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With a little awareness, every human being can begin to transform habit into choice, compulsion into consciousness.
Many people talk freedom but they secretly fear it. They feel secure in bondage. Other people opt for bondage because identification with an ideology, a religion, a relationship, or even a gadget enhances their identity in some way. Consider something as simple as your cell phone. If it is used to enhance activity, it can be a source of empowerment. But if it is used to enhance identity, it becomes a source of bondage. In this way, people acquire vasanas unconsciously, often believing they are choosing freedom when they are actually choosing enslavement.
The moment you wait before you engage in a compulsion, you are aligning yourself with the conscious nature of existence.
Intention motivated by a personal agenda always accrues much more karma.
Your karma is not in what is happening to you; your karma is in the way you respond to what is happening to you.
What you call fate is just a life situation you have created for yourself unconsciously. Your destiny is what you have crafted in unawareness. If you become a hundred percent conscious, your destiny becomes a conscious creation. If you remain unconscious, you fall back on words like fate and providence to describe your predicament. It is as simple as that.
You believe you are an individual because your memory tells you that this is who you are.
Everything you consider to be yourself is a result of memory.
Don’t look for anything. Don’t look for the meaning of life. Don’t look for God. Just look—that’s all.
Instead of seeing life as just life, they identify with fragments of it.
Unfortunately, our idea of individuality is separateness, and that is the basis of all suffering.
When you live by the memory of a single book, you are religious. When you live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When you live by the memory of several generations of people, you become a truly compassionate human being. But when you live beyond the memory of generations of people, you become a mystic.
Sharpening the body’s ability to perceive is the whole purpose of yoga.
Here is a major difference between the source of creation and the rest of creation: the source of creation is pure intelligence that creates memory out of itself; the rest of creation projects memory as intelligence.
how to decondition the body; how to rewrite the repetitive and unoriginal life narratives authored by the mind; how to conquer the unconscious blocks and uncontrolled oscillations in the energy system in order to harness its transformative potential.
If you can sit absolutely still, you will see that just breathing and being alive is the most extraordinary thing in the world.
When you are trying to attain happiness by hoping for a certain result from your activity, outside situations will determine whether you are joyful or miserable.
If you saw your life as an expression of your happiness, rather than as a pursuit of it, you would find you have made a significant paradigm shift.
What you call karma—the bags of tendencies and predispositions you carry with you—is only in your memory and imagination. So if you inhabit this moment deeply, fully, completely, you have dropped your karmic load.
