On Awakening

Collection of Quotes about Awakening






"I wish to become a teacher of the Truth."
"Are you prepared to be ridiculed, ignored and starving till you are forty-five?"
"I am. But tell me: What will happen after I am forty-five?"
"You will have grown accustomed to it." Wellsprings : A Book of Spiritual Exercises (1985), p. 19




Spirituality means waking up. 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 that we call human existence. You know — all mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare. As quoted in Approaching God : How to Pray (1995) by Steve Brown, p. 94




The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body. Awakening : Conversations with the Masters (2003), p. 24




"What, concretely, is Enlightenment?"
"Seeing Reality as it is," said the Master.
"Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?"
"Oh, no! Most people see it as they think it is."
"What's the difference?"
"The difference between thinking you are drowning in a stormy sea and knowing you cannot drown because there isn't any water in sight for miles around." Awakening : Conversations with the Masters (2003), p. 221

One Minute Wisdom (1989)


Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?

Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose? This is what Wisdom means: To be changed without the slightest effort on your part, to be transformed, believe it or not, merely by waking to the reality that is not words, that lies beyond the reach of words. If you are fortunate enough to be Awakened thus, you will know why the finest language is the one that is not spoken, the finest action is the one that is not done and the finest change is the one that is not willed. Introduction

To a disciple who was forever complaining about others the Master said, "If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth." Transformation

To a visitor who asked to become his disciple the Master said, "You may live with me, but don't become my follower."

"Whom, then, shall I follow?"

"No one. The day you follow someone you cease to follow Truth." Discipleship

"Why is everyone here so happy except me?"

"Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere," said the Master.

"Why don't I see goodness and beauty everywhere?"

"Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside." Projection


There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law.
"Obedience keeps the rules," he would say. "Love knows when to break them." Revolution


"You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone."
"What then is a Master for?"
"To make you see the uselessness of having one." Blindness




The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two. Identity
"Help us to find God."
"No one can help you there."
"Why not?"

"For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean." Discovery

To a visitor who described himself as a seeker after Truth the Master said, "If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else."
"I know. An overwhelming passion for it."
"No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong." Humility




When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself. Violence

Is there life before death? — that is the question! Irrelevance

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance. Wisdom

When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today. Wisdom

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die. Flow

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?" Restriction

People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change. Healing

A disciple said to him, "I am ready, in the quest for God, to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?"

The Master calmly replied, "One's beliefs about God." Belief

Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description. Comprehension

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum: Those who know do not say; Those who say do not know.

When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant.

Said the master, "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?"

All of them indicated that they knew.

Then he said, "put it into words."

All of them were silent. Words


When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence. Comprehension


Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self. Emptiness

The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see. Non-Instruction

The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen. Trust

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it. Thought

A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality. Thought

Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practise this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise. Revelation

The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept "God." Incompetence

A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries.

Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy. Persecution

The Master never ceased to attack the notions about God that people entertain. Prayer

A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories. Cultivation

The feigning sleeper can delude others — he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself. Deception

If you never condemned you would never need to forgive. Judgement

A zealous disciple expressed a desire to teach others the Truth and asked the Master what he thought about this. The Master said, "Wait."

Each year the disciple would return with the same request and each time the Master would give him the same reply: "Wait."

One day he said to the Master, "When will I be ready to teach?"

Said the Master, "When your excessive eagerness to teach has left you." Aggression




"What is love?"

"The total absence of fear," said the Master.

"What is it we fear?"

"Love," said the Master. Fearlessness




The Master insisted that what he taught was nothing, what he did was nothing.

His disciples gradually discovered that Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.

That transformation is the consequence not of something done, but of something dropped. Purification




A writer arrived at the monastery to write a book about the Master.

"People say you are a genius. Are you?" he asked.

"You might say so." said the Master, none too modestly.

"And what makes one a genius?" "The ability to recognize." "Recognize what?"

"The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being." Genius




Much advance publicity was made for the address the Master would deliver on The Destruction of the World and a large crowd gathered at the monastery grounds to hear him.

The address was over in less than a minute. All he said was:

"These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness." Humanity




"What kind of a person does Enlightenment produce?"

Said the Master:

"To be public-spirited and belong to no party,

to move without being bound to any given course,

to take things as they come,

have no remorse for the past,

no anxiety for the future,

to move when pushed,

to come when dragged,

to be like a mighty gale,

like a feather in the wind,

like weeds floating on a river,

like a mill-stone meekly grinding,

to love all creation equally

as heaven and earth are equal to all

— such is the product of Enlightenment."

On hearing these words one of the younger disciples cried, "This sort of teaching is not for the living but for the dead," and walked away, never to return. "

Being a Vegetarian

A change of diet will not change a man who will not change his thoughts. Pure thoughts leads to a pure actions and diet. Impure thoughts leads to impure actions and diet.

A change of consciousness will lead to a change of diet. High levels of consciousness leads to a high standard choice of food. A low level of consciousness leads to a low standard choice of food.

As within, So without. As abo
ve, So Below.

Its not something you force yourself to do. When your consciousness change your diet will naturally change too.

It all starts from the inside.


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These great vegetarians, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Nikola Tesla, Shopenhauer, Thoreau, Leonardo Da Vinci, Voltaire etc. knew there could be no spiritual advancement while attaining ones nourishment from cruelty and the exploitation of others.

Albert Einstein:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

Leonardo DaVinci:
"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men." DaVinci claimed that flesh eaters were using their bodies as "grave yards."

Charles Darwin:
"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."

Thomas Edison:
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

George Bernard Shaw:
"We pray on Sundays that we may have light to guide our footsteps on the path we tread; We are sick of war we don't want to fight. And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead."

