Tao Te Ching
Authentic Presence
For reasons of survival - if not the typical motivations of fame, fortune, pleasure, and power - almost all of us sell at least part of our soul to the devils of materialism, ambition, and strategies for various kinds of success. Awareness of the true costs of these goal-oriented endeavors is both rare and potent. These quotes can help show us the unconscious prices we’re paying as well inspire new, more genuine shifts in life direction.
“Inner authentic presence comes from exchanging yourself with others, from being able to regard other people as yourself, generously and without fixation.” — Chögyam Trungpa
Quotes (87)
“When the words come from within, when you are freeing an idea, then the words are powerful. They give life to the thought. They can ignite a fire in another person’s mind.”
“In giving advice, seek to help, not to please, your friend. Do not counsel what is most pleasant, but what is best.”
“Before all, be real. Only the truth gives the power of Orpheus’ lyre to the word.”
“Genuineness is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death.”
“I have shown you the path of liberation. Now liberation depends on you.”
“Those who turn inward and find that they are not true to themselves cannot govern the people well.”
“Truthfulness is the beginning and end of things; without truthfulness, there is nothing.”
“Can you stop looking to others and focus on your innermost self? Can you return to the beginning of the world and be like a newborn baby?”
“When your mind is transparent to the depths and your words and actions are one, the whole world becomes transparent.”
“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”
“In trying to please other people, we lose hold on life's purpose. To live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes.”
“The self-directed metaphysician discovers the life-germ, understands not just seeming-knowledge but authentic science; and, abandoning all the realms of deceit and falsity, wanders in the ‘Meadows of Truth.”
“The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.”
“Sages create but do not possess what they create. They succeed but do not claim success. Because they do not lose themselves, they do not lose others.”
“things themselves are the true self and the true self itself is things”
“Free from duality, preconception, and discursive thought; the realization of pure awareness and knowledge assures freedom.”
“Empty, cold and thin, simple and genuine.. when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs… Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces.”
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
“The sage seeks without seeking and studies without studying. For the truth of all things lies not in acting but in doing what is natural. By not acting, the sage shares in the naturalness of all things.”
“If you wish to be free from all blame, there is no better course than to be always sincere... All blame from others is due to pretending experience, making oneself out to be skillful, putting on superior airs, and looking down on people.”
“Progress on the Path is a reconstitution of our belief in a fictitious self, a transformation of ego being into real, authentic being.”
“Authentic presence may have a dream-like quality but it is not dreaming or tied to any purpose but founded on the recognition of reality developing from acceptance and appreciation.”
“And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts… Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there is no living.”
“The ways of the world become daily more artificial. Hence we have names like wisdom and reason, kindness and justice, cleverness and profit.”
“Their utter honesty enables others to see. Hence they cannot be abandoned. They are content and free of desires. Hence they cannot be helped. They dwell beyond life and death. Hence they cannot be harmed.”
“Know your strongest quality and cultivate it. Everyone would have excelled at something if they had known their strongest qualities but most do violence to themselves trying to be someone else.”
“Charm, the power of exotic beauty, fascinates and is like the flame in a fire, the light in a lamp, the luster in jewels. Commonly misunderstood as good looks, it’s much more powerful and can make the old appear young, the ugly beautiful, the dull exciting.”
“There are too many men who claim to be pure scholars and yet are stupid and arrogant; we'd be better off with less talk of moral principle and more practice of it.”
“It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."”
“The first duty of men is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is the right to be done.”
“I was never in truth my own master; I was always governed by circumstance.”
“To greatly increase your happiness, just realize the simple truth that the value and the meaningfulness of our lives is within and not based on external factors.”
“One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
“Why chase after thoughts which are only superficial ripples of present awareness?”
“be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.”
“with that solid, imperturbable ease and good-humor which is infections, and—like great grassy hills in the sunshine—quiets even an irritated egotism, and makes it rather ashamed of itself”
“Neither of us tried to meddle with the other’s soul and in this way my good husband and I, both of us, felt ourselves free in spirit.”
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
“Follow your spontaneous inspiration above all gaining ideas. The world will either honor or hate you—the difference is small.”
“I long ago decided to try to be fully what I am and not to be anything or anybody else.”
“No one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.”
“The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it.”
“Siddhartha determined to no longer be instructed by any doctrine whatsoever and said, ‘I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha.’ He then looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.”
“Realization is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage”
“Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
“She had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
“if today's creative artist formulated his deepest inner presentiments with integrity, he would aid future man to be born one hour sooner, one drop more integrally.”
“Desire, not experience, is the essence of life; experience becomes the tool of desire in the enlightenment of mind and the pursuit of ends.”
“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
“If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.”
“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
“I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”
“Perhaps the greatest gift one can give to another human being is not any thing, not ideas, not knowledge, but one's full attention.”
“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
“But pretense was impossible. There was a quality in the air of Shangri-La that forbade one the effort of counterfeit emotion.”
“Uncarved wood… metaphysically means the One, simple and undifferentiated… simplicity, plainness, genuineness in spirit and heart”
“We must learn to be different…If Wakan Tanka likes the plants, the animals, even little mice and bugs to do this, how much more will he abhor people being alike, doing the same thing, getting up at the same time, putting on the same kind of store-bought clothes, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time.”
“In this world that our technological skill has made rigid, artificial, and spiritually void; we have a desperate need to recover spontaneity and depth.”
“It's such a relief to realize that we don't have to be anything.”
“Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.”
“If as Sun Tzu says, ‘Deception is the art of war,’ it follows that being genuine and authentic is the art of peace.”
“stepping into the future of the new America, we may discover in ourselves and of the old Earth, which is yearning for all of us to become genuine men and women of the soul.”
“The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging… earn authentic presence by letting go, and by giving up personal comfort and fixed mind.”
“When you meet a person with authentic presence, you find he has an overwhelming genuineness, which might be somewhat frightening because it is so true and honest and real. You experience a sense of command radiating from the person of inner authentic presence. Although that person might be a garbage collector or a taxi driver, still he or she has an uplifted quality, which magnetizes you and commands your attention. This is not just charisma.”
“It’s not a question of what you should be or what you should not be doing. It’s a question of what you are.”
“Inner authentic presence comes from exchanging yourself with others, from being able to regard other people as yourself, generously and without fixation.”
“Trying to please everybody is impossible - if you did that, you'd end up in the middle with nobody liking you. You've just got to make the decision about what you think is your best, and do it.”
“Like a child at the cinema, we get caught up in the illusion. From this comes all of our vanity, ambition, and insecurity. We fall in love with the illusions we have created and develop excessive pride in our appearance, our possessions, and our accomplishments. It’s like wearing a mask and proudly thinking that the mask is really you.”
“There is nothing inherently wrong with playing roles, but it is important to notice when the roles start to play us... When such patterns of behavior become so ingrained that we don't even notice them, how authentic are we being in the various roles we play?”
“the bare nature of our mind, the naked state of our being, does not feel at all comfortable with these layers of conceptual, philosophical, and religious clothing that we are trying to put on.”
“You build a mask and then grow into that mask... masks that hide our true selves... The process of training the mind peels off the masks... let go of rote behaviors... being defensive and uptight, lazy, irritable, or self-conscious... We can survive the death of impersonating ourselves, and of wearing masks. We will not just survive, but flourish.”
“authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside one—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions... your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.”
“Just to simply relax and rest in your own natural state is all that you need to do.”
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