Physically Present Mentally Absent Quotes

The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. ‘In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.” Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within. Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’. Nietzsche called Buddha ‘that profound physiologist’ and his teachings less a religion than a ‘kind of hygiene’...’ Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside. ‘Be at least interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.’... In a mindful state one can choose to be aware of the ebb and flow of emotions and thought patterns instead of brooding on their content. Not ‘he did this to me therefore I’m suffering’ but ‘I notice that feelings of resentment and a desire for vengeance keep flooding my mind.’... ‘Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,’... ‘It is called ‘Bare’ because it attends just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses of through the mind without reacting to them.

ambiguous grief.” It can be a life sentence. It’s a kind of unresolved grief. You might feel it if you have a child or another family member who is mentally impaired. You might mourn the person you think they could have been if things had turned out differently. That person is physically present but psychologically absent. Conversely,

There’s a term we use for it: “ambiguous grief.” It can be a life sentence. It’s a kind of unresolved grief. You might feel it if you have a child or another family member who is mentally impaired. You might mourn the person you think they could have been if things had turned out differently. That person is physically present but psychologically absent. Conversely, and this is what happens in cases of abduction, or more commonly in divorce, the child or the person is psychologically present but physically absent.

When we are preoccupied with the past or worried about the future, we are physically present with our children but are mentally absent.

Another way of posing the problem is to ask oneself: what is the “present”? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn’t exist yet. But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the “now.” Compare “now” with “here.” “Here” designates the place where a speaker is: for two different people “here” points to two different places. Consequently “here” is a word the meaning of which depends on where it is spoken. The technical term for this kind of utterance is “indexical.” “Now” also points to the instant in which the word is uttered and is also classed as “indexical.” But no one would dream of saying that things “here” exist, whereas things that are not “here” do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are “now” exist and that everything else doesn’t? Is the present something that is objective in the world, that “flows,” and that makes things “exist” one after the other, or is it only subjective, like “here”? This may seem like an abstruse mental problem. But modern physics has made it into a burning issue, since special relativity has shown that the notion of the “present” is also subjective. Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the universal “flow” of time is a generalization that doesn’t work. When his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving letter to Michele’s sister: “Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time “runs,” “flows,” “passes”? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time—a thing “is” or “was” or “will be.” It is possible to imagine a world without colors, without matter, even without space, but it’s difficult to imagine one without time. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized our “dwelling in time.” Is it possible that the flow of time that Heidegger treats as primal is absent from descriptions of the world? Some

And when you lay in bed with your wife, are you mentally there or with the women on TV? Or the women who you've been intimate with though the screens? You not only compare your wife to these women but also love her as though she was someone else Physically present when making love to her but mentally absent from her You kiss her lips while your heart kisses the "screen woman

Why do we really use our devices in meetings? Our technology gives us a way of being physically present but mentally absent; the uncomfortable truth is that we like to have our phones, tablets, and laptops in meetings not for the sake of productivity but for psychological escape. Meetings can be unbearably tense, socially awkward, and exceedingly boring—devices provide a

We rarely exist in the here and now. Rather, we tend to exist in some mental bubble based on our experiences of the past or our hopes and fears of the future. So we live our days and nights physically present but mentally absent.