David Deida Quotes

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

I've worked all my life on the subject of awareness, whether it's awareness of the body, awareness of the mind, awareness of your emotions, awareness of your relationships, or awareness of your environment. I think the key to transforming your life is to be aware of who you are.

If you have your full attention in the moment, you will see only love.

Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.

What I've learnt is to be in the now. It's something my mum has always said to me, and when I read a book called 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle, I realised just how important it is.

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself.

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.

For awareness you need not go to the Himalayas; you need not go anywhere. Your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware. Somebody insults you - listen to it in full awareness. And you will be surprised - the insult is no more an insult. You may even smile. It does not hurt; it hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises and appreciates you - listen with alertness. And then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things. Nobody can bribe you; flattery becomes impossible. You will smile at the whole nonsense.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

We must each achieve greater individual consciousness and self-knowledge, and project mindful kindness toward everything and everyone.

There's only what you choose, and how you can have it. If you choose peace and joy and love, you won't get much of it through what you're doing. If you choose happiness and contentment, you'll find little of that on the path of doingness. If you choose reunion with God, supreme knowing, deep understanding, endless compassion, total awareness, absolute fulfillment, you won't achieve much of that out of what you're doing.

Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem. The point is to see it.

The only mistake that we can make as human beings is to be asleep, unaware of ourselves.

The most effective way to transform into higher consciousness is to pay attention in the present moment.

It is only through meditation that slowly slowly more consciousness is created within you, more light is created; more watchfulness, witnessing, happens. And that is the miracle of awareness: if you become aware of anger you become a master of anger. Then it is up to you whether to be angry or not. You are absolutely free to be this way or that way.

If you are fully aware in the moment, there is only love.

You are not what happens in your life. You are the space in which it happens, which is consciousness itself.

Only a deep attention to the whole of our life can bring us the capacity to love well and live freely.

Meditation means to look deeply, to touch deeply, so we can realize we are already home.