lack of presence Quotes

Space has no "existence." "To exist" literally means "to stand out." You cannot understand space because it doesn't stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the unmanifested.

When you get there, there isn't any there there.

I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.

‎Not having time for a person, not being able to sit in silence together with somebody, that's the same as rejecting them, as being scornful about them.

As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.

Every something is an echo of nothing

I'm nothing, I'm not even here

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

If you are mentally somewhere else, you miss real life

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are...they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty - with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.

Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn't even notice.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

I think people generally are lost, as they keep thinking about what is going to happen and what they have done. They are not alive anymore. The art of listening is missing. In their head, they are doing something else.

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

I feel like I'm away for much of my own life.

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."