Orators

"Try to catch the voice in your head, in the very moment it complains about something. Recognise it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a thought."

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be."

"For this companion volume to A New Earth, I selected passages from the original book that felt particularly suitable for inspirational or meditative reading. For this reason I do not recommend that you read this book straight through from cover to cover. It would be far more beneficial to read, at the most, one chapter at a time, stopping at and perhaps rereading whatever passages elicit an inner response. Then let the words sink in and sense the truth to which they point, which is, of course, already within you. It can also be helpful to open the book at random occasionally, read one page or just one passage and let the words point the way to that dimension deep within that is beyond words, beyond thought. The truth to which the words point, the timeless dimension of consciousness, cannot be arrived at through discursive thought and conceptual understanding."

"A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!"

"Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness."

"When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego."

"We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease....."

"What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself."

"Life is the dancer and you are the dance."

"The human condition: lost in thought."

"When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world."

"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness."

"Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe."

"Presence is a state of inner spaciousness."

"Listen to people's stories and they all could be entitled "Why I Cannot Be At Peace Now" The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now."

"Being must be felt. It can't be thought."

"Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the “Holy Inquisition,“ an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This sure ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity... The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other lifeforms, and is more attuned to the natural world... If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being."

"Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego."

"When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself."

"You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now."

"All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind."

"Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?"

"Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness."

"Instead of asking "what do I want from life?", a more powerful question is, "what does life want from me?""

"Teachings that pointed the way beyond the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the insanity. And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion."

"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge."

"Awareness is the greatest agent for change."

"The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence. Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right or another wrong. With very unconscious people, arguments can easily lead to physical violence."

"Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment...you can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer."

"How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them."

"When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life."

"Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word."

"What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that."

"This book itself is a transformational device that has come out of the arising new consciousness. The ideas and concepts presented here may be important, but they are secondary. They are no more than signposts pointing toward awakening. As you read, a shift takes place within you."

"The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers—Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known—were humanity's early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings. A widespread flowering was not yet possible at that time, and their message became largely misunderstood and often greatly distorted. It certainly did not transform human behavior, except in a small minority of people."

"Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?"

"To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence."

"Another of humanity’s early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching."

"In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means “the awakened one.”"

"The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness."

"Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. “A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm."

"The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of “a new heaven and a new earth." We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus."

"In most cases, we cannot begin to understand what role a seemingly senseless event may have within the totality of the cosmos but recognizing its inevitability within the vastness of the whole can be the beginning of an inner acceptance of what is and thus a realignment with the wholeness of life. (Ch 10)"

"The wholeness of life becomes fragmented through our thinking. Yet the totality of life has brought this event about. It is part of the web of interconnectedness that is the cosmos. This means whatever is could not be otherwise. (Ch 10)"

"The interconnectedness of all things: Buddhists have always known it and physicists now confirm it. Nothing that happens is an isolated event, it only appears to be. The more we judge and label it, the more we isolate it."

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.(Ch 9)"

"Microorganisms are at work. Molecules are rearranging themselves. So death isn’t to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms. What can you learn from this? (Ch 9)"

"Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life. Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. (Ch 9)"

"When you walk though a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. (Ch 9)"

"Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer? (Ch 8)"