The New Paradigm Book of Quotes

Like koans, quotes can provide wisdom in short bites. In selecting new paradigm quotes for this section, I have included those that touched me deeply, that provide a collective map of values and visions that can serve as guideposts in our daily life choices and larger life journey's. From this point forward, we must make far wiser choices in order to overcome the momentum of the past errors that have produced the many threats and challenges to humanity's well being and the survival of life on Earth.

There are visionary voices here from the past, present and "future-present". I hope you may find them inspiring and empowering catalysts in your personal, community and business life. I imagine it might be possible for someone diving deeply into these quotes and allowing them to penetrate their mind, heart and soul to actually change the course of their life. One never knows what's around the next bend in life particularly if you have prepared the soil of your mind and heart to receive its wisdom. May these quotes lead you in the direction of your highest aspirations and possibilities and may you leave behind all else.

The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“BE POSSIBLE,” Change will say when it finds you, “Your permission to yourself is all I require of you.” ~ Tommy Bahler

We've all been given the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back. ~ Edo

The future is the present unrealized. ~ Ray Kurzweil

This is one of the rarest moments in the entire span of human evolution—after tens of thousands of years of separation, we are finally beginning to develop stories of “all of us.” With the old stories breaking down, and new stories not yet in place, the world is uniquely open to discovering “Great Transition Stories.” Our mission is to meet this window of opportunity with inspiring and empowering narratives that are grounded in lived experience. ~ Duane Elgin, Social Visionary

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBA's who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys. ~ Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind

Humans live by stories. But it is the sacred stories that guide us toward how we may live in balance with all other life, and what is most worthy of our respect, care, and cultivation. The modern world lacks a sacred story, which helps explain the economic, social, environmental, and political failings of modern society. Sacred activism begins with, and builds from, a story of a Sacred Earth Community. Grounded in indigenous wisdom, this sacred story reminds us we are embedded in the web of life, and recognizes that our well-being is only as great as that of the living Earth Community we come from, and are sustained by. ~ David Korten, www.davidkorten.org

What we're really looking for is a new story -- a story to live in to. Not old stories to live out of. That takes some extraordinary imagination. What do you know and why do you know it? We know with our hearts. We know with our gut. Our body tells us what we know. What some people call intuition, I call a perceptive sense that many of us have lost (nearly) complete connection to. Our mind processes this information and then takes action based on old information. It's time to redevelop our sense of knowing intuition. And feel that anything -- everything -- is possible. It's time to create the story we want to live in to. And become that story ourselves. ~ Peter Buffett

Black Elk’s word, ‘The center is everywhere,’ is matched by a statement from a hermetic, early medieval text, The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers: ‘God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.’ The idea, it seems to me, is in a most appropriate way illustrated in that stunning photograph taken from the moon, and now frequently reproduced, of an earthrise, the earth rising as a radiant celestial orb, strewing light over a lunar landscape. Is the center the earth? Is the center the moon? The center is anywhere you like. Moreover, in that photograph from its own satellite, the rising earth shows none of those divisive territorial lines that on our maps are so conspicuous and important. The chosen center may be anywhere. The Holy Land is no special place. It is every place that has ever been recognized and mythologized by any people as home. ~ Joseph Campbell

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

You become great by being exactly, and uniquely yourself. This is a call for more eccentrics, more individuals, more creative, unrepentant adventurers. Go where your heart and your instincts lead you. Follow your dream. Instead of following the "normal" highway, blaze a new path and leave a trail for others to follow. ~ Philip E. Humbert, PhD, TIPS for Extraordinary Living!

Everything has to do with loving and not loving. ~ Rumi ~ We are moving from a chain of command to a web of connection, from competition to collaboration, from markets to networks and stockholders to stakeholders, and greed to green. This collective rite of passage will unravel our world system based on the love of power and deliver us to one based on the power of love. ~ Anodea Judith, The Global Heart Awakens

The emergence of a form of direct-intuitive consciousness would likely instill within each person a sense of the greater cosmic whole; the realization that humanity exists and evolves within a universe of intelligence and meaning - a living universe. This would serve to impart within humanity a more profound, and acknowledged, spiritual impulse. This could then lead to increased intuitive faculties and extrasensory phenomena not only becoming an implicate part of our lives but also opening up access to greater creativity and inventive capacities for participating and designing our way ahead in the world. The rise of these attributes within a small percentage of people, initially, could eventually lead to a critical mass that would tip human consciousness into a new perceptual paradigm and worldview. ~ Kingsley Dennis

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. ~ Pablo Picasso

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms...And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. ~ Philip K Dick

Something from just beyond the horizon Calls us forward, To become who we already are, But do not yet know ~Rilke

There are so many activities, networks, plans, visions all in the air - with many people working to realize these catalyzing events. I come into contact regularly with people who are engaged with such 'game-changing' events. It feels as if the 'actualizing energy' is now flowing, allowing many people to connect and put their plans into action. We are now in a phase of 'doing'. People all over the world are expressing their frustration with the 'old energy', with many voicing their frustration publicly in the streets. What this also shows us is that there is a change in human consciousness under way - a shift in our perspectives and how we view things.

The 21st century will be the meeting point where the wisdom of ancient traditions can find a synthesis with modern science; as without an inner wisdom and maturity also guiding humanity there will remain an imbalance and many limitations. ~Kingsley Dennis, www.kingsleydennis.com

A sane society, like a healthy mind, must put ethics before science if it wishes to prosper. ~ Unknown

It is my firm conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet. ~ Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic

I foresee a world of such joy, abundance, and beauty that I hardly dare to describe it. This world is not a hope, it is an inevitability. I believe I will see it unfolding in earnest in my lifetime. It is my pleasure and my calling to do whatever is in my power to bring this world into being. It is already closer than close, a mere shift of perception away. This is true on both the personal and collective level. We catch glimpses of it, now and then, by the grace of something beyond our ken. It is a world where work and art are reunited, where no one asks, "How can I make a living?" but rather, "What is my gift to the world?"; where humanity is united in allowing the planet to heal; where money is an aid to generosity not competition or accumulation; where a multitude of long-suppressed and barely-imagined technologies, both material and psychological, blossom. I am not a dreamer. I know these transformations are inevitable, because they naturally accompany the new sense-of-self, the new human identity, that the present convergence of crises is propelling us toward. ~ Charles Eisenstein

But it is too late for me, you might say, I am already full-grown. Not so, for in the world of our inwardness, we are always growing…. We can return and begin again by facing ourselves. In this way, we can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard.… Instead of counting the scars from being hurt in the world, we can find and re-kiss the very spot in our soul where we began to withhold our trust. ~ Mark Nepo

Poetry should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a Remembrance. ~ John Keats

And then your life, the life you are telling me about, becomes a short story that had force only because it was viewed from a particular slant, your slant, which you found within the one language you speak. ~ Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compassion is the radicalism of our time ~Dalai Lama

Don't live someone elses life. Don't be trapped by dogma-whch is living with the results of other people's thinking. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Everything else is secondary ~ Steve Jobs Spiritual intelligence is the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the situation. In simple terms it is the ability to shift from the perspective of our ego-activated self and see and act from our higher self, our higher or nobler nature. ~ Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21

Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. ~ John Muir

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions . . . for the god wants to know himself in you. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We've all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back. ~ Edo

"The difference between reality and imagination wasn't ever clear to me at all. ~ David Lynch

Everything you can imagine is real. ~ Pablo Picasso

Individually, we are a drop in the ocean. Together, we are an Ocean. ~ Ryunosuke Satoro

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. ~ Tuli Kupferberg

Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning. ~ Joel Garreau, staff writer, The Washington Post and author, Radical Evolution

We're running out of options except to wake up.

If you want to know something, go elsewhere If you want to un-know everything, sit and listen.

There's a great space in which this moment takes place. There's a great silence that is listening to the thoughts ~ Adyashanti, http://www.adyashanti.org

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high. ~ Frances Moore Lappé, Time for Progressives to Grow Up

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom, but we must appeal as human beings to human beings, remember our humanity, and forget the rest. If we do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise. ~ Albert Einstein ~

Things can get better, so there's work to do. The world is not done yet.

Two-and-a-half million year old axes record the first moment that we understood that the world was malleable–that things can change and move, and that we can initiate those transformations ourselves. To be human is to tinker, to envision a better condition, and decide to work toward it by shaping the world around us. The work has enough love when enthusiasm transfers from the maker to the audience and bonds them. An improvisational structure enables us to get to work, because we no longer need to know where we are going-just choose a direction and trust the momentum.

Design is imagining a future and working toward it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire. Design is a practice built upon making things for other people. We are all on the road together. These two things dictate our relationship to the world and our bond to one another. They form the foundations of the design practice, so our work should revolve around these truths. ~ Frank Chimero,

The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed. We have the technologies to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play. ~ Lester Brown, Plan 3.0 and Plan 4.0

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never clearly understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. ~ Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays

Eternity now! Put your good where it can do the most. We’re all the same person trying to shakes hands with our self. We can all make a difference and have fun doing it. ~ Wavy Gravy, Wavy Gravy.net

I have often noticed that a person who depends on external things always lives a disturbed and anxious life and suffers many a disappointment, while the only person to live in peace and certainty is the one who leads a life based, not upon the passing show without, but upon the eternal within himself. ~ Ficino

5 Principles of Authentic Living

Be Present Pay Attention Listen deeply Speak Truthfully Act Creatively ~ Robert Rabbin

Don't let those who aren't in tune with you, distract you from those who are. ~ Mike Dooley, http://www.tut.com

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. ~ Albert Einstein

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir, artist

New World is the dynamic inter-mix of huge numbers of free people each creating their deepest desires. Then and only then does the world REFLECT imagination and creative force at work. ~ Jon Rappoport

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long. ~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

We’re at the point in our evolution that we all have to become conscious. This is a time of revolution. There’s no holding back. So I’m about tearing down the monastery walls and seeing the whole world as the monastery, as the practice, as the spiritual temple. What we’re all working on is this very being, this very life. This is the temple, it has no walls. ~ Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel from Big Mind · Big Heart

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ~ Elie Wiesel

Living among the Quechua of the Andes and Shuar of the Amazon, I learned that "the world is as you dream it." They said that the war, assassinations, and the brutality were the results of our greedy, materialistic, and exploitative dreams. We had given energy to a world-view that was threatening to destroy us. But, they continued, we could solve our problems. All we had to do was envision and energize a new dream.

For the first time in history we are communicating with each other around the planet, instantaneously. People are waking up. In Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the U.S. we speak out and demonstrate – not just against a war or racial inequality but against the corrupt system that fostered them which in recent years has catapulted exploitation to new levels. We are forging a new dream and we are taking action to energize it.

People around the globe are determined to take back the reins. We the People are on the march. We will not be stopped In these dark times of crises, there are many rays of hope. When we give energy to hope we offer ourselves and future generations the greatest gift possible. ~ John Perkins

I am on a mission with passion, inspired by wisdom of science, shaped by the beauty of nature and the arts. No one put me in charge, but me. The state of the world and the plight of billions make it impossible to accept a status quo, or simple an improvement. We need to give ourselves the freedom to go beyond the present, and even change the rules of the game without ever saying that one is bad, believing that everyone without any exception can always do better.

All endeavors are undertaken not to pursue self-enrichment or a satisfaction of the ego, it is a commitment to live life on a path that pursues a sustainable world where we are able to respond to the basic needs of all with what we have. A path that allows us to learn ever more and realize that the only science is a temporary one, and that we are in pursuit of discovery of the web of life. ~ Gunter Pauli, http://www.gunterpauli.com

We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation taking place before our eyes ... of a particular biological entity such as has never existed on earth-the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere. The coming stage of evolution won't be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of ManOur Earth

Conscious Evolution carries us beyond the human potential movement toward the social potential movement and describes a new social architecture to enhance and connect social innovations now evolving our world. Conscious Evolution identifies, out of the breakdowns in modern society, systemic breakthroughs demonstrating that we are in the midst of a positive quantum change — a metamorphosis of humanity ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Homo sapiens succeeded Cro-Magnon. But evolution has not stopped with us, enlightenment traditions say. Higher forms of humanity await future emergence. Our race is evolving to a godlike state, marked by states of consciousness which include the rationality and intellect of Homo sapiens but go beyond that with new faculties and depth of intelligence. ~ John White, author of The Meeting of Science and Spirit

I'm trying to imagine how people would govern themselves if they converged around defining characteristics other than political parties and nation-states, religious ideology and moral certitude -- the list goes on... not because these things would disappear so much as they would get so granular that other qualities would emerge and reveal whole new layers of overlap in a sort of "camaraderie of values" between people and communities. ~ Peter Buffett, Change Our Story, composer, author

When imagination is put on hold, a civilization dies. It can look like many other causes are producing the decline and fall, but at bottom it's the lack of imagination. That's why societies go into the swamp. That's why the individual decides his best choice is to be part of a group. A group has no imagination. A group can supply story-line to a seeking mind, but that's all. It can never supply the faculty that makes stories. This society provides millions of outlets that offer "better stories." But it doesn't offer the underlying power to create new stories. A human has the capacity to invent an infinite number of stories, but because most humans can't perceive the value of doing that, they, the only creatures on the planet who have this ability, toss it away like an old rag. They default. They shrug it off.

