Quotes About Awakening

Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what do you accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what do you accept - what opens up your world – and what to reject – but seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery.

Everything in your life - every moment, every struggle - is the path. Everything is an opportunity for awakening.

May bodhichitta, precious and sublime, Arise where it has not yet come to be; And where it has arisen may it not decline, But grow and flourish ever more and more. The

We can use our lives, in other words, to wake up to the fact that we're not separate: the energy that causes us to live and be whole and awake and alive is just the energy that creates everything, and we're part of that. We can use our lives to connect with that, or we can use them to become resentful, alienated, resistant, angry, bitter. As always, it's up to us.

With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

It's a gradual awakening, and it's cumulative, but that's actually what happens. We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

All the maras point the way to being completely awake and alive by letting go, by letting ourselves die moment after moment, at the end of each out-breath. When we wake up, we can live fully without seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, without re-creating ourselves when we fall apart.

imperfections into a nice smooth ride. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It's becoming critical. We don't need to add more depression, more discouragement, or more anger to what's already here. It's becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times. The earth seems to be beseeching us to connect with joy and discover our innermost essence. This is the best way that we can benefit others.

To be fully alive, fully human and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to always be in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

there is nobody on the planet, neither those whom we see as the oppressed nor those whom we see as the oppressor, who doesn't have what it takes to wake up.

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.

I no longer understand anything literally. I cannot wait until I wake up, whereas earlier I could not wait to fall asleep. I have been made to speak. I have been sentenced to reality. - Do you hear it? (Silence.) Can you hear? (Silence.) Psst. (Silence.)

A bad dream. You were having a bad dream. Oh, I say. Is that what I'm having?

I often thought of comparing life to a dream, because death always seemed to be an awakening.

Byron had to blink a dozen times, each time hoping the dream would end. But the unreal was real.

I DON'T THINK so." I blinked upward into Cass's face. His hair was haloed by a fluorescent ceiling light. I was in a glaringly bright room with puke-green walls and a tiled floor. My arm was attached to an IV stand, and by the wall was a wheeled table with beeping medical machines. "Huh?" I said. "You called me Mom. I said, 'I don't think so.'" "Sorry," I said. "The Dream.

It took a scenario that he was going to die for Fred to wake up. It took that kind of shock for his life to be transformed. Maybe that's what needs to happen for all of us, for everyone who lives on Earth. That could be what a requiem scenario offers us.

it is no surprise that extraordinary leaders, like Mieko Nishimizu and Roger Saillant, often have deep personal stories of moments of awakening, when some old part of them died and a new part emerged.

The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.

One of the ancient functions of pilgrimage is to wake us from our slumber.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." That's what I was searching

In the strictest form of Zen, monitors roam the meditation hall, striking sleeping or listless meditators with a flat wooden stick, called a keisaku, to get them to pay attention. This is not intended as punishment. In fact, the keisaku is sometimes referred to as a "compassionate stick." The purpose of the blow is to reinvigorate the meditator and make him or her more awake in the moment.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up.