N. Scott Momaday Quotes

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

Concentration is not the approach towards God. Concentration is a mind approach. God is everywhere, so you have to relax, you have to be meditative.

If your mind is still... You can sense the peace that emanates from the earth.

Either by silencing the mind or by opening the heart, today's man can become tomorrow's God, tomorrow's Divinity. And embodied Divinity soon becomes revealed Immortality.

The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

You exist in time, but you belong to eternity.

We have to learn to go beyond both a positive mind and a negative mind to become a silent, nonjudgmental, non-analytical, non-interpretiv e mind. In other words, the silent witness. In the process of silent witnessing, we experience inner silence. In the purity of silence, we feel connected to our source and to everything else.

I am conscious of eternal life.

The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends.

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?

I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.

To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever

The point is, as death gets closer - what's so wrong with wanting someone you love to live forever?

Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

When you drink in nature through your senses, you deepen your awareness of the great silent intelligence flowing through all things. You nourish your mind, body, and spirit as you connect to the divine love of Being.

If you have your attention on what is see its fullness in every moment you will discover the dance of the divine in every leaf in every petal in every blade of grass in every rainbow in every rushing stream in every breath of every living being. ...beyond memory and judgement lies the ocean of universal consciousness.

To be here and now, you have to be in meditation, beyond mind.

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on Christs, priest, or creeds.

After having stopped the lower activities of the mind, it must be made receptive; and, instead of weaving all kinds of empty and idle thoughts, the mind should receive intuitions from above.