Quotes about Awareness

There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. We are already one, yet we know it not.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.

The climate of this prayer is, then, one of awareness, gratitude and a totally obedient love which seeks nothing but to please God.

For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find Him.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: "It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me." Hence

We do not know we are full of paradise because we are so full of our own noise that we cannot hear God singing us and all things into being.

Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.

Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.