Quotes About Awareness

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.

My starting point is that we're already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

For many secular people today we live in a disenchanted universe without meaning, purpose, or direction. We are aware only of what it is not. Seldom do we enjoy what it is. Probably it is only healthy religion that is prepared to answer that question. Healthy religion is an enthusiasm about what is, not an anger about what isn't.

We become what we are willing to see.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting, pushing or pulling, you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic. You can take that as axiomatic: in most cases, you become a mirror image of both what you oppose and what you love (see Ephesians 5:14).

As physicist Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

I believe the contemplative mind is the mind of Christ.

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

We don't think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness

You cannot know anything spiritually by saying it is a not-that : you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there.

And it points forward, urging us toward the realization that this hint and taste of union might actually be true. It guides us like an inner compass or a "homing" device.

We cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.

Truly enlightened people see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out. If you think you are privately "saved" or enlightened, then you are neither saved nor enlightened, it seems to me!

The ability to stand back and calmly observe my inner dramas, without rushing to judgment, is foundational for spiritual seeing.

It is the primary form of "dying to the self" that Jesus lived personally and the Buddha taught experientially. The growing consensus is that, whatever you call it, such calm, egoless seeing is invariably characteristic of people at the highest levels of doing and loving in all cultures and religions.

Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don't know it.

Don't start by trying to love god, or even people. Love rocks and elements first. Move to trees, then animals, and then humans… It might be the only way to love, because how you do anything, is how you do everything.

To stay on the surface of anything is invariably to miss its message—even the surface meaning of our sinfulness.

To keep the mind space open, we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. This has been the most neglected in recent centuries, substituting the mere reciting and "saying" of prayers, which is not the same as a contemplative mind, and often merely confirms us in our superior or fear-based system.

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.