Quotes About Awareness

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they 'love' animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

In a room with many windows some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)

those who follow their own breath will come to know both Being's nature and their own.

An hour is not a house" An hour is not a house, a life is not a house, you do not go through them as if they were doors to another. Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling. An hour can be dropped like a glass. Some want quiet as others want bread. Some want sleep. My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.

Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men," Bash? wrote.

Un giorno è sconfinato Un giorno è sconfinato Fino a mezzogiorno Poi è andato L'acqua del laghetto di ieri m'intreccia ancora i capelli Non so che ora è Impossibile capirlo Ma possibile rinunciarvi p#159

How close to human must the breathed-in air come before it develops a sense of shame or humor?

A person falling does not, mid-plummet, look up.

The self in exile remains the self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

There is no dwelling in past, present or future and one is able to see the world without any pre-conceptions.

The more we cling to the belief in a self, the more pain and alienation we feel.

Enlightenment is the total sense of freedom that comes from letting go of the concept of being an individual "self".

We are preoccupied with the past, which has already happened, and we are pre-occupied about the future, which does not yet exist. We worry about what will happen and we think about various things that make us feel anxious, frustrated, passionate, angry, resentful, afraid. While we are so preoccupied, our awareness of the here-and-now slips by and we hardly notice its passing. We eat without tasting, we look without seeing and live without ever perceiving what is real.

Most of us live without awareness of the natural course of our lives. We were all born but don't remember the pain or shock of the transition from being safe and enclosed to the shock of being pushed out into a new element. We treat illness with resentment as though it is a total betrayal, and our bodies become an enemy. Old age is seen as something that happens to other people, and death is treated like rumour that may or may not be true.