You Are IT

You can’t go preventing pleasure and pain, you can’t keep the mind from labeling things and forming thoughts, but you can put these things to a new use.

If the mind labels a pain, saying, ‘I hurt,’ you have to examine the label carefully, contemplate it until you see that it’s wrong: the pain isn’t really yours. It’s simply a sensation that arises and passes away, that’s all.

~ Upasika Kee Nanayon

Let anything happen – good or bad. But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens. The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self and respect it and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun during solar eclipse.

Just realize that nothing observable, or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself. You are aware anyhow, you need not try to be. What you need is to be aware of being aware. Be aware deliberately and consciously, broaden and deepen the field of awareness. You are always conscious of the mind, but you are not aware of yourself as being conscious.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Only a being’s perspective leads to suffering. Two people in the exact same situation, according to their outlook and expectations, can have completely different experiences.

Turn that around, and any conditions can be a vehicle for bondage –or freedom and awakening.

~ Vinny Ferraro

To be truly and wholly present even for the briefest moment is to be vulnerable, for we have arrived at the point where the obstacle that fear constructs between ourselves and others dissolves.

It is here that the heart is drawn out of hiding and the inherent sympathetic response called compassion arises.

~ Lin Jensen

The starting point is realizing that letting go is not a dramatic moment we build up to some time in the future. It is happening now, in the present moment—it is not singular but ongoing. Letting go is based on our present realization of the reality of impermanence.

~ Judy Lief

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.

~ Germaine de Staël

When you maintain the straightforward frankness of your own mind as it comes to life each instant, even without effort, even without training, you are beautifully born each instant. You die with each instant, and go on to be born again, instant by instant.

~ Soko Morinaga Roshi