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
"Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals slake his thirst with the steaming blood."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "Economy" (1854):
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Henry David Thoreau:
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Mark Twain:
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Benjamin Franklin:
Flesh eating is "unprovoked murder." On the subject of vegetarianism, Franklin noted that one will achieve "greater progress, from the greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension."

Thomas A Edison, 1847-1931:
"The Doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease."

Francis of Assisi:
"Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission-to be of service to them wherever they require it."

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi:
"To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

Abraham Lincoln:
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

Thomas Paine:
"Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty."

Henry Salt:
"The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone."

Albert Schweitzer:
"...the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."

George Bernard Shaw:
"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."

Leo Tolstoy:
"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

Alice Walker:
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men."

President Abraham Lincoln:
I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

Pythagoras:
Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul.

Pythagoras:
The earth affords a lavish supply of richess of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.

George Bernard Shaw:
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw:
All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw:
Animals are my friends; I don't eat my friends.

John Robbins (p. 49 Diet for a New America):
Our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative. If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi:
"To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

"I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian." ~ George Bernard Shaw

In addition to his writings on non-violence, Leo Tolstoy's advocacy of vegetarianism led to his friendship with Mohandas Gandhi. He wrote several essays about vegetarianism, but perhaps never more compellingly than when he said:
"flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is contrary to moral feeling: killing."

Nikola Tesla was a humanitarian who loved animals. He argued that animal slaughter was “wanton and cruel” and eventually became a vegetarian.

Voltaire was an advocate of civil rights and freedom. He also believed in the virtues of vegetarianism. He once wrote that "men fed upon carnage, and drinking strong drinks, have all an impoisoned and arid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different ways." This sounds like an early precursor of the phrase "you are what you eat."


-Borrowed this from Dawning Golden Crystal Age

Law Abiding Citizen

Conveyor Belt

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

 -Steve Jobs

The unfortunate thing is that most schools and educational systems operates just like religion. It does not teaches us to question and probe. It teaches us to be dependent upon authority and that it is always correct and absolute which is often incorrect and dangerous for a person's independent development. 

And because of that, we have a society where most people are lost and lives in fear and guilt every single day of their lives. Either you go to hell or you get punished by the environment when you don't follow the herd.

This kind of conveyor-belt factory approach does not work and does not allow the person to discover its true identity towards self-actualization. 

Just like a forest, it will be sad if it only has one flower or one plant or a single tree. Being different and diverse is lovely, It brings color to life.

I have seen good and great schools but they all suffer from a tendency to reward conformity and to punish anyone who questions or does not conform to their ideal. 

We were not taught the causes and the effect of history and the events and dates. We were not taught to think for ourselves but to know the facts rather than to bring out the best in each of us and be independent and self-reliant.

The most dangerous person for a government or any authority figure is the person who thinks for himself is independent, wealthy and sophisticated individual who can take care of his/her own needs. The perfect citizen for a authority figure is a needy one because the more you need an authority figure the more controllable you are. 

True power comes from within. Think for yourself. 

Think different.

Emotional Roller-coaster

“The man who thinks hateful thoughts brings hatred upon himself. 

The man who thinks loving thoughts is loved.” 

― James Allen

Mankind most of the time, only engage in intellectual ideas or concepts about loving one another and thy neighbor. 

Love, often times becomes just a wonderful idea but they don't know that the moment something or someone displeases you, you have forgotten there was Love in the Universe for the moment. When the anger goes forth or the criticism or the condemnation or blame or discontent-or whatever it is- the moment the feeling is there, Love is gone from your world.

This happens most of the time, because mankind is not taught how to govern their feelings we go to church attend seminars just to feed our mental hunger for knowledge. And most Godly virtues only exist in the intellect and not on practice. Just like a boat, knowledge without action is like a boat on dry land.

Now, many times when your intellect knows that you want to handle a disturbing condition by your mind but your feeling doesn't want to do it. Your intellect may know it's correct, and that you ought to do it; but your feelings rebel like fury against it. Because people lack the control in their feelings and only strong people could handle their feelings well, weak ones easily give in to temptations.

From the cradle to the grave Government, Religion, Church, Groups, Organizations in this world mostly only teach ideas or principles that nourishes the mind (food for thought), but not how to control their feelings. That is why even intellectually, you know what's the right thing to do, but the feelings or emotions takes over then you are easily swayed into doing the undesirable thing.

It is easy to judge, condemn or criticize another human being because that is what most people do (Herd Mentality) you see it in the news, facebook and in the environment and sometimes they even make fun out of it. Even me, slips from time to time because of the pressure of the environment but at least, I make effort to stop myself and stand for what is right even if I'm alone. And not because everybody is doing it, it is right.

I've always believed that no matter how much you criticize, gossip, blame, condemn another it will not change you or the situation. We have this saying in tagalog that "Kung wala ka din naman sasabihin na matino buti pang tumahimik ka nalang."

Imagine, if the time spent criticizing is spent on productive things like praying for the person to improve and sending loving thoughts or talking to the person or better yet taking action of becoming part of the solution instead of the problem, will do wonders not only for you but for the nation and environment as well.

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, 

whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, 

whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence,

 if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." 

-Philippians 4:8

Highly evolved people never talks about another person's flaw even in a non-threatening or joking manner.
When your mind and feelings is not focused on what you like, it is then focused on what you don't like- and you attract that in your life.

You have to lead by example. For things to change, you have to change.

People are bind because they bind others.

A Jar Full of Balls

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles roll
ed into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed..

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else---the small stuff.

'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.' The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

Be Right or Be Kind?