Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Consciousness is indeed always with us. Everyone knows 'I am!' No one can deny his own being.

Life is a state of consciousness.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

To be conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

Your duty is to be, and not to be this or that. I Am That I Am sums up the whole truth; the method is summarized in Be Still.

Be - don't try to become. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

Meditation is not doing something. But you cannot take a jump immediately into non-doing. So I suggest that you make your doing total. Move into it so deeply, and so totally that suddenly the doing drops, and you alone are left, just existing.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive - that you can touch the miracle of being alive - then that is a kind of enlightenment.

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.

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

All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be — don´t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance." Osho

It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you, which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.

Your soul is Me, and it knows it. What it is doing, is trying to experience that. And what it is remembering is that the best way to have this experience is by not doing anything. There is nothing to do but to be.

Being is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?

Big mind is something to express, not something to figure out. Big mind is something you have, not something to seek for.

First, meditation should be of a negative nature. Think away everything. Analyse everything that comes in the mind by the sheer action of the will. Next, assert what we really are-existence, knowledge, and bliss-being, knowing, and loving.