Tao Te Ching
Awakened Awareness
What separates humans from animals? From birds and insects? From the biological point of view, not much. All are subject to and mainly controlled by inner genetic traits and external conditioning by family, culture, indoctrination, and media. Awakened Awareness may be the only major difference. Animals and insects adapt, change, and evolve; but, those changes seem mainly instinctual and conditioned. As far as we know, only humans have the possibility of a conscious shift and choice based on awareness. And though unfortunately rare, this re-direction seems to be increasing on the planetary scale foreshadowing an evolutionary leap.
Without awareness, we have no freedom, no choice, no ability to participate in evolution’s inspiring march of progress.
Quotes (112)
“As the smith melts fragments of metal, fusing the into a single ingot, dissolve the fragments of your knowledge in the vast expanse of your mind's nature.”
“Wake, wake up! See with your own eyes what all these years you longed for!”
“Not wanting anything to be different, we see the inner essence.”
“Awareness floats and drifts... making no distinction between going his way and going that way.”
“To accept destiny is to face life with open eyes; not to accept destiny is to face death blindfolded.”
“To see things as they really are means to transcend what are nothing but perceptions of your own mind.”
“When we realize the universal oneness, there will be nothing we do not know. But if we do not realize the oneness, there will be nothing that we truly know.”
“A non-religious person when awake would make others sleep. Therefore his sleeping is good. A religious person when awake will awaken others. Therefore his awakening is good.”
“Creatures of a day! What is anyone? What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow is our mortal being. But when there comes to men a gleam of splendor given of heaven, then rests on them a light of glory and blessed are their days.”
“We cannot enjoy full happiness, untroubled by suffering unless we realize the nature of things.”
“The kingdom of God comes not with observation… the kingdom of God is within you”
“Open your eyes: See things for what they really are... It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
“Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.”
“we call it ‘the formless form.’ But although it has neither shape nor form, neither sound nor echo, there is nothing it cannot penetrate and nowere it cannot go.”
“Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.”
“Whoever realizes that from the very beginning there has been nothing other than mind, has acquired the realization of all the Buddhas of the three times.”
“The teachings are like a flower, the mind like a bee, and realization the honey of awakened life.”
“Realization is like writing in water.”
“Whoever realizes the purity of his own mind, sees through the Buddha's eyes.”
“Without self, not thinking, not achieving… I live in consummate pure delight and perfect awareness.”
“Armed with the sword of undying awareness, I conquer my enemies, the demons of the 3 realms.”
“The flame of pure awareness burns away all delusion.”
“The soul of the poet is a most delicate instrument, extremely susceptible to everything that comes in contact with it.”
“Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight”
“When there is continuous awareness from mind-moment to mind-moment you will naturally meet the Source on all sides.”
“Once you discover the original, inherently complete and real mind, no matter what situation you meet, you will understand completely.”
“Free from duality, preconception, and discursive thought; the realization of pure awareness and knowledge assures freedom.”
“Clear out obsessive thinking and distraction, see the vast radiance without barriers, the genuine awakened field, and immediately respond to the ten thousand changes”
“Wisdom probes the ignorance and dispels the longtime darkness. Eye cataracts worn away, illusory flowers naturally fade. Spirit radiance simply shines; recurring falseness dissolves.”
“You are our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep.”
“I hear the song of the nightingale,
The sun is warm the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,
Here no bull can hide.”
“Remembering that human life is difficult to gain and easy to lose, don’t waste a moment sleeping away your time like a fool.”
“A thunderclap under the clear blue sky… all beings on earth open their eyes.”
“I will be waiting for your silence to break, your soul to shake, and your love to wake!”
“Those who stay asleep will watch their life drift past them like a dream, and the traces of their memory will fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
“The root of confused and harmful activity arise from the loss of awareness.”
“What is this precious love and laughter budding in our hearts?
Is is the glorious sound of a soul waking up!”
“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few see clearly.”
“The very contemplation of things as they are—without superstition, imposture, or confusion—is in itself more beneficial than all the fruits of technology and invention.”
“All success depends on timing. To turn out well, an endeavor must be done on its own day. At that time, seize the opportunity without hesitation.”
