Quotes About Awareness

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.

We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.

Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?

In the end it's all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don't.

As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.

When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.

Awareness isn't something we own; awareness isn't something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world.

The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.

Whatever you think you are, that's not it.

Effortless doesn't mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this "effortless effort." We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON

You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.

When our minds start to open, we're no longer in a constant state of evaluation and judgment. Naturally, then, our senses open—and we can really see what is before us. Our eyes open in a different way, our hearing opens in a different way, our emotions open, our hearts open to all of existence. We see how judging and condemning actually close our hearts and harden us to our experience of life and others.

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.