Quotes About Awareness

breakthroughs come when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions.

A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.

In other words, I like control. Not just being in control, but the awareness of control, the feel of control, and the ability to manipulate control itself.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment - now!

Some people think that meditation takes time away from physical accomplishment. Taken to extremes, of course, that's true. Most people, however, find that meditation creates more time than it takes.

Acceptance is not a state of passivity or inaction. I am not saying you can't change the world, right wrongs, or replace evil with good. Acceptance is, in fact, the first step to successful action. If you don't fully accept a situation precisely the way it is, you will have difficulty changing it. Moreover, if you don't fully accept the situation, you will never really know if the situation should be changed.

Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on?

Pain (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories We would be more alive if we did more of this, and, Life would be more lovely if we did less of that. Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.

To use fear as the friend it is, we must retrain and reprogram ourselves...We must persistently and convincingly tell ourselves that the fear is here--with its gift of energy and heightened awareness--so we can do our best and learn the most in the new situation.

You will know your state of mind when you wash the dishes. Your care or your impatience; your attention or your distraction. You will see yourself, at that moment, clearly.

she's teaching me to read to be blind sighted.

she's teaching me to see to be blind sighted.

Planning up front isn't only about making a plan. It's about learning, awareness, and practice; so we can identify options, understand feedback, and deal with disruption. Improvisation favors the prepared mind and body.

Between perfect vision and total blindness lies all the truth we know.

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.

I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater—because at first glance I could see through him and he could see through me, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Look, love, I've been bullied all my life by bigger experts than Larry Olivier, I can assure you, and he's just got to get in line.

I don't go for this auto-cannibalism. Very damaging.

Men frequently get lost in their thoughts and go to far-off places in their minds without even realizing the journey has started or considering the consequences.

In the first instant of seeing, of knowing, Catell heard the terrible sounds of everything that breaks, bursts, and rips apart beyond repair, and the mad turning of all that moves, speeds, dashes about for a while, turning like a giant wheel, around, around. Then the wheel stopped.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you do is for yourself—and there isn't one. —Wei Wu Wei

Knowing" can be useful, but learning not to know creates a powerful openness that is inconceivable until it is experienced.

We confuse being some thing with Being.