To understand life at a more expansive level, you have to go there. Imagine what victory in a war means when the survivors, on both sides, emerge with battered minds, bodies, and souls. The experience of war makes them see the future in different terms. ~ Jon Rappoport

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. ~ William Carlos Williams Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one person consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings they have lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them ~ Leo Tolstoy If life is only a passage, at least on this passage let us sow flowers.- ~ Michel de Montaigne, writer

Once the call of the True Self is heard not only with the heart but also with the mind and conscience there will be no way back to the way things have been. Sooner or later we will recognize that we no longer have any choice but to allow ourselves the extraordinary freedom to go all the way in this life. Because, after all, if we have begun to see through the illusory world that the ego creates and have heard the call of the True Self to live our lives for a greater purpose-what else is there to do? ~ Andrew Cohen from Living Enlightenment

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. ~ John Lubbock

The deeper I dive into gratitude ocean The more I become aware of my divinity The stronger my commitment is to uphold Spiritual principles ..light reveals itself with joy Now right now.. right here ..I make up my mind To be totally aware of the treasure within me Happiness already is ... Don't have to earn it WILL yourself to live your light THINK only thoughts that heal PERCEIVE clearly with sacredness BE mighty with humility DO the impossible consistently ACHIEVE the most memorable significant meaningful Don't pursue it let it come to you.. GRACE always does TRUST is traction BELIEVE is acceleration HOPE is power If you long to transform your imperfections LOVE them to death with compassion and kindness Peace ~ Carlos Santana. http://architectsofanewdawn.ning.com

Our Earth has the potential to be paradise and we have the power to design and build her into that dream world…Go Planet ! ~ Jim Channon, http://thecyberversity.com

This is not an era of change, it's a change of eras! Dr Paul Ray, sociologist, researcher, author, The Cultural Creatives

Wisdom never fights, it waits patiently, speaks positively, releases easily, sees benefit in everything and envisions a future of abundance…knowing that all needs will be met at the right moment, in the right way ~ Unknown

The written word was and is an extraordinary technological tool but it was the first step in the separation of knowledge from experience. It extended knowledge, in time and space, but away from self, and made invisible, and often forgotten, the source of knowledge, the reason for knowledge. There are trade-offs in the process of literacy which I think are very important to examine. Literacy allows detachment, lack of involvement, sometimes, and most important of all, irresponsibility to the essential understanding and retention knowledge. Physical-conceptualization is deeper and more lasting as a learning process, and the individual is propelled into a sense of responsibility by that process, that, I think, is why Bucky said invisibility can be "understood and coped with only by experience-educated mind. ~ Allegra Fuller Snyder

Things are getting better and better, and worse and worse, faster and faster. ~ Unknown

We are at a critical stage in our remarkable human journey on this planet: We are coming to a place where the road ends. From here on out, we will be making the road as we walk it, in ways we've never had to do before. We now have the job of forging our own evolutionary destiny, and being prime agents of the process of evolution here on earth. ~ Tom Atlee, http://www.co-intelligence.org

Building local centers that are self-sustaining and that can create forms of community that are not dependent on corporate forces is a political act, because these corporate forces need us to continue to consume their products and rely on their services. And the less we consume and the less we are hostage, the less we need these forces, the more independent we become. ~ Chris Hedges

During times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act ~ George Orwell

We are in love with inanimate objects that don't return our affection. ~ Eric Fromm

The pain pushes until the vision pulls. ~ Michael Beckwith I don’t want to gloss over the profundity of the paradigm shift we are accepting if we are to see nature as intelligent and purposive. To do so is to abdicate the exclusive domain to which we have appointed ourselves: the sole intelligence of the world. It is to humble ourselves to something greater, and seek our place not as Cartesian lords and possessors of nature, but as contributors to an unfolding process beyond our selves. This inescapable conclusion is, perhaps, the reason why teleology is anathema to orthodox science. Purpose was supposed to be our domain! And the king of that domain was the scientist, wielding technology to enact its dominion. ~ Charles Eisenstein

The future of the human race is to wake up ~ unknown

Photo:Joseph Crachiola

At what point do we begin to mistrust one another? When do we begin to judge one another based on gender or race?

The answer is contained in these lyrics from South Pacific

You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a different shade, You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!

If you don't go out seeking, if you don't retreat, if you don't put yourself into the wilderness with nothing to carry you, you will never see what you need to shed or what you need to gain. You will never change. And if you never change, neither will anything else. ~ Paul Kingsnorth

It’s easier than ever to convene, to organize, to create spaces where strangers will cease to be strangers and turn into allies and friends. Those that convene overcome their resistance just one time, and then benefit from the generosity they’ve delivered to the group. The only difference between a group of strangers and a group of friends is that the friends benefitted from someone willing to go first. When we weave together strangers and turn them into a tribe, we create real value, value that lasts. ~Seth Godin, Sea of Strangers

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it. ~ Antoine de St Exupéry

The world is my country, all mankind my brethren and to do good is my religion. ~ Thomas Paine Wisdom enters through the wound. Your scars are sometimes your greatest source of strength. ~ Michael Bungay Stanier

No matter what our attempts to inform, it is our ability to inspire that will turn the tides. ~ Jan Phillips, The Living Kindness Foundation

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) - -but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel(experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel(experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself--in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.- ~ E.E. Cummings

In zero-sum games, there's a clear winner and a clear loser. In positive-sum games, "everyone wins." In a positive-sum game, a rational, self- interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. Some competition will always be zero-sum — such as the competition for mates. ~ Steven Pinker, psychology professor, Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

The expression of hope can be quite static. The expression of Love is creative and moving; it promotes change. Hope tends to look outside for help and waits; Love looks within and finds the power of Self.

All that is happening in your present time/frame – from the most gross/negative to the ultra-positive – is a reflection of the whole human consciousness of that frame. There is truly no right and wrong, good or bad; there is only the individual expressions of fear/ deny or Love/accept, and all the shades in between that determine the eternal Now of each individual with the Whole. Neither innocence nor guilt, nor judgment and blame has any place within this; it is all self-determined.

No matter how noble the motive, fear is not the basis of unity. Fear-based actions threaten the extinction of many species of trees, yet if the defense of the trees is also based on fear, in consciousness nothing creative happens. Fear is a force of restriction, of separation. If a thousand fearful people plant a thousand trees a day, then fear plants the trees, and fear will just as surely remove them. In a year or a hundred years, a fear-based action will reap the harvest of separation and more fear.

If, however, a person plants a single tree each month, or each week or each year, and planting that tree is a pure expression of that person’s love, with no motive other that the joy of sharing life with that tree, then in consciousness this act will affect the entire universe – and Beyond. Love connects and creates. ~ Michael Roads, Journey Into Oneness

The work being done by conscious creatives in the realms of words, music, filmmaking and beyond, is too important to leave to the skewed bias of the old economic models. Our capacity to free ourselves from the illusions of the corporate imagineers is akin to seeing ourselves again for the first time in a long time. Our art is a reflection of ourselves, and our ability to truly see the reality behind the curtain: our world is dying, and She needs us to wake up.

Everyone is concerned about economics and right relationship to money; it sits at the center of our personal lives and our culture. All we have to do is look around us at the economic crisis to know that the old systems are collapsing. But what are the new ones that are coming in? We can enable our dreams, projects and visions to become reality through creative crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is one of the key pillars of our emerging social and economic paradigm. We can reinvent and reimagine our world through our relationship with giving, receiving, new currencies and tapping into a culture of generosity. Ian Mackenzie, Canadian filmmaker and crowdfunding expert

The desire for excellence is heating up. In a meaningful way we all have not just an opportunity but a responsibility now to give the greatest performance of our life. We can take the Directorial cues from our changing economic landscape. All of us are ready for a new scene. Our faltering systems calling for re-takes present us with the opening to answer the calling, to heed the heart strings, to toss all fears to the wind and courageously follow our passions, attune to the energies, restructure ourselves and our lives. A performance of a lifetime happens not by chance but by choice. ~ Dianne Collins, QuantumThink.com

In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. ~ Buckminster Fuller

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none. ~ Albert Einstein

I trust that a healthy balance can exist between "dreaming big" and "wanting small." This is especially true if we're able to keep our desires and aspirations in proper proportion with our gratitude and good intentions. By balancing these things, we can set our sights to achieve extraordinary things, practice thankfulness for what we have, and stay grounded in the wisdom that we don't always know what our life might hold and what is in our best interests. ~ Karen Horneffer Ginter is co-founder of the Center for Psychotherapy and Wellness and the author of 'Full Cup, Thirsty Spirit: Nourishing the Soul When Life’s Just Too Much

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ~ Maya Angelou

What is a thriving world? To me it is a world based on integrity, individual freedom, and voluntary cooperation. It's a world where not just some, but everyone gets to live the fullest life possible. ~ Foster Gamble

The truest measure of a life is not its length, but the fullness in which it is lived. If I am not myself, then the one they are loving is not me. ~ Maria Housden, author, Hannah's Gift

Questions are like lights that we can shine on the habitual, the reactive, and the assumed. Questions,are the central keys to transformation. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.” So make each day in your life new and more alive with great questions. ~ Clarisa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness until it flowers again from within ~ Galway Kinnell

Each individual we encounter in life is our teacher especially those difficult people who drive us crazy. By observing them, by observing our reactions to them and our feelings about them, we learn and grow and we discover that these challenging people in fact enrich our lives and connect us more deeply to our truest selves. ~John E. Welshons, One Soul, One Love, One Heart, http://onesoulonelove.com

Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive! ~ Bugs Bunny

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm. ~Winston Churchill

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.

Our duty as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If we are free, philosophy will strengthen our wings. If we are enslaved, philosophy will weaken our chains. ~ Stefan Molyneux, MA, Host, Freedomain Radio

As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but now ascending feminine. But why has the pervasive masculinity of the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition suddenly become so apparent to us today, while it remained so invisible to almost every previous generation? I believe this is occurring only now because, as Hegel suggested, a civilization cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching its own death. Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of man himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine. ~ Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

We are all coded in our very DNA with the Impulse of Evolution unfolding AS each of us. We are incarnating the Impulse as our own heart's desire to give our greater gifts. We are a vital planetary resource, especially when we develop a resonant community among ourselves to support others in their own unfolding. We need each other. Now that we are in the Post Birth or rather in the New Born Era of a Planetary Cocreative Culture we need to cultivate the resonant field that nurtures the seed of the new being that we are becoming. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Don’t play for safety. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world. ~ Hugh Walpole As more of us feel our goodness, the future of humanity and our planet will shift. ~ Sakyong Mipham, The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity's Hidden Treasure

For a whole new generation, the common good is becoming an ethic and a vision worth committing one’s life to. ~Jim Wallis, Editor, Soujourners and author, On God's Side: For the Common Good.

Perhaps change is less about fixing a broken world and more about uncovering hidden wholeness in all events, all organizations and all people and remembering our personal power to make a difference. Everyone and everything has in it a seed of a greater wholeness, a dream of possibility. Perhaps what I once saw as “broken” or “lacking” might just as easily be seen as the growing edge of things … a place to be valued and nurtured in our patients, our students and in ourselves. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, nationally recognized medical reformer and educator and author, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings

The most important networks are our own inner and inter-human spiritual, emotional, mental and physical connections. There is pure pleasure in engaging with another person in even the most simple contact: it lights up the circuits of the brain and heart, it makes us feel fuller, more connected to something bigger than us, whole, it instills faith and hope, it requires smiling, and is downright therapeutic on many levels, personal and societal. ~ Susan Stanton Rotman

I was an active member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for years. As campaigners, we did great things, and they were nice people. Then I read a book by Alastair McIntosh, and he said it’s no good being a campaigner if you’re not a good neighbor. Somehow, that hit home. I resigned from the campaign groups and went to my next-door neighbor. I told her about this movie about peak oil, and invited her to come over and watch it with me. She brought her husband and a friend who was ‘into this kind of stuff.’ I served tea and biscuits, and we watched the film. We talked about it a bit, and then one day, a solar engineer stopped by our street and put solar panels on my neighbor’s roof. I realized, Wow, this can be powerful! ~ John-Paul Flintoff, author, How To Change the World

At the moment, our society's notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. But it's time for a third metric founded on well-being, wisdom and our ability to wonder and to give back. ~ Arianna Huffington

I have taken life itself to be the primary phenomenon, and creativity, rather than ‘the conquest of nature,’ as the ultimate criterion of man’s biological and cultural success.

The Megamachine is the central theme of Western society: a social construction built upon absolutism, centralization, mechanization, regimentation, militarism, genocide, biocide, spectacle, and alienation – with attendant loss of the very qualities the species had developed through evolution: autonomy, human scale, spontaneity, diversity, communalism, and participation. ~ Lewis Mumford

While some of us are angry about the economic conditions in the world and some point fingers, others are turning lawns into vegetable gardens and organizing their neighbors to start pea patches and farmers’ markets. They’re getting together with neighbors to swap preserves and skills, and to relearn the skills their grandparents had. They are protecting local resources — water, land, forests and fisheries — that can offer sustenance into the future, and they are starting up energy and weatherization cooperatives.

They’re paying off their debt, moving their money out of big corporate banks to local banks and credit unions, and supporting local businesses. As they do, they are freeing themselves from the global corporate economy that moved jobs overseas and fueled the speculation that undermined the real economy of jobs, goods and services. These folks have chosen instead to use their resources to strengthen local economies and the small and medium-sized businesses that are most likely to create the new jobs of the next economy. These are the pioneers of the new normal, and you can find them building the foundations of a hopeful future in urban centers, small towns and suburbs. Perhaps you’re one of them. ~ Sarah van Gelder, Executive Editor, YES! Magazine.

These are times of revelation, and two things are getting revealed simultaneously: how our power has been taken from us, and how we can reconnect with our Source of true power. As I've likely mentioned many times before, the original meaning of "apocalypse" is "the lifting of the veils." The veils that Swami has called the "irony curtain" are being peeled away, and the sound of whistleblowers blowing whistles can be heard even through the media's blather of babblum.

It's easy to look at these times of radical (to the root) transformation as "end times." Certainly, it's the end of a way of being that is obsolete and unsustainable. But like the caterpillar transforming into butterfly, it is also a time for something else to be born. We on the planet today are right now living in two worlds, as one paradigm dissolves and another one emerges. In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and I call it "the changing of the Gods." ~ Swami Beyondananda

We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind. ~ Chris Hedges, “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

If as a college president you do stand up to oil companies, then you stand some chance of changing the outcome of the debate, of weakening the industry that has poured billions into climate denial and lobbying against science. The action you’re demanding of your students—less driving—can’t rationally be expected to change the outcome. The action they’re demanding of you has at least some chance. That makes you immoral, not them. ~ Bill McKibbon There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential either to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us. In Dispelling Wetiko, I pay homage to the way Native American traditions have long been tracking the very same psychic virus that I point to. Indigenous people’s articulation of the disease inspires all of us to track and bring into focus this elusive, nonlocal parasite of the mind.

Writing this book has helped me stay sane in a world gone mad. To quote the maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man … normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” Our species is clearly in the middle of a mass psychic epidemic, which I call “malignant egophrenia” and Native Americans call “wetiko.”

Whichever name we use, we are in the midst of a collective psychosis of titanic proportions, and one of its most stunning features is that very few people are even talking about it. Does that seem as crazy to you as it does to me? Our madness has weirdly become normalized, to the point where we don’t even notice it. This book is an effort to shine a revealing light on both the madness and the source of the madness, which is ourselves.

Living encounters with the psychic wetiko virus have disfigured, re-formed, and changed me. As a result, I am no longer who I was, while at the same time never being more myself. It became obvious that my life—just like everyone else’s—is a particularized microcosm, a personalized iteration of a collective macrocosmic fractal. ~ Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil

When you master your mind, you master your life.

