Quotes on Awareness

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain - breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are heightens your awareness of exactly where you're stuck.

The fear of death comes from limited awareness.

A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

The basic nature of all conscious beings is 'self-existing wakefulness'. _x000D_ _x000D_ Self-existing meaning spontaneous or without effort and wakefulness meaning natural awareness. _x000D_ _x000D_ To ignore our basic nature, is to wander in fear and confusion, _x000D_ _x000D_ to directly realise our essential nature is to be Enlightened.

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.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.

We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody.

Once the current of awareness of the self is set afoot, it becomes everlasting and continuous by intensification.

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

In politics nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence