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Let us not
look back in anger
or forward in fear, but around
in
awareness.
James Thurber
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awareness - awareness
3 |
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Shut
your eyes and you will know what I mean by thought
entombed in darkness.
Light comes through the
senses, and not only through the sense of sight.
When
you see without feeling, you are still partly blind; you
lack the inner light
that brings awareness. Awareness
requires the interplay of every faculty,
the use of your
entire being as an eye.
Charles A. Lindbergh
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There
is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which
operates by a
variation of lights and shadows,
happiness alternating
with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this
process of contrast a sense of satisfaction,
of richness
that can be captured and pinned down only
by those who
possess the gift of awareness. |
Louis
Bromfield |
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If I
were to prescribe one process
in the training of people which is
fundamental
to success in any
direction, it
would be thorough
ongoing training in the habit
of accurate
observation. It is
a habit which every one of us
should be seeking evermore to perfect.
Eugene G.
Grace
The
next message you need
is always right where you are.
Ram Dass
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You know
of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness.
. . .
There also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul.
Its most dangerous aspect
is that one is unaware of
its coming. That is why you have to be careful.
As soon as you notice the slightest sign of
indifference, the moment
you become aware of the loss of
a certain seriousness, of longing,
of enthusiasm and zest,
take it as a warning.
You should realize your soul
suffers if you live superficially.
Albert Schweitzer
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Jon
Kabat- Zinn |
Most of the time, if
you're not really paying attention,
you're someplace else.
So your child might say, "Daddy,
I want this,"
and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy."
Now that's no big deal--we all get busy, and kids
frequently ask for attention. But over your child's
entire youth, you may have
an enormous number of such
moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought
you were busy, you didn't see
the opportunities these
moments presented. . . . People carry around an enormous
amount of grief because they missed the little things. |
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Matthew Fox
We must work on our souls, enlarging
and expanding them.
We do so by experiencing all of life--
the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and
pain.
Soul work requires paying attention to life,
to the laughter and the sorrow,
the enlightening and the
frightening,
the inspiring and the silly.
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It
takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to
realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of
the world in which we live. |
Aldous
Huxley |
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The
ultimate value of life depends upon awareness,
and the
power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
Aristotle
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Who
said it first? We don't know, but very often
we find the same ideas attributed to two different
people. All we can do is give you both. . . . |
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The universe is full of
magical things
patiently waiting for our wits to grow
sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
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The
world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our
senses to grow sharper.
John Keats |
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Giving
our full attention to another person is itself stimulating.
However dull
they might appear to be, the person you're with right now is a human
being
with a full set of human qualities that you can respond to. If you
don't see
those qualities in them at first, ask yourself: Am I looking
deeply enough,
attending closely enough? When people feel that they have your
full attention
sometimes they blossom before your eyes. Even if the communication
only lasts three minutes, it can make a big difference to both of your
days.
Kulananda
and Dominic Houlder
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Look
everywhere with your eyes; but with your soul never look
at many things, but at one.
V.V.
Rozanov
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One never
knows what each day is going to bring. The important
thing is to be open and ready for it.
Henry Moore |
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All of us tend to put off living. We
are all dreaming
of some magical rose garden
over the
horizon instead of enjoying the roses
that are blooming
outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie
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The
present moment is significant, not as the bridge between
past and future,
but by reason of its contents, which can
fill our emptiness and become ours,
if we are capable of
receiving them.
Dag Hammarskjold
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Albert
E. Dunning
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Great
opportunities come to all, but many do not know
they have met them. The only preparation to take
advantage of them is . . .
to watch what each day
brings.
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If we face our unpleasant feelings with care,
affection, and nonviolence,
we can transform them into a kind of energy that is healthy and has
the capacity to nourish us. By
the work of mindful observation,
our unpleasant feelings can illuminate so much for us, offering us
insight and understanding into ourselves and society.
Thich Nhat Hanh
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The
unthankful heart . . . discovers no mercies; but let the
thankful heart
sweep through the day and, as the magnet
finds the iron, so it will find,
in every hour, some
heavenly blessing.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The best things are nearest: breath in
your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at
your feet,
duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not
grasp at the stars,
but do life's plain,
common work as it comes, certain that
daily duties and
daily bread
are the sweetest things of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Most human beings have an almost
infinite capacity
for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
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To have an open self is to provide a free channel
for the infinite goodness of God.
To have an open self is to keep yourself aware, alert and
sensitive
to the beauty and wonder of life.
God’s love will flow through you
into the world when you are open.
You enlarge the dimensions of your life
when you keep yourself open to the highest and best. The key to God’s
infinite riches is within you; open yourself and you will receive.
Wilferd A. Peterson
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| Too many people miss
the silver lining because they're expecting gold.
Maurice Setter
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Sunshine is delicious, rain is
refreshing,
wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather,
only
different types of good weather.