As we hold ourselves (ALL of us) as if we are already living in an expanded, enlightened ield of consciousness, living in sync with new world view principles, and we are that right now—we authentically live the wisdom as walking-talking embodiments of the principles we’ve been singing to the choir all these years. This is not “positive thinking;” this is the realization that we are choosing to live from a new context. Context is neither true nor false. Context shapes reality. To live the wisdom, we put an end to the “the shift is on it’s way, yes it’s coming soon” conversation—and we live the new consciousness now. ~ Dianne Collins, Creator, QuantumThink, www.diannecollins.com

Mahatma Gandhi said that there is enough in the world for everybody’s need but not enough for anybody’s greed. At the moment, 1% of the population is greedy, while 99% are suffering. This 1% wants to be the superpower. But we need to embrace all of society. We need to solve social problems of poverty and wars with imagination and creativity, forgiveness. How much can you give? How much can you take? All problems can be solved by negotiation, friendship, giving in, letting go of ego and going into eco. Eco means home, eco means relationships. Let us make a shift from ego to eco, from self interest to mutual interest of whole human society. ~ Satish Kumar

Beware the effects of a fragmented society. Perhaps someone should express concern about having to live in a society where creativity is not only undervalued, but all but ignored. Creativity is vital for a balanced society, that is, in the schools, not because one might become an artist one day, but because the arts develop the heart — not only the rational mind. ~ Catherine Jones, Healing With Writing

Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are undergoing a rite of passage of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out on the stage of history with, as it were, the cosmos itself as the tribal matrix of the initiatory drama. Perhaps humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation, separating it from the larger community of life, from the cosmos itself, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis--an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. It is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, and we cannot really know where it is headed. I believe we have a choice. There are many possible universes, many possible meanings, floating through us.

We are not solitary subjects in a meaningless universe upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we just empty vessels, as it were, on automatic, playing out passively the implacable processes of history, of the universe, of our environment, of our genes. Rather, we are all miraculously self-reflective creative participants in a larger cosmic drama, in a co-evolutionary unfolding of reality. It is a complex process where both we and the universe are mutually creators and created. What seems to be unfolding is not only a recovery of the soul of the world, the anima mundi, but a new relationship to it. Something new is being forged. ~Richard Tarnas, author, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. www.cosmosandpsyche.com

Luke: I can't believe it. Yoda: That is why you fail.

The next phase of human evolution is the recognition that we are each and all cells in a super-organism called Humanity. The multiple crises we face are an invitation, an opportunity for our entire species to evolve. Some might call this evolution "heaven on earth". The cellular community beneath our skins would simply call it "health".

While evolution might sound fine and dandy in the ideal, when it comes to the "real deal" it can be messy and uncomfortable, particularly when we insist on holding on to structures (physical, mental and spiritual) that the forces of evolution are sweeping away because they have become obsolete in our lives. ~ Steve Behrman aka Swami Beyondananda

We have within us extraordinary creative potentials that have yet to be massively unleashed, leading to wide-scale cooperation, innovation, sustainability and peace. The solutions are available; it is only the human software that needs an upgrade. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. ~ Louis L'Amour

hat is why you fail." In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. ~ Richard Buckminster Fuller

The visionary is the only true realist. ~ Federico Fellini

All external sources of happiness are highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance. ~ Schopenhauer

Joy and Happiness are the indicators of balance. ~ Walter Russell

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of write. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need.” While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. ~ from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Only those who risk going too far will ever know how far they can go. ~ T.S. Eliot

The adventure of life is to learn. The goal of life is to grow. The nature of life is to change. The challenge of life is to overcome. The essence of life is to care. The secret of life is to dare. The beauty of life is to give. The joy of life is to love. ~ William Arthur Ward

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. ~ Howard Zinn

Living with integrity means... behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. ~ Barbara De Angelis

Ideas don't change the world. People who faithfully and tenaciously pursue and implement their ideas change the world. ~ Eugene Cho

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, All your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, Your consciousness expands in every direction, And you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself To be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.“

Patanjali - approximately 200 BC The Father of Yoga

Fame or Integrity: which is more important? Money or happiness: which is more valuable? Success or failure: which is more destructive? If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. ~ Lao Tzu

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. ~ John Manyard Keynes

Military weapons and wars are irrelevant. Issues and problems are increasingly global, not satisfactorily resolvable by individual nations. The real security threats to nations and humanity include: global warming, water shortages, epidemics that cross national boundaries, massive pollution sometimes carried by air and oceans around the world, piracy that can only be stopped by organized multi-national action, disintegrating economies, food shortages, and increased poverty. None of these problems can be solved by any nation alone; all require cooperation, conservation, sharing, mediation and diplomacy. War only exacerbates the problems and retards the most promising and necessary change. All of these problems mean that the wealthier people on the planet, for their own benefit, must not turn their backs to the increasing social and environmental needs of the less wealthy. ~ Alan Kay, Eliminating War

~ Jimi Hendricks

Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done. ~Paul Hawken We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high. ~ Frances Moore Lappé, Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Our government has forsaken its people – and the world – in the past. It is doing so again. We must demand that this cease and that those we elect protect the rights guaranteed by our Constitution – including the right to privacy and freedom of speech. Let the clarion call go out onAugust 15 that we will end the wars we are currently fighting and policies that keep expanding the gap between rich and poor, here at home and around the globe. ~ John Perkins

The planetary commons ... our atmosphere, our soil, our sea-life, the water, the forests … have no voice! That’s the bigger part of our world and definitely the biggest part of our future! We simply must expand our awareness to include the stage we all stand upon. Creating a comprehensive new global news format has to be near the top of the list for our world today.

We don’t need to wait to have governments lead us forward. They have some very vested interests in keeping things separate. It is critical to remember they are just social inventions like a county or a province or a territory. They are reported to have killed 160 million people last century because among other things they still, have too much ideology, patriarchy, hierarchy and just plain bloat. ~ Jim Channon, GO Planet

Creating the capacity for public wisdom in the 21st century is our task, our calling. We are the revolutionary founders of the new democracy. ~ Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom

You can’t change the world from the rear view mirror. —Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

It began on the Internet social networks, as these are spaces of autonomy, largely beyond the control of governments and corporations that had monopolized the channels of communication as the foundation of their power, throughout history. By sharing sorrow and hope in the free public space of the Internet, by connecting to each other, and by envisioning projects from multiple sources of being, individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments. They came together. And their togetherness helped them to overcome fear, this paralyzing emotion on which the powers that be rely in order to prosper and reproduce, by intimidation or discouragement, and when necessary by sheer violence, be it naked or institutionally enforced. From the safety of cyberspace, people from all ages and conditions moved towards occupying urban space, on a blind date with each other and with the destiny they wanted to forge, as they claimed their right to make history — their history — in a display of the self-awareness that has always characterized major social movements. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope

Many experts now point to an imminent paradigm shift: a transformation in the way we conduct our business, engage with each other and relate to life itself. For instance, Professor Michael Porter stated when addressing a business leaders forum in October 2011 ‘the old models of corporate capitalism are dead…we are witnessing a paradigm shift’. In 2012 John Elkington, in The Phoenix Economy report, notes that ‘the time is ripe for a true paradigm shift to a more sustainable economy.’ So here we are in 2013; there is no time like the present. The paradigm shift is not going to happen five or ten years from now, it is happening as we speak. ~ Giles Hutchins, The Nature of Business

Business is about maximizing relationships; the money is just a tool. ~ Judy Wicks, from her new book: Good Morning Beautiful Business.

I have the feeling that a whole new way of life is growing in the cracks of the old order. ~ UTNE Reader Survey Question

Strive not to be a success but to be of value. ~ Albert Einstein

“Entrepreneurial quality - is by far the toughest (criterion for a social entrepreneur).. For every one thousand people who are creative and altruistic and energetic, there's probably only one who fits this criterion, or maybe even less than that. By this criterion...we do not mean someone who can get things done. There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.” ~ Bill Drayton

Fear is the easiest way to keep humanity from evolving. From the fear of God, to the fear of paying the mortgage, to the fear of not being seen as cool. It’s a lockdown. Our culture has us in a chokehold at any cost. It doesn’t care about you or me. And fear is its go-to position. But by being fearless and "ending the world as we know it", we can usher in a new era. My new single "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" is available now. Buy it on iTunes or listen in my store here. ~ Peter Buffett, "The Skin We're In" The truth shall upset you free. Explore ways to "metabolize" the "residoo-doo." ~ Swami Beyondananda

The whole of humanity is somehow represented in each and every cell of our body. None of the positive or negative experiences we have escapers the highly conditioned design of our hologram. Our conscious life is like the tip of an iceberg, the visible portion representing only 3-5% of the whole that we actually are. The submerged portion of the iceberg is the subconscious portion of our life, the one that permeates cells with information and memory. The subconscious operates as if it were behind a veil, conditioning our way of perceiving and responding. Luis Diaz, Memory in the Cells, Founder, Change Agents University "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. ~ Winston Churchill

“As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with those contemporary facts.” ~ Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

We've built a world based on the assumption that we will have endless energy to subsidize endless economic expansion, which was supposed to magically produce justice. That world is over, both in reality and in dreams. Either we begin to build a different world, or there will be no world capable of sustaining a large-scale human presence. ~ Robert Jensen

At the level of ordinary consciousness, we deny pain and paradox. We doctor them with Valium, dull them with alcohol, or distract them with television. Denial is a way of life. More accurately, it is a way of diminishing life, of making it seem more manageable. Denial is the alternative to transformation. Personal denial, mutual denial, collective denial. Denial of facts and feelings. Denial of experience, a deliberate forgetting what we see and hear. Denial of our capacities. Politicians deny problems, parents deny their vulnerability, teachers deny their biases, children deny their intentions. Most of all, we deny what we know in our bones. We are caught between two different evolutionary mechanisms: denial and transformation. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time

The promise is that we are at the threshold of a consciousness revolution. Some compare the opportunity to the cultural renaissance of 15th- century Italy, which made room for humanity in a world ruled by an omnipotent God. The new, spiritual, renaissance opposes our god—the power of the market and technology—and offers humanity a new social place.

In past centuries, humanity has enthusiastically pursued the discovery of everything that can be seen and touched. The overwhelming question regarding the “why” of our existence—the understanding of consciousness—was shoved aside for the sake of convenience. But that doesn’t mean evolution can escape the question. In fact, physicists have been discovering ever-smaller particles. There is no smallest piece of matter. It seems that matter is ultimately dissolving in energy. At the same time, recent brain research shows that our thoughts—the proof of our consciousness—are energy as well. So it may well be that the science of matter is leading to the question of consciousness and bringing us closer to our biggest “why?” ~ from The Intelligent Optimist

Read more about how the revolution in our own consciousness will change everything: receive The Consciousness Issue in digital format in your e-mailbox, free.

Optimism requires courage and is rooted in action. It does not sit by and complain about what others are or are not doing, but rather takes action that makes a difference. Thus, optimism is self encouraging, as it can see the difference it makes and is compelled to continue doing so! ~Debbie Ford People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want, not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others, on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we can then become the change we want to see. ~ George Monibot

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has their own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein they cannot be replaced, nor can their life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is their specific opportunity to implement it. ~ Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense. Authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.” ~ Bruce Levine, Ph.D., Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

As a culture we seem to be approaching a certain awareness that things must change, and not just superficially. This awareness is arising, in part, because of the obvious decline in planetary health. But recent decades suggest that a sense of environmental ethics alone is not sufficient to provoke the level of change that is needed.

What does seem to be motivating people, however, is the growing awareness that many of the difficulties, problems and conflicts we experience as deeply personal—depression, poverty, joblessness, marital breakdown, loneliness, non-fulfilling work, sick children, the food we eat and medicine we are given—are related to the framework of beliefs and behaviors provided by our cultural world view or paradigm. http://www.wakinguptogether.org/thegreattransformation.shtml

Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. And when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists – they don't want to ask for things. It's not easy to ask. … Asking makes you vulnerable. ~ Amanda Palmer, musician and Kickstarter success story

This we are now is not imagination, not a grief or joy, an elation or a sadness. These come and go. This is the Presence that doesn't. ~ Rumi

Ayahuasca has a very insistent message. It's one of those universals that almost everyone who drinks the brew, sooner or later reports. It's about the sacred, magical, enchanted, interconnected, infinitely precious nature of life on earth and the interdependence of material and spiritual realms. It and many other historical mind altering substances in Greece, India, Egypt, were used in responsible ways to help us balance our harmony with the universe and to remain aware of our spiritual connection to life. There is a war on consciousness today. We must have the adult right of sovereignty over consciousness to responsibly use visionary plants should we choose. Our destiny might be forestalled by this prohibition. ~ Graham Hancock There is no more time to play along with the rules and engineered social scenery produced by the 'global old boys club' from the past. The old paradigm is not just getting chaotic - thankfully its dying and we now step forward over the threshold into potential for the goals sought by all previous generations: Truth, peace, justice, love and true representation. ~ Colin Andrews at Rio Rico, Arizona - 28 October 2009

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetised commonwealth that it consumes, the financial capital has turned to devour its own body: the industrial economy that it was supposed to serve. ~ Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

Our primary hope lies in changing our behavior and expectations. We must learn to live with less. Plan for economic stagnation or contraction. Share more. Create community. Policy makers should aim to shrink the financial industry, reduce economic inequality, stabilize and reduce population levels through family planning, decentralize food and energy systems, and build resilience throughout society. Replacing GDP with an economic indicator that measures quality of life and environmental integrity would also be a very useful tactic, as it would help policy makers shift their efforts to areas where social progress is still possible. Consuming more doesn’t necessarily make people happy, but beautiful neighborhoods where people know and trust one another, and communities where individuals have greater control over the circumstances of their lives, foster a sense of satisfaction that money alone can’t buy. ~ Richard Heinberg

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. ~ Charles Mingus

The basic insight I see is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception is that there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better. The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy. And now the field is open. This is a very important achievement. ~ Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher, and Professor

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Until Now! ~ Caroline Casey's mantra when people get caught up in negative talk. Caroline is the brilliant host of the Pacifica radio show The Visionary Activist

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before. To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know." - G.I. Gurdjieff

Cowardice asks the question: "Is it safe"? Expediency asks the question: "Is it politic"? Vanity asks the question: "Is it popular?" But conscience asks the question: "Is it right?"

We have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living plant: to hurt it or to help it. ~ Ray Anderson, Founding Chairman of Interface, Inc.

