Like koans, quotes can provide deep wisdom in short bites. In selecting new paradigm quotes for this book, I have included those that touched me deeply, that provide a collective map of values and visions that can serve as guideposts in our daily life choices and larger life journey's. This is by no means a complete collection but will provide the reader with access to some of the great minds of our times and in human history. 

From this point forward, we must make far wiser choices and be far more creative in order to overcome the momentum of the past errors in design and thinking that have produced the many threats and challenges to humanity's well being and the survival of life on Earth.

A friend suggested that I put this book into sections but something tells me we are living in a non-linear time and that the best form for this book is simply revealing the discovery process that led me to collect the quotes I am sharing. That is what I have decided to do and readers will let me know if this free form works or not. It will be interesting to find out.

There are visionary voices here from the past, present and "future-present". Their purpose is to act as inspiring and empowering catalysts in our personal, community, and business lives. I imagine it might be possible for some individuals diving deeply into these quotes and allowing them to penetrate their mind, heart and soul to actually change the course of their lives for the better and in so doing improve the lives of others with whom they are connected. One never knows what's around the next bend in life particularly if we have prepared the soil of our being to receive its wisdom. Anything is possible and nothing is certain in the twinkling of an eye.

This is the quote book I wish someone had given me. May these quotes lead you in the direction of your highest aspirations and possibilities and may you leave all else behind .

Jeff Hutner, Vilcabamba, Ecuador                                                                                                                                                                  July, 2015

We live in a challenging era, a time when a culture of greed and mania for growth undermines human amity and degrades the planet. Yet, we still have time and world enough to shape an alternative future where the health of the environment, the breadth of human solidarity, and the quality of lives become the legitimate measures of development and true wealth. The key to such a Great Transition is the capacity and willingness of the world’s citizens to gain new insights, embrace new values, and take common actions.

~ Tellus Institute

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

~ Marvin J. Ashton

The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human

~ Thomas Berry

We are entering an era in which global networks and the sharing of information can create revolutionary wealth at the micro-level, while enabling the harmonization of invest-ments at the macro-level. This is an era in which trans-parency of cost and effect will eradicate corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse at the same time that it makes possible global to local engagement and collaboration such that we can create a prosperous world at peace. This is an era in which we will see a bottom-up conscious evolution of humanity that liberates and leverages the one inexhaustible resource we have: the human brain.

~ Robert David Steele, Intelligence for Earth

Each of us works very hard taking on responsibility for so much when what really counts in realizing our individual potential is collaboration that includes shared values along with multidimensional viewpoints and ideas. Creative collaboration, without limits, and living in the field of possibility even if for a few hours a week can birth exciting new directions, ideas, products and processes. In short...collaborate with the most creative minds you can find.

~ Jeff Hutner, New Paradigm Digest

The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.

~ Pete Seeger, activist-singer

Times are too dire to be anything but optimistic!

~ Wendell Berry

There is no wealth but life.

~ John Ruskin’s

Give life to things which are beautiful. Don’t give life to ugly things. You don’t have much time, much energy to waste. With such a small life, with such a small energy source, it is simply stupid to waste it in sadness, in anger, in hatred, in jealousy. Use it in love, use it in some creative act, use it in friendship, use it in meditation; do something with it which takes you higher. And the higher you go more energy sources become available to you. At the highest point of consciousness, you are almost a god. It is in your hands.

~ Osho

The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I invite the reader to consider the possibility that we are now entering a period of hospice for ourselves and with one another. Never before in human history or in our own personal history has our full embodiment, the healing of the mind-body split, been as urgent as it is in this moment. Never before have we so desperately needed to reflect upon our lives and find meaning in them as we do now.

Industrial civilization has held us in a subhuman state all our lives, and we now have the opportunity to discover the powers of the universe coursing through us and our environment. Likewise, we have the extraordinary privilege as consciously self-aware humans of intentionally participating with those powers in an intimate, passionate, caring relationship with the universe.”          

~ Carolyn Baker, Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: Cultivating the Relationships We Need to Survive

A worthy economic policy goal might be maximizing the cumulative number of lives ever to be lived over time at a level of per capita wealth sufficient for a good life. ~ Herman Daily

The role of the writer is to lift people up and not lower them down. ~ E.B. White

Without an imagined picture of the future, our civilization would not exist.

~ Dan Falk

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

~ Rebecca Solnit

We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.

~ Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi

Choose Love – at every opportunity. Every time another annoys you, choose Love. Don’t react negatively; choose Love. You can only choose Love consciously as Love can never be a habit or a subconscious action. When habit dominates you are struggling to really live your life. When the focus is Love, you attract Love into your life. By consciously choosing Love you’ll make the most mind-altering, positively uplifting and powerfully transforming choice of your life.

~ Michael Roads, Into a Timeless Realm

Make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

~ Buckminster Fuller

Most optimists and pessimists imagine themselves as part of a culture with a story that continues. What they disagree on is whether that continuity will happen with the current leadership in charge presiding over business-as-usual--or only with drastic changes to make a scaled-down version of our civilization possible before our violation of the limits of nature turns fatal.

Even though all we actually have is the current moment and our memories of the past, it seems that unless we can fill in that blank called "the future," a time that will always be a product of our imaginations, we cannot know who we are because we will not know where we are going. And these days, that seems to be the paramount question for the human community.

~ Kurt Cobb:

Everyone, either in his career or as a part-time activity, should be doing something about which he cares deeply. And if he is to escape the prison of the self, it must be something not essentially egocentric in nature... Institutions are renewed by individuals who refuse to be satisfied with the outer husks of things. And self-renewal requires somewhat the same impatience with empty forms.

Unless we attend to the requirements of renewal, aging institutions and organizations will eventually bring our civilization to moldering ruin. Unless we cope with the ways in which modern society oppresses the individual, we shall lose the creative spark that renews both societies and [individuals]. Unless we foster versatile, innovative and self-renewing men and women, all the ingenious social arrangements in the world will not help us.

~ John W. Gardner, Self Renewal

Developing the capacity to operate from the nothingness of the now, the ability to discern and take the next step in situations where old structures have broken down and new structures haven’t yet emerged is perhaps the most important core capacity of navigating work and life in this century.

~ Otto Scharmer

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

~ Victor Hugo

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends                                                                     otherwise.

~ Aldo Leopold

Finally a day comes when you get it. When in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead in your tracks and                                                                                somewhere, the voice inside your head cries out–ENOUGH!

~ Unknown

Shall the individual discover how much power and freedom and imagination he actually has, or shall he cut off that process of discovery, in order to join a group whose aims are diluted and foreshortened versions of consciousness and freedom? The individual answers these questions overtly, with great consideration, or the questions answer and diminish him through wretched default.

~ Jon Rappoport

Touch the rawness of your fear and you will know your greatest strength.

~ Gaia Codex: Node 3221.841, Sarah Drew

The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omni-cooperative, omni-world humanity.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The only questions worth asking are the ones impossible to answer.

~ Krishnamurti

My motto, a play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is 'the truth at any cost lowers all other costs' Others wiser than I have pointed out that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace.

~ Robert David Steele

We can only find nature outside of us if we first know her within us.

~ Rudolph Steiner

Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance – often visible to us, but invisible to those around us. Difficult as it is to remember, it is our work that creates the market, not the market that creates our work. Art is an act of faith, and we practice practicing it.

~ Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.

~ Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

It will not be possible to build an enduring peace until the average man has been convinced that personal selfishness is detrimental to personal happiness and personal success. It must be shown that self-seeking is out of fashion, and that the world is moving on to a larger conception of living.

~ Manly Palmer Hall, author

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

~ John Lennon

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth - a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.

~ Prof. Martin McKee, Professor of Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loathe to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worth while for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us.

~ C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

Every one of us, every human being, is part of one people, one life. The brutality of nationalism and patriotism and every other “ism” divides us. There is only one human tribe: humanity. Until we understand and acknowledge that ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, hunger, suffering and disease make victims of us all, we will never be safe from their consequences. These, unequivocally, are the weapons of mass destruction on Earth.

~ Joseph R. Simonetta, Will Humanity Survive

Until relatively recently, the impetus for developing compassion and the way of doing it came primarily from spiritual and religious traditions. What is extremely exciting is that the last 30 years or so have seen the science of psychology and studies of the human brain begin to put compassion, caring, and pro-socil behavior center stage in the development of well-being, mental health and our capacity to foster harmonious relationships with each other and the world we live in.

~ Paul Gilbert, PhD, The Compassionate Mind

If at first the idea is not absurd, thenthere is no hope for it

~ Albert Einstein

The New Story needs to be told in myriad ways. It needs to be taught.It needs to be read in bedtimestories andtoldat the hearth and campfire. It needs to be sung, danced, and expressed in liturgy and art. It needs to be beaten on drums. Orchestral works, operas, and oratorios need to resound in celebration of the evolutionary adventure taking place throughout the universe.

~ Herman Greene

We have within our sight, if not yet within our reach, a radically new human freedom. It is the freedom from our inborn genetic condition—the liberation from the constraints of our biological form, such as our inevitable aging process. The human era as we have known it is coming to an end. The post-human era is about to begin.

~ Ted Chu, Human Purpose & Transhuman Potential

We are capable of constructing our economy, our societies and our religions specifically to perpetuate a healthy planet and healthy, prosperous people. We are designed to do those things. How can we not focus on those goals? How can we deny our responsibility? How can refuse our destiny?

~ Bryan Welch

In the United States, the speculators are taxed at lower rates than those who work for a living. The result of that is more resources go into speculation. The result of that?: an economy that has an excessively large financial sector, an economy that's excessively is unstable, excess activities in speculation, and, less of our scarcest resource, our most talented young people, fewer of them are going into research, into the kinds of things - transistors, lasers - all these basic research that would improve our standard of living. Why go into those low-paying research jobs if you can make a lot more money after tax in speculation? Ask a simple question: is it better to tax bad things or good things? Is it better to tax something that's destroying the global planet or to tax work or savings? And my view is: let's tax carbon and use that revenue to enable a lowering of taxes on savings and work. To me, it's just common sense. Tax bad things rather than good things.

~ Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate economist

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot.

~ Michael Altshuler

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value – the rapture that is associated with being alive – is what it's all about.

– Joseph Campbell

Matter is not made up of matter; basically there is only spirit.

~ Hans-Peter Durr, long-time coworker of Heisenberg

We have, each one of us, an infinite life, lived in a world that is convinced it is bounded. It's time we dissolved that false contradiction.

~ Jon Rappoport

To reclaim the sacred nature of the cosmos – and of planet Earth in particular – is one of the outstanding spiritual challenges of our time.

~ Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology

If the world is to be healed by human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.

~ Joanna Macy

Everyone comes with baggage. Find someone who loves you enough to help you unpack.

