enlightenment  

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present.
Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.

Bill Watterson

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

J.M. Power

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There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of
themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.

Brooke Medicine Eagle

Right now, this very moment, you are asleep . . . Even if you are reading these
words in broad daylight--sitting at your desk or beside the kitchen table, your
feet firmly planted on the floor, eyes open, senses alert, feeling the weight of this
book in your hands as sounds of life rise and fall rhythmically around you--
you are deeply asleep, and dreaming furiously.

Vincent Casspriano, Jr.

The majority of people are not awake; it is only here and there that we find
one even partially awake. Practically all of us, as a result, are living lives that
are unworthy almost the name of lives, compared to those we might be living,
and that lie within our easy grasp.  While it is true that each life is in and of
Divine Being, hence always one with it, in order that this great fact bear fruit
in individual lives, each one must be conscious of it; he or she must know it
in thought, and then live continually in this consciousness.

Ralph Waldo Trine

I've continued to recognize the power individuals have to
change virtually anything and everything in their lives in
an instant.  I've learned that the resources we need to turn
our dreams into reality are within us, merely waiting for the
day when we decide to wake up and claim our birthright.

Anthony Robbins

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only
one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual
exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or
divine life.  To be awake is to be alive.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical means, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

Whatever noble aims we may have, paths we may be on, or necessary efforts
we may make, our only real freedom is to awaken now, this very instant, to
the mystery and miracle of being, to the spacious awareness that we are.
It is only this immediate awakening to the deepest levels of ourselves, to the
conscious source that connects us all, that will enable us to experience and
manifest real harmony, intelligence, kindness, love, and compassion in our
lives and bring about the transformation in the world that we all wish for.

Dennis Lewis

How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make
contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures
and pains, are born, grow up, live and die--but asleep!

Joseph Joubert

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.

Alan Watts

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.  They’re born asleep,
they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep,
they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand
the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.

Anthony de Mello

People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.

P. D. Ouspensky

Your life as it is happening is only half lived while half awake, lost in thoughts
of the future and neglecting your real and true life experience by failing to give
it the quality of attention that is warranted.  You are never fully where your life is,
yet you cannot be anywhere else.  This is a life of limbo, the in-between place
that does not exist, except in the space of your busy mind.

Aaron McNaught

Walking meditation is a way of waking up to the wonderful moment
we are living in.  If our minds are caught up and preoccupied with our
worries and our suffering, or if we distract ourselves with other things
while walking, we can't practice mindfulness; we can't enjoy the
present moment.  We're missing out on life.  If we're awake, then we'll
see this is a wonderful moment that life has given us, the only moment
in which life is available.  We can value each step we take, and each
step can bring us happiness because we're in touch with life, with the
source of happiness, and with our beloved planet.

Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Walk

enlightenment   

One must die; that is, one must free oneself from a thousand petty attachments
and identifications. . . . One is attached to everything in one's life, attached to
one's imagination, attached to one's stupidity, attached even to one's sufferings,
possibly to the sufferings more than to everything else. . . . Attachment to things,
identifications with things, keep alive a thousand useless "I"s in a person.  These
"I"s must die in order that the big I may be born.  But how can they be made to
die?  They do not want to die.  It is at this point that the possibility of awakening
comes to the rescue.  To awaken means to recognize one's nothingness.

G.I. Gurdjieff

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating
birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we
see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know
love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear
an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the
awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the
emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident,
all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back.  From then
on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in
the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment.  The eternal makes you
urgent.  You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back
from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.

John O'Donohue
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Now wake up.  I want you all to wake up.  Because I want you to know, you'll
start falling asleep as soon as you are confronted with that which you do not
want to hear.  You literally start falling asleep right in your chair.  And you'll
think, of course, that it's to do with something else other than what he's
talking about.  "I'm just tired."  That is the mechanism of the subconscious
when it starts confronting data that it does not want to fully receive or to
embrace.  "I'll just sleep through this part."  Be careful, because most of us are
sleepwalking through life.  So, be careful you don't spend your life sleep-
walking.  Stay awake.  Stay awake.

Neale Donald Walsch
Little Book of Life

Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are
who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that
they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.

Søren Kierkegaard

When we awaken, we find that we are part of the one great
Reality and we realize our union with all things.

Paramananda

enlightenment  

In Pali, the original language of the Buddha scriptures, the word Buddha
literally means awake.  “Awaken from what?” one might ask.  Awaken
from the dreams of delusion, confusion, and suffering; awake to all that you
are and all you can be.  Awake to reality, to truth, to things just as they are.

Lama Surya Das
Awakening the Buddha Within

In the face of circumstances that drive others to madness, awakened people
have a kind of calmness and serenity inside them. They’re in charge of how
they react. They’re not calculating, they’re not cold, they’re not emotionless
people—they simply know how not to make negative assessments of the
world and what’s in it. They practice having healthy reactions to whatever
happens, rather than practicing ego-driven behavior.

Wayne Dyer
Happiness Is the Way