“The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.”
"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."
- Alan Wilson Watts
Awareness
"The source of all light is in the eye."
- Alan Wilson Watts
Awareness
"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."
- Alan Wilson Watts
Awareness
"Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that 'I' and all other 'things' now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are."
- Alan Wilson Watts
Awareness
"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."
- Alan Wilson Watts
Awareness
"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else."
- George Saunders
Meditation
"When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."
- Alan Watts
Meditation
"The Prophet Muhammad (s) said: 'When He opens for you a way of getting to know Him, do not mind if the quantity of your actions lessen in its presence.'"
- Al Hikam of Ibn Ata Allah
Meditation
"When meditation is mastered, The mind is unwavering like the Flame of a lamp in a windless place. In the still mind, In the depths of meditation, The Self reveals itself. Beholding the Self By means of the Self, An aspirant knows the Joy and peace of complete fulfillment. Having attained that Abiding joy beyond the senses, Revealed in the stilled mind, He never swerves from the eternal truth."
- Bhagavad Gita
Meditation
"When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place."
Meditation