What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that.
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of “me” based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie making.
Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.
The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind.
Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.
Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
Spiritual Awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.
Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you’re back in time.
You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.
Whereas the notion of purpose before was always associated with future, there is now a deeper purpose that can only be found in the present, through denial of time.
For the ego to survive, it must make time – past and future – more important than the present moment.
Through being “right”, you feel superior and through feeling superior you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.