Women know how much time, love and effort goes into raising a child. When war arises, all that is reduced to nothing . . . this is why women's active participation in conflict resolution is of great importance.

We have the power to alter our destiny...

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place.

[GNP] values, for example, bombs and bullets since they are things that are produced for money. It does not value the environment. It values salaries paid to teachers, but it does not value what people know -- how educated they are. It places no value on `human capital,' meaning people. It does not even place a value on the public infrastructure.

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.

~ Hazel Henderson, Futurist and Evolutionary Economist

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one what is right." - Martin Luther King

"Presentism" has brought about the end of storytelling and completely changed branding, culture, politics and our personal lives. Much of what we are using to grow ourselves, our businesses, our families, and our organizations to the next level are artifacts of an old evolutionary paradigm based in duality, scarcity, and a Newtonian model of cause and effect – all of which have been shattered by discoveries in quantum physics, cutting edge brain science, and mind-body medicine. Even many sincere spiritual teachings of the ‘new age,’ when not combined with an understanding of this law, often lead to just ‘spiritual materialism’ — causing the same stress, struggle, fear, and failure that so many people suffer from. The “real-time, always-on, pervasive, and constant” nature of reality impacts companies, brands, political movements, societies-- humanity. As we move into a more presentist society, we begin to see steady-state economic systems come into play. Think Etsy, but writ large. Peer-to-peer trading, local reinvestment, and nonpublic companies that are not required to grow.

Companies need to market by giving their customers and other constituents the facts they need to promote the brand to friends and others. All we’re looking for is what I call "social currency"--good excuses to share information with other people. So give us the ammo we need to use your brand as a badge of green, local, or some other form of social responsibility. And then give us the data we need to communicate this. We will do the work for you. Just give us the ammo we need to tell "our" story. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682643

The Law of Emergence: A Revolutionary Principle for Achieving Your Full Potential, is the first course to explain this evolutionary process; a process that will free you from the need to look outside for answers and authorities, from trying to add something to yourself, fill up places you perceive are empty, or even ‘attract’ things to you. It will reveal the secret of your true sovereignty and power, the fundamental principle great mystics have tried to teach, but that has been largely lost; a principle great leaders in every field have utilized to create masterpieces, build empires, and ignite revolutionary forces that have propelled society forward, yet it has rarely been understood or easily repeated. At a time when so many people are living a prodigal life, feeling cut adrift, fearful, and spiritually impoverished, The Law of Emergence will bring you home again, where you will find peace, renewal, and the inspiration to fulfill the great purpose for which you were born. ~ Eric Rydell, http://lawofemergence.com

We spent the last century building a massive global economy to run on cheap liquid oil, not on solar or wind. We need to wean ourselves off our high-energy lifestyle. We’ve got to transition to a way of life that’s slower, more local, less plastic, more renewable, more . . . organic. Fortunately, our satisfaction and well-being do not depend upon maintaining unsustainable levels of consumption. If, as a society, we focus more on the quality of our communities and the integrity of our relationships, we’ll be far happier, even as we burn less petroleum. We’d be foolish to wait for events to settle the debate once and for all. Let’s say goodbye to oil; it’s saying goodbye to us. ~ Richard Heinberg, http://richardheinberg.com/museletter-242-our-cooperative-darwinian-moment

"When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up" - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." - Gandhi

"Anything is one million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatorily: Does this path have a heart?" - Don Juan Matus

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." - Carl Gustav Jung

"Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call *samsara* and which our Holy Bible calls *dust*." - Jacob Needleman

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Genius is often expressed through a change of perception -- a modifying of context of paradigm. The mind struggles with an unsolvable problem, poses a question, and is open to receive an answer. The source that this answer comes from has been given many names, varying from culture to culture and time to time; in the arts of Western civilization, it’s traditionally been identified with the Greek goddesses of inspiration called the Muses. Those who are humble and grateful for illumination received tend to have the capacity to access genius; those who credit the inspiration to their own ego soon lose this capacity, or are destroyed by their success. High power, like high voltage, must be handled with respect. Genius and creativity then, are subjectively experienced as a witnessing; it’s the phenomenon that bypasses the individual self or ego. The capacity to finesse genius can be learned -- though often only through painful surrender -- when the phoenix of genius arises out of the ashes of despair after a fruitless struggle with the unsolvable. Out of the defeat comes victory; out of failure, success; and out of humbling, true self-esteem.

~ David R. Hawkins, "Power vs. Force"

National governments, once the proudest achievement of the biosphere, are now a planetary auto-immune disorder fighting the butterfly of a unified humankind as it liquidates the caterpillar to make room for wings. (Yes, “liquidates.” Economic crisis is a symptom of transformation. You can’t do that much mindless eating without having to reckon with your debt.) ~ Michael Garfield, paleontologist turned performing philosopher, his multimedia maps of the evolutionary landscape and our place in it are an attempt to demonstrate that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice. Follow him on twitter: @michaelgarfield or visit his website,

How do you say "thank you" for sunshine or health...for clear days or gentle rains...for happiness, joy or love? You say it by sharing what you have. You say it by making the world a better place in which to live. ~ Thomas D. Willhite

Being here means so much, and because all that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us / and strangely concerns us. To have been on earth just once -- that's irrevocable. Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about. / You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos / where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show / him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation / until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours.

Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less. More being than I'll ever need springs up in my heart. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

"Don't worry about whether or not I am now happy. Today is only chapter one. We have yet to write the book." ~ Lois Wyse

Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew. ~ Dan Millman

The purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others." ~ Albert Schweitzer

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order. -Henry Miller

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. -Carl Jung

We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously. -Epicurus

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ -Martin Luther King Jr.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them. -Brenden Francis

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement. -Aldous Huxley

Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward. -Achaan Chah

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it. - Buddha

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. -Goethe

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -Leonardo da Vinci

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. -Thornton Wilder

If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. -Lao Tzu

Let him that would move the world first move himself. -Socrates

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. -Saint Francis de Sales

Many writers, artists, and musicians have talked about having the experience of suddenly tapping into a dimension of their being where they could see the whole painting already done, or sense the whole book already done, or literally hear the completed song playing – and all they had to do was be a channel for it or take ‘divine dictation’. The word ‘human’ actually comes from a Sanskrit term meaning ‘the dispenser of divine gifts’. And that is what we’re here to do — to draw these patterns from the invisible and dispense them on earth. Self-actualization and true fulfillment are not about adding anything to you, but about ‘seeing’ your True Self, releasing everything it isn’t, and allowing your life to unfold according to its perfect pattern. ~ Derek Rydall, http://lawofemergence.com

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne

"We are currently in dire need of evolutionary advancement and don't have time for a slow,gradual evolution" ~ Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in Spontaneous Evolution

You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now. ~ Wallace D. Wattles fromThe Science of Getting Rich

I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. ~ Mark Twain

Only by placing living above thinking can we get away from the re-breathed air of philosophy and recapture some of the freshness and naturalness of the true insight of the child."

The world as we have known it is coming to an end and a new world is being born. Our new world will have new technologies, new ways of doing business, new ways of people relating to each other, new forms of medicine, and new ways of participating consciously in our evolution. Humanity stands at the threshold of a new era with exciting and mind blowing new opportunities to dissolve old paradigms, painful challenges and terrible injustices. ~ Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. psychologist, anthropologist, author, founder of The Four Winds Society. (energy medicine)

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

The ultimate advantage is in adding value to others ~ Tony Robbins

The question at the heart of all my work: Life in service of business? Or business in service of life? ~ Gil Friend, Natural Logic

Success comes when you commit to make an impact on every life you touch! ~ Windy Lipton-Dibner

The Institute for Sustainable Engineering (www.ise-now.com) (Dr. Tony Pereira) envisions a prosperous, free, decentralized, sustainable world. “...the design, architecture and engineering of state-of-the-art sustainable, renewable, solar energy powered, organic food producing, and non-toxic built environment, homes, residences, offices, buildings, schools, cities and communities that are economical, safe to live in, long lived, low maintenance, use the smallest amount of energy and resources both for construction and life supporting service, produce their own energy and recycle their own waste, human waste included, collect and recycle water, all working in balance and harmony with the natural environment: air, water, soil and light.” ~ Dr. Pereira

"This is a state of love-filled delight in possibilities and eager joy at the prospect of actualizing them. Bright faith goes beyond merely claiming that possibility for oneself to immersing oneself in it. With bright faith, we are lifted out of our normal sense of insignificance, thrilled as we no longer feel lost and alone. The enthusiasm, energy, and courage we need in order to leave the safe path, to stop aligning ourselves with the familiar and convenient, arise with bright faith." - Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

As physicists keep discovering ever-smaller particles, it seems that matter is ultimately dissolving in energy. At the same time, recent brain research shows that our thoughts--the proof of our consciousness--are energy as well. Some pioneering scientists link the two and propose that both matter and thought ultimately come from the same field--the Akashi field, the zero point field.

In this vision, that field links all of us, and all what we do. From that perspective there's nothing we can do that doesn't have an impact on all of us and on our environment. That growing realization will surely increase our consciousness. It will drive us to new ways of living and working together. That's why the exploration of our consciousness is the mission of our lifetime. There's no other and more sustainable way to the better world we seek. And the good news is that your next meditation practice, your next moment of mindfulness, or your next encounter of compassion will be adding to our joint understanding and discovery. We are on our way to becoming who we truly are. ~ Jurriaan Kamp

As the awareness of our interconnectedness with others and, beyond that, to the plant and animal kingdoms and the cosmos continually emerges, we will awaken to the fact that in the largest sense, there is only one of us here. Infinite forms of the one in every vibrant color of the rainbow. In that recognition lies the joy of understanding, the dissolution of separation and war, and the manifestation of peace on earth. ~ Jeff Hutner

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. ~ Anonymous

The closeness of your relationships is directly proportional to the degree to which you have revealed the truth about yourself. It can be painful. ~Anonymous

Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see greatness within you even when you don't see it yourself. ~ Edmund Lee

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge That myth is more potent than history That dreams are more powerful than facts That hope always triumphs over experience That laughter is the only cure for grief And I believe that love is stronger than death. ~ Robert Fulghum

"Life is nothing to be very serious

about. Life is a ball in your hands to

play with. Don't hold on to the ball."

-- Ravi Shankar, sitar virtuoso

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these. ~ George Washington Carver

A text without a context is pretext. ~ Author Unknown I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ Abraham Maslow

It only takes one person to change your life--you. ~ Ruth Casey

God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius. ~ Anna Pavlova

Change cannot be avoided...change provides the opportunity for innovation. It gives you the chance to demonstrate your creativity. ~ Felice Jones

Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is. ~ Mary Anne Roadacher-Hershey

When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven ~ Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment,

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life... ~ Nisargadatta

An object is limited when it is believed to be separate and independent of Awareness but infinite when understood to be an expression of Awareness itself. ~ Rupert Spira

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Since everything is but an illusion, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing! ~ Longchenpa

Lift Each Other Up We are put on this Earth with the ability to decide how we interact with those around us. By lifting each other up instead of putting each other down, we create a sustainable and flourishing support system and community. We allow our friends, loved ones and even strangers the space and room to shine. When we support those around us, we are in turn supporting ourselves and our world.

How can you lift those up around you? No act too big nor too small... please share with us how you lift others up in your life!

Click here to share your kind acts and words with us!

It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days, but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze. --Boris Pasternak, poet

I have been running so sweaty my whole life Urgent for a finish line And I have been missing the rapture this whole time Of being forever incomplete --Alanis Morissette, Incomplete anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you --David Whyte, poet

I found out that there weren't too many limitations, if I did it my way. --Johnny Cash,

I am not the person who is singing I am the silent one inside. . . . I am not my house, my car, my songs They are only stops along my way. . . . --Paula Cole, Me

Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. As long as you stick to good, you'll never have real growth. --Bruce Mau, designer

If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all. --John Keats

I do not want to be folded for where I am folded, there I am a lie. --Rilke

Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight-- how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly. --Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else-- your strengths. This doesn't mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you'll grow most where you're already strong. --Marcus Buckingham, Now, Discover Your Strengths

The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder in modern life. --Thomas Moore, Original Self

An integral being knows without going, sees without looking, and accomplishes without doing. --Lao-tzu

Take a nap Making the mountain water Pound the rice. -- Kobayashi Issa

Whenever there is enthusiasm, there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of. --Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

The longing for happiness and freedom from suffering expresses the great natural potential of mind. --Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist lama

The one who asks questions doesn't lose his way. --African proverb

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius is the ability to receive from the universe. --I Ching

You are what you think about all day. --Allen Ginsberg

You can't change the world from the rear view mirror. --Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all. --Ben Okri, Mental Flight

How you get so high? . . . from not being afraid to fall out the sky. --Jay Z, Beach Chair

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering. --Alan Watts, Zen master

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. --Aristotle

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. --Saint Thomas

Losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing. A real tragedy? That's the loss of the heart and soul themselves. If you've abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern. Live your truth, losses be damned. Just like that, your heart and soul will return home. --Martha Beck

The way is light and fluid for the man with no preferences. --Lao-tzu

Love everyone. Trust few. Paddle your own canoe. --Anonymous

When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion. To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone. --Stephen Levine

A lot of the time, it's better to quit than to be the hero. -- Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson, authors of Rework

The entire universe is a great theater of mirrors. --Alice Bailey

I am my best work-- a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines. --Audre Lorde, poet People who earn the label creative are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is that most schools and organizations train us out of those habits. --Guy Kawasaki, Reality Check

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. --Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Education must teach us to deal with uncertainty. ~ Author Unknown

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. --Margaret Fuller

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. --Osho

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

If it looks good, you'll see it. If it sounds good, you'll hear it. If it's marketed right, you'll buy it. But if it's true, you'll feel it. --Kid Rock

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. --Judy Garland

Rejoice and love yourself today 'Cause baby, you were born this way. --Lady Gaga

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but it is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage. --Seth Godin

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong. --Jack Kerouac

The market for something to believe in is infinite. --Hugh MacLeod

Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us! --Robert Burns

What is the why behind everything you do? When we know this in life or design It is very empowering and the path is clear. ~Jack Canfield

In the name of the Fire, The Flame And the Light; Praise the pure presence of fire That burns from within Without thought of time. --John O'Donohue

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. --Albert Einstein

Quit thinking time is out there. Take ownership of time-- acknowledge that you are where it comes from-- and it will stop owning you. Claim time as yours and it will release its claim on you. --Gay Hendricks

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. --Ayn Rand

Sales solve everything. --Mark Cuban

I find it quite curious and distressing that the wage gap-- the disparity between what men and women make-- captures so much attention, when the far more insidious problem is our own proclivity to settle for less.

