Quotes About Awakening

When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on, and you're groggy and pointing at things saying circle and blue and car and then sex and job and health care.

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

The old man woke up at once. "Ay, ay!" cried Whitefield, fixing his eyes on him, "I have waked you up, have I? I meant to do it. I am not come here to preach to stocks and stones: I have come to you in the name of the Lord God of Hosts, and I must, and will, have an audience.

I knew those feelings of wanting to be with another brother were not dead; they were just asleep.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice. —Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead

What a terrible time to find out how good life can be, I thought. And how good to find out anyway.

Spiritual practice is not a mindless repetition of ritual or prayer. It works through consciously realizing the law of cause and effect. Perhaps we can sense the potential of awakening in ourselves, but we must also see that it doesn't happen by itself. How we act, how we relate to ourselves, to our bodies, to the people around us, to our work, creates the kind of world we live in, creates our very freedom.

To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.

The path of awakening begins with a step the Buddha called right understanding.

It is not enough to touch awakening. We must find ways to live its vision fully.

You may have heard of "out-of-the-body experiences," full of lights and visions. A true spiritual path demands something more challenging, what could be called an "in-the-body experience." We must connect to our body, to our feelings, to our life just now, if we are to awaken.

Built on the foundation of concentration is the third aspect of the Buddha's path of awakening: clarity of vision and the development of wisdom.

Sophisticated meditative disciplines, healing practices, cognitive and emotional trainings, conflict resolution techniques—he used them all to awaken his visitors to their own qualities of integrity, equanimity, gratitude, and forgiveness.

If we had been seeking strength through control over ourselves and others, we discover that was only a false version of strength, that truth and inherent strength appear in moments of deep silence and wholeness when we rest unshakably with things as they are. If we had been seeking beauty or love through others or in states that perfect our mind, this too comes whole and unbidden when desires and longings themselves come to rest. This is awakening to our Buddha nature.

When sleepy, meditate with your eyes open wide. Stand in place for a few minutes or do walking meditation. If it's really bad, walk briskly or walk backward, splash some water on your face. Sleepiness is something we can respond to creatively. When

Every color shines in the awakened heart.

was still afraid—not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself.

He woke in the dimity light of dusk to owl song and found her gone. Far across the valley the keen, yearning song of a solitary vixen called to his blood. The world turned.

Before I came to New York I lived here, in this mausoleum. I was nothing. I was dead. When I came to New York it was like a veil lifting. For the first time I felt I was alive, breathing.

I WOKE WITH a start, my head hurting, aching all over. For a moment I didn't know where I was. Indeed, I felt so fuddled I didn't even know who I was. Hetty Feather, Sapphire Battersea, Emerald Star? I had three names now.

It was an epiphany, the kind only a horrible trauma can induce.

Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.

Who will wake up at the end of my dream?