~ Unknown

No longer searching for whys and hows, I simply breathe, look, listen, and allow. There is no end to this allowing. It is an ongoing deepening where I slowly lose more and more of what I think I am. Sometimes this allowing is blissful, sometimes it is painful, yet through it all there is this wakefulness, the clarity and aliveness that wasn't noticed before, and this is life. Real life. I don't have anything you don't already possess. What you are searching for is what you already are. You are always already free. Reaching for enlightenment is the last thing this "me" you believe yourself to be does just before it dissolves into pure presence, pure awareness.

~ Enza Vita, Always Already Free

The discoveries of quantum physics are directly pointing to the hitherto-unsuspected powers of the mind to cast reality in its image rather than the other way round. In any case, though seemingly subtle in nature at the present moment, this shift in paradigms that quantum physics is initiating is an earth-shaking affair, with ramifications beyond our present imagination.

~ Paul Levy, Quantum Meta-Physics

Now is the terrible crisis of our civilization. Now is the fateful hour of high decision. For better or worse, We, the People of the Earth, must choose our Future.

The Strange Story of the Quantum, Banesh Hoffmann, 1947

I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system. That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancien regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets. It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.

~ Lewis Latham

Revolution is not just changing institutions, it’s changing ourselves.

Grace Lee Boggs, 99 years young, activist and author

An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Life is a festival only to the wise.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.
~ O. Henry -

Our civilization’s challenge is thus to create positive and detailed visions of a sustainable and desirable future. This not only needs to be a future with sustainable quality of life as the overarching goal but also a future that captivates and motivates the public. In this future, living in harmony with nature is recognized as enhancing everyone’s quality of life and can create a world that we are proud to bestow on our grandchildren. Until we create and widely share this vision, we have no hope of achieving it.

~ Ida Kubiszewski, Robert Costanza, Creating a Sustainable and Desirable Future

The true crisis in our world is not social, political or economic.

Our crisis is a crisis of consciousness.

Our inability to directly experience our true nature.

Our inability to recognize this consciousness in everyone and in all things.

In the Buddhist tradition, the bodhisattva is a person with an awakened Buddha nature

A bodhisattva vows to help to awaken every being in the universe, realizing there is only one consciousness.

To awaken ones true self, one must awaken all beings.

There are innumerable sentient beings in the universe. I vow to help them all to awaken.

My imperfections are inexhaustible. I vow to overcome them all.

The dharma is unknowable. I vow to know it.

The way of awakening is unattainable. I vow to attain it.

~ Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds, www.innerworldsmovie.com.

Imagination is the motive force and the energy that instigates, invents, and multiplies realities beyond the lens of language and is the doorway out of the Matrix.

~ Jon Rappoport

Too much self-discipline will discourage your playful,wandering imagination. It'll snuff out the flames of inspiration and creativity. And it'll weigh you down with routines and logic. It simply isn't"spiritual. But, then, neither is too little.

~ The Universe

Human senses at their general state of functionality are only able to perceive a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This small portion gets filtered through a range of processes – we can call it pattern-recognition – that then provides a picture of reality that conforms to both the senses and one's conditioned set of patterns. These "perceptions" are then analyzed and interpreted by you numskulls through an even finer sieve of conditioned patterns called human thinking. What comes out at the end of this labyrinth of obscurity and psychosis is a picture of reality that's closer to Salvador Dali then anything else.

~ from Meeting Monroe: Conversations with a Man Who Came to Earth by Kingsley Dennis

What we are seeing, as I've argued in detail before, are escalating, interconnected symptoms of the unsustainability of the global system in its current form. While the available evidence suggests that business-as-usual is likely to guarantee worst-case scenarios, simultaneously humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves. Our current trajectory is unsustainable because our demand for ecological resources and services is increasingly going beyond what the planet is able to provide. This 'overshoot' is already responsible for a range of overlapping crises - the financial crash, the food crisis, intensifying civil unrest to name just a few - and is likely to worsen without meaningful action.

~ Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed                                                                                                                                         www.nafeezahmed.com

~ Steve Howard, IKEA's Chief Sustainability Officer

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

~ Albert Einstein

We must abolish all armies and weapons and move step by step toward general disarmament. Together we shall save the planet or perish in it's flames.

~ John Kennedy

Only a root-to-branch rewriting of the global economic operating manual can save society from an unliveable future                 ~ Dr. Jeremy Leggett, UK Department of Trade & Industry, Renewables Advisory Board (2002-2006)

We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.

~ Martin Luther King

For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value…The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.

~ Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth

The power of art is that it shows us there are so many more emotions than we had previously imagined. We can be much freer than we supposed. The synthetic world of mind control and the handful of feelings that are linked to images is what keeps us in thrall. The world---the world of what we can be---is so much wider and more thrilling and revealing.

~ John Rappoport, Exit From the Matrix

The trouble with spending all your time splashing around in the waters of denial is that you attract the attention of the crocodiles of reality.

~ Robin Datta

When nothing has an intrinsic value and we have lost the sacred and everything is commodified, then you exploit it until exhaustion or collapse.

~ Chris Hedges

Every age has its massive collection of heavily loaded apple carts, and the job of Zen is to overturn them. When up is down, and insanity is called normal, that's where you begin.

~ Jon Rappoport

The key to getting lots of strangers to work together is not to create an endless stream of new laws or institutions but to create a set of shared values. Laws are something you merely obey. Values are something you feel. 


~ Professor Edward Slingerland

Our situation is like a house of cards; the way we've arranged ourselves is terrible for everybody and the Earth. It's not working for us. An old paradigm is dying. I think of it like an old landmass that is crumbling into the sea and can no longer support us. We can try to use big steel girders to hold it together and use lots of resources and effort. Or we can look over and see there is a new continent, a new landmass that is naturally emerging, just as the islands of Hawaii emerged out of the ocean.

~ Lama Tsomo

The old economy of greed and domination is dying. A new economy of life and partnership is struggling to be born. Imagine an economy in which life is valued more than money and power resides with ordinary people who care about one another, their community, and their natural environment. It is possible. It is happening. Millions of people are living it into being. Our common future hangs in the balance.

~ David Korten

We will save only what we love;

We will love only what we understand;

We will understand only what we have been taught.

—Senegalese environmentalist, Baba Dioum

Use things, not people

Love people, not things

~ Unknown

You sometimes think you want to disappear, but all you really want is to be found.

~ Unknown

That amazing feeling when you take a breath, look and realize that the only thing in front of you is opportunity

~ Unknown

What we face now is an escalating clash between two opposing paradigms: the old industrial paradigm of centralised, hierarchical fossil fuel dependency with all its concomitant economic and environmental ramifications; and a new paradigm of clean, equitably-distributed, people-owned energy, with greater economic and environmental equity. There are five key critical factors which – depending entirely on our choices – could serve to challenge the status quo and speed the transition to new paradigm: "First, the readiness of clean energy for explosive growth. Second, the intrinsic pro-social attributes of clean energy. Third, the increasing evidence of people power in the world. Fourth, the pro-social tendencies in the human mind. Fifth, the power of context that leaders will be operating in after the oil crash.

~ Dr Jeremy Leggett, The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-04-10/five-pathways-to-post-capitalist-renaissance-by-a-former-oil-man

I am a social artist, process designer, poet/writer, community organizer and a transition host whose purpose is to serve the transition of humanity and the planet to the new paradigm by awakening a sense of possibility and the sacred in the human heart and spirit.

~ Filiz Telek.

The hard facts of our predicament have not changed a bit: the age of cheap abundant energy is ending; the economic systems, social structures, and lifestyle habits that were made possible by that temporary condition are accordingly going away, and nothing anyone can do will bring them back again, not now, not ever. The endpoint of the mess we’re currently in, centuries from now, will most likely be the emergence of eco-technic societies—societies that maintain relatively high technology on the modest energy and resource inputs that can be provided by renewable sources.

~ John Michael Greer,                                                                                                                      http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com

The Internet of Things is a game-changing platform that enables an emerging collaborative commons to flourish alongside the capitalist market. This collaborative rather than capitalistic approach is about shared access rather than private ownership. For example, 1.7 million people globally are members of car-sharing services. A recent survey found that the number of vehicles owned by car-sharing participants decreased by half after joining the service, with members preferring access over ownership. Millions of people are using social media sites, redistribution networks, rentals and cooperatives to share not only cars but also homes, clothes, tools, toys and other items at low or near zero marginal cost. The sharing economy had projected revenues of $3.5 billion in 2013. We are entering a world partly beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent, collaborative, global commons.

~ Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society

Ours is a systemic and structural problem that requires we come together to make real change as a passionate creative political                                                                                                                force and movement. It’s happening. You see it in the fight against the Keystone pipeline and fracking, GMO’s,                                                                                                                                               the oil divestment effort that’s spreading globally, and in the 20,000 rallies of 350.org in every country in the world.

~ Bill McKibbon

I read above my head the words that read something like ‘Justice Is the Foundation of Democracy.’ And I wonder if this is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ People of color, people who are poor, the people where I come from, do not have a chance for justice. Those people have no choice but to plea out. They can never win in court. I can fight it. This makes me a very privileged person. It is disgusting to think that this is what our democracy has come to. I am heartbreakingly sad for our country.

~ Cecily McMillan, arrested during a peaceful protest during Occupy Wall Street

Hope is what we become as action together. Life is about connection, continuous change and co-creation.                                                                                                                                                 We are moment-to-moment changing the world and live in the field of possibility.

~ Francis Moore Lappe

Hope cannot be said to exist

Nor can it be said no to exist

For actually, it is like the roads across the earth

In the beginning, there were no roads

But when many people pass one way

A road is made

Li Hsun

If we live with respect for ourselves and one another and the whole earth community then there is a possibility that our vision                                                                                                          and aspiration as human beings can manifest and that future generations won’t look back on this time as a catastrophe,                                                                                                                       but as an opportunity that was finally seized and taken.

~ John Robbins

In a world where there is adequate leisure, above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid.

~ Bertrand Russell

Hope emanates from your plans being commensurate with the scale of the problem. So if you have a giant problem and tiny plans, it may be difficult to be hopeful. But if you look at the transformation of our energy, transportation, food and agricultural systems and see a future of sustainable energy, a place where forests grow larger, not smaller, and organic forms of agriculture providing all people with healthy food, you can be hopeful in that sense of the word. It’s heroic and important work. Go forward with a good attitude.

~ Randy Hayes, Founder, Rainforest Network & Foundation Earth

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

~ Lily Tomlin

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her…she has neither language nor discourse; but she creates tongues and hearts, by which she feels and speaks… She is all things.

