Quotes about Consciousness

Doing things with mindfulness means you perform each action with clear awareness of what's happening and of what you're doing in the present moment, and you feel happy as you do it. Mindfulness is the capacity to shine the light of awareness onto what's going on here and now. Mindfulness is the heart of meditation practice.

Mindfulness is the opposite of this tendency. We must invite these things up into our mind consciousness every day and tell them, "My dear, I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of my fear.

Nirvana is the complete silencing of concepts.

Whenever everyone's eyes are fixed on the earth—looking at the trees, plants, hills, mountains, or each other—then we know we are in the historical dimension, the world of birth and death. But when everyone's eyes look into space then we have entered the ultimate dimension, the unborn and undying world.

What we have to be is what we are.

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

The real purpose of meditation is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give.

The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.

If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner I, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the I AM of the Almighty.

The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea, not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting." ? Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton On Prayer

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality

There is only now.