The real reason under-earners are in denial is that they are afraid. An admission of truth makes us accountable to change. Denial keeps us stuck. Recognition sets us free. --Barbara Stanny, Secrets of Six-Figure Women

All the best things I did at Apple came from a) not having any money, and b) not having done it before, ever. --Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple

Don't spend it before you have it. -- Melody Biringer, self-proclaimed start-up junkie and founder of more than twenty businesses, most currently the CRAVE Company

Don't spend it when you get it. --Robert Kent, photographer and philanthropist

Grow organically. --Rikia Saddy, marketing strategist

Follow the money. -Plenty of people.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. --Albert Schweitzer

There is no union except in the same high effort. --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people. --Albert Einstein

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. --George Bernard Shaw

Of all the fires, love is the only inexhaustible one. --Pablo Neruda

That I spent, that I had; that I gave, that I have; that I left, that I lost. --Robert Byrkes, A.D. 1579

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. ~ Einstein

Give until it hurts. --The Dalai Lama

Spiritual practice is returning again and again to softness. --Stephanie Dowrick, Seeking the Sacred

That's why we're here-- to make a dent in the universe. --Hugh MacLeod

Givers get given to. --Russell Simmons

Now is blessed The rest Remembered --Jim Morrison, Wilderness

Ready, aim, fire? Fire. Fire. Fire. --Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Your way begins at the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. --Rumi

You're stronger, and you're better, and you're ready for whatever. --Alicia Keys, Wait Til You See My Smile

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. --Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again-- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm. --Seamus Heaney, poet

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. --Robert Hughes, art critic

If consensus is overrated, I think balance is, too. I have no interest in living a balanced life. I want a life of adventure. --Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity

In the end, the quest for balance is bogus. Love your burdens. Love them hard. And when your loves knock you down or your weak ankles trip you up, stop worrying about balancing -- 'cuz you're not-- and bounce. --Kelly Diels, Cleavage

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest. It's wholeheartedness. --David Whyte, poet

Enough of these phrases, conceit and metaphors, I want burning, burning, burning. --Rumi

You are in the perfect position to get there from here. --Abraham-Hicks

I forged you with my speech, No longer bereft, you blaze. --Emily Warn, poet

Capitalism, at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.” ~ Jon Ronson

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. ~ Franz Kafka Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you. ~ Eckhart Tolle from Oneness With All Life

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you can't choose between two evenly balanced courses of action to take, choose the bolder. ~ General W.J. Slim

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. ~ David Foster Wallace

Wherever I go, whomever I speak with, I sense a growing readiness for true evolutionary emergence – from state of emergency to state of emergent seeing. As Bruce Lipton says, crisis precipitates evolution, and as we look at our world, all forecasts indicate the chances of precipitation are 100%. In Swami’s words, it’s time for Humanity to “shift or get off the pot!”

That shift involves us individually and collectively upshifting our focus from problems to solutions, from a you-OR-me reality to a you-AND- me Reality, from mere survival to full-on thrival. If this seems utopian, here’s what I learned writing Spontaneous Evolution: What you and I might think of as heaven on earth, the community of cells beneath our skins simply call “health.” It’s now time for us to become as smart as our cells, and make the shift together.

I call this exciting process of co-learning and co-evolving an “evolutionary upwising” because it involves waking up to our true potential, and activating wisdom – new and old – to make the necessary shift. And if we expect to “upshift” our game as a species, we must first do it as individuals. ~ Steve Behrman aka Swami Beyondananda

Remember this ancient Chinese blessing/curse? -- "May you live in interesting times!" In the third year of what we are calling The Decisive Decade, chaos reigns. From a whole systems perspective, we are in far-from-equilibrium conditions -- ecologically, economically, socially, and spiritually. Yet chaos is fertile ground for the emergence of deep creativity and transformation. If we pay attention to what matters most, we can learn to thrive on chaos and give birth to a new world that is sustainable, compassionate, and just. Our collective intention to joyfully connect with each other to increase love, wisdom, and happiness throughout the world can become "the difference that makes a difference." Rick Ingrasci, M.D., Hollyhock, www.hollyhock.ca

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” ~Schopenhauer

The Universe favors those who are in harmony with it. ~ Buckminster Fuller

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. —Peter Drucker

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The time has come to write a new story for our lives and to let go of those handed to us by our families, the culture and the generations that have gone before. These are not our stories; they do not belong to us. It is time to hand them back with love and write our own. We are no longer destined to live 'his-story,' or her story, but to instead create and live This Story – Our Story.

The highest evolved relationship seeks only peace and harmony, and all that supports the experience of such. A Higher Love is so, when the focus of the beloveds is no longer on Self, yet on the Service such a blessed Union can offer to the World. ~ Nicolya Christi

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. ~ Joseph Campbell

This new awareness has radical implications for each and every one of us. For it reveals a wholly interconnected, conscious and holographic universe, a Cosmos where consciousness is primary--and where we are therefore both creator and co-creator.

Unity awareness is consciousness of the greater whole of which we are all a part and which we are now able to embody in human form. ~ Jude Currivan (The 8th Chakra)

The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential. ~ Calvin Coolidge

We are all on an earnest and authentic search to understand our lives seeking answers to basic and profound questions that percolate in our subconscious landscape.

Religion , Politics, corporations, bankers, Wall Street and psychiatrists all claim higher authority and use powerful symbol language to shortcut and control the seeking mind. They have the answers, pearls from a higher source that they will dispense for a piece. The price is your attention, consciousness and psyche.

In contrast to this manipulation, art abandons shortcut translations of symbols and offers instead, the invention of stand-alone worlds born out of imagination – the creative immortality of the individual. It doesn't close off life but opens endlessly. The antidote to the Matrix is art and imagination. ~ Jon Rappoport

An idea grows stronger when it is shared. ~ A Course in Miracles I see that the New Era is moving us toward a more synergistic, cooperative, participatory form of democracy. It's a democracy that recognizes that we are facing a whole system breakdown and therefore we need to work toward a whole system shift. We need to become a democracy that takes its next step by developing synergistic rules of order to evolve Robert's Rules of Parliamentary procedure. By doing so we can better foster social synergy, cooperation and the liberation of human potential. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, elder storyteller and visionary for Conscious Evolution

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. ~ Albert Schweitzer

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult. ~ E.B. White

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. ~ Jonathan Swift

Returning to silence is returning to simplicity. Without silence, without simplicity, we believe everything we think and say, we live in the narrative created by thought and language. Even in our spiritual endeavors (I might say “especially”), we have to be careful of the trap of language. So many teachings, so many descriptions and definitions and explanations and recommendations — all in language. So many insights and understandings and revelations. So many certainties. So much dogma. All in language. Silence is truly the mother tongue of all. ~ Robert Rabbin

It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning. ~P.D. Ouspensky

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~ Howard Thurman

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. ~ C. S. Lewis, writer Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself. Cathy Guisewite, cartoonist

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once we abandon this obsessive fanaticism of absolute complete knowledge, we can continue on with our process of discovery without the headache of a deadline. ~ Henry Warwick

Doubt is not pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd ~Voltaire

There is absolutely nothing to transcend...only all of Creation to unite with. – Jeffery Wolf Green

All things are possible once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake. – Norman Cousins

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well. ~ Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

You cannot change what you refuse to confront. Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. Don’t think of cost. Think of value. If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it. In life, if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come. There are things that we don’t want to happen but have to accept, things we don’t want to know but have to learn, and people we can’t live without but have to let go. When you choose to see the good in others, you end up finding the good in yourself. You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one. Things turn out best for people who make the best out of the way things turn out. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. http://blog.johnspence.com/2012/06/90-quotes-change

Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind. ~ Krishna

“Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times, it is the only time we have. ” ― Art Buchwald

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” ― Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, Sayings Of Buddha “What a present it is to be able to drive past the future. (All these tenses in one sentence makes me tense).” ― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ― Alan Wilson Watts

“Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.

Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.” ― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.” ― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.” ~ David Allen

“Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.” ― Winston S. Churchill “Have you noticed, she asked him, how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quietly unnoticed?” ― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.” ― Margaret J. Wheatley, A Simpler Way

The Goddess Vision

I see a world filled with Peace, Serenity, Joy, Laughter and ABUNDANCE! I see Magic and Miracles every single day. I see Hearts Overflowing, Arms Embracing and Nature completely Healed and Whole!

I see Healthy Foods Flowing and Pure Water Sparkling ~ and I see each Hand reaching out to Help one another! I see Celebrations of the Moon, the Sun and the Earth! I see the Dancing of Hearts and Feet ! I see Kindness and LOVE spread like Wildfire, unable to be stopped ! I see us all as O N E ! ~ The Intenders of the Highest Good; Vision Alignment Project

“Superheroes see attachment to the known as a false sense of security and recognize that the striving for security (our traditional understanding of power) is, ironically, the basis of all insecurity. Superheroes do what needs to be done with impeccability and the highest motivation for the greatest good and leave the results to the unknown. Their focus is on the action, not the fruits of the action.” ~ Deepak Chopra with Gotham Chopra from The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes

“The word secure comes from two small Latin words: se meaning ‘without’ and cure meaning ‘care’—being without care, freedom from anxiety. ~ Eric Butterworth’s wisdom from Spiritual Economics(see Notes):

Be like the bird That pausing in her flight While on boughs too slight, Feels them give way Beneath her, and yet sings, Knowing she hath wings.”

~Victor Hugo

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other— above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

~ Albert Einstein

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. ~ Gen. Eric Shinseki

There is only one journey ... and that is going inside yourself. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In my dream the angel shrugged and said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination. And then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand. ~ Bryan Andreas

I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another mans ~ William Blake It's called the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

- George Carlin

All that you are attached to, all that you love, All that you know, someday will be gone.

Knowing this, and that the world is your mind Which you create, play in, and suffer from, Is known as discrimination.

Discriminate between the Real and the Unreal, The known is unreal and will come and go So stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging, the Truth.

If you desire to be one with truth, 'you' must completely disappear. Papaji

Fantasy can inspire us, and our dreams can stimulate us toward trying new things. Creativity needs this, so some fantasy is excellent. But if we habitually seek refuge in some favorite fantasy (or two), it is likely that we are spending time avoiding some area of our real lives. Our favorite fantasies have much in common with belief systems that came down from ancient scriptures — they are rigid compared to reality. We get to be totally in control, which is what our lack of confidence craves, and seeking control is a large part of why modern humans resort to non-stop distractions, chit-chat, entertainments and daydreams. The dance of life is too dynamic for much control — it is an improvisational work in progress, featuring important relationships. It is a dance hall full of uncertainty, miscalculations and missteps. It’s risky, always risky. Fantasy is easy, available and tempting. But too much indulgence and your ability to make the right moves at the right time, with any kind of rhythm, is compromised. When it comes to feeling good overall, trying to stay in control doesn’t work. C’mon … let’s practice our dancing! ~ Paul O'Brian, author, The Visionary I-Ching

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. ~ Steven Johnson

I am drawn — and audiences who think of themselves as outside the mainstream are drawn — to stories of outsiders.

It’s O.K. if a lot of people don’t like it, as long as the people who love it are spreading word of mouth with passion and getting others excited.

My conversations with students and filmmakers have in common a desire to get them to stop trying to please an imaginary internalized Professor or Studio Head and free themselves to say something original, fresh and useful — something constructively weird. ~ James Schamus, CEO, Focus Features,

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring - Jung

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

‘If you seek small things to do, and do them well, great things will seek you, and demand to be performed ~ Anon

Do you think the universe is a friendly place to live?

This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.

For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.

God does not play dice with the universe,

--Albert Einstein

For if our words so

melt the heart they start the

Milk of Humankindness flowing

– so that every time we speak our mind

we set another flower growing –

then I believe, before our very eyes,

we human beings, like butterflies

will fully metamorphosize.

Laurel Airica www.laurelairica.com

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Just as it is essential to know the difference between working hard and working smart, so we must understand the difference between creating something big, and creating something meaningful. ~ Philip E. Humbert, PhD. “To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.” ~ Ivan Illich, Introduction to Tools for Conviviality

Every man dies. Not every man truly lives. ~ Braveheart

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. ~ Ayn Rand

Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly. ~ Lauren Bacall

Studies show that 65% of Americans are confused and the rest aren't sure. There are two kinds of mystics in the world - the optimystics and the pessimystics. The pessimystics are very much in touch with reality. But the optimystics are happier and live longer. ~ Swami Beyondananda

I said Somebody should do something about that. Then I realized I am somebody.

Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

~ Lily Tomlin

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

To be healthy is 'to be full of music' ~ Gaelic translation

History shows us that the people who end up changing the world--the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries--are always nuts, until they're right, and then they're geniuses. ~ Dr. John Eliot from Overachievement

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. ~ Apple's Genius Ad

Anyone who strives too far from the majority or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled arrogant, or a maverick, a wildman, weird, or even crazy. ~ Dr. John Eliot fromOverachievement from http://www.dreambuilders.com.au When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied: I wish no gifts, only presence.

