Quotes About Awareness

As the Persian mystic Rumi instructs us, "When you go to a garden, do you look at thorns or flowers? Spend more time with roses and jasmine.

you must be present to win.

the reality of experience is an ever-changing river. Direct perception drops beneath the names of things to show us their ephemeral, mysterious nature. When we bring our attention to the direct perception of experience, we become more alive and free.

James Joyce described this relationship in the line, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

Spiritual life may initially be focused on self-transformation, but as mindfulness and compassion grow we naturally become attentive to the values of the society around us. When we do so, we can see how the popular promise of happiness through greed and excess consumerism is increasingly shallow and false.

When we live in our thoughts of the past and future, everything seems distant, hurried, or unfulfilled.

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound at our ears, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, "The between is ringing." The sound of the bell is here to be heard everywhere—in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take.

As you acknowledge desire or wanting, you can begin to see that your mind acts a little like a child at Disneyland: "I want that candy and I want to go on that ride and I want that stuffed toy.

If you hold on to any expectation, you miss the wisdom. It is impermanent. Be the One Who Knows, the witness to it all. This is how trust grows." And it is how love grows as well. Trust and love are the keys.

Then one day you will be sitting and fear will arise, and you will feel it and recognize it and think, "Oh, this is fear, I recognize you. Welcome back." Then it is as if the fear becomes one of your friends.

Working with these distractions, steadying the canoe, letting the waves pass by, and coming back again and again in a quiet and collected way, is at the heart of meditation. After

The problem is, you think you have time.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.

The only thing that makes something impossible is ignorance.

What you don't have to think about can't really get to you.

Look at the average American diet: ice cream, butter, cheese, whole milk, all this fat. People don't realize how much of this stuff you get by the end of the day. High blood pressure is from all this high-fat eating.

Stay humble. Always answer your phone - no matter who else is in the car.

Intelligence and compassion are the heart of what it means to be human. Help others where you can. That is clear enough. But a Creator may well want us to open our eyes, as well. If there is a judgment, God may not be particularly interested in how many hymns we sang or what prayers we memorized. I suspect He may instead look at us and say, "I gave you a brain, and you never used it. I gave you the stars, and you never looked.

Scramblers could, of course, be manufactured to resemble comm links or compacts or virtually any other kind of metal object. But my philosophy is that if someone has a weapon pointed at him, he should know about it.

In low levels of consciousness it is unwise to believe, trust or follow our thinking

Our consciousness can only give us an experience of our thinking.

I am tired of pursuing happiness. I want to breathe it in as ubiquitous as air.