~ Goethe

This time of rapid change is something like a huge tidal wave. It has the power to be very destructive, but it also has the power to allow you to move very rapidly forward, along multiple lines of development. The key, in my experience, to falling into a frequency of unconditional fulfillment and inspired action is learning how to ride this wave of change and to say “yes” to it. Almost without exception, when we are having a hard time these days, we can discover that we are deeply resisting something that is happening. Whether its finances, or health or relationship there is a certain kind of stubbornness that wants things to go back to the way they were, and that refuses to be happy until the status quo is returned. When you fight a big wave, the wave always wins, and you end up bruised and battered on the rocks. The alternative is to discover the art of surfing waves of change, and to discover a way to always see the evolutionary potential of everything that’s happening to you.

~ Arjuna Ardagh

The body is a community guided by the mind: 50 trillion cells in the body each have a brain, and a digestive and a reproductive system. ‘Our body replaces 1 billion cells every hour. Everything we think, feel, do, and eat in an hour influences that cell replacement more than stem cell therapy.

~ Bruce Lipton

Martin Seligman identified five basic components of well-being that I also consider the elements of a good movie: positive emotions, engagement, achievement, relationships, and meaning—living with a sense of purpose. What we're basically talking about here is human resilience—a storytelling motif that leaves audiences with a satisfied glow.

~ Lindsay Doran, former president of United Artists Pictures

The word "art," across the full range of its meanings, is what happens when, from a platform of structure, a person takes off and discovers that consciousness doesn't particularly want to wait around a railroad station looking at What Is forever. Consciousness wants to invent what isn't there.

~ Jon Rappoport

Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe.

~ Plotinus, first century A.D.

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not. Those people who recognize that imagination is reality's master we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

~ Tom Robbins

Silence is to the heart as sunlight is to flowers. Flowers tilt towards the sun, blossom, and release their fragrance. The heart opens in silence and releases its fragrance.

~ Robert Rabbin

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.

~ Al- Shafi’i, eighth-century Muslim jurist

When we peel away the unconscious responses revealing the authentic feelings below them and EMPATHY to self and others emerges, our captive positive energy is released and we feel and look better than we have in years.

~ Jamie Jackson, psychologist

Ecocide is the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished. It's a crime against humanity, nature, future generations and peace. It's about prioritizing people and planet over profits.

~ Polly Higgins, Earth Lawyer and author Eradicating Ecocide

An increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint. This new ruling class is aided by a security and surveillance state that is by no means loath to use its police powers to quell all forms of dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

~ David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

We need a change in values and paradigm and to aim at an economy where man's wealth does not result in nature's poverty and the poverty of other people. As Peter Volz, the researcher from Agronauten says “the moment of social transformation is when people look each other in the eyes”. When people act based on their place in an abstract system instead of being humans, we get problems.

~ Gunnar Rundgren, writing on Transition Towns

When our laws align themselves to equality and justice, then we will have true peace in the world.

~ Martin Luther King

Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.

~ David Orr, eco-philosopher

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.

~ Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, to talk, to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everyone goes "awww!

~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Our digital challenge is to prosper by ascending to a world that can produce universal greatness.

~ Michael Jackson, Shaping Tomorrow Newsletter

This universe is increasingly no longer gravitationally bound. The expansion of this universe will continue to accelerate until the illusion of separation from the Infinite will simply not be supported on any level whatsoever. Levity overwhelms gravity.

~ Adam Trombly

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

Things are not nearly so comprehensible and sayable as we are generally made to believe. Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit. And most unsayable of all are works of art, which — alongside our transient lives — mysteriously endure.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us into symbols, colors, forms, or sounds and something that can last in man's memory. That is our duty and if we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and words, fables, stories, or poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He's always working even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisibles friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

~Jorge Luis Borges

It's clear we are at a crisis points but it's also a turning point. Although some may think we're at the end, when people of good hearts get together and support one another, what can happen is a rite of passage. And what happens in a rite of passage is that in the space between where the world breaks down and reforms itself, between no longer and not yet, a whole new way can emerge. In this space we can get out of the rut of the habitual and make room for miracles to happen.

~ Joan Borysenko, It's Not The End of The World

Without land, water, and culture, we are nothing. The river systems are the life, and … grandmother moon, grandfather sun— everything is alive. When you're raised with that relationship, that the foxes are your cousins and the eagles are your brothers, you start to have a totally different relationship and interaction with everything around you. And so much of humanity has lost that. But indigenous people have retained it somehow. If you kill the land, the waterways, the air and culture of those people, you essentially kill those people. And that, in fact, is the definition of genocide.

Eriel Deranger, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation

Passing on wisdom and insights then is part of the responsibility of the elder, but certainly not all of it. It also includes knowing that one is a sacred being living in a sacred, precious world. Quite different from the Western concept of "retiring." This awareness invites the experience of the elder to be respected and put into action for as long as possible.

~ Connie Buffalo, Renaissance International

The real solution to our cascading crises is to recognize the inevitability of civilizational change, and to work toward a fundamental systemic transformation based on more participatory forms of living, politically, economically and culturally.

~ Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It

Even with all that is going on in our topsy-turvy world today, in fact because of it, this is a time for tremendous optimism because our challenges give us a clear sign that the old and the no-longer-valuable are breaking down to make way for the new. To be successful in these efforts, let us also remember to be guided as much by our hearts as by our heads so that we might better align our thoughts, words and actions with a more elevated consciousness.

~ Sedena Cappannelli. CoFounder, AgeNation and the World Council of Wisdom Keepers and author, Do Not Go Quietly

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate

~ E.B. White

Do you feel the passion within, urging you to live the greater story of your life? Myth is always about the making of the soul. It is the journey of the heroic soul as you travel from an outmoded existence to an amplified life. In times of breakdown and breakthrough - which we're in right now - myths arise telling us of the new heroes, new heroines, and of the noble journey we must take in search of the Possible Human both within ourselves and in others. How do we evoke this emergence? How do we inspire this possible, passionate human so that we may not just survive our time, but thrive, leaving a legacy of a new way of being for our children, our grandchildren and the future? It is only when we have discovered this possibility that we go beyond our pessimism and create a world in which we make a difference. It is in working with myth in a creative manner that we can gain fresh perspectives on our life journey. Myth can take us beyond our ordinary, habitual ways of being to the essence of what we really are or can be.

~ Jean Houston

Don't curse the darkness,become the light. If you love humanity passionately, allow your genius to serve in it's re-creation. Fear nothing and love everything. It is agape–our capacity to love even those whom we do not like–that has the power to restore the world to its innocence and grace. It's in the blend of the tough and the tender, the mystical marriage of our minds and hearts, the we find the key to our personal and political healing.

We have the intelligence; it's time to retrieve our souls. We have a political democracy still; it's time to reclaim or commitment to keeping it, and live up to the historical challenge to make it even better for our children and theirs. Democracy is profoundly relevant to the evolution of humanity. It carries the psychological momentum to create miracles in the strangest places. As Roosevelt said, and its truer than ever, "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny."

An emphasis on "being" precedes all-powerful "doing." Integrated in the service of a higher good they create an enlightened politics–an aspect of the most compassionate life.

~ Marianne Williamson

It has long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

~ Leonardo da Vinci

To me, being a radical human is to be a person who is concerned with the world in which he lives, recognizes a great deal of inhumanity in this world, and has decided to do something about it. But it’s not enough to go about it, in what I would call little increments. They’re important. They’re certainly not unimportant. But I really believe that some fundamental revision of society would be necessary to deal with peace as opposed to war and human cooperation as opposed to exploitation.

~ Abe Osheroff, One Foot in the Grave, The Other Still Dancing

It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites — or, more precisely, could unite — all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.

~ Václav Havel, former President, Czech Republic

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Live your life as if this is the last day AND the first day.

~ Unknown

Nothing changes till it becomes what it is.

~ Unknown

The relationship between an external global tipping point that happens somewhere out there and illuminating and activating                     our own potentials, becoming the greatest possible version of ourselves and living a truly extraordinary life, is the ultimate key.

~ Ken Wilber

Where your passions intersect with the needs of the public, therein lies your vocation.

~ Aristotle

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

~ Einstein

There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

~ Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war...anything that seeds to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others.

~ Chris Hedges

When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it don't back down and don't give up then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.

~ Bob Dylan

When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.

~ Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible

In the early days of a paradigm shift or inflection point those who break first from the pack are considered fools or contrarians                                                                                                                                                 at best. When the herd later follows they are then regarded as heros,     

- Mr. Numbertaker

It's an incredible time to be alive! We are moving from an industrial growth society to a life sustaining society that measures its                                                                                                                                 success not in how fast it grows like a cancer but in health, longevity, wisdom, beauty and grace. From a systems perspective,                                                                                                                                      the industrial economy is a doomed system on runaway because it seeks to maximize one part of it which makes balance and                                                                                                                     sustainability impossible. There are many ways of going about The Great Turning. Here are three: Holding actions slow down                                                                                                                                     the destructiveness of the industrial growth society. New Gaian structures and patterns of organizing. A shift in consciousness                                                                                                                                       and new ways of seeing the sacred in the scientific and spiritual domains.

~ Joanna Macy, Eco-philosopher and author of The Work That Reconnects

So easily can the God of Religion saddle up to the Gods of Empire, of Commerce, of Greed, of Power, of Militarism. That is why we always have to criticize the idols around us and within us. Idolatry is alive and well; we have to pay attention.

~ Matthew Fox

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.


~ Emily Dickinson

What am I going to do that will be most strategic to have the biggest effect in benefiting beings?

~ Lama Tsomo

The discoveries of quantum physics are truly a game-changer that requires a novel response in us which, when more fully understood and integrated, will irrevocably change us─both on the individual level and as a species─in the very core of our being. This new way of seeing things, this imaginative leap is truly an evolutionary upleveling─a real quantum jump in consciousness─that quantum physics is inviting each of us to partake in. Quantum theory has opened up the door to a profoundly new vision of the cosmos, where the observer, the observed and the act of observation are inseparably united. Coming to terms and facing up to consciousness’s intrusion into their hallowed halls is forcing physics to come to terms with questions of meta-physics, which for most physicists is not what they signed up for. And yet, like an uninvited, unwelcome guest at dinner, consciousness refuses to go away.

~ Paul Levy

Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a ‘participatory universe'.

~ John Archibald Wheeler

There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it, and that we ought to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death out of mere thoughtlessness.

~ Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Vegetarian)

Before any plans can be developed to create a positive future, what is first required is for a critical mass to find the courage within themselves to stand up against corrupt political and financial forces. The masses must demand policies and practices that bring societies to higher levels of being.

~ Gerald Celente, Trends Journal

Members of the old arrogant power structures are desperately fighting for their survival and throwing everything they have at us in a control and manipulation blitz but the good news is, it has no chance of surviving. The numbers waking up and seeing the truth is fantastic and the tipping point lies directly ahead. No more identifying with fear and a little me identity, no more being affected by it because we can choose to be living in a new vibrational world of peace, love, creativity and justice rather than the old vibrational fields of fear and contraction. Our kids and grandkids are not going to live in an Orwellean state or a global fascist dictatorship. As we choose truth, we heal within. The old control system is built on conflict, distorted values and perceptions built around a me-me-me world. Harmony dissolves it. Connection dissolves it. Love dissolves it. The truth process is underway and the old power structures will fall. If you believe in love, peace and harmony, tune in and become these states and you will make your contribution to the birth of a world of truth.

