovery of that age, and that which was established by the most ample induction, the existence of gravity as a fact in which all bodies agree, he was always incredulous, because no proof of it, a priori could be given."

"There are... in mathematics, some examples of so called induction, in which the conclusion does bear the appearance of a generalization grounded upon some of the particular cases included in it. A mathematician, when he has calculated a sufficient number of the terms of an algebraical or arithmetical series to have ascertained what is called the law of the series, does not hesitate to fill up any number of the succeeding terms without repeating the calculations. But I apprehend he only does so when it is apparent from à priori considerations (which might be exhibited in the form of demonstration) that the mode of formation of the subsequent terms, each from that which preceded it, must be similar to the formation of the terms which have been already calculated. And when the attempt has been hazarded without the sanction of such general considerations, there are instances upon record in which it has led to false results. ...Even, therefore, such cases as these, are but examples of what I have called induction by parity of reasoning, that is, not really induction, because not involving any inference of a general proposition from particular instances. ...I am happy to be able to refer, in confirmation of this view of what is called induction in mathematics, to the highest English authority on the philosophy of algebra, Mr. Peacock. See pp. 107-8 of his profound Treatise on Algebra."

"Induction... is a process of inference; it proceeds from the known to the unknown; and any operation involving no inference, any process in which what seems the conclusion is no wider than the premises from which it is drawn, does not fall within the meaning of the term. ...A general proposition is one in which the predicate is affirmed or denied of an unlimited number of individuals; namely, all, whether few or many, existing or capable of existing, which possess the properties connoted by the subject of the proposition."

"The first and second editions of the "System of Logic" contained a passage which purported to controvert the views of Archbishop Whately respecting Inductive Syllogism. In the third edition the most controversial portions of this passage are omitted, and additions are made, which materially modify the result. But it is still implied, that "Archbishop Whately's must be held to be the correct account" of no more than "the immediate major-premise in every inductive argument;" and it is still maintained, that "if we throw the whole course of any inductive argument into a series of syllogisms, we shall arrive, by more or fewer steps, at an ultimate syllogism, which will have for its major-premiss the principle, or axiom, of the uniformity of the course of nature;" which principle or axiom is regarded by Mr. Mill as known to us only by "induction.""

"The examples of plausible reasoning collected in this book... may throw light upon a much agitated philosophical problem: the problem of induction. The crucial question is: Are there rules for induction? ...the question should be... treated... in closer touch with the practice of scientists. ...older writers, such as Euler and Laplace, clearly perceived... that the role of inductive evidence in mathematical investigation is similar to its role in physical research. ...so the door opens to investigating induction inductively."

"Although... there is not yet extant a body of Inductive Logic, scientifically constructed; the materials for its construction exist, widely scattered, but abundant: and the selection and arrangement of those materials is a task with which intellects of the highest order, possessed of the necessary acquirements, have at length consented to occupy themselves. Within a few years three writers, profoundly versed in every branch of physical science, and not unaccustomed to carry their speculations into still higher regions of knowledge, have made attempts, of unequal but all of very great merit, towards the creation of a Philosophy of Induction: Sir John Herschel, in his [A Preliminary] Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy; Mr. Whewell, in his History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences; and, greatest of all, M. Auguste Comte, in his Cours de Philosophic Positive, a work which only requires to be better known, to place its author in the very highest class of European thinkers. That the present writer does not consider any of these philosophers, or even all of them together, to have entirely accomplished this important work, is implied in his attempting to contribute something further towards its achievement..."