John Ruskin |
Saint Basil
Many a
person curses the rain that
falls upon their heads,
and know not that it brings abundance
to drive
away hunger. |
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| i know full well that
one of the greatest gifts that i've been given is that of
awareness. i see things, i hear things, i feel
things that i've recognized that other people just don't
notice for some reason. i truly appreciate this
gift, for it gives me so much in life that's already
there, just waiting to be seen. i can stand still
for an hour in a field in the mountains, just seeing
things and feeling the air and hearing the sounds. i
love to sit in one place in the city, just watching
people go by, wondering what they're thinking, wondering
what that look on her face means, how their lives are
going, why he seems so agitated.
of course, there's a prerequisite to
awareness--we have to slow down. we have to realize
that life is going to go on whether or not we rush around
in order to get everything possible done today, and that
our own mental, emotional, and physical well being is at
stake. we have a beautiful world that surrounds us,
that offers us unlimited opportunities for peace,
serenity, learning, helping, getting, feeling, hoping,
love--you name it, it's there in abundant quantities,
more than any one of us will never need. but we
have to see it, to acknowledge it's there, to let it
become a part of us by making ourselves a part of it.
rainer maria rilke claimed that there
are angels and spirits all around us, but over the course
of the history of humankind we've pulled away from the
things that we used to be able to see clearly; we've lost
our connection with this planet upon which we live and
everything here. i believe he has a good point--we're
so wrapped up in our jobs and television and movies that
we almost never consider what's here that we can't see.
and as much as i dislike what the people involved
in television have done to our culture (it's not the
television's fault), i appreciate the show the x-files,
for that's one of the few shows that actually approaches
the possibility of there being more than we can see on
this planet with intelligence and respect.
awareness is seeing all around you
with different eyes-- appreciative eyes, wondering eyes.
it's knowing what you want out of life (and yes,
you have to ask yourself in order to find out) so that
you can go after it. it's knowing that things
change, and that what you want today may not be what you
want tomorrow. it's looking into the eyes of a
friend or another person and realizing that that's
another human being put on this planet with hopes and
fears and dreams and desires and needs.
as rilke says, "perhaps all the
dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting
to see us once beautiful and brave. perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something
helpless that wants help from us." awareness
is the ability to see that the way we see things isn't
necessarily the way things are--for every setback or
terrible incident, there may be hundreds of ways to see
it. we have to choose to be able to see many
possibilities, many explanations. if we get caught
up in being right all the time, we'll never have the
blessing of being aware.
tdw |
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To become
different from what we are,
we must have some awareness of what we
are.
Bruce Lee
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Isn't it splendid
to think of all the things there are to find out about?
It just
makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world.
Montgomery
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I
shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a
cloud, or a person. I
shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but
simply be glad that they are.
I shall joyfully allow them their "divine, magical,
and ecstatic" existence.
Clyde
S. Kilby |
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When
I speak about attention, I mean literally, "How much attention can
we pay to ourselves?"
As children, sometimes we cannot hold our attention for more than a
couple of seconds.
Over the years we are able to attend to more and more.
Yet, we're seldom schooled to hold life in respect, to enlarge our
ability to love,
take care of, and be respectfully connected with all things around us.
Brooke
Medicine Eagle
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There
is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends.
I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys.
The bright sunshine
on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the
clock ticking;
the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the
family come home;
Sunday-evening tea before the fire!
I have never missed one moment of beauty,
not even taken it for granted.
Spring, summer, autumn, or winter.
I wish I had failed as little in other ways.
Agnes Sligh Turnbull
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It
can be tempting to blame others for our loss of direction.
We get lots of information
about life but little education in life from parents, teachers, and
other authority figures,
who should know better from their experience.
Information is about facts.
Education is about wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.
But no matter how much advice you get, you are the one who chooses which
train to board.
As you pass through life, pay attention to the signs and
stations; if you don't like the scenery,
pull the emergency cord and get off the train.
There is no other conductor in charge.
There is no one who needs to give you permission to transfer.
This is your life. Your
journey. Your trip to
conduct.
Bernie
Siegel
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When
I found I no longer had the stamina to work long hours clearing the
fallen limbs
in the woods around my house, I began to bring a lawn chair and a
thermos with me.
I still work in the woods, but stop frequently to sit and have a cup of
tea. I’ve identified
birds
I didn’t know lived here and
evidence that a bobcat shares the property.
Since I’ve slowed
down some, I see things I never saw before and find that quiet solitude
is not lonely
but nurturing, allowing my heart to open to the signs
and lessons of nature that surround me.
Sallirae
Henderson
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A
prisoner lived in solitary confinement for years. He saw
and spoke to no one and his meals were served through an opening
in the wall.
One
day an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in
fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in
the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain
or two, and kept it under his tin cup at night.
One
day it suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years
of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an
ant.
Anthony
de Mello |
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We collect
data, things, people, ideas, "profound experiences,"
never penetrating any of them. . . But there are other times.
There are times when we stop. We
sit still. We lose
ourselves
in a pile of leaves or its memory.
We listen and breezes
from a whole other world begin to whisper.
James
Carroll
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One does not need to fast for days and meditate
for hours at a time
to experience the sense of sublime mystery which constantly envelops us.
All one need do is to notice intelligently, if even for a brief moment,
a blossoming tree, a forest flooded with autumn colors, an infant
smiling.
Simon Greenberg
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Even
sitting still on a lawn can open up to you a whole
new world, if you look long enough and closely enough.
There is a great deal of life available to you in such a place,
but we usually miss it as we walk quickly over it. Once I taught
in a building that had a tree growing right next to it, so from
our third-floor window we had a great view of the top of the
tree and all the bugs and birds that lived there or were stopping
by for visits. That close view taught me a lot about the tops
of trees, and I can't look at trees in exactly the same way any more.
Stop
today and look. Learn. Appreciate. See. Touch.
Feel. Looking closely is nothing more than using our
powers of observation, a gift that we were given that
we let lie unused far too often. If we do this, the
world becomes an awesome, incredible place.
tom
walsh
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