Quotes About Awareness

I’ve worked all my life on the subject of awareness, whether it’s awareness of the body, awareness of the mind, awareness of your emotions, awareness of your relationships, or awareness of your environment. I think the key to transforming your life is to be aware of who you are.

In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside. As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind's compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

Consciousness is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of consciousness, but awareness is beyond all--being as well as not-being.

I want to say that what is cool about writing self-aware first person narrative is that the awareness is not necessarily the same awareness of the reader. I have a story coming out in the Paris Review and it's about a hipster. He think's he's self-aware, he's very introspective and analytical, but when you're reading it you can totally see through his self-analysis because you have a higher awareness than he does. I like playing with that too.

How to do meditation, many people ask. Don't do anything, just go into thoughtless awareness. Try to go to the thoughtless awareness. If you can get into that condition of thoughtless awareness, you've done your job because that's the point where you are with the truth, with the reality, with the joy, with everything that is so fundamental.

For awareness you need not go to the Himalayas; you need not go anywhere. Your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware. Somebody insults you - listen to it in full awareness. And you will be surprised - the insult is no more an insult. You may even smile. It does not hurt; it hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises and appreciates you - listen with alertness. And then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things. Nobody can bribe you; flattery becomes impossible. You will smile at the whole nonsense.

The innermost core is witnessing, awareness, watchfulness. You can call it anything, but it will be another meaning of witnessing. Truth is pure awareness.

In stand up, you get an awareness of how you come across, but in acting there is almost a hyper-awareness on how you might be physically perceived.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

The final result of all life is your awareness. Your awareness is existence.

...Every single one of us goes through life depending on and bound by our individual knowledge and awareness. And we call it reality. However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies, don't you think?

Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.

Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only - you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is essentially spaceless.

When I stretch, I stretch in such a way that my awareness moves, and a gate of awareness finally opens.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

Emotions reflect intentions. Therefore, awareness of emotions leads to awareness of intentions.

Right awareness is awareness of one's own being in its totality: all that is good and all that is bad. But as you become aware, the bad starts disappearing - just as when you bring light into the room, the darkness disappears. When light is in the room, darkness cannot exist there. Sin is darkness, forgetfulness, unconsciousness.

I live in a kind of controlled awareness. I wouldn't call it fear, but it's an awareness. I know I have a responsibility to behave in a certain way. I'm able to do that.

Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.

Tantric Zen is the awareness of the infinitude of all things. To gain that awareness, to be it, is enlightenment.

We must intend to live [the new spiritual awareness], to integrate each increased degree of awareness into our daily routine. It only takes one negative interpretation to stop everything.

Your energy and your awareness are directly connected. If your energies are intense, your awareness naturally grows and sharpens.

Remember the word bodhichitta, because Atisha says the whole effort of religion, the whole science of religion, is nothing but an endeavor to create bodhichitta, buddha-consciousness: a mind which functions as a no-mind, a mind which dreams no more, thinks no more, a mind which is just awareness, pure awareness.

Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself.

As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even have to try. It's a beautiful paradox: the more you open your consciousness, the fewer unpleasant events intrude themselves into your awareness.

Some souls seek to walk in awareness. Souls who walk in awareness choose a different path. They seek to experience all the peace and joy, limitlessness and freedom, wisdom and love that Oneness brings.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

Furthermore, it is not that Spirit is present but you need to be enlightened in order to see it. It is not that you are one with Spirit but just don't know it yet. Because that would also imply that there is some place Spirit is not. No, according to Dzogchen, you are always already one with Spirit, and that awareness is always already fully present, right now. You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness. There is nowhere Spirit is not.

Your choices are really very limited. They are limited by your level of awareness. If you can change your level of awareness radically, then you can change your destiny.

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

If you don't take the lamp of awareness with you, you are going to create a hell around you. Light your lamp wherever you gocourting, not courting, that is not the point. Wherever you go, whatsoever you do, always do it in the inner light, with awareness.

Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.

Suppose I grant that pigs and dogs are self-aware to some degree, and do have thoughts about things in the future. That would provide some reason for thinking it intrinsically wrong to kill them - not absolutely wrong, but perhaps quite a serious wrong. Still, there are other animals - chickens maybe, or fish - who can feel pain but don't have any self-awareness or capacity for thinking about the future. For those animals, you haven't given me any reason why painless killing would be wrong, if other animals take their place and lead an equally good life.

Even if one child falls in a borewell, the entire country gets worried; we must generate more awareness about hundreds of children who are unable to survive due to lack of primary healthcare facilities.

Take a few moments every day to sit in silence and turn your full awareness inward to connect with your Spirit. These moments of silence can occur anytime and anyplace. The more you learn to tune in wherever you are, the easier it will become.

It's important to understand the work that's being done, and to make sure it's actually helping. And sometimes, by working on it myself, I get a better grasp of the challenges and complexities of the task, and I'm able to talk about it better. That's why a balance of actual work and awareness is good, because they feed each other.

Awareness, one with knowing, is love.

The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.

I have a spiritual practice which helps to keep me grounded and centered. Yoga is vital because it keeps me in full awareness and connection with my breath. I keep a gratitude log, which helps to remind me of all the blessings I experience daily.

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces - tapping and shaking and whatnot - but a shift in presence.

I have committed to contribute in raising general public awareness, as well as inspiring broad, positive, committed action against illegal trade. It is an on-going and tough fight, but I believe that if we all join our hands, we can conquer!

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

Descartes says: I think, and I am every moment I am thinking, because I have this inner awareness of myself. And I always thought there was something fishy about that. I don't think there's any privileged self-knowledge. Most of our attention is to things outside us.

Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we're telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by strong emotion, do we remember that it is our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can't practice when distracted but KNOW we can't, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on.

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.