Quotes about Awareness

Just as we care for our bodies with good food and rest, so we must also care for our spiritual selves, that part of us that is connected to God. If we are spiritually ill, our bodies and minds also become sick. This is why regular prayer and times of silent contemplation are necessary parts of our daily lives. Periodically, we must also take extra measures of self-examination and learning, that we might be ever-perfected in the grace of the infinite and perfect God.

Search your hearts and minds for the spiritual wounds of unforgiveness and fear, which are atheistic and unchristian, and repent of them so that you might be healed by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Your Father in Christ,
Bishop JOSEPHhttp://www.antiochianladiocese.org/

Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being.

Remember one thing: meditation means awareness. Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation. Action is not the question, but the quality that you bring to your action.

Walking can be a meditation if you walk alertly. Sitting can be a meditation if you sit alertly. Listening to the birds can be a meditation if you listen with awareness. Just listening to the inner noise of your mind can be a meditation if you remain alert and watchful.

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly crackles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.

While holding positive thoughts and emotions is advantageous, positive thinking itself is not "Hallmark Card thinking."  It's really an ongoing awareness that all truly is well with the world, with life, and with oneself. It's also a commitment not to mindlessly pass on fears but to bring positive energy, images, ideas, and feelings into the lives of others, to help them attune to the wellness at the heart of the world.

We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.

Great drama, like the energy implicit in every atom, is eternally around and within us, but liberated only by coincidence, ceremony, creativity, periods reaching completion, pressures reaching the bursting point, and the simple but painful cultivation of awareness.

In a railroad car at nightfall, when the natural light outside has diminished until it is even with the artificial light inside, the passenger facing forward sees in his window two images at once: the dim landscape rushing toward him out of a pit of darkness, and the interior of the car, reflected with its more or less motionless occupants. At this hour most passengers unconsciously give allegiance to one of these two polarities of vision; and the individual momentarily aware of both may be struck by the profound, almost tragic duality between outer and inner worlds, between the rush of experience and the immobility of awareness.

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I’m going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don’t, too bad! As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.

Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts -- generally somebody else's -- mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can't really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Those who do the impossible are often unaware that what they did was impossible.

Being present is real work.

It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the "I Am," our real presence, can awaken.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

To be really aware you must be able to know simultaneously what is going on thousands of miles away today, what may have happened centuries ago, what will happen anywhere in the world decades from now, and what is occuring, has occured, or will occur on other planes of existence. And you must still act as if you know nothing. You must just sit and talk with other people and play the part which Nature has assigned to you.

"Man is always seeking a power, a power to overcome something or destroy something; and therefore he is not living in the awareness of God, because in the realization of the presence of God there is no need to overcome, to destroy, or to do anything."

The instant experience of the present, right now and here, as it is, for your mind, energy and body, are many, and each is operating in a different state of awareness and dimension of time.
The present of your mind is far away from the time of here and started beyond the time your remember, in a time that is ever lasting and always there.
The present of your energy is actively in a time you can perceive, beyond the vision of the world in this time, and is replicated at each dimension you are manifested or related.
The present of your body, is an experience of your senses, limited to the infinite potentiality of a body that exists beyond time.
The instant experience of all dimensions of time, is available here and now, through every cell you experience and nourish with life.
 

What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to become aware of an omnipresent ocean of wild divine love that has always been a secret to you in the same way that the sea is invisible to a fish?

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision - the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.  So the individual lives his daily life, without due attention to the fact that he has no guarantee of tomorrow.  He hides from himself the knowledge that his life is a unique experience, which will end in the grave; that at every second, lives as unique as his start and end.  This blindness allows a pattern of living to hand itself on, and few who challenge this pattern survive.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.  Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.  And it is true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

Expansion of Perspective, Unity of Purpose

If we allow the love within us to evolve naturally we generate new possibilities , nurture awareness and create a vehicle for joyous living.

The Earth thirsts for our blood, but we need not give it so readily.

The foot feels the foot when the foot feels the ground.

Spiritual life is not doing the sadhana alone and coming to satsang alone. It is an everyday challenge to do the highest good in the name of God, not in the name of anybody else. This is the shift in consciousness that will take you to God. When you serve him continually in perfection, you yourself become perfect.

Satsang is the greatest of all spiritual practices. Always be in the company of the realized teacher, the Master. Always be where the truth is being spoken and where the holy books are being read. The wisdom is being shared in these places. You'll see that some topic of wisdom will be important for you that day. It will help you on your spiritual path. Because of hearing these truths, your mind will open to a whole other level of consciousness.