James H. Austin > Quotes

“Ordinary man to Zen Master Ikkyu: ‘‘Master, please write the maxims exemplifying the highest wisdom.’’ Ikkyu immediately writes the ideogram ‘‘Attention,’’ with his brush. The man asks, ‘‘Will you please add something more?’’ Ikkyu now writes, twice: ‘‘Attention. Attention.’’ The man remarks, with an edge, ‘‘There’s really not much depth or subtlety here.’’ Ikkyu then writes the same ideogram three times: ‘‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’’ The man now demands: ‘‘What does that word ‘Attention’ mean, anyway?’’ Ikkyu replies: ‘‘Attention means attention.”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“Perceiving Clearly The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. William James (1842-1910) Can we trust what we perceive? William James pointed to another attribute of attention: it helped augment the ‘‘clearness of all that we perceive or conceive.”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“Attention is malleable. We can intensify it, shift it either voluntarily or involuntarily. We can soften it, diffuse it. We can deploy global attention toward tangible external objects, or to their intangible attributes. We can direct attention internally to retrieve items that we have stored in memory. We can sustain attention by infusing a component of motivation, either from the top-down (by intention) or by much more subtler means related to our habitual ongoing attitudes.”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“Do some involuntary forms of ‘‘no-thought’’ attention normally exist that can be cultivated during long-term meditative training?”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“To some persons nowadays, mindfulness might seem to be just another short course. After auditing it for only a few weeks, they could thereafter meditate casually, whenever … This isn’t where Living Zen Remindfully is coming from. Authentic Zen training means committing oneself to a process of regular, ongoing daily life practice. This preparation enables one to unlearn old unfruitful habits, retrain more wholesome ones, and lead a more genuinely creative life. Currently,”
― James H. Austin, Living Zen Remindfully: Retraining Subconscious Awareness

“The evidence that creative men demonstrate a high degree of “masculine-associated” traits such as assertiveness, confidence, determination, ambition, and drive for power, while at the same time having a greater than average incidence of “feminine” interests, suggests that it is a wedding of the necessary sensitivity and intuition together with purposive action and determination that is conducive to creativeness.8 The creative man may be less constrained to deny the side of his nature, viewed as feminine in our football-oriented culture, that reflects an openness to emotions and feelings and considerable self-awareness.”
― James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty

“Research worldwide is starting to clarify both how greater degrees of mental clarity can evolve and how the older biased judgments and concepts that we had attached to scenes can be softened, suspended, or dissolved.”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“This book extends some original implications of mindfulness. It explores the many positive, helpful subconscious aspects of remindfulness. It suggests ways that long-term meditative retraining can help cultivate hidden, affirmative resources of our subconscious memories. Accessing these subtle processes of transformation can enable us to adapt more effectively and to live more authentic lives. To”
― James H. Austin, Living Zen Remindfully: Retraining Subconscious Awareness

“Ruth Baer based her recent analysis of mindfulness on descriptions of how a variety of normal subjects experience mindfulness internally when they are (more or less) ‘‘just sitting.’’3 Their mental experience includes: Acting with greater awareness. This implies that the subjects are neither being distracted nor are they acting solely on ‘‘automatic pilot.’’ Experiencing internal and external events nonjudgmentally. Noting an experience, but not reacting to it. Identifying mind states and describing them silently with words. Simply observing sensations that arise in the body, noticing feelings and thoughts, while attending to each of them with awareness.”
― James H. Austin, On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight

“Experimental ideas are very often born by chance as a result of fortuitous observations.”
― James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty

“persistent practice and rare insights help shrink the once almighty I, the vulnerable Me, and the intrusive Mine. Not gone entirely. Just reduced to manageable proportions. Just i-me-mine. Something more considerate of the you, the we, the ours, and the rest of the biosphere. Being diminutive, this new i-me-mine carries a very low profile. Smaller and streamlined, it no longer sticks up high to trip the positive functions of the mature ego. Neither is it windblown by every shifting, hot or cold breeze from the old instinctual self. Nor will it be overloaded by distortions imposed by others’ guilt-ridden consciences.”
― James H. Austin, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness

“Perhaps we remember them, too, because their lives show us how malleable our own futures are. In their work we perceive how many loopholes fate has left us—how much of destiny is still in our own hands. In them, we see that nothing is predetermined. Chance can be on our side, if we but stir it up with our energies, stay receptive to its every random opportunity, and continually provoke it by individuality in our hobbies, attitudes, and our approach to life.”
― James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
― James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty

“Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.

Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.

Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.”
― James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty