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“Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present—a person can be aware—without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or a corporation can act without there being any singular entity that performs that action.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“If we truly want to live fully and love well during our limited time on earth, we must recognize the fact that the suffering of turning away from reality is ultimately greater than the suffering of surrendering to what is.”
― David Chernikoff, Life, Part Two: Seven Keys to Awakening with Purpose and Joy as You Age

“My body and my psychological states are constantly changing, like the oil and lamps that support the flames. But, like those flames and those lamps, they constitute a causal sequence with a common function. And we have a convention of calling distinct members of such sequences by the same name. So, in one obvious sense, I am not identical to the person called by my name yesterday. We are alike, causally related, but numerically distinct. In another sense, though, we are the same person. We share a name, many properties, a causal history, and a social role; and that, while not involving a self, is enough.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“The good news is that we can learn to relinquish our obsession with the information, mastery, and control we imagine will assuage our existential anxiety. Opening to things as they are on a moment-to-moment basis, we gradually learn to trust our unfolding lives and to relax into the not-knowing that is ever present and ultimately unavoidable.”
― David Chernikoff, Life, Part Two: Seven Keys to Awakening with Purpose and Joy as You Age