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence. ~ Barbara Marciniak

Nothing is separate from anything else. Separation is impossible. ~ Burt Harding

If your inner energy is misdirected, so will your whole life be. ~ C. Astrid Weber

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask yourself this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't then it is of no use to us. ~ Carlos Castaneda

Know yourself as wise, loving, intelligent, eternal consciousness that never needed to change or fix anything in the first place. Then see what happens. ~ Christine Breese

He does not seem to me a free man who does not sometimes do nothing. ~ Cicero

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. ~ Daniel Goleman

Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls it. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness. ~ David Bohm

The goal of the Creator is for each entity to make a conscious choice to again seek Oneness, out of our own free will – not because anyone else forced us to. If we are told what to do and what to believe, then we have learned nothing and will not make any progress. Perhaps the single most basic realization to make is that we live in a loving Universe. If we are all One Being, then it is foolish for us to hate anyone, as we are only hating ourselves. ~David Wilcock

Changing mass consciousness is an individual responsibility. ~ Dennis Weaver

In truth it matters less what we do... than how we do it and why. ~Donna Farhi

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. ~ Dr. Seuss

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. Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Speaks) Daily, I am deeply inspired by the exquisite luminosity of Nature's Design. The hum of the hummingbird. The Vibrant Hum of Souls. The synchrony of wings moving at diferent velocities. Unfolding symphonies of Life Awakening. ~ Sarah Drew

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity? ~ Emile M. Cioran

True, absolute silence and true, absolute love are not different. Absolute silent awareness overflows with simple, fulfilled absolute love. Objects – people, nature, emotions – may or may not appear. Objects are not needed and they are welcomed. The joy of this full silence is uncaused and unlimited. Always here, always discovering itself. It is the treasure, and it is hidden only when we refuse to keep quiet and find out who we are. Gangaji (Hidden Treasure: Uncovering the Truth in Your Life Story)

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing – peace is the measure. ~ George Melton

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

The ego isn't actually an entity. Rather, it is the sense of being a separate individual. We feel like individuals, although we are in actuality manifestations, or expressions, of One Being...Encased in this human body, we have lost awareness of our true nature and are meant to rediscover the truth. ~ Gina Lake

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past. ~ H.F. Hedge

“This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.” ~ Hafiz

There can never be an enlightened person, there is only the realization that there is no separation. ~ Halina Pytlasinka

Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain. ~ Hallaj

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved. ~ Hans Kung

“You must exist in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find eternity in each moment.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.” ~Henry Miller

The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware. ~ Herb Goldberg

The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. ~ Herbert Agar

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. ~ Howard Thurman

We are all Spirit experiencing a process set up to facilitate its (each Spirit's) understanding of its true identity and, through that understanding, to revert to its pristine state. ~Ian Gardner

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do. ~ Igor Stravinsky

Every tear has a smile behind it. ~ Iranian Proverb

I am my own heaven and hell! ~ J.C.F. von Schiller

Enjoy doing nothing without falling asleep-meditation. In the beginning you will fall into the gaps in between thoughts - after practicing for years, you become the gap. ~ J.Kleykamp

Thoughts are not the problem… it’s the thing that goes out and grabs them and makes them ‘yours’ that’s the problem. Jac O’keeffe

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life. ~ James Allen

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. ~ James Thurber

The opportunity for brotherhood presents itself every time you meet a human being. ~ Jane Wyman

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood. ~ Jean Klein, I Am

Each time a man looks into your eyes, he is only searching to find himself; for he knows already, that he is part of you [and you are him]. ~ Jeremy Aldana

Beloved one, if you know already that you are whole, complete, awakened, knowledgeable, rich, abundant, then it doesn't matter whether you stay here or you go there, because you're going to be who you are wherever you are. ~ Jeshua

The separation never happened. Hear me well. The separation is not real. The separation is but a figment of imagination, and nothing more. ~ Jeshua (from THE OTHER VOICE by Brent Haskell)

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself. ~ Krishnamurti

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. ~ Jimi Hendrix

“God is always connected, you are the one who's always getting disconnected” ~Jo Chui

Man is always seeking a power, a power to overcome something or destroy something; and therefore he is not living in the awareness of God, because in the realization of the presence of God there is no need to overcome, to destroy, or to do anything. ~ Joel S. Goldsmith

That which is creative must create itself. ~ John Keats

Two basic motivating forces exist: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and hope for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

“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?

“The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn’t saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me.” ~ John Lennon

Every visible and invisible creature is an appearance of God. ~ John Scotus Erigena

I would define love very simply: as a potent blend of openness and warmth, which allows us to make real contact, to take delight in and appreciate, and to be at one with----our selves, others, and life itself. Openness----the heart's pure, unconditional yes----is love's essence. And warmth is love's basic expression, arising as a natural extension of this yes---- the desire to reach out and touch, connect with, and nourish what we love. ~ John Welwood

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and the we'll need no other light. ~ John Wolfgang Von Goethe

When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Time and again human consciousness fixates, and slams the door on its greatest gift, the open-endedness of infinite possibility. As a result we do not experience reality but merely our concept of it.

Who owns your time owns your mind. Change your time and you change your mind. Change your mind and you change your world. ~ Jose Arguelles

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are. ~Jose Ortega y Gasset

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. ~ Judith Wright

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place. ~ Julie Sarah Powell

The truth is, you already are, it is finished. It is absolutely and totally possible, and freely available, to step out of this limitation of the Self and rest as your true nature right now. Life all through has become a consistent karma yoga session. There is no-one who requires thanks for the service and there is no-one who is getting the benefit of going against the usual selfish, self-serving, immature, self-gratifying, agenda ridden movement of the Self or mind-body package. It is just service because there is no other. ~ June McLeod

As our awareness begins to shift, old patterns are beginning to break down and we lose our familliar points of reference. We need to let go and flow with events, not knowing the outcome but trusting in divine purpose. When I see myself in others, I have no enemy. ~ Juno Cristi

The person who makes all cares into one care the care for simply staying present will be cared for by that presence which is creative love. ~ Kabir Helminski

The truly great man is he who would master no one, and who would be mastered by none.

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness; and knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream. ~ Kahlil Gibran

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” ~ Kalu Rinpoche

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God. ~ Karen Armstrong

Once the Self is known, that Self which sees with eyes open or shut, all sorrows end.

Let the five senses and the mind they serve become still. Let awareness itself cease all activity and become watchful. Then you have begun your journey to the highest path. ~ Katha Upanishad

The question is how the questioner exists. ~ Kedar Joshi

A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them. ~ Keith Miller

I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now -- unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future. ~ Ken S. Keyes jr.

The lesson is acceptance of differences. Don't forget you are a part of everything and everything is a part of you. If every human being recognized the power of the love and forgiveness principle, all consciousness on earth would change instantly. ~ Kuan Yin Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.

Be truly whole, and all things will return to you.

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. ~ Lao Tzu

God Transcends all concepts. Only ego presumes that the All Pervading Divine Presence could be reduced to words. ~ Leland Lewis

No words. No thoughts. Just being. Freedom from the known. Embracing the infinite moment. Wake up. You are home. ~ Jeff Hutner

We are on a journey of becoming that which we already are. That is the impossible paradox of our lives. “If you can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it, touch it, or smell it, you can be present with it. It is of the present moment, and so it brings to you the opportunity to be present with it.” ~ Leonard Jacobson

Notice what happens as you let go of what you think you know and allow what is absolutely so to reveal itself. The truth of cosmic oneness is unalterable.

Understand what reality is and know there is nothing to fear.

You only see what you are ready and willing to accept.

What if being free, loved, and accepted is already reality? In stillness, something is receptive and nothing is listening. Trust the universe only ever supports you. As the light of wisdom arises, the mind of the perceiver is seen as it is.

Notice how you feel as you realize existence is contentment itself, as you recognize self-concern for what it is, as you know you are complete as you are. Why fear being One with everything right now? ~ Liara Covert

A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I'm sure that's true, but they aren't willing to make healing a high priority. They aren't willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it. ~ Lindsay Wagner

Oneness is very simple: everything is included and allowed to live according to its true nature. This is the secret that is being revealed... ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive inter-dependencies. ~ Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? ~ M.C. Escher

Our world is pretty messed up. With all the violence, pollution and crazy things people do, it would be easy to turn into a grouchy old man without being either elderly or male. There's certainly no shortage of justification for disappointment and cynicism. But consider this: Negative attitudes are bad for you. And gratitude, it turns out, makes you happier and healthier (...) if you can find any authentic reason to give thanks, anything that is going right with the world or your life, and put your attention there, then statistics say you're going to be better off. ~ Ocean Robbins

All things that ever were, that are, or that will be, having; their record upon the astral light, or tablet of the unseen universe, the initiated adept, by using the vision of his own spirit, can know all that has been known or can be known. ~ Madame Blavatsky

“All higher dimensional understanding comes from the oneness that exists within a frequency of bliss-charged love. For it is this frequency that allows your DNA to spin and take you to worlds far beyond three-dimensional physicality. ~ Magenta Pixie

When one withdraws all desires as a tortoise withdraws his limbs, then the natural splendor of the world soon manifests itself. ~ Mahabharata

There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune.

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused. ~ Marcel Proust

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart—messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you’ll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along. ~ Martha Beck

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. ~ Martha Washington

If thou art master to thyself, circumstances shall harm thee little. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God. ~ Martin Luther

One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle their honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are – beyond all ideas.

Without a need to constantly remain attached to ideas and beliefs, the clarity of your formless form recognizes the truth of itself -- with nothing to confirm or ever deny.

You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence. ~ Matt Kahn

What actually matters is you, who you are within yourself. Societes are structured in such a way as to prevent you from finding yourself.

It all comes down to connecting with all the people around you. ~ Max Igan

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk. The eye with which I see God is the same eye [seeing] with which God sees me.

The eyes that see God are the same eyes through which God sees me.

Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest to all of us.

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. ~ Meister Eckhart [The void] It's that place in our lives where what we've been hanging onto . . . clinging to for dear life . . . is stripped away. It's that place in us where we let go of what we know, what we think we know, and what we want and surrender to the unknown. It is the place of saying and meaning, 'I don't know.' It means standing there with our hands empty for a while, sometimes watching everything we wanted disappear; our self image, our definition of who we thought we should be, the clones we've created of ourselves, the people we thought we had to have, the things we thought were so important to collect and surround ourselves with, the job we were certain was ours, the place we thought we'd live in all our lives. . . Surrender control to the supreme wisdom and authority of God and to the Divine in your soul. Step into the void with courage. Learn to say, I don't know. That's not blind faith. It's pure faith that will allow God and your spirit to lead you wherever your soul wants and needs to go. ~ Melody Beattie

Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith. ~ Michael Bierut

How do we break this cycle of adding to the unconsciousness on the planet? The answer lies in seeing that our true nature consists ONLY of love, and so that is ALL we have to give [and see] when we know ourselves as that... ~ Michael Jeffries

“Memories are of the ethereal, and not the material world, that is how I know I am forever.” ~ Michael Poeltl

We are all Earth Angels and our souls are the place where heaven and earth meet. By knowing yourself you change the world for the better and live your higher self. ~ Michael Teal

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but saves himself.

When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas [or inner knowing] more clearly. ~ Michel de Montaigne

Though we may be genetically wired for temporary happiness, we’ve also been gifted with the ability to recognize within ourselves a more profound and lasting sense of confidence, peace, and well-being. Among sentient beings, human beings appear to stand alone in their ability to recognize the necessity to forge a bond between reason, emotion, and their instinct to survive, and in doing so create a universe—not only for themselves and the human generations that follow, but also for all creatures who feel pain, fear and suffering—in which we are all able to coexist contentedly and peaceably.” ~ Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

You are the harmony within which all things move. They are just illusion.

The game is not set. There are so many layers that it is being perceived on. As your own consciousness becomes more refined, the game changes.

You are the light of consciousness and also the witness of this light. You are pure awareness.

Everything takes you back to yourself. When you get there, you know you never left. You only dreamt you left. You have never been other than that. You are only dreaming due to the idea of 'I am the body.' ~ Mooji

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine. ~ Morihei Ueshiba

...all the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them... ~ Muhammad Asad

One who meditates, all his knots of his heart, the bondages are opened; all the doubts are eliminated and one becomes gradually free from the fetters of action with ego. ~ Mundaka Upanishad

The human race is governed by its imagination. ~ Napoleon

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. ~ Nathaniel Branden The hurt of one is the hurt of all. The honour of one is the honour of all. ~ Native American Saying

You are not a human being. You are not your body, you are not your mind, and you are not your soul. These are things that You have. The You that has these things - indeed, that has given your Self these things - is far bigger than any of them, and even all of them put together.

First, we become aware of that which is Divine around us. Then we become aware of that which is Divine within us. Finally, we become aware that all is Divine, and that there is nothing else. This is the moment of our awakening.

“People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus

It doesn't matter what's happening... what matters is how you touch it. ~ Nirmala

I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says I am everything. Wisdom says I am nothing. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

You are not in the world...the world is in you, what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world, that is, there is no you that is real or in any world. The world is in you means that the world is in your mind and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]

I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning--it is not as hard as you think.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be...stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

That whisper you keep hearing is the universe trying to get your attention. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. ~ Oscar Wilde It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual. ~ Oswald Chambers

Your nature is to keep quiet. You came from silence and you have to return to silence… you are dancing only for a little while you see… a little while you are dancing.

Who is journeying for freedom? The one who is already free. Thoughts are impediments to seeing your own face. Don't give rise to any thought, and discover who you are.

I am your own self and the self of all beings that exist. ~ Papaji

The so-called miraculous powers of a great master are a natural accompaniment to his exact understanding of subtle laws that operate in the inner cosmos of consciousness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

“There is no map that can show you how to leap. The map for this is somewhere in our own imagination. Paramananda

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~ Pat Obuchowski

Peace can be reached through meditation on the knowledge which dreams give. Peace can also be reached through concentration upon that which is dearest to the heart.

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” ~ Patanjali

Me, I will throw away... ~ Patrick Cavenaugh

“The best scholar is one who has realized the meaning of no-self. The best monk is the one who has tamed his own mind. The best quality is a great desire to benefit others. The best instruction is always to watch the mind. The best remedy is to know that nothing has any inherent reality. The best way of life is one that does not fit with worldly ways. The best accomplishment is a steady lessening of negative emotions. The best sign is a steady decrease of desires.” ~ Patrul Rinpoche

Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning. ~ Paul Lam

You know at this point you have everything you need. It's available to you from the inside and you see you are supported in many ways. You realize that there is more to this dimension, to this reality, than you have seen before. You see you are being taken care of, you are being loved, you are being looked after. All that's needed is to go inside, become still and listen. ~ Paul Lowe (The Experiment is Over)

The presence of advanced attention is the only thing that really changes us, and the benefits of receiving it are always extraordinary. ~ Paul Richards

“Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.” ~ Paul Tillich

What we do flows from who we are. ~ Paul Vitale

Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal. The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive. Repeat that to yourself every morning: 'I've arrived.' That way you'll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day. ~ Paulo Coelho

“To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe” ~ Peggy Jenkins

If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that - then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught. ~ Pema Chodron

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity. ~ Philip Levine

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power. ~ Pierre Corneille

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force. ~ Prentice Mulford

“I'm aware people I have loved and have died are in the spirit world looking after me.” ~ Princess Diana

Man is the measure of all things. ~ Protagoras The search for self-worth begins by finding what is indestructible inside, then letting it be. ~ Prudence Kohl

From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own. ~ Publilius Syrus

The biggest advances are not made by being a great teacher; they are made by being a great student. ~ Pursah (from The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard)

Great doubt will eventually lead to great awakening. ~ Rabia al-Adawiya

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Be ever so still, all movement is mind- one thought is a cloud, do not stir it about the sky. ~ Rafael Stoneman

“The only journey is the journey within. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

What lies behind and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

“The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.” ~ Ralph Waldo Trine

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. The next message you need is always right where you are.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear. We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.

