Reality

"There is beauty all around us, and the light finds us when we realize, we are all part of that beauty and worth the cherishing. If we despise any, we journey to despise ourselves. See all as beautiful, even if they choose to see themselves through you, as being less than so. We have the power to see for each, and be the reflection of what they may yet see."

"Some people spend their whole lives seeking heaven, when all they needed to do was look about them, and embrace that which was already there."

"Learning about freedom, for . . . the very essence of human existence, knowledge, as the mind is an element that enables us to shift the winds of luck, reshape the forces of fate or destiny, and, ultimately, empower us to become free authors of our own lives, for the true art of human expression is the ability to express our dreams, thoughts, and emotions as we feel them or as they come to mind, as we search for universal equality, justice, peace, love, truth, and reality."

"Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die. But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change. In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don’t know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery."

"Mind is obsessed with fleeting illusions, while Spirit is constant and free."

"There is a fine line between any contradictory matters. When our souls fail to spot it before our minds, we lose track of both reality and vision in which lead to a one way ticket for an unknown path"

"You are deluded if you think that the world around you is a physical construct separate from your own mind."

"No, Ben. What I’m asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben’s the driver, right?"

"Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree. The Sixth Ancestor said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves."

"I’m not sure. But – unless I’m struggling with the darkness within – I like to sustain the illusion that death is actually much further from me than it really is."

"...returning to nature has been a dream present in the minds of every generation since mankind first left nature."

"There is a feeling the body gives the mindof having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like fallingwithout the sense that you are passing through one world,that you could reach anotheranytime. Instead the realis crossing you,your body an arrivalyou know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in betweenthese geese forever entering andthese spiders turning back,this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place."

"How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person."

"When you take a photo, you often take your own reality into your camera - the reality that you shaped in your mind - and not the real reality over there, whatever it is!"

"Stretch your mind and you will reach beyond your current reality."

"If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both."

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity."

"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth."

"The reality of the mind can be one hundred percent different than the reality of the reality!"

"The superb use the mind as mirror, not welcoming nor rejecting, reflect without hiding, and triumph without harming. (Chuang Tzu)"