~ David Icke

An Ideal is merely an escape, an avoidance of what is, a contradiction of what is. An ideal prevents direct action upon what is. To have peace, we will have to love, we will have to begin not to live an ideal life but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them.

~ J. Krishnamurti

There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

~ Nigel Marsh

Get rid of everything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful

~ Unknown

The result of imagination, if pursued and deployed long enough and intensely enough, is: Consensus reality begins to organize itself around you, rather than you organizing yourself around it. In true alchemy, one's past, one's experience, one's conflicts all become fuel for the fire of creating new realities. Fears are all illusions that disintegrate when a person shoves in his chips on imagination and makes that bet and lives it.

~ Jon Rappoport

Paint what you want to, no matter what anyone else says. You may not always know what you want to create, but that's good. Keep working, keep painting. You'll find your way. You'll invent something new, something unique, if you don't give in. You'll see everything in a new light. Reality is a bad joke. It's nothing more than what everyone assents to, because they're afraid. They're afraid of what people will say. They're afraid they have far more power than they want to discover. They're afraid that power will lead them away from common and ordinary beliefs. They're afraid they'll become a target for all the masses who have surrendered their own lives and don't want to be reminded of it. They afraid they'll find out something great about themselves.

~ Richard Jenkins

The minute you alter your perception of yourself and your future, both you and your future begin to change.


~ Marilee Zdenek

The future is literally in our hands to mold as we like. But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Centuries from now, when historians look back on this time, no matter what they find, they will still need this lesson. They will need to know that in the soul of every person, there are colors of visions which, when acted upon, make new lives, new delight, joy, ecstasy. And the alternative is always less. The simple compounding of these lessers, without the need for mathematical sophistication, explains the root cause of the decline of civilizations.

~ Jon Rappoport

Everyone on the planet, over the next five years, will feel an overture from the universe to deepen and expand their relationship to the higher order of intelligence, but it will be up to the individual whether they connect via an intermittent dial-up modem, a 24/7 broadband connection, or simply turn away in the assumed comfort of                                                                                                                                         separation.

~ James, Wingmakers

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

~ Wallace Stevens

Exist to Inspire

~ Sign at Brooklyn Boulders Somerville open office

The visionary is the only true realist.

~ Federico Fellini

We have, each one of us, an infinite life, lived in a world that is convinced it is bounded. It's time we dissolved that false contradiction.

~ Jon Rappoport, Exit From the Matrix

Perhaps the most important lesson the interdependence this gorgeous world teaches is humility. Among other things, it counsels restraint. It says that giving up on life and the living is a form of arrogance. In “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” Alice Walker examines the politics of bitterness, the temptation to conclude that we’re destined for extinction: “Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach [us] anything.” But then Walker remembers the acts of others that have given her cause to hope, and resolves that she will not be defeated by despair. What is this but a form of forgiveness? And everyone needs forgiveness—ourselves, for not taking on every cause and winning every battle, as well as others, our neighbors and co-workers, relatives and friends, and especially those who disagree with our beliefs or accept the lies and misdirections now so commonplace in our culture.

~ Paul Rogat Loeb

It is the task of our generation to recreate the American poiiteia, to awaken from our culture of distraction and re-engage the process of democracy with soulfulness and hope. Yes, we see there are problems in the world. But we believe in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right. Such is the divine authority of love to renew the heart, renew the nations, and ultimately, renew the world.

~ Marianne Williamson

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

~ Albert Schweitzer

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us, or spare us.

~ Marcel Proust

The ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time is that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress. I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.

~ David Simon, There Are Two Americas. My Country is a Horror Show

What's a 21st century capitalist to do!?

Get human. Your sense of humanity will guide you to new opportunities to thrive with society. And, it will inform how you pursue them.

~ Elsie Maio

Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too.

~ Charles Eisenstein

Anarchism is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936; reaches further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the American rust belt, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain; and encompasses the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives. This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself.

~ Noam Chomsky, How We Can Escape the Curse of Economic Exploitation, http://goo.gl/NY3fKH

My reputation is not worth anything. What matters are how people feel about these issues, regardless of your opinion of me. What matters are your rights and how they’re being infringed.

~ Edward Snowden

We have a moral responsibility to safely hand over this planet to our children and grandchildren. If we don't address the energy transformation at sufficient speed and intensity, we'll not be able to do that.

~ Jules Kortenhorst, CEO, Rocky Mountain Institute

We are at an irreversible turning point in human history. Whether we choose evolution or extinction, everything will change. In the tumult of great disruption, millions of us are rising in a more universal, holistic, cosmic consciousness, seeking to fulfill our highest potential through joining together in co-creative action. The emerging worldview of conscious evolution provides us a purpose, pattern and process to bring forth a new future, a new world and a new humanity. The promise of Conscious Evolution is nothing less than the emergence of a universal humanity capable of guiding its own evolution into a future of unimaginable co-creativity.

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

I’ve learned the hard way about shadows, projections, thoughts and feelings and how my fearful ego uses them to protect itself, hurt you, sabotage me, judge all of “them” and ignore the fact that everything I think and feel is an illusion I overlay onto the transcendental, mysterious experience of living.

~ Jan Hutchins

Wise decision-making requires that we draw on all parts of our cognitive complexity—our rational minds, certainly, but that can only be a start. Knowledge is quite well captured by rationality alone. Wisdom, however, requires a more multifaceted kind of engagement. It requires that we apply the whole of ourselves as cognitive systems. Culturally mature understanding consciously bridges facts with feelings, the workings of the imagination with more practical considerations, and observations of the mind with things only our bodies can know.

~ Charles Johnston, psychiatrist, futurist and author, Hope and The Future

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

~ Herman Melville

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.

~ Mahatma Ghandi (c. 1940)

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

~ Ai Weiwei

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.

~ Buddha

Nothing can stop you from letting go and starting over.

~ Guy Finley

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

~ Albert Einstein

I can think of no better thing to do with my life than to be totally involved with the inner and outer transformation I am now convinced is the only path toward a future I would feel good about bequeathing to my grandchildren.

~ Willis Harman, IONS President (1978–1997)

Did anyone ever tell you changing the world looks good on you?

~ Unreasonable Group, a family of companies bound together by their desire to have a positive dent on history.

Be a rainbow in someone else's cloud.

~ Maya Angelou

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.

~ Voltaire

Each person leaves a legacy -- a single, small piece of herself, which makes richer each individual life and the collective life of humanity as a whole.


~ John Nichols

The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.

~ Colin Crouch, Post Democracy

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.


~ Seth Godin

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle. It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.


~ Alexander Berkman, writer and activist

All truth passes though three stages: Dental, Violent Opposition and then Widespread Acceptance.

~ Mohandas Ghandi

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

~ C.G. Jung

My purpose in life is to create change in my community and the world by being a gentleman when difficult, a servant when needed, and a rebel when necessary.

~ Derrius Quarles

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills…The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born…”

The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.

~ Pope Francis, from the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World

The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

~ Albert Einstein

There is no Planet B

~ Jigar Shah,                                                                                                                                                  http://www.carbonwarroom.com

The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate the darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.

~ James Baldwin

The reality salesman is selling limitation. He works for a set of controllers. The controllers have long since realized that the package they're selling cements their hegemony and their power. The one crack in their armor is our inner conviction that we can create new realities that go beyond what we ordinarily perceive. Life is essentially a cartoon. Yes, it can be a vicious and nasty and inhibiting animation, but it's a cartoon nonetheless, when is all is said and done. Whether we sit still for it or break out is entirely up to us. It's our choice.

~ Jon Rappoport

Death is wrong, and we should do all we can to fight it using reason, science, and technology. Life is wonderful, and there are amazing opportunities people can have only if they live much, much longer than they currently do. Moreover, the scientific facts suggest the feasibility of achieving major increases in longevity during our lifetimes, so that some of us might never die at all.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Transhumanist and author, Death is Wrong

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that.

~ Howard Thurman

Any door you choose to open always leads to another. Choose the one that speaks to your soul. Anything else is a detour.

~ Unknown

We are awakening to our responsibilities to create a new world in every field of endeavor. We are also aware of the obstacles that can keep us from moving ahead. Beyond all our differences, we share the same vision: the transformation of the current world order based on money, markets and exclusion to a system that puts people and the planet first.

~ Nancy Roof, Editor, KOSMOS

Dialog is great but we need action – positive, disruptive action – action that leads to exponential good, to exponential progress toward solutions to the challenges we face. We need to stop thinking linearly and embrace exponential change – change that comes from being open to innovative partnerships, and solutions. This is true innovation.

~ Ron Garan

What makes great stories so powerful is their "stickiness," their ability to catch our attention and engage our hearts and minds. The best stories stand out in the constant stream of new media that surrounds us. Storytelling is about making sense of the wild world around us, connecting with people and inspiring empathy. Telling an authentic story can make your ideas accessible and invite others to become part of your evolving journey to effect positive social change.

~ From the Ashoka Community

The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

~ Werner Herzog

If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.

~ Albert Einstein, physicist

In a world where even Art seems to be measured by its financial value, the value of Money as we know it is becoming increasingly unclear. Our current form of Money, detached from any tangible asset and only backed by our trust, has seemingly taken on the role of an omnipresent Philosopher's Stone, magically turning any quality of life into a measurable quantity of bigger or smaller heaps of cash, or rather digits on our computer screen. But not all values and qualities can be converted that easily into a pile of banknotes. After all, what we really value in life is 'priceless'.Even though they both start with an M, Money and Magic are very different things. Money is just a medium of exchange. But our intentions, ideals, and actions behind the way we use that medium might indeed make Magic happen.

~ Dadara

The world we live in is a whole and so, of course, are we—individually and collectively. So are every environment and situation we face. When we act as if we and they are separate from each other, wholeness creates ‘side effects’ that can be undesirable and ultimately catastrophic. On the other hand, when our exercise of power is in harmony with the reality of wholeness, wholeness evolves in harmony with us, including and supporting us. This conscious participation in co-created power of, by, and for the whole—this wholesome power—is key to creating the kind of lives and societies that are an ongoing delight to belong in.

~ Tom Atlee,                                                                                                                                                                                                         co-intelligence.org

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

~ Arundhati Roy

We must reject the ugly image that we are primarily consumers, a kind of warm-blooded locust whose purpose is to chew through the planet. We must lighten the pressure on the world and on ourselves. We must conserve what we love and build what will last.

~ Bob Massie, president, New Economics Institute

If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.

~ David Lloyd George, British prime minister, 1917

You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck!

~ Rumi

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.

~ Barbara Marciniak

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world...indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

~ The Charter for Compassion

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.

