Carlos Castaneda Quotes

Live with all of your senses.

Shut your eyes and you will know what I mean by thought entombed in darkness. Light comes through the senses, and not only through the sense of sight. When you see without feeling, you are still partly blind; you lack the inner light that brings awareness. Awareness requires the interplay of every faculty, the use of your entire being as an eye.

When we shift back to feeling the sensations in our body and connect to what's in front of us, the creative channel opens up.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.

With devotion at the center of your awareness, you don't have to refer to your past in order to make a choice of how to respond or react in any given situation.

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.

Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.

The mind is always present. You just don't see it.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

As instruments for knowing the objects, the sense organs are outside, and so they are called outer senses; and the mind is called the inner sense because it is inside. But the distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body; in truth, there is neither inner nor outer. The mind's nature is to remain pure like ether.

Meditation will sharpen your senses and your awareness.

Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty- and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

We're a feeling, an awareness encased here

In truth we gaze but do not see, and hearken but do not hear; we eat and drink but do not taste. And there lies the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and ourselves. His senses were all continually made new, and the world to Him was always a new world.

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing...a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

Watch, witness. Your body is not you; your mind is not you. You are just a pure witness.

Self-awareness includes awareness of your body.

Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

If y'can't see with yore own two eyes what's in front of them, then y'better off closin' 'em an' goin' t'sleep, 'tis far more restful! —Gerul

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

Don't let your eyes refuse to seeDon't let your ears refuse to hear

Be aware of everything around you, because you are receiving the answers to your questions in every moment of the day.