Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
Peace is your priority, not saving the world. That follows that.
I drink a glass of wine or two occasionally with dinner. ‘You drink alcohol?!’ Well, if my state of consciousness is so fragile that a glass of wine would upset it, then it can’t be worth very much.
Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‘I know.’ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
You can still achieve certain things through effort, struggle, determination, and sheer hard work or cunning. But there is no joy in such endeavor, and it invariably ends in some form of suffering.
If increased meta-knowledge is not counter-balanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness then the likelihood of psycho-spiritual dysfunction is great.
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.
Leave life alone. Let it be.
When there’s a teacher who embodies presence, then it seems to come for a while through that opening. The teacher is an opening to presence.
The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.
If there are people you haven’t forgiven, you’re not going to really awaken. You have to let go.
Any action that arises out of stress is of low quality, and it contributes to human suffering. You are making yourself and others suffer.
When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
The future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
The other person’s presence ultimately is the same as your presence, because it is in presence that there is true meeting.
Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.
When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what’s around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.