Inspiration is God making contact with itself.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

The next message you need is always right where you are.

Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead. ~ ~ Ram Dass

If you can give up all thoughts, you will right here and now atain the realization of oneness with all. ~ Ramayana

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. ~ Ray Bradbury

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.' ~ Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Your outer circumstances are the mirror of your inner world. Change your inner world, and you change your outer world.” ~ Remez Sasson

“The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake. ~ Rhonda Byrne

Realisation of Buddha Nature is synonymous with being in the flow of Qi -the universal life force. ~ Ricardo B. Serrano

“There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.”

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go. ~ Richard Bach

And you know, when you've experienced grace and you feel like you've been forgiven, you're a lot more forgiving of other people. You're a lot more gracious to others. ~ Rick Warren

I choose things by how they resonate in my heart. ~ Rita Coolidge

Awareness is empowering. ~ Rita Wilson

We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror. ~ Robert Brault

Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation. ~ Robert Moss

“The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.” ~ Robert Valett

Silent harmony is the gift you give yourself... As you push past the infinite, you can feel your own music, your own frequency, beginning to project itself past you, beyond infinity, into nowhere, starting to generate its own star.

See and feel who you are. Love like you have never loved before. The practial point is to live and enjoy from where you are. You can feel every movement because you are not here. The logic is only important to the body-mind.

Our gift to the world is to receive because when we receive, it becomes part of the world... It will turn many things upside down for you. That is what its supposed to do because what we have been using is a brain that tells us what's wrong. The solidarity you have is what's missing. This infinite trust that is goes through everything forever. It sits with you in a magic way to solve everything before it even gets to you... Remember nothing. Do nothing. It just is.

The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that. ~ Robert Young

There is Nothing wrong with you. Be Who You Are. ~ Robin Rice

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention. ~ Rudolf Arnheim

It was our Creator who led us through the stages of evolution, from the animal state to the human. His purpose was to make us intelligent and aware, so that we might know Him.

The world is like a courtroom, with God as our judge. We are called upon to fulfill our covenant with God, who asked, Am I not your Lord? To which we answered, Yea. And since here on earth we are on trial, our every word and action form the witness to and the evidence of that agreement.

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

If the spiritual universe and the way to it were shown, No one would remain in this world for a single moment.

Kill the cow of your ego as quickly as you can, so that your inner spirit can come to life and attain true awareness.

To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life. What you seek is seeking you.

“Out beyond the rightdoing and wrongdoing is a field. I’ll meet you there.” ~ Rumi

Shiva's tribute to Shakti: With thee I can create all things Without thee I am powerless. ~ S'Mrimad Devi Bhagawatam

You seek too much information and not enough transformation. ~ Sai Baba

Everything is the content of space. ~ Sailor Bob Adamson

Patience is the companion of wisdom. ~ Saint Augustine

Saint Jerome The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

What you seek is already within you. You uncover it by shedding all that is untrue within you. You are not what arises, but that which witnesses ALL that arises. ~ Sampo Kaasila

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me. ~ Samuel Beckett

Sanaya Roman Spiritual growth means increasing your awareness of beauty, opening your heart, and experiencing more love and compassion.

Santosh Kalwar “We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” Sarada Devi ...if you want peace, do not find fault with others. Rather, see your own faults. No one is a stranger...the whole world is your own.

Sarah Ban Breathnach Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.

Satguru Siva Yogaswami Only one task to do here: find out who you are. How do you find out who you are? Dive into the silence and see.

Scott Adams “You don't have to be a person of influence to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.”

Scott Morrison Just let awareness have its way with you completely.

Seneca Tranqility is a certain quality of mind, which no condition or fortune can either exalt or depress. Shakti Gawain ... my life has been dedicated to my growth and evolution as a conscious being. ... becoming more aware of all that was taking place within me and around me; how my inner world affected my outer world and vice versa. I realized that the more awareness I have, the more choice I have in how I create or respond to the circumstances of my life.

Our bodies communicate to us clearly and specifically, if we are willing to listen to them.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, allow our natural channel to open.

Shankara “The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.

Sharon Lee “The moment you say 'I know everything' is the end of your growth.”

Shinjo Ito What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

Shrii Shrii Anandamurti “You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars guides you too.”

Shunru Suzuki When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

Shyamananda “When you can see through the mist of Maya (illusion) to the Self, that mist has not disappeared. You have just learned to see through it.

Sidney Lanier If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Siva Sutras One who is established in a comfortable posture while concentrating on inner Self naturally becomes immersed in the Heart's ocean of bliss.

Sogyal Rinpoche ...we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .

Sol Luckman Mastery of Intention is a deeply personal process that always occurs in the present. No technology, guru or savior, however advanced, can do for us what only a commitment to evolving and operating out of our own divine consciousness and physiology can achieve.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves?

Solange Nicole Bringing to light what had been hidden in darkness should not overwhelm you, but EDUCATE you.”

Sonia Choquette (The Answer is Simple...) We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and to remember our Divine nature.

Sri Atmananda At the time a thing is being done, there is no thought or feeling that one is doing it. This is further proof that one is not a doer. Claiming to have done a thing after the doing cannot make one a doer.

Sri Aurobindo Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

Sri Bhagavan Oneness is inner silence, which remains undisturbed by external factors. This silence is not the opposite of noise. That is inner Oneness.

Sri Chinmoy Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness.

Sri Lakshmana Swami If you have a mind then the earth, the sky, and the stars will exist, and you will be able to see them. When the mind dies there will be no earth, no sky, no stars, and no world. The world of objects, names, and forms is only the mind, and when the mind dies, the world dies with it. Only the Self then remains. > Seeing everything as the Self gives the impression that the Self is equally distributed everywhere. This is also an idea in the mind. When the mind finally dies you realize that there is no distribution and no everywhere. > So, I go off now to be in the effortless thought fee state, with no desires for anything or nothing...

Sri Muruganar Awareness is not a quality of the Self. The Self is without qualities. Awareness is not an action of the Self. The Self does nothing. The Self, our Being, IS Awareness.

Sri Neem Karoli Baba The whole universe is your home. All are your family.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj There is no such thing as unconsciousness for it is not experienceable. We infer unconsciousness when there is a lapse in memory or communication.

Sri Ramana Maharshi Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside. You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things; that is, of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them, then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve the silence?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar How far to heaven? Just open your eyes and look. You are in heaven.

Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya Knowing all objects to be impermanent, let not their contact blind you, resolve again and again to be aware of the Self that is permanent.

St. Francis of Assisi Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.

St. John of the Cross If a man wishes to be sure of the path he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

St. Thomas Aquinas We can't have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence for ourselves.

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

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Stephan Bodian When you awaken, you realize that the separate person you took yourself to be is just a construct, a mental fabrication...

It's a pathless path because it's unique to each seeker and keeps changing as the journey unfolds. Even more essentially, it isn't really a path at all, because there's nowhere to go and nothing to discover; everything you need to know and be is right here and now--indeed, it is the very here and now that you are.

Stephen King The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Story Waters “Everything is your reflection. There is nothing we are not. This is about re-integration. It is all energy. We are all one.

Stuart Wilde The more you establish quiet time and mediation as part of your daily discipline, the more you go through the rotation into mirror (dream) worlds.

Sue Atchley Ebaugh How I relate to my inner self influences my relationships with all others. My satisfaction with myself and my satisfaction with other people are directly proportional.

Sue Patton Thoele Intuition is a heart message minus the static.

Sun Bu'er The secret of the receptive Must be sought in stillness; Within stillness there remains The potential for action.

Susan Jeffers By learning to trust your intuition, miracles seem to happen. Intuitive thoughts are gifts from the higher self.

Susan Velasquez There is alchemy at work when our past, our present, and our future convene in the present moment.

Susanna Thorpe-Clark We have been slowly preparing for our Soul (our Higher Self) to come and join us in our physical body, and we are clearing out the space, by releasing attachments, fears and limiting thoughts so that this powerful part of ourselves can get in. This is the time when Spirit really begins to MERGE with physical matter, and it is a truly Divine and joyous moment. Remember this when the going gets tough. Remember this when you feel you want to give up. Just hold the thought of the magic and wonder that lies just ahead if you continue. The struggle, the opposition, the frustration, the lack of abundance, the ill health and the emotional and physical pain will all be gone FOREVER. So just keep focused, stay centred and continue to LET GO.

Suzanne Segal To see things for what they are is to see with the eyes of the vastness itself.

Swami Krishnananda Our prosperity, our friends, our bondage and even our destruction are all in the end rooted in our tongue, says a famous adage. Swami Premodaya You go from reacting to observing. There is an emotional disconnection that must take place; non-attachment. This doesn't mean not feeling anything, but being okay with whatever outcome manifests.

Swami Rajneesh being aware of awareness itself only consciousness can get you there to the truth of yourself the immortal inner being...

Swami Satchidananda 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

Though we can't always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves.

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.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati It makes no difference whether you worship God, Jehovah, Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Christ or Krishna- it is still and always one and the same God.

Swami Shivananda Patient and regular practice is the whole secret of spiritual realization. Do not be in a hurry in spiritual life. Do your utmost, and leave the rest to God.

Swami Venkatesananda By introducing you to yourself it enables you to discover for yourself the true meaning of life and thus enrich every moment of it. Such self-discovery can lead to greater understanding of fellow-beings and therefore to true love.

Swami Vivekananda ...oneness is the secret to everything.

“BY the study of different RELIGIONS we find that in essence they are one.”

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.”

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish in the future can be produced by our present actions; se we have to know how to act.

“All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.”

Sylvia Plath I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

T. S. Eliot We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot “Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”

Tao Te Ching If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something,you must first allow it to flourish If you want to take something,You must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.

Tarthang Tulku The world will be balanced when we are balanced.

Tarun Sardana Enquiry doesn't lead one to the truth. Enquiry leads to dissolving of the one who is seeking the truth.

Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama) The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

“Through awareness, you get a certain attitude. That’s the way, you see, to achieve more peaceful, more compassion, more friendship through that way.”

A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware.”

“To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities.”

To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else.

Teri Degler If you have picked up this book and begun to read, chances are you have experienced the power of the creative spirit. This power is not a figment of your imagination; it is not an abstract concept. It is real. It is a force that manifests itself, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically. If you don't believe this, the next time you feel the urge to create, sit with the feeling. Go to a place of stillness, become completely in touch with your body, bring your consciousness to bear on this urge, and you will feel it in your body: a sensation, perhaps almost imperceptible, that begins in the nest of your pelvis, then rises up, reaches your heart and throat, and bursts into an aching, a longing, a profound need.

The Matrix Reloaded We're all here to do what we're all here to do.

The Power of One Any question you have the answer you find it in nature.

Thich Nhat Hanh May we awaken from the dream that we are different.

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

“If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you.

Thomas Carlyle Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Thomas Jefferson I like to see the people awake and alert.

Thomas Mann This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected - in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

Thomas Merton The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Thor Heyerdahl I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thornton Wilder “The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.”

Thrangu Rinpoche, Transcending Ego There are several realms which ordinary persons do not perceive. Because they cannot see them, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. One of these realms is the sambhogakaya that can only be visited by highly realized Bodhisattvas. In the pure realm of the sambhogakaya, the Dharma is continuously taught. One sambhogakaya realm is Tushita, which is presided over by the next Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha. Buddha Shakyamuni dwelled there before coming to earth to give Dharma teachings.

Thubten Chodron We are fortunate now to become aware of the contents of our mind. With that knowledge we will be able to change the aspects that lead to confusion and misery in our lives.

Tony Samara “Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity”

Trinity to Neo in The Matrix It's the question that drives us Neo. It's the question that brought you here. The answer is out there. It's looking for you... and it will find you.

Tsunetomo Yamamoto It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all Ways and be more and more in accord with his own.

Tyler Zabel The Self is All and the All is Selfless.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Unknown Author Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all.

Upanishads Approach life with a mind sharpened by your practices, and see the One in the many.

Ursula K. LeGuin What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Valclav Havel Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

Vanna Bonta A heart needs only its own voice to do what is right.

Vernon Howard It is utterly useless to try to change the outer world, for it is but a reflection of inner causes. The true seeker seeks to change himself.

Victor Hugo “It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”

Vincente Alexandre Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.

W. Clement Stone Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

W.E. Henley I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Walt Whitman The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You. “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walter Russell Security and contentment can come only through interdependence of every man upon every other man.

Knowledge in not acquired from without but merely recollected from within. The recollection of knowledge from within is an electro-magnetic process of thinking Mind...

Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

When our knowing exceeds our sensing, we will no longer be deceived by the illusions of our senses.

Wayne Dyer “Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Wilfried Fink The only thing which has to heal is the illusion of being separate.

William Blake If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The eye altering, alters all.

William Butler Yeats When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.

William Glasser It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

William Hazlitt Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

William James “Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

“The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.”

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William Newton Clarke “Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see”

William Penn True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Yasutani Roshi The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yoda Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Yogavasistha Maharamayana The same undivided and indivisible space is outside and inside of a thousand pots. Likewise the Self pervades all beings.

Yogi Bhajan If you can't see God in All, you can't see God at all.

Yogi Ramacharaka Prana (life energy) colored by the tought of the sender may be projected to persons at a distance, who are willing to receive it, and the healing can be done this way.

Zen Master “When I heard the bell ring, suddenly, there was no 'I' and no 'bell', just the ringing.

Zora Neale Hurston No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you. Featured Book Coming Soon Self-Mastery Series Book 2 Be Yourself

Magenta Pixie “All higher dimensional understanding comes from the oneness that exists within a frequency of bliss-charged love. For it is this frequency that allows your DNA to spin and take you to worlds far beyond three-dimensional physicality.

Mahabharata When one withdraws all desires as a tortise withdraws his limbs, then the natural splendour of the world soon manifests itself.

Mahatma Gandhi There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune. Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well. Marcel Proust It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused. Marilyn Ferguson Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Martha Beck Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart—messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you’ll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.

Matt Kahn One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle their honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are – beyond all ideas. Without a need to constantly remain attached to ideas and beliefs, the clarity of your formless form recognizes the truth of itself -- with nothing to confirm or ever deny. You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence.

Max Igan What actually matters is you, who you are within yourself. Societes are structured in such a way as to prevent you from finding yourself. It all comes down to connecting with all the people around you.

