Quotes About Awareness

There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.

It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

pride. If there's too much "I know," it will lead to illusion and ignorance. Isn't that ironic? Jesus says, "The person who says 'I know,' is precisely the blind one" (John 9:41).

15:9). Big Truth is intended to deeply change the seer himself or herself, or it is not Big Truth—or truth at all. Some form of contemplative practice is the key to this larger seeing and this larger knowing.

We have to accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We're sleepwalkers.

Stinking thinking' is the universal addiction." This is one of the most stunning, succinct, and profound sentences I've ever read. And this is indeed a book for anyone and everyone who cannot stop creating trances and numbness via alcohol, drugs, sex, workaholism, or toxic, obsessive thinking.

True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

the Greek word meta-noia, which literally means to move "beyond the mind," is usually translated "repentance" and no longer points to its much deeper meaning.

To keep the mind space open, you need some form of meditative practice—something much more than saying prayers. In fact, if recitation of prayers does not lead to a change in consciousness, it is actually counterproductive.

Anne Wilson Schaef

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So, it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.

do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.

Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.

One of the few generalizations we can make in the field of universal spirituality is this: No one else is your problem.

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.