Quotes About Awareness

Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?" "Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain't it, kiddo?

So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at.

was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation's political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.

You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

God comes to you disguised as your life

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting...you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.

You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.

Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. —from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.