Mason Cooley Quotes

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

Your freedom is a supreme value. Nothing is higher than that. But your freedom is possible only if you are not encaged in your habits, unconscious patterns of living. Change your gestalt from unconsciousness to consciousness.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

When I sleep every night, what am I called or not called? And when I wake, who am I if I was not I while I slept?

The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence.

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

I rant, therefore I am.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

I am, therefore I'll think.

The Self is self-luminous without darkness and light, and is the reality which is self-manifest. Therefore, one should not think of it as this or as that. The very thought of thinking will end in bondage.

I am Walter, a body, but more important than the body is my spirit.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.

Man ordinarily is a robot. He lives apparently awake, but not really. He walks, he talks, he acts, but it is all as if in sleep - not conscious of what he is doing, not conscious of what he is saying, not conscious of all that surrounds him. He moves surrounded in a dark cloud of unawareness. According to Gautama the Buddha, this is the original sin: to live unconsciously, to act out of unconsciousness. In fact, the word 'sin' comes from a root which means forgetfulness. Sin simply means that we are not conscious, aware, alert, that we don't have any inner light to guide us.

The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.

Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.