Quotes About Awareness

the capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility

Abstractions that we unwittingly treat as physical reality tend to block us from seeing the way things are, and therefore reduce our power to accomplish what we say we want.

What freedom! Unencumbered by the obstacles that the calculating self tackles daily, the central self can listen in innocence for who we are, listen for the whole of it, inquire into what is here. The

But the central self is open and aware because it need only be the unique voice that it is, an expression that transcends the personality that got it out of childhood alive.

You look for thoughts and actions that reflect survival and scarcity, comparison and competition, attachment and anxiety. Notice that the question is not, "Are my thoughts . . ." which is a question of assessment, but, "How are my thoughts . . ." which is a true inquiry.

Why does it spiral downward, why do things tend to look more and more hopeless? For the same reason that red Dodge pickups seem to proliferate on the highways as soon as you buy one and that pregnant women appear out of nowhere approximately eight months before your baby is due. The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow. Attention is like light and air and water. Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.

BEING WITH the way things are calls for an expansion of ourselves. We start from what is, not from what should be; we encompass contradictions, painful feelings, fears, and imaginings, and—without fleeing, blaming, or attempting correction—we learn to soar, like the far-seeing hawk, over the whole landscape. The practice of being with the way things are allows us to alight in a place of openness, where "the truth" readies us for the next step, and the sky opens up.

We keep looking so hard in life for the "specific message," and yet we are blinded to the fact that the message is all around us, and within us all the time. We just have to stop demanding that it be on OUR terms or conditions, and instead open ourselves to the possibility that what we seek may be in front of us all the time.

I am the framework for everything that happens in my life.

Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet.

Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.

1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.

Temptation is a slower process and you'll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep.

Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.

Watch out.' 'For what?' said Pollux. 'For when that uniform starts to wear you

She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.

Father Damien maintained a neutral, kind, meditative watchfulness that had in it no hint of impatience.

It reminded me of what Pollux said once about owls. That when you are approached by an owl, when you don't seek it out but it flies to you or perches on your fence, say, the owl is telling you to prepare yourself. Prepare yourself for what? That sort of warning can drive you crazy. Impossible to know how to avoid something when you don't know what it is.

Why were they talking all at once? Omakayas wondered. Nokomis thought for a while. I think they talk to each other all the time, she said, but our minds are not always peaceful enough to hear them.

as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. Something good he was doing for her by playing with her son from the other kingdom.

some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

No matter what they died to me, it would still be a 'life sentence' to be a white woman in the rong skin. sentenced to be white was my fate.

because it costs a lot to not be aware.