Tag: Awareness

Effortless

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Awareness is aware of itself as the nature of mind.

When local awareness becomes aware of spacious awareness, it begins to recognize itself. When local awareness and spacious awareness unite, they realize they have always been united. Awareness knows itself by being itself. We discover that awareness is already awake without our help.

If you can abide as awareness of itself – content-less, timeless, boundless, knowing – for even three to five seconds, that experience can shift you into the ground of Being.

Lock Kelly

Hell

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The mind can create its own hell:

Hell is a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement

and where everyone has a grievance.

C. S. Lewis

Want, don’t want

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The more likes and dislikes we have, the more physical and psycho-somatic problems we are likely to develop, worst of all, the more turmoil we will feel inside.

People with strong likes and dislikes go about with a sign that says ‘upset me.’

Everywhere they go, they meet a lot of other people wearing the same sign who are only to happy to oblige

Eknath Easwaran, 1910 – 1999, Indian-born spiritual teacher, author, The  Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living

Mysterious

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A man who has never experienced this has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.


Carl Jung

Activity Mind

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The essence of meditation is training in mindfulness. This is done by resting the attention on an external meditation support, and returning to it every time it drifts away into thought. This action is possible because one part of the mind observes and identifies with thoughts and feelings as they arise. If we did not have this capacity for self-reflective awareness we would not know or realize we were thinking when thinking happens. We call the part of the mind that observes “observer consciousness” and the part that thinks and gets observed as “activity mind”

Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

Directly knowing

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Direct knowing is one of the main purposes of meditation practice, dropping the filtering caused by busyness and distraction, regret and resentment, ideal worlds and future wishes

If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality.

If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both.

from the legendary, larger than life, Bodhidharma, 5th or 6th C, AD.