~ Mohammed Ali

Happiness is a state that comes and goes in response to how we’re changing and how our world is changing.

~ Unknown

Simple living is not about abandoning luxury, but discovering it in new places. These masters of simplicity are not just telling us to be more frugal, but suggesting that we expand the spaces in our lives where satisfaction does not depend on money. Imagine drawing a picture of all those things that make your life fulfilling, purposeful, and pleasurable. It might include friendships, family relationships, being in love, the best parts of your job, visiting museums, political activism, crafting, playing sports, volunteering, and people watching. There is a good chance that most of these cost very little or nothing. We don't need to do much damage to our bank balance to enjoy intimate friendships, uncontrollable laughter, dedication to causes or quiet time with ourselves.

~ Roman Krznaric, Ph.D., How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life.                              www.romankrznaric.com

New thinking is not just a clever or innovative idea. It’s a whole new way to view your life and the world. We live in a Quantum Age but still use thinking shaped by the Industrial Age, so it’s no wonder we feel limited by it. New thinking provides a different foundation, an expanded basis and framework for thinking in sync with more accurate and updated principles suited to modern times. QuantumThink is a solution-based perspective for new thinking presented in 21 principles at the edge of knowledge today—based in insights of quantum science and wisdom of spiritual traditions — applied successfully for mastering business results, relationships, global issues, and personal fulfillment.

~ Dianne Collins, Do You Quantum Think?                                                                                                            http://diannecollins.com

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

~ inaccurately attributed to Emerson

In addition to the older goal of helping the patients to solve their particular psychological problems and overcome their pain, of "curing" them, we have the added goal of helping them sing their own unique song in life, to beat out their special music in being, relating, creating. This is the goal of "healing."

~ Lawrence LeShan, Ph.D.

Don't be prisoner of your past, but the architect of your future.

~ Unknown

"Do shit that matters." You either get it. Or you don't. You either do it. Or you don't. It's pretty simple. At COMMON, we're about doing shit that matters in the course of the everyday business of human life. We find, launch and accelerate the rebel approach, the new movement, new business model, new voice, and we think that very well could be yours.

Alex Boqusky, http://www.common.is

I envision a new business paradigm: one in which business operates to add value to society, without compromising the well-being of future generations

Josh Mailman, 80's philanthropist

I saw that there are good people everywhere. I realized that a company can build a business, do good in society and have fun. These three goals can run along side one another, without being dominated by the bottom line. People, given the right tools, can accomplish amazing things. We can change our lives. We can change the world.

~ Biz Stone, founder Twitter

Business must be part of the solution, or there won’t be a solution.

Ben of Ben & Jerrys

A profound renewal at the personal, societal and global levels is crucial for our planetary future. What’s needed to underpin these renewals are change-makers who are willing to lead from the emerging future: leaders who are willing to open up to, learn about and practice the journey from ego-system to eco-system thinking. We already have much of what we need to hand in the form of living examples, tools and frameworks. What’s missing is the co-creative vision and the common will to make this revolution a reality.

~ Otto Scharmer,

At HuffPost we've made the Third Metric -- redefining success beyond money and power to include well-being, wisdom and our ability to wonder and to give -- a key editorial focus.

~ Arianna Huffington

We humans speak new worlds into being—whether Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” or Ray Anderson’s “Mission Zero,” JFK’s call for the moon landing or the rapidly trending Living Building Challenge. Only then can we step into those new possibilities and bring them about.

~ Gil Friend, Natural Logic and one of the ten most influential sustainability voices in the U.S.

Be Possible Change will say when it finds you, Your permission to yourself is all I require of you.

~ Tommy Bahler

We've all been given the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back.

~ Edo

The future is the present unrealized.

~ Ray Kurzweil

The Earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

~ Anais Nin

We are experiencing the limits to growth in the current paradigm. We have gone beyond the limits of the existing system and it’s breaking — this is the crisis we are experiencing. At the same time, a new paradigm is emerging that embraces these breaking points while extending into new product possibilities. Many of these ideas (sharing, bartering, community currencies) are not necessarily new, but technology is renewing them. We are living through an economic paradigm shift.

~ George Dvorsky

The big trend here is that the crowd is empowered to get the physical world from each other rather than buying it from brands,

~ Jeremiah Owany, Sharing is the New Buying

This is one of the rarest moments in the entire span of human evolution—after tens of thousands of years of separation, we are finally beginning to develop stories of “all of us.” With the old stories breaking down, and new stories not yet in place, the world is uniquely open to discovering “Great Transition Stories.” Our mission is to meet this window of opportunity with inspiring and empowering narratives that are grounded in lived experience.

~ Duane Elgin, Social Visionary

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBA's who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

~ Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind

The artists of every generation must reinvigorate the myths.

~ Joseph Campbell

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

~ Anais Nin

If a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is to connect it with more of itself.

~ FranciscoVarella, biologist

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'

~ John F. Kennedy

Allow the static of the world to clear … and the soul’s Morse Code to come through … There is no more exciting, inspiring and important adventure than the reunion with your Self.

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance

“Look,” he told them. “I’m retired. I’ve got the time, and I’ve made all this money. I want to help you save your rain forests.” “That’s nice,” said the elders. “But it’s not us killing the rain forests. It’s your people in the north with all your dreams of fancy buildings, cars and hamburgers that are killing the rain forests. You say you want to help? Then go back to your people and help them change their dream of greed into a dream that honors life—a dream that nurtures the earth instead of destroying it.”

Left to their own devices, men will hunt until there are no more animals in the forest. They will fish until there are no more fish in the rivers, and cut down trees until there are no more trees. It is their nature. It is the job of the women of the tribe to tell the men when to STOP. John, where are your women? Why are they not telling the men to stop?”

~ John Perkins relating his experience with two South American tribal elders

Currently in our civilized society we esteem money and riches, power, automobiles, fancy houses, fame, fashion, status, peer pressure, education, religion, politics, sport, fast food, name brands, and the media as being much more important than nature. Yet we are only able to partake of these secondary aspects of life because of the primary benefits of nature, such as sunlight, soil, plants, minerals, water, air as well as a host of organisms and animals we live off. Furthermore, primary benefits such as sunlight, air and sometimes water and soil are often free. Perhaps our estimation of the primary benefits of life needs to change places with those considered as being secondary aspects

~ Aaron John Beth'el, The Spiritual Guide for the New Millennium

Humans have long struggled with ethics. How we treat one another has been at the heart of our religious and spiritual traditions, as well as philosophy, for millennia. As we learn that the brains of other species are not so different than our own, we have to consider them in what has been exclusively human territory. We’ve acted like this planet is ours for eons; the next step in our moral evolution needs to include an antidote to that disease.

~ Derek Beres

Art is an echo of the creative force that birthed the galaxies and creativity is a way that the cosmos evolves and communicates with itself. The great uplifting of humanity beyond its self-destruction is the redemptive mission of art. Visionary art matters because the visionary mystical experience is the most direct contact we have with the divine.

~ Alex Grey

We are a living, breathing manifestation of this beautiful and generous planet. Knowing this, we can begin to transform our relationship to the Earth. We can begin to walk differently and to care for her differently. We will fall completely in love with the Earth. When we are in love with someone or something, there is no separation between ourselves and the person or thing we love. We do whatever we can for them and this brings us great joy and nourishment. That is the relationship each of us can have with the Earth. That is the relationship each of us must have with the Earth if the Earth is to survive, and if we are to survive as well.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth

Humans live by stories. But it is the sacred stories that guide us toward how we may live in balance with all other life, and what is most worthy of our respect, care, and cultivation. The modern world lacks a sacred story, which helps explain the economic, social, environmental, and political failings of modern society. Sacred activism begins with, and builds from, a story of a Sacred Earth Community. Grounded in indigenous wisdom, this sacred story reminds us we are embedded in the web of life, and recognizes that our well-being is only as great as that of the living Earth Community we come from, and are sustained by.

~ David Korten, www.davidkorten.org

What we're really looking for is a new story -- a story to live in to. Not old stories to live out of. That takes some extraordinary imagination. What do you know and why do you know it? We know with our hearts. We know with our gut. Our body tells us what we know. What some people call intuition, I call a perceptive sense that many of us have lost (nearly) complete connection to. Our mind processes this information and then takes action based on old information. It's time to redevelop our sense of knowing intuition. And feel that anything -- everything -- is possible. It's time to create the story we want to live in to. And become that story ourselves.

~ Peter Buffett

Paint what you want to, no matter what anyone else says. You may not always know what you want to create, but that's good. Keep working, keep painting. You'll find your way. You'll invent something new, something unique, if you don't give in. You'll see everything in a new light. Reality is a bad joke. It's nothing more than what everyone assents to, because they're afraid. They're afraid of what people will say. They're afraid they have far more power than they want to discover. They're afraid that power will lead them away from common and ordinary beliefs. They're afraid they'll become a target for all the masses who have surrendered their own lives and don't want to be reminded of it. They afraid they'll find out something great about themselves...

~ Richard Jenkins, healer

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

~ Philip K. Dick

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world is, and remains, immortal.


~ Albert Pine -

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

~ Bill Moyers

When you finally expose yourself and let yourself be known, the sky does not fall. Instead, things begin to unfold; miracles happen

~ Suzanne Falter-Barns

Black Elk’s word, ‘The center is everywhere,’ is matched by a statement from a hermetic, early medieval text,The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers: ‘God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.’ The idea, it seems to me, is in a most appropriate way illustrated in that stunning photograph taken from the moon, and now frequently reproduced, of an earthrise, the earth rising as a radiant celestial orb, strewing light over a lunar landscape. Is the center the earth? Is the center the moon? The center is anywhere you like. Moreover, in that photograph from its own satellite, the rising earth shows none of those divisive territorial lines that on our maps are so conspicuous and important. The chosen center may be anywhere. The Holy Land is no special place. It is every place that has ever been recognized and mythologized by any people as home.

~ Joseph Campbell

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

~ Neale Donald Walsch

You become great by being exactly, and uniquely yourself. This is a call for more eccentrics, more individuals, more creative, unrepentant adventurers. Go where your heart and your instincts lead you. Follow your dream. Instead of following the "normal" highway, blaze a new path and leave a trail for others to follow.

~ Philip E. Humbert, PhD, TIPS for Extraordinary Living!

Everything has to do with loving and not loving.

~ Rumi ~

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

~ Krishnamurti

We are moving from a chain of command to a web of connection, from competition to collaboration, from markets to networks and stockholders to stakeholders, and greed to green. This collective rite of passage will unravel our world system based on the love of power and deliver us to one based on the power of love.

