J. Donald Walters Quotes

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

Above all, know that ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

Your body is not who you are. The mind and spirit transcend the body.

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

Find your true self. The old question, asked in many ages, "Who am I?" Once you figure out who am I, and you know who am I, then you have that knowledge of self.

You are not a human being. You are not your body, you are not your mind, and you are not your soul. These are things that You have. The You that has these things - indeed, that has given your Self these things - is far bigger than any of them, and even all of them put together.

On the deepest level, what I know for sure is that who I am, essentially, is consciousness and consciousness is timeless and it transcends the body; it transcends the psychological "me," the egoic self. Everybody can know themselves as consciousness.

He who sees his soul is more than his life does not confuse the two.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

The ego is nothing but condensed unawareness. When you become aware by and by that condensed unawareness we call 'ego' disappears. Just as if you bring a lamp into the room - and the darkness disappears. Awareness is the lamp, the lamp we were talking about the first day. Be a lamp unto yourself.

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather

Come to the Root of the Root of your Self

I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, nor the ego, nor the mind-stuff

The child is born with a Self but not with an ego. The child develops the ego. As he becomes more and more social and related, ego develops. This ego is just on your periphery where you are related with others - just on the boundary of your being. So ego is the periphery of your being, and Self is the center. The child is born with a Self, but unaware. He is a Self, but he is not conscious of the Self.

Remove the Ego and Avidya (Ignorance) is gone. Look for it, the ego vanishes and the real Self alone remains.

When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.

I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

I am not the perishable body, but the eternal Self.

Only a spiritual being has awareness.

What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that.

It is when I am working that the real me comes out - that is when I am the most real and honest.

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.