Quotes About Perception

The sweetest sounds I'll ever hear are still inside my head.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see".

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, "I've got it." Always and forever, mystery gets you!

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

God can most easily be lost by being thought found.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing—and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.

We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.

It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The "obvious" seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.

The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.

Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "false evidence appearing real.

Men as a class appear to be at risk, maybe even at high risk.

It's not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

We become what we are willing to see.

Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.

the eyes with which you will look back at God will be the same eyes with which God first looked at you.

A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long.

They look like the oppressors, but have no doubt they are really the oppressed.

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.