~ Anodea Judith, The Global Heart Awakens

The emergence of a form of direct-intuitive consciousness would likely instill within each person a sense of the greater cosmic whole; the realization that humanity exists and evolves within a universe of intelligence and meaning - a living universe. This would serve to impart within humanity a more profound, and acknowledged, spiritual impulse. This could then lead to increased intuitive faculties and extrasensory phenomena not only becoming an implicate part of our lives but also opening up access to greater creativity and inventive capacities for participating and designing our way ahead in the world. The rise of these attributes within a small percentage of people, initially, could eventually lead to a critical mass that would tip human consciousness into a new perceptual paradigm and worldview.

~ Kingsley Dennis

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

~ Pablo Picasso

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms...And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

~ Philip K Dick

Something from just beyond the horizon

Calls us forward,

To become who we already are,

But do not yet know

~Rilke

I forgive people for not sharing my views. I do not forgive them for not sharing theirs.

~ Tallyrand, diplomat

I think the true measure of success is not how many companies you’ve started. Not how many “exits” you’ve had. Not how much money you made or how many houses you own. No, the true measure of success in life is how many other lives you made better.

~ Jeff Hofffman, serial entrepreneur

There are so many activities, networks, plans, visions all in the air - with many people working to realize these catalyzing events. I come into contact regularly with people who are engaged with such 'game-changing' events. It feels as if the 'actualizing energy' is now flowing, allowing many people to connect and put their plans into action. We are now in a phase of 'doing'. People all over the world are expressing their frustration with the 'old energy', with many voicing their frustration publicly in the streets. What this also shows us is that there is a change in human consciousness under way - a shift in our perspectives and how we view things.

The 21st century will be the meeting point where the wisdom of ancient traditions can find a synthesis with modern science; as without an inner wisdom and maturity also guiding humanity there will remain an imbalance and many limitations.

~ Kingsley Dennis, www.kingsleydennis.com

A sane society, like a healthy mind, must put ethics before science if it wishes to prosper.

~ Unknown

It is my firm conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet.

~ Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic

I foresee a world of such joy, abundance, and beauty that I hardly dare to describe it. This world is not a hope, it is an inevitability. I believe I will see it unfolding in earnest in my lifetime. It is my pleasure and my calling to do whatever is in my power to bring this world into being. It is already closer than close, a mere shift of perception away. This is true on both the personal and collective level. We catch glimpses of it, now and then, by the grace of something beyond our ken. It is a world where work and art are reunited, where no one asks, "How can I make a living?" but rather, "What is my gift to the world?"; where humanity is united in allowing the planet to heal; where money is an aid to generosity not competition or accumulation; where a multitude of long-suppressed and barely-imagined technologies, both material and psychological, blossom. I am not a dreamer. I know these transformations are inevitable, because they naturally accompany the new sense-of-self, the new human identity, that the present convergence of crises is propelling us toward.

~ Charles Eisenstein

But it is too late for me, you might say, I am already full-grown. Not so, for in the world of our inwardness, we are always growing…. We can return and begin again by facing ourselves. In this way, we can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard.… Instead of counting the scars from being hurt in the world, we can find and re-kiss the very spot in our soul where we began to withhold our trust.

~ Mark Nepo

Desire is the need of every unit to extend its experience by combining with its opposite.

~ Aleister Crowley

We find our purpose and the means to fulfill it at the place where our deepest desires meet the world's deep needs. This is the wellspring of our vitality---this intersection of self awareness and self-giving. Transformation originates in people who see a better way or a fairer world, people who reveal themselves, disclose their dreams, and unfold their hopes in the presence of others. And this very unfolding, this revelation of raw, unharnessed desire, this deep longing to be a force for good in the world is what inspires others to feel their own longings, to remember their own purpose, and to act, perhaps for the first time, in accordance with their inner spirit.

Jan Phillips, The Art of Original Thinking

We have made life predictable. We need to turn life back into a series of surprises. Life has to feel like a visit to the toy store - we dream off!

~ Gunter Pauli

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

~ Simone Weil

Poetry should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a Remembrance.

~ John Keats

The stage play called reality is dedicated to top-down control, because consciousness, if unleashed as creative power, if allowed to flourish, would explode the stage flats and take us out into an open sky of such varied magic it would ring in a multiverse of unpredictable beauties...none of which require supervision from the psychopaths behind the curtain.

~ Jon Rappoport

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compassion is the radicalism of our time

~Dalai Lama

Don't live someone else's life.

Don't be trapped by dogma-which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Everything else is secondary

~ Steve Jobs

‎The next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha will take the form of a community; a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the Earth.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many - they are few.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Spiritual intelligence is the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the situation. In simple terms it is the ability to shift from the perspective of our ego-activated self and see and act from our higher self, our higher or nobler nature.

~ Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21

The power to create new reality, new future, on a personal level, on any level, wherever innovation can change a status quo which is unsatisfying and limiting. Imagination is the buried key that unlocks the door that exits from the Matrix. We have, each one of us, an infinite life, lived in a world that is convinced it is bounded.

~ Jon Rappoport, Exit From the Matrix

Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

~ John Muir

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions . . . for the god wants to know himself in you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Creative power---this "little selfish preoccupation," as it's been called---is the difference between night and day, civilization and chaos, desire fulfilled and victimhood, life-force and walking death, deception and insight, fierce joy and a sinkhole in which the same emotions go around and around and around. It's as if we're living in a huge room with no ceiling and yet we're behaving as if there is a ceiling 10 feet high. The "10- feet high" is the result of amnesia about our own imaginations. The purpose of the collective is destruction of imagination. But imagination can never be destroyed. All individuals can do is force themselves to stay asleep about it. Or decide to wake up.

~ Jon Rappoport

We've all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back.

~ Edo

The difference between reality and imagination wasn't ever clear to me at all.

~ David Lynch

He said, “I used to meditate for two things. But today my parents died and I am in sorrow, so I’m not meditating.” His language was entirely mystical.

I said, “Your parents died? You’re a swami. You have nothing to do with parents.” “No, no,” he said.“You also have parents.When they die you will understand.” He continued: “Attachment was my mother, and anger was my father.They both died, so I have nothing to do....”

~ Swami Rama

Everything you can imagine is real.

~ Pablo Picasso

Individually, we are a drop in the ocean. Together, we are an Ocean.

~ Ryunosuke Satoro

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

~ Tuli Kupferberg

Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning.

~ Joel Garreau, staff writer, The Washington Post and author, Radical Evolution

We're running out of options except to wake up.

If you want to know something, go elsewhere

If you want to un-know everything, sit and listen.

There's a great space

in which this moment takes place.

There's a great silence

that is listening to the thoughts

~ Adyashanti, http://www.adyashanti.org

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.

~ Frances Moore Lappé, Time for Progressives to Grow Up

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom, but we must appeal as human beings to human beings, remember our humanity, and forget the rest.

If we do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise.

~ Albert Einstein ~

Things can get better, so there's work to do. The world is not done yet. Two-and-a-half million year old axes record the first moment that we understood that the world was malleable–that things can change and move, and that we can initiate those transformations ourselves. To be human is to tinker, to envision a better condition, and decide to work toward it by shaping the world around us. The work has enough love when enthusiasm transfers from the maker to the audience and bonds them. An improvisational structure enables us to get to work, because we no longer need to know where we are going-just choose a direction and trust the momentum.

Design is imagining a future and working toward it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire. Design is a practice built upon making things for other people. We are all on the road together. These two things dictate our relationship to the world and our bond to one another. They form the foundations of the design practice, so our work should revolve around these truths.

~ Frank Chimero,

The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed. We have the technologies to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play.

~ Lester Brown, Plan 3.0 and Plan 4.0

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never clearly understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

~ Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays

I have often noticed that a person who depends on external things always lives a disturbed and anxious life and suffers many a disappointment, while the only person to live in peace and certainty is the one who leads a life based, not upon the passing show without, but upon the eternal within himself. 


~ Ficino

Eternity now!

Put your good where it can do the most.

We’re all the same person trying to shakes hands with our self.

We can all make a difference and have fun doing it.

~ Wavy Gravy, Wavy Gravy.net

Be Present

Pay Attention

Listen deeply

Speak Truthfully

Act Creatively

~ Robert Rabbin

Don't let those who aren't in tune with you, distract you from those who are.

~ Mike Dooley, http://www.tut.com

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

~ Albert Einstein

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness

~Pierre-Auguste Renoir, artist

New World is the dynamic inter-mix of huge numbers of free people each creating their deepest desires. Then and only then does the world REFLECT imagination and creative force at work.

~ Jon Rappoport

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

We’re at the point in our evolution that we all have to become conscious. This is a time of revolution. There’s no holding back. So I’m about tearing down the monastery walls and seeing the whole world as the monastery, as the practice, as the spiritual temple. What we’re all working on is this very being, this very life. This is the temple, it has no walls.

~ Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel from Big Mind · Big Heart

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

~ Elie Wiesel

Living among the Quechua of the Andes and Shuar of the Amazon, I learned that "the world is as you dream it." They said that the war, assassinations, and the brutality were the results of our greedy, materialistic, and exploitative dreams. We had given energy to a world-view that was threatening to destroy us. But, they continued, we could solve our problems. All we had to do was envision and energize a new dream.

For the first time in history we are communicating with each other around the planet, instantaneously. People are waking up. In Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the U.S. we speak out and demonstrate – not just against a war or racial inequality but against the corrupt system that fostered them which in recent years has catapulted exploitation to new levels. We are forging a new dream and we are taking action to energize it.

People around the globe are determined to take back the reins. We the People are on the march. We will not be stopped In these dark times of crises, there are many rays of hope. When we give energy to hope we offer ourselves and future generations the greatest gift possible.

~ John Perkins

I am on a mission with passion, inspired by wisdom of science, shaped by the beauty of nature and the arts. No one put me in charge, but me. The state of the world and the plight of billions make it impossible to accept a status quo, or simple an improvement. We need to give ourselves the freedom to go beyond the present, and even change the rules of the game without ever saying that one is bad, believing that everyone without any exception can always do better.

All endeavors are undertaken not to pursue self-enrichment or a satisfaction of the ego, it is a commitment to live life on a path that pursues a sustainable world where we are able to respond to the basic needs of all with what we have. A path that allows us to learn ever more and realize that the only science is a temporary one, and that we are in pursuit of discovery of the web of life.

~ Gunter Pauli, http://www.gunterpauli.com

We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation taking place before our eyes ... of a particular biological entity such as has never existed on earth-the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere. The coming stage of evolution won't be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of ManOur Earth

Conscious Evolution carries us beyond the human potential movement toward the social potential movement and describes a new social architecture to enhance and connect social innovations now evolving our world. Conscious Evolution identifies, out of the breakdowns in modern society, systemic breakthroughs demonstrating that we are in the midst of a positive quantum change — a metamorphosis of humanity

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Homo sapiens succeeded Cro-Magnon. But evolution has not stopped with us, enlightenment traditions say. Higher forms of humanity await future emergence. Our race is evolving to a godlike state, marked by states of consciousness which include the rationality and intellect of Homo sapiens but go beyond that with new faculties and depth of intelligence.