Melody Beattie [The void] It's that place in our lives where what we've been hanging onto . . . clinging to for dear life . . . is stripped away. It's that place in us where we let go of what we know, what we think we know, and what we want and surrender to the unknown. It is the place of saying and meaning, 'I don't know.' It means standing there with our hands empty for a while, sometimes watching everything we wanted disappear; our self image, our definition of who we thought we should be, the clones we've created of ourselves, the people we thought we had to have, the things we thought were so important to collect and surround ourselves with, the job we were certain was ours, the place we thought we'd live in all our lives. . . Surrender control to the supreme wisdom and authority of God and to the Divine in your soul. Step into the void with courage. Learn to say, I don't know. That's not blind faith. It's pure faith that will allow God and your spirit to lead you wherever your soul wants and needs to go. Michael Jeffries How do we break this cycle of adding to the unconsciousness on the planet? The answer lies in seeing that our true nature consists ONLY of love, and so that is ALL we have to give [and see] when we know ourselves as that...

Michael Teal We are all Earth Angels and our souls are the place where heaven and earth meet. By knowing yourself you change the world for the better and live your higher self.

You are the light of consciousness and also the witness of this light. You are pure awareness. Everything takes you back to yourself. When you get there, you know you never left. You only dreamt you left. You have never been other than that. You are only dreaming due to the idea of 'I am the body.'

Morihei Ueshiba The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.

Muhammad Asad ...all the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them...

Mundaka Upanishad One who meditates, all his knots of his heart, the bondages are opened; all the doubts are eliminated and one becomes gradually free from the fetters of action with ego.

Napoleon The human race is governed by its imagination.

Jeff Hutner It is within the space beyond the mind where the heart and soul meet that the infinite is contacted and once contacted, it is a struggle to return to our former life. But we do so. Our life therefore is about remembering and forgetting until we forget to remember and simply are nothing and everything.

Nisargadatta Maharaj I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says I am everything. Wisdom says I am nothing. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning--it is not as hard as you think. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

You are not in the world...the world is in you, what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world, that is, there is no you that is real or in any world. The world is in you means that the world is in your mind and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]

Nathaniel Branden The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

Native American Saying The hurt of one is the hurt of all. The honour of one is the honour of all.

Neale Donald Walsch First, we become aware of that which is Divine around us. Then we become aware of that which is Divine within us. Finally, we become aware that all is Divine, and that there is nothing else. This is the moment of our awakening.

Oscar Wilde Be yourself, everyone else is taken. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Papaji Your nature is to keep quiet. You came from silence and you have to return to silence… you are dancing only for a little while you see… a little while you are dancing. Who is journeying for freedom? The one who is already free. Thoughts are impediments to seeing your own face. Don't give rise to any thought, and discover who you are. I am your own self and the self of all beings that exist.

Pat Obuchowski You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it.

Patanjali When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Patrul Rinpoche The best scholar is one who has realized the meaning of no-self. The best monk is the one who has tamed his own mind. The best quality is a great desire to benefit others. The best instruction is always to watch the mind. The best remedy is to know that nothing has any inherent reality. The best way of life is one that does not fit with worldly ways. The best accomplishment is a steady lessening of negative emotions. The best sign is a steady decrease of desires.

Paul Lam Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning.

Paul Lowe (The Experiment is Over) You know at this point you have everything you need. It's available to you from the inside and you see you are supported in many ways. You realize that there is more to this dimension, to this reality, than you have seen before. You see you are being taken care of, you are being loved, you are being looked after. All that's needed is to go inside, become still and listen.

Paul Tillich Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

Paul Vitale What we do flows from who we are.

Paulo Coelho Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal. The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive. Repeat that to yourself every morning: 'I've arrived.' That way you'll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day.

Peggy Jenkins To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe

Pema Chodron If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that - then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

Philip Levine I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

Pierre Corneille Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Prentice Mulford Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force.

Prudence Kohl The search for self-worth begins by finding what is indestructible inside, then letting it be.

Publilius Syrus From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.

Rachel Naomi Remen The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.

Rafael Stoneman Be ever so still, all movement is mind- one thought is a cloud, do not stir it about the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke The only journey is the journey within.

Ralph Waldo Emerson What lies behind and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Ralph Waldo Trine A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all- pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.

Ram Dass Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. The next message you need is always right where you are. The quieter you become, the more you can hear. We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them. Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying. As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody. Inspiration is God making contact with itself. I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken. The next message you need is always right where you are. Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.

Ramayana If you can give up all thoughts, you will right here and now attain the realization of oneness with all.

Ray Bradbury We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'

Remez Sasson Your outer circumstances are the mirror of your inner world. Change your inner world, and you change your outer world.

Rhonda Byrne The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.

Ricardo B. Serrano Realisation of Buddha Nature is synonymous with being in the flow of Qi -the universal life force. Richard Bach There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

Rita Coolidge I choose things by how they resonate in my heart.

Robert Brault We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror.

Robert Moss Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

Robert Valett The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.

Robert Young Silent harmony is the gift you give yourself... As you push past the infinite, you can feel your own music, your own frequency, beginning to project itself past you, beyond infinity, into nowhere, starting to generate its own star.

See and feel who you are. Love like you have never loved before. The practical point is to live and enjoy from where you are. You can feel every movement because you are not here. The logic is only important to the body-mind.

Our gift to the world is to receive because when we receive, it becomes part of the world... It will turn many things upside down for you. That is what its supposed to do because what we have been using is a brain that tells us what's wrong. The solidarity you have is what's missing. This infinite trust that is goes through everything forever. It sits with you in a magic way to solve everything before it even gets to you... Remember nothing. Do nothing. It just is.

The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that.

Robin Rice There is Nothing wrong with you. Be Who You Are.

Rumi Kill the cow of your ego as quickly as you can, so that your inner spirit can come to life and attain true awareness. What you seek is seeking you. Out beyond the right doing and wrong doing is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Sai Baba You seek too much information and not enough transformation.

Saint Augustine Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Saint Jerome The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

Sampo Kaasila What you seek is already within you. You uncover it by shedding all that is untrue within you.

You are not what arises, but that which witnesses ALL that arises.

Samuel Beckett I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.

Sanaya Roman Spiritual growth means increasing your awareness of beauty, opening your heart, and experiencing more love and compassion.

Santosh Kalwar We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking. Sarada Devi ...if you want peace, do not find fault with others. Rather, see your own faults. No one is a stranger...the whole world is your own . Sarah Ban Breathnach Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.

Satguru Siva Yogaswami Only one task to do here: find out who you are. How do you find out who you are? Dive into the silence and see.

Shinjo Ito What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

Shrii Shrii Anandamurti You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars guides you too.

Shunru Suzuki When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

Shyamananda When you can see through the mist of Maya (illusion) to the Self, that mist has not disappeared. You have just learned to see through it.

Sidney Lanier If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Siva Sutras One who is established in a comfortable posture while concentrating on inner Self naturally becomes immersed in the Heart's ocean of bliss.

Sogyal Rinpoche ...we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .

Sol Luckman Mastery of Intention is a deeply personal process that always occurs in the present. No technology, guru or savior, however advanced, can do for us what only a commitment to evolving and operating out of our own divine consciousness and physiology can achieve.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher- dimensional octaves?

Sonia Choquette (The Answer is Simple...) We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and to remember our Divine nature.

Sri Aurobindo Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

Sri Bhagavan Oneness is inner silence, which remains undisturbed by external factors. This silence is not the opposite of noise. That is inner Oneness.

Sri Chinmoy Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness. Sri Lakshmana Swami If you have a mind then the earth, the sky, and the stars will exist, and you will be able to see them. When the mind dies there will be no earth, no sky, no stars, and no world. The world of objects, names, and forms is only the mind, and when the mind dies, the world dies with it. Only the Self then remains. > Seeing everything as the Self gives the impression that the Self is equally distributed everywhere. This is also an idea in the mind. When the mind finally dies you realize that there is no distribution and no everywhere. > So, I go off now to be in the effortless thought free state, with no desires for anything or nothing...

Sri Neem Karoli Baba The whole universe is your home. All are your family.

Sri Ramana Maharshi Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside. You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things; that is, of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them, then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve the silence?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar How far to heaven? Just open your eyes and look. You are in heaven.

Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya Knowing all objects to be impermanent, let not their contact blind you, resolve again and again to be aware of the Self that is permanent.

Stanislav Grof Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution. Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Stephan Bodian When you awaken, you realize that the separate person you took yourself to be is just a construct, a mental fabrication...It's a pathless path because it's unique to each seeker and keeps changing as the journey unfolds. Even more essentially, it isn't really a path at all, because there's nowhere to go and nothing to discover; everything you need to know and be is right here and now-- indeed, it is the very here and now that you are.

Stephen King The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Story Waters Everything is your reflection. There is nothing we are not. This is about re-integration. It is all energy. We are all one.

Sue Atchley Ebaugh How I relate to my inner self influences my relationships with all others. My satisfaction with myself and my satisfaction with other people are directly proportional.

Sue Patton Thoele Intuition is a heart message minus the static.

Sun Bu'er The secret of the receptive Must be sought in stillness; Within stillness there remains The potential for action.

Susan Jeffers By learning to trust your intuition, miracles seem to happen. Intuitive thoughts are gifts from the higher self.

Susan Velasquez There is alchemy at work when our past, our present, and our future convene in the present moment.

Susanna Thorpe-Clark We have been slowly preparing for our Soul (our Higher Self) to come and join us in our physical body, and we are clearing out the space, by releasing attachments, fears and limiting thoughts so that this powerful part of ourselves can get in. This is the time when Spirit really begins to MERGE with physical matter, and it is a truly Divine and joyous moment. Remember this when the going gets tough. Remember this when you feel you want to give up. Just hold the thought of the magic and wonder that lies just ahead if you continue. The struggle, the opposition, the frustration, the lack of abundance, the ill health and the emotional and physical pain will all be gone FOREVER. So just keep focused, stay centered and continue to LET GO.

Suzanne Segal To see things for what they are is to see with the eyes of the vastness itself.

Swami Krishnananda Our prosperity, our friends, our bondage and even our destruction are all in the end rooted in our tongue, says a famous adage.

Swami Premodaya You go from reacting to observing. There is an emotional disconnection that must take place; non-attachment. This doesn't mean not feeling anything, but being okay with whatever outcome manifests.

Swami Rajneesh being aware of awareness itself only consciousness can get you there to the truth of yourself the immortal inner being...

Swami Satchidananda 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 Though we can't always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves. 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.

Swami Shivananda Patient and regular practice is the whole secret of spiritual realization. Do not be in a hurry in spiritual life. Do your utmost, and leave the rest to God.

Swami Venkatesananda By introducing you to yourself it enables you to discover for yourself the true meaning of life and thus enrich every moment of it. Such self-discovery can lead to greater understanding of fellow-beings and therefore to true love.

Swami Vivekananda ...oneness is the secret to everything. By the study of different RELIGIONS we find that in essence they are one.

Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish in the future can be produced by our present actions; se we have to know how to act.

All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.

Sylvia Plath I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

T. S. Eliot We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Tarthang Tulku The world will be balanced when we are balanced.

Tarun Sardana Enquiry doesn't lead one to the truth. Enquiry leads to dissolving of the one who is seeking the truth.

Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama) The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

Through awareness, you get a certain attitude. That’s the way, you see, to achieve more peaceful, more compassion, more friendship through that way.

A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware.

To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities.

Teri Degler If you have picked up this book and begun to read, chances are you have experienced the power of the creative spirit. This power is not a figment of your imagination; it is not an abstract concept. It is real. It is a force that manifests itself, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically. If you don't believe this, the next time you feel the urge to create, sit with the feeling. Go to a place of stillness, become completely in touch with your body, bring your consciousness to bear on this urge, and you will feel it in your body: a sensation, perhaps almost imperceptible, that begins in the nest of your pelvis, then rises up, reaches your heart and throat, and bursts into an aching, a longing, a profound need.

The Matrix Reloaded We're all here to do what we're all here to do.

Thich Nhat Hanh May we awaken from the dream that we are different.

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you.

Thomas Carlyle Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Thomas Jefferson I like to see the people awake and alert.

Thomas Mann This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected - in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

Thomas Merton The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Thor Heyerdahl I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thornton Wilder The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

Thubten Chodron We are fortunate now to become aware of the contents of our mind. With that knowledge we will be able to change the aspects that lead to confusion and misery in our lives.

Tony Samara Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity.

Trinity to Neo in The Matrix It's the question that drives us Neo. It's the question that brought you here. The answer is out there. It's looking for you... and it will find you.

Tyler Zabel The Self is All and the All is Selfless. Universal Declaration of Human Rights All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Unknown Author Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all.

Upanishads Approach life with a mind sharpened by your practices, and see the One in the many.

Ursula K. LeGuin What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Valclav Havel Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

Vanna Bonta A heart needs only its own voice to do what is right.

Vernon Howard It is utterly useless to try to change the outer world, for it is but a reflection of inner causes. The true seeker seeks to change himself.

Victor Hugo It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Vincente Alexandre Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.

W. Clement Stone Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

W.E. Henley I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Walt Whitman The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You.

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walter Russell Security and contentment can come only through interdependence of every man upon every other man.

Knowledge in not acquired from without but merely recollected from within. The recollection of knowledge from within is an electro- magnetic process of thinking Mind... Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

When our knowing exceeds our sensing, we will no longer be deceived by the illusions of our senses.

Wayne Dyer Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Wilfried Fink The only thing which has to heal is the illusion of being separate.

William Blake If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. The eye altering, alters all. William Butler Yeats When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.

William Glasser It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

William Hazlitt Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

William James “Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. “The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.” The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William Newton Clarke “Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see”

William Penn True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Yasutani Roshi The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yoda Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.

Yogavasistha Maharamayana The same undivided and indivisible space is outside and inside of a thousand pots. Likewise the Self pervades all beings.

Yogi Bhajan If you can't see God in All, you can't see God at all.

Yogi Ramacharaka Prana (life energy) colored by the tought of the sender may be projected to persons at a distance, who are willing to receive it, and the healing can be done this way.

Zen Master When I heard the bell ring, suddenly, there was no 'I' and no 'bell', just the ringing.

Zora Neale Hurston No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842 R. Buckminster Fuller Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

The People's Peace Movement is an idea whose time has come. All people with access to a computer at home, at a friends or at an internet cafe can sign the People's Peace Charter. Once a billion of us fellow humans have signed, we have already changed apathy to power and make no mistake, the people have the power even though it appears the people in charge do. That can change in the twinkling of an eye and is about to. Stay tuned… Jeff

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.” ..primarily the individual is going to study at home.

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.