“Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.”
Anthony de Mello
“To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the ‘in’ box and the ‘out’ box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free fuutre, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past—maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 39)
“Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 38)
“Both peace and joy and their counterparts, non-reactiveness and present moment awareness, all stem from a particular quality of mind, equanimity. When the mind is balanced and steady, when it is taking in the world without clinging to it, when it is simply observing without judging, the mind is in a state of equanimity. The door to access the full beauty of life and the wisdom of the universe is opened by equanimity.”
Yung Pueblo
“In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 49)
“The literature on [the] psychological benefits [of mindfulness] is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply the state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 35)
“The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 34)
“History is concerned with the past. It is concerned with the dead. It is concerned with that which is no more. The whole concern should be with that which is right now, this very moment. Don’t only forget history, but forget your biography also, and each morning start your day as if it were completely new, as if you have never existed before. That’s what meditation is all about: to start each moment anew, fresh like dew, not knowing anything of the past. When you don’t know anything of the past and you don’t carry anything of it, you don’t project any future. You have nothing to project. When the past disappears, the future also disappears. They are joined together. Then pure present is lift. that is pure eternity.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 298)