~ John White, author ofThe Meeting of Science and Spirit

I'm trying to imagine how people would govern themselves if they converged around defining characteristics other than political parties and nation-states, religious ideology and moral certitude -- the list goes on... not because these things would disappear so much as they would get so granular that other qualities would emerge and reveal whole new layers of overlap in a sort of "camaraderie of values" between people and communities.

~ Peter Buffett, Change Our Story, composer, author

When imagination is put on hold, a civilization dies. It can look like many other causes are producing the decline and fall, but at bottom it's the lack of imagination. That's why societies go into the swamp. That's why the individual decides his best choice is to be part of a group. A group has no imagination. A group can supply story-line to a seeking mind, but that's all. It can never supply the faculty that makes stories. This society provides millions of outlets that offer "better stories." But it doesn't offer the underlying power to create new stories. A human has the capacity to invent an infinite number of stories, but because most humans can't perceive the value of doing that, they, the only creatures on the planet who have this ability, toss it away like an old rag. They default. They shrug it off.

To understand life at a more expansive level, you have to go there.

Imagine what victory in a war means when the survivors, on both sides, emerge with battered minds, bodies, and souls. The experience of war makes them see the future in different terms.

~ Jon Rappoport

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

~ William Carlos Williams

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one person consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings they have lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them

~ Leo Tolstoy

If life is only a passage, at least on this passage let us sow flowers.-

~Michel de Montaigne, writer

Once the call of the True Self is heard not only with the heart but also with the mind and conscience there will be no way back to the way things have been. Sooner or later we will recognize that we no longer have any choice but to allow ourselves the extraordinary freedom to go all the way in this life. Because, after all, if we have begun to see through the illusory world that the ego creates and have heard the call of the True Self to live our lives for a greater purpose-what else is there to do?

~ Andrew Cohen from Living Enlightenment

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

~ John Lubbock

The deeper I dive into gratitude ocean

The more I become aware of my divinity

The stronger my commitment is to uphold

Spiritual principles ..light reveals itself with joy

Now right now.. right here ..I make up my mind

To be totally aware of the treasure within me

Happiness already is ... Don't have to earn it

WILL yourself to live your light

THINK only thoughts that heal

PERCEIVE clearly with sacredness

BE mighty with humility

DO the impossible consistently

ACHIEVE the most memorable significant meaningful

Don't pursue it let it come to you.. GRACE always does

TRUST is traction

BELIEF is acceleration

HOPE is power

If you long to transform your imperfections

LOVE them to death with compassion and kindness

Peace

~ Carlos Santana. http://architectsofanewdawn.ning.com

Our Earth has the potential to be paradise and we have the power to design and build her into that dream world…Go Planet !

~ Jim Channon, http://thecyberversity.com

This is not an era of change, it's a change of eras!

Dr Paul Ray, sociologist, researcher,author, The Cultural Creatives

Wisdom never fights, it waits patiently, speaks positively, releases easily, sees benefit in everything and envisions a future of abundance…knowing that all needs will be met at the right moment, in the right way

~ Tom Atlee

The written word was and is an extraordinary technological tool but it was the first step in the separation of knowledge from experience. It extended knowledge, in time and space, but away from self, and made invisible, and often forgotten, the source of knowledge, the reason for knowledge. There are trade-offs in the process of literacy which I think are very important to examine. Literacy allows detachment, lack of involvement, sometimes, and most important of all, irresponsibility to the essential understanding and retention of knowledge. Physical-conceptualization is deeper and more lasting as a learning process, and the individual is propelled into a sense of responsibility by that process, that, I think, is why Bucky said invisibility can be "understood and coped with only by experience-educated mind.

~ Allegra Fuller Snyder

Humanity has the option to become successful on our planetif we reorient world production away from weaponry --from killingry to livingry. Can we convince humanity in time?

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Things are getting better and better, and worse and worse, faster and faster.We are at a critical stage in our remarkable human journey on this planet: We are coming to a place where the road ends. From here on out, we will be making the road as we walk it, in ways we've never had to do before. We now have the job of forging our own evolutionary destiny, and being prime agents of the process of evolution here on earth.

~ Tom Atlee, http://www.co-intelligence.org

Building local centers that are self-sustaining and that can create forms of community that are not dependent on corporate forces is a political act, because these corporate forces need us to continue to consume their products and rely on their services. And the less we consume and the less we are hostage, the less we need these forces, the more independent we become.

~ Chris Hedges

During times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act

~ George Orwell

In this life, we have two choices. We can create what already is, or we can create what isn't and never was. The second choice is the vast adventure, which, when embarked upon, lets a person know why he's alive. What is called mind control is everything a person does to himself to curtail and develop amnesia about the vast adventure.

~ Jon Rappoport

We are in love with inanimate objects that don't return our affection.

~ Eric Fromm

The pain pushes until the vision pulls.

~ Michael Beckwith

I don’t want to gloss over the profundity of the paradigm shift we are accepting if we are to see nature as intelligent and purposive. To do so is to abdicate the exclusive domain to which we have appointed ourselves: the sole intelligence of the world. It is to humble ourselves to something greater, and seek our place not as Cartesian lords and possessors of nature, but as contributors to an unfolding process beyond our selves. This inescapable conclusion is, perhaps, the reason why teleology is anathema to orthodox science. Purpose was supposed to be our domain! And the king of that domain was the scientist, wielding technology to enact its dominion.

~ Charles Eisenstein

The future of the human race is to wake up

~ unknown

Photo:Joseph Crachiola

At what point do we begin to mistrust one another?

When do we begin to judge one another based on gender or race?

The answer is contained in these lyrics from South Pacific

You've got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught

From year to year,

It's got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a different shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught!

If you don't go out seeking, if you don't retreat, if you don't put yourself into the wilderness with nothing to carry you, you will never see what you need to shed or what you need to gain. You will never change. And if you never change, neither will anything else.

~ Paul Kingsnorth

It’s easier than ever to convene, to organize, to create spaces where strangers will cease to be strangers and turn into allies and friends. Those that convene overcome their resistance just one time, and then benefit from the generosity they’ve delivered to the group. The only difference between a group of strangers and a group of friends is that the friends benefitted from someone willing to go first. When we weave together strangers and turn them into a tribe, we create real value, value that lasts.

~Seth Godin, Sea of Strangers

When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty.
~ Coleman Barks

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

~ Antoine de St Exupéry

The world is my country, all mankind my brethren and to do good is my religion.

~ Thomas Paine

Wisdom enters through the wound. Your scars are sometimes your greatest source of strength.

~ Michael Bungay Stanier

No matter what our attempts to inform,

it is our ability to inspire

that will turn the tides.

~ Jan Phillips, The Living Kindness Foundation

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) - -but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel(experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel(experience), you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself--in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.-

~ E.E. Cummings

In zero-sum games, there's a clear winner and a clear loser. In positive-sum games, "everyone wins." In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. Some competition will always be zero-sum — such as the competition for mates.

~ Steven Pinker, psychology professor, Harvard University; author,The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

The expression of hope can be quite static. The expression of Love is creative and moving; it promotes change. Hope tends to look outside for help and waits; Love looks within and finds the power of Self.

All that is happening in your present time/frame – from the most gross/negative to the ultra-positive – is a reflection of the whole human consciousness of that frame. There is truly no right and wrong, good or bad; there is only the individual expressions of fear/deny or Love/accept, and all the shades in between that determine the eternal Now of each individual with the Whole. Neither innocence nor guilt, nor judgment and blame has any place within this; it is all self-determined.

No matter how noble the motive, fear is not the basis of unity. Fear-based actions threaten the extinction of many species of trees, yet if the defense of the trees is also based on fear, in consciousness nothing creative happens. Fear is a force of restriction, of separation. If a thousand fearful people plant a thousand trees a day, then fear plants the trees, and fear will just as surely remove them. In a year or a hundred years, a fear-based action will reap the harvest of separation and more fear.

If, however, a person plants a single tree each month, or each week or each year, and planting that tree is a pure expression of that person’s love, with no motive other that the joy of sharing life with that tree, then in consciousness this act will affect the entire universe – and Beyond. Love connects and creates.

~ Michael Roads, Journey Into Oneness

The work being done by conscious creatives in the realms of words, music, filmmaking and beyond, is too important to leave to the skewed bias of the old economic models. Our capacity to free ourselves from the illusions of the corporate imagineers is akin to seeing ourselves again for the first time in a long time.Our art is a reflection of ourselves, and our ability to truly see the reality behind the curtain: our world is dying, and She needs us towake up.

Everyone is concerned about economics and right relationship to money; it sits at the center of our personal lives and our culture. All we have to do is look around us at the economic crisis to know that the old systems are collapsing. But what are the new ones that are coming in?We can enable our dreams, projects and visions to become reality through creative crowdfunding.Crowdfunding is one of the key pillars of our emerging social and economic paradigm. We can reinvent and reimagine our world through our relationship with giving, receiving, new currencies and tapping into a culture of generosity.

Ian Mackenzie, Canadian filmmaker and crowdfunding expert

The desire for excellence is heating up. In a meaningful way we all have not just an opportunity but a responsibility now to give the greatest performance of our life. We can take the Directorial cues from our changing economic landscape. All of us are ready for a new scene. Our faltering systems calling for re-takes present us with the opening to answer the calling, to heed the heart strings, to toss all fears to the wind and courageously follow our passions, attune to the energies, restructure ourselves and our lives. A performance of a lifetime happens not by chance but by choice.

~ Dianne Collins, QuantumThink.com

In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that

no one else seems to see need to be done.

~ Buckminster Fuller

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.

~ Albert Einstein

I trust that a healthy balance can exist between "dreaming big" and "wanting small." This is especially true if we're able to keep our desires and aspirations in proper proportion with our gratitude and good intentions. By balancing these things, we can set our sights to achieve extraordinary things, practice thankfulness for what we have, and stay grounded in the wisdom that we don't always know what our life might hold and what is in our best interests.

~ Karen Horneffer Ginteris co-founder of the Center for Psychotherapy and Wellness and the author of 'Full Cup, Thirsty Spirit: Nourishing the Soul When Life’s Just Too Much

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
 ~ Maya Angelou

What is a thriving world? To me it is a world based on integrity, individual freedom, and voluntary cooperation. It's a world where not just some, but everyone gets to live the fullest life possible.

~ Foster Gamble

The truest measure of a life is not its length, but the fullness in which it is lived.

If I am not myself, then the one they are loving is not me.

~ Maria Housden, author, Hannah's Gift

Questions are like lights that we can shine on the habitual, the reactive, and the assumed.

Questions,are the central keys to transformation.

Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.”

So make each day in your life new and morealive with great questions.

