Quotes About Awareness

People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one. When nature finally calls, they have no idea where to go and are in a mess.

Strengthening the mind is not done by making it move around as is done to strengthen the body, but by bringing the mind to a halt, bringing it to rest.

Of course, there are dozens of meditation techniques, but it all comes down to this - just let it all be.

Only when the mind sees for itself, can it uproot and relinquish attachment.

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened. When you sit, let it be. What you walk, let it be. Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing. Ajahn Chah

If your mind is happy, then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth us all there is. It's like when you've learned how to read - you can then read anywhere you go.

Someone commented: I can observe desire and aversion in my mind, but it's hard to observe delusion. Ajahn Chah replied: You're riding on a horse and asking where the horse is?

How does the Dhamma teach the proper way of life? It shows us how to live. It has many ways of showing it - on rocks or trees or just in front of you. It is a teaching but not in words. So still the mind, the heart, and learn to watch. You'll find the whole Dhamma revealing itself here and now. At what other time and place are you going to look?

Inconspicuousness begins as self-protection but soon extends to self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of who we are and where we belong in things.

She suggests, too, that our capacity for intimate relationships can depend on having this deep core of private awareness; and that acknowledging our unknown and unseen selves, and offering these up only when and if we choose, is essential to our ability to engage in close relationships. Valuing interior experience is vital to developing a sense of self, and how we reveal ourselves to the outside world has everything to do with how we stay out of view when we need to.

Seeing the sky darken & the fields turn brown & the lake lead-grey as some enormous scrap of sheet metal & wind grabs the world around the equator I am most thankful then for knowing about the little gold hairs on your belly

Never run advertising until the major publicity possibilities have been exploited.

Advertising can only maintain brands that have been created by publicity.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Our sadness won't be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it