Quotes about Awareness

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness

You cannot know anything spiritually by saying it is a not-that : you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there.

We cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.

The ability to stand back and calmly observe my inner dramas, without rushing to judgment, is foundational for spiritual seeing.

It is the primary form of "dying to the self" that Jesus lived personally and the Buddha taught experientially. The growing consensus is that, whatever you call it, such calm, egoless seeing is invariably characteristic of people at the highest levels of doing and loving in all cultures and religions.

To stay on the surface of anything is invariably to miss its message—even the surface meaning of our sinfulness.

To keep the mind space open, we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. This has been the most neglected in recent centuries, substituting the mere reciting and "saying" of prayers, which is not the same as a contemplative mind, and often merely confirms us in our superior or fear-based system.

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.

Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." I

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, "Invoked or not invoked, God is still present."*3