~ Clarisa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness

until it flowers again from within

~ Galway Kinnell

Each individual we encounter in life is our teacher especially those difficult people who drive us crazy. By observing them, by observing our reactions to them and our feelings about them, we learn and grow and we discover that these challenging people in fact enrich our lives and connect us more deeply to our truest selves.

~John E. Welshons, One Soul, One Love, One Heart, http://onesoulonelove.com

Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive!

~ Bugs Bunny

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.

~Winston Churchill

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.

Our duty as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If we are free, philosophy will strengthen our wings.

If we are enslaved, philosophy will weaken our chains.

~ Stefan Molyneux, MA, Host, Freedomain Radio

As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but now ascending feminine. But why has the pervasive masculinity of the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition suddenly become so apparent to us today, while it remained so invisible to almost every previous generation? I believe this is occurring only now because, as Hegel suggested, a civilization cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching its own death. Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of man himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine.

~ Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

We are all coded in our very DNA with the Impulse of Evolution unfolding AS each of us. We are incarnating the Impulse as our own heart's desire to give our greater gifts. We are a vital planetary resource, especially when we develop a resonant community among ourselves to support others in their own unfolding. We need each other. Now that we are in the Post Birth or rather in the New Born Era of a Planetary Cocreative Culture we need to cultivate the resonant field that nurtures the seed of the new being that we are becoming.

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Don’t play for safety. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.

~ Hugh Walpole

As more of us feel our goodness, the future of humanity and our planet will shift.

~ Sakyong Mipham, The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity's Hidden Treasure


For a whole new generation, the common good is becoming an ethic and a vision worth committing one’s life to.

~Jim Wallis, Editor, Soujourners and author, On God's Side: For the Common Good.

Perhaps change is less about fixing a broken world and more about uncovering hidden wholeness in all events, all organizations and all people and remembering our personal power to make a difference. Everyone and everything has in it a seed of a greater wholeness, a dream of possibility. Perhaps what I once saw as “broken” or “lacking” might just as easily be seen as the growing edge of things … a place to be valued and nurtured in our patients, our students and in ourselves.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen, nationally recognized medical reformer and educator and author, Kitchen Table WisdomandMy Grandfather's Blessings

The most important networks are our own inner and inter-human spiritual, emotional, mental and physical connections. There is pure pleasure in engaging with another person in even the most simple contact: it lights up the circuits of the brain and heart, it makes us feel fuller, more connected to something bigger than us, whole, it instills faith and hope, it requires smiling, and is downright therapeutic on many levels, personal and societal.

~ Susan Stanton Rotman

I was an active member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for years. As campaigners, we did great things, and they were nice people. Then I read a book by Alastair McIntosh, and he said it’s no good being a campaigner if you’re not a good neighbor. Somehow, that hit home. I resigned from the campaign groups and went to my next-door neighbor. I told her about this movie about peak oil, and invited her to come over and watch it with me. She brought her husband and a friend who was ‘into this kind of stuff.’ I served tea and biscuits, and we watched the film. We talked about it a bit, and then one day, a solar engineer stopped by our street and put solar panels on my neighbor’s roof. I realized, Wow, this can be powerful!

~ John-Paul Flintoff, author, How To Change the World

Think about it this way: We're killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200 million year old sunlight. We frack our backyards or blow up mountaintops for an hour of electricity when we could just take what's falling from the sky.

~ Danny Kennedy

At the moment, our society's notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. But it's time for a third metric founded on well-being, wisdom and our ability to wonder and to give back.

~ Arianna Huffington

I have taken life itself to be the primary phenomenon, and creativity, rather than ‘the conquest of nature,’ as the ultimate criterion of man’s biological and cultural success.

The Megamachine is the central theme of Western society: a social construction built upon absolutism, centralization, mechanization, regimentation, militarism, genocide, biocide, spectacle, and alienation – with attendant loss of the very qualities the species had developed through evolution: autonomy, human scale, spontaneity, diversity, communalism, and participation.

~ Lewis Mumford

While some of us are angry about the economic conditions in the world and some point fingers, others are turning lawns into vegetable gardens and organizing their neighbors to start pea patches and farmers’ markets. They’re getting together with neighbors to swap preserves and skills, and to relearn the skills their grandparents had. They are protecting local resources — water, land, forests and fisheries — that can offer sustenance into the future, and they are starting up energy and weatherization cooperatives.

They’re paying off their debt, moving their money out of big corporate banks to local banks and credit unions, and supporting local businesses. As they do, they are freeing themselves from the global corporate economy that moved jobs overseas and fueled the speculation that undermined the real economy of jobs, goods and services. These folks have chosen instead to use their resources to strengthen local economies and the small and medium-sized businesses that are most likely to create the new jobs of the next economy. These are the pioneers of the new normal, and you can find them building the foundations of a hopeful future in urban centers, small towns and suburbs. Perhaps you’re one of them.

~ Sarah van Gelder, Executive Editor, YES! Magazine.

As significant sections of the elite realise their future prosperity and power is threatened by climate change, or enhanced by the resulting market shifts, the balance of power in the whole global system will shift. From the David vs. Goliath of the ‘economy vs environment’ debate, it will become ‘my economy vs.your economy’, with multi-trillion dollar impacts for the winners and losers. And with a battle between Goliath and Goliath, business leaders will increasingly have to choose sides. Now that will be interesting.

~ Paul Gilding

So the bottom line is, as an investor I think it's essential to keep an eye on returns to the network and use that information in a model where you never intentionally do anything that has either a negative return to the investor or a negative return to the network. I think you really have to say in this environment, "I don't care how much money I make on Monsanto; I don't want it and I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to finance my own death. I'm not going to finance the death of my family. I'm not going to liquidate the planet to make a quick buck." And I think that's a line that increasingly investors are going to have to draw. -

~ Catherine Austin Fitts, http://solari.com

These are times of revelation, and two things are getting revealed simultaneously: how our power has been taken from us, and how we can reconnect with our Source of true power. As I've likely mentioned many times before, the original meaning of "apocalypse" is "the lifting of the veils." The veils that Swami has called the "irony curtain" are being peeled away, and the sound of whistleblowers blowing whistles can be heard even through the media's blather of babblum.

It's easy to look at these times of radical (to the root) transformation as "end times." Certainly, it's the end of a way of being that is obsolete and unsustainable. But like the caterpillar transforming into butterfly, it is also a time for something else to be born. We on the planet today are right now living in two worlds, as one paradigm dissolves and another one emerges. In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and I call it "the changing of the Gods."

~ Swami Beyondananda

Look up. The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope - into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up!"

~ Charlie Chaplin, excerpted from The Great Dictator (1940)

We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

~ Chris Hedges, “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

If as a college president you do stand up to oil companies, then you stand some chance of changing the outcome of the debate, of weakening the industry that has poured billions into climate denial and lobbying against science. The action you’re demanding of your students—less driving—can’t rationally be expected to change the outcome. The action they’re demanding of you has at least some chance. That makes you immoral, not them.

~ Bill McKibbon

There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential either to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us. In Dispelling Wetiko, I pay homage to the way Native American traditions have long been tracking the very same psychic virus that I point to. Indigenous people’s articulation of the disease inspires all of us to track and bring into focus this elusive, nonlocal parasite of the mind.

Writing this book has helped me stay sane in a world gone mad. To quote the maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man … normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” Our species is clearly in the middle of a mass psychic epidemic, which I call “malignant egophrenia” and Native Americans call “wetiko.”

Whichever name we use, we are in the midst of a collective psychosis of titanic proportions, and one of its most stunning features is that very few people are even talking about it. Does that seem as crazy to you as it does to me? Our madness has weirdly become normalized, to the point where we don’t even notice it. This book is an effort to shine a revealing light on both the madness and the source of the madness, which is ourselves.

Living encounters with the psychic wetiko virus have disfigured, re-formed, and changed me. As a result, I am no longer who I was, while at the same time never being more myself. It became obvious that my life—just like everyone else’s—is a particularized microcosm, a personalized iteration of a collective macrocosmic fractal.

~ Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil

Irreversibly awakening out of its somnambulistic trance, humanity is going through an evolutionary metamorphosis in which it is unfurling its incandescent wings of creative imagination as it flies into the open-ended space of previously undreamt possibilities, releasing itself into the luminous imaginal sky of freedom.

~ Paul Levy, Awaken in the Dream


As we hold ourselves (ALL of us) as if we are already living in an expanded, enlightened field of consciousness, living in sync with new world view principles, and we are that right now—we authentically live the wisdom as walking-talking embodiments of the principles we’ve been singing to the choir all these years. This is not “positive thinking;” this is the realization that we are choosing to live from a new context. Context is neither true nor false. Context shapes reality. To live the wisdom, we put an end to the “the shift is on it’s way, yes it’s coming soon” conversation—and we live the new consciousness now.

~ Dianne Collins, Creator, QuantumThink, www.diannecollins.com

Mahatma Gandhi said that there is enough in the world for everybody’s need but not enough for anybody’s greed. At the moment, 1% of the population is greedy, while 99% are suffering. This 1% wants to be the superpower. But we need to embrace all of society. We need to solve social problems of poverty and wars with imagination and creativity, forgiveness. How much can you give? How much can you take? All problems can be solved by negotiation, friendship, giving in, letting go of ego and going into eco. Eco means home, eco means relationships. Let us make a shift from ego to eco, from self interest to mutual interest of whole human society.

~ Satish Kumar

Beware the effects of a fragmented society. Perhaps someone should express concern about having to live in a society where creativity is not only undervalued, but all but ignored. Creativity is vital for a balanced society, that is, in the schools, not because one might become an artist one day, but because the arts develop the heart — not only the rational mind. We've become lopsided living only in our heads. Writing, in order to serve the soul, must integrate outer craft with the inner world of intuition and feeling.

~ Catherine Ann Jones

Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are undergoing a rite of passage of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out on the stage of history with, as it were, the cosmos itself as the tribal matrix of the initiatory drama. Perhaps humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation, separating it from the larger community of life, from the cosmos itself, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis--an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. It is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, and we cannot really know where it is headed. I believe we have a choice. There are many possible universes, many possible meanings, floating through us.

We are not solitary subjects in a meaningless universe upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we just empty vessels, as it were, on automatic, playing out passively the implacable processes of history, of the universe, of our environment, of our genes. Rather, we are all miraculously self-reflective creative participants in a larger cosmic drama, in a co-evolutionary unfolding of reality. It is a complex process where both we and the universe are mutually creators and created. What seems to be unfolding is not only a recovery of the soul of the world, the anima mundi, but a new relationship to it. Something new is being forged.

~Richard Tarnas, author, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. www.cosmosandpsyche.com

Luke: I can't believe it.

Yoda: That is why you fail.

The next phase of human evolution is the recognition that we are each and all cells in a super-organism called Humanity. The multiple crises we face are an invitation, an opportunity for our entire species to evolve. Some might call this evolution "heaven on earth". The cellular