p.3 When mindless... people treat information as though it were context-free - true regardless of circumstances.
p.4 When we blindly follow routines or unwittingly carry out senseless orders, we are acting like automatons, with potentially grave consequences for ourselves and others.
p.9 The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. - William James, "The World We Live In"
p.33 St. Augustine said, "The present, therefore, has several dimensions... the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future."
p.41 The various causes of mindlessness that we have just discussed - repetition, premature cognitive commitment, belief in limited resources, the notion of linear time, education for outcome, and the powerful influence of context - influence each day of our lives... we discuss how to counteract them with a mindful outlook
p.43 In the routine of daily life we do not notice what we are doing unless there is a problem.
p.44 The consequences of mindlessness range from the trivial to the catastrophic.
p.63-64 Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones. Categorizing and recategorizing, labeling and relabeling as one masters the world are processes natural to children. They are adaptive and inevitable part of surviving in this world. Freud recognized the importance of creation and mastery in childhood:
Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of the world in a new way which pleases him?
The child's serious re-creation can become the adult's playful recreation.
As adults, however, we become reluctant to create new categories... our outcome orientation tends to deaden a playful approach.
p.65 When we make new categories in a mindful way, we pay attention to the situation and the context.
p.134 An old Vedic proverb admonishes, "Avert the danger not yet arisen." To catch the early warnings of trouble, we must be alert to new information, to subtle deviations from the way things typically go.
p.198 The effective person... allocates attention wisely, choosing where and when to be mindful.
p.199 second-order mindfulness, choosing what to be mindful about, is something that we can be doing all the time. Though we cannot and would not want to be mindful of everything simultaneously, we can always be mindful of something. The most important function task for... us, is choosing what to be mindful about... the mindfully mindful [person] chooses where to pay attention.
p.200 Second-order mindfulness recognizes that there is no right answer. Decision making is independent of data gathering. Data don't make decisions, people do - either with ease or with difficulty.
p.201-202 Mindful awareness of different options gives us greater control... mindfulness engages us in a continuing momentum... if there is a solution, the more mindful person is more likely to find it.