“Without thinking of anything whatsoever, rest vividly awake in the practice of mind essence.” 
“Enlightened awareness is within each one of us, right at this moment… without effort rest naturally as the Unborn Mind, as a living Buddha.”
“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
“Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.”
“The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this Me, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.”
“A moment's realization of the luminosity of one's mind purifies the accumulated evil deeds and obscurations of countless aeons.”
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
“Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendor, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.”
“The refuge of radiant awareness is closer, more profound, easier, and more wondrous than we can imagine.”
“Make yourself at home in the natural state of pure presence, just being, not doing anything in particular.”
“To be awake is to be alive… millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in hundreds of millions is awake enough for a poetic or divine life.”
“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawn to which we are awake is there more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
“We don't understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”
“Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it well. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors that describe it best.”
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
“Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show us a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins our journey of awakening.”
“Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.”
“adolescence is the only period during which we really leaned anything... later we see things from a more practical point of view in conformity with the rest of society”
“The play and counterplay between two personalities... plays out in every individual. In my life, No. 2 has been of prime importance... but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious understanding is not sufficient to realize that he is also what they are.”
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
“When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”
“Zorba taught me to love life and have no fear of death... he had just what a quill-driver needs for deliverance: the primordial glance which seizes its nourishment arrow-like from on high, the creative artlessness, renews each morning which enabled him to see all things constantly as though for the first time.”
“If we can keep our minds and eyes open, the world will be our best textbook.”
“Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
“What has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example.”
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
“what you are… that is what we must realize. And to this realization Zen practice leads us step by step. This is the aim of Zen.”
“‘You're assuming,' said Dr. Robert, 'that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness.”
“as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island—a fresh green breast of the new world... vanished trees [that] had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams... for a transitory enchanted moment many must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor denied”
“performers and spectators are welded into one and have both become active participants in a magic rite, which initiates them into one of the most ancient mysteries which is the origin of all religious life and the beginning of the awakening of man.”
“Heaven in our author’s thought is synonymous with Tao. Tao is the absolute, the enduring, the ever-so.”
“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.”
“Into the sphere of clear light, empty, without edge or center, the nature of the mind, grasping nothing, dissolves as one taste. If only I had the good fortune to practice this day and night, knowing for myself unspoken untainted bliss.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
“At a particular moment, in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton appeared that tried to catch me. And then instantly everything around me became white.”
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”
“The face of nature is unknowable. Trying to capture the unknowable in theories and formalized doctrines is like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net.”
“awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet — worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.”
“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
“Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up.”
“Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.”
“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.”
“In the expectation of wonderful things to happen in the future, one doesn’t hear the sound of the wind and rain, the breath and heartbeat this instant.”
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
“For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are… To ask is to break the spell.”
“Whenever we stay in the extreme of nihilism or in the extreme of eternalism, we divide phenomena from emptiness, and because of our division habit, we cannot go beyond in the pure light secret essence of the elements.”
“Consciousness is a combination of speech and our basic, sharp intelligence.”
“Awareness without choice or awareness that contains no experience…you begin to see yourself as tables and chairs or rocks and sky and water. You begin to identify with the phenomenal world completely.”
“Iinstead of seeing things as new, you see them as very ordinary and full of details… You yourself become a living teaching; you yourself become living dharma… the reference point takes the form of awareness… choiceless awareness.”
“wakefulness that has never needed to become awakened because it has never fallen asleep... never falls into the illusion of self”
“Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.”
“When we wake up from our confused state of mind, that is enlightenment.”
“We think we are a One, but you and I know an 'I' is a 'Many.' There's a Nice Guy Me. Psychopath Me... I is an Empire of 'I's.”
“beauty is something to be found rather than passively encountered, it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea... Chardin opens our eyes to the beauty of salt cellars, Elstir paints nothing grander than cotton dresses and harbors”
“Even though thoughts and emotions come and go, the mind’s natural clarity is never disturbed or interrupted… Just as space isn’t defined by the objects that move through it, awareness isn’t defined by what it apprehends.”
“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
“when your awareness of others' suffering remains mere knowledge without full affective involvement, it can cause you pain and distress. Once you connect completely on the level of feelings, that distress goes away.”
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