Quotes About Awareness

until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.

The suppression of awareness required by our universal practice of commodifying, enslaving, and killing animals for food generates the "built-in mental disorder" that drives us toward the destruction not only of ourselves but of the other living creatures and systems of this earth. Because this practice of exploiting and brutalizing animals for food has come to be regarded as normal, natural, and unavoidable, it has become invisible.

By denying the intelligence in animals, ignoring their extensive abilities to feel and to live as subjects in their own ways in the natural world, we have made our culture and ourselves less intelligent.

As Joseph Campbell once said, watching birds speeding through webs of branches and never even grazing a wing tip, animals may dwell in a realm beyond mistakes, totally present to life in ways our concept-crowded thinking cannot fully understand.

He ran into God many times during the year: felt of him in the warm field-dirt of May; saw his face in the shiny harvest grain; heard his voice among the tops of the Norway pines.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

I'm learning in my old age that the only thing you can do to keep your sanity is to stay in the moment.

Some knowledge of the diversity of Christian religious experience and a sympathetic awareness of of non-Christian religious experience can help directors transcend their personal absolutes and open them to a greater sense of wonder toward the manifold experience of people with God.

The columnist George Will likes to quote a line that he says Cardinal Wolsey uttered about Henry VIII: "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.

One who can see without seeming to see-- That's an observer as good as three.

Pluck not the wayside flower; It is the traveler's dower.

If we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it." —George Santayana Every

If everything I perceive is based on what I already know, how will I ever perceive anything new? If I never perceive anything new, how will I change? How will I grow?

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you"?

Opportunity is often difficult to recognize we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.

pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.

We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.

After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.