Quotes About Awareness

What I have not seen or failed to see I leave as a gift.

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Let the apple ripen on the branch beyond your need to take it down.

Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we were going.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now.

We do not even have time to find out if our momentum is taking us over the nearest cliff.

Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.

beginning well means seating ourselves in the body again, catching up with ourselves and the person we have become since we last tried to begin.

You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being 'productive') cannot find.

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD (excerpt) The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of a field. Asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper to one that waits. Either way takes courage, either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing away.

The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.

What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the same progression that this tiny invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated.

My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.

We do not experience things as they really are! We experience things only through a filter and that filter determines what information will enter our awareness and what will be rejected. If we change the filter (our belief system), then we automatically experience the world in a completely different way.

God's greatest gift is to endow human beings with the capacity to perceive - and the create - holiness.

But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.

Well, they never know they're ill, do they? You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.

the whole world [is]a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.