Fasting the Mind Quotes

“We need to think of our life in terms of a dance. What’s more important: getting to the end of the dance, or the process of the dance itself?”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“We lose consciousness of our true self (Atman/Purusha) when we begin to believe we are the waves (personality) rather than the ocean (Brahman).”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“All the sounds around us and all the thoughts that we’re constantly replaying in our minds can be thought of as a kind of food. We’re familiar with edible food, the kind of food we physically chew and swallow. But that’s not the only kind of food we humans consume; it’s just one kind. What we read, our conversations, the shows we watch, the online games we play, and our worries, thoughts, and anxieties are all food. No wonder we often don’t have space in our consciousness for beauty and silence: we are constantly filling up on so many other kinds of food.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“Samskara in Sanskrit means “mental impressions or subliminal psychological imprints that are latent within our unconscious mind.” We develop samskaras unknowingly from birth, and they drive our actions, interests, and desires until the day we die. It is also thought in India that some samskaras pass over from past lives if they haven’t been cleansed from our psyche. Everything we experience in life, no matter whether we believe it is good or bad, are samskaras that we store in the subconscious. They remain dormant until activated by external stimuli if we don’t learn how to work through them and release them.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“What keeps many of us locked away from this divine beauty and creative spontaneity is that we have bought into the illusion that this cold cognition is “us” and that the hot cognition is something separate and isolated from who we are, almost as if the bodily hot cognition is a hindrance that disturbs our mental life.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“This doesn’t mean giving up following our interests; on the contrary, what it does mean is that we are not attached to our interests or their outcomes. Instead, we do things because we sincerely love”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“(However, the damage done by marijuana and other psychedelics is small in comparison with that of the world’s preferred choice of downregulating cold cognition: alcohol.)”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“Yet, as with exercise, if sex is not in moderation then it can lead to all sorts of problems. And the fact is we can’t have sex all the time either, so this is only a temporary method of downregulating your “I.” Other more popular methods are also linked to pleasure.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“There are numerous methods for downregulating our cold cognition. Some are obvious, and some aren’t. A lot of us know these methods because we explore them in our lives at particular moments. Exercise is one method that many of us are unaware of. When we exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise, we get that sense of effortlessness (wu-wei) because the sense of a person disappears due to the automatic functions of the body. As a result, the unconscious wisdom of the mind-body has downregulated the prefrontal cortex.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“They understood that the problem resides in the overuse of cold cognition leading our mind to think in terms of duality, which in turn begins the process of believing you are this person opposed by the rest of the universe.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“In the ancient East they were attentive to the propensity to think the body and mind were separate, and so they sought to design systems for people to realize their innate nonduality. Hatha yoga and t’ai chi, for example, came into existence for people to realize there is no separation between mind and body.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“Again, Chuang Tzu employs the metaphor of a totally free and purposeless journey, using the word yu (to wander, or a wandering) to designate the way in which the enlightened man wanders through all of creation, enjoying its delights without ever becoming attached to any one part of it.5”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“The poor old body becomes the innocent victim to our ego and our attempts to transcend the ego, which in truth is itself an egotistical attempt. Leave the poor body alone; you were given it against your will and it is a gift because only in this body can you experience the divine supreme reality.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad from 700 BCE there is an emphasis on understanding that Atman (the true self, the deep-down, real you with no mental content or attachment to the physical world) is Brahman (ultimate reality), meaning that the idea of separateness in the world is born only from believing each of us is a permanent individual with a lasting personality. This illusion of a personal and permanent soul is known as the jiva or jivatman in Sanskrit.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“We may not recognize this, but the experiences we have that don’t accord with our rigid beliefs can actually lead to a breakdown of our conditioning. We ignorantly call these experiences painful. Pain in this sense is actually a psychological shock to our ego that facilitates an evolution within our consciousness, a necessary dent in the armor of our ego that makes us realize—momentarily—that we are not in control of our life.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox

“So the real problem exists when we begin to identify with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as if they are permanent and something that we can hold on to.”
― Jason Gregory, Fasting the Mind: Spiritual Exercises for Psychic Detox