Quotes about Awareness

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will only see what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. . . . So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say.

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.… Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house."266

To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.

My starting point is that we're already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is

We become what we are willing to see.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting, pushing or pulling, you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic. You can take that as axiomatic: in most cases, you become a mirror image of both what you oppose and what you love (see Ephesians 5:14).

the eyes with which you will look back at God will be the same eyes with which God first looked at you.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

I believe the contemplative mind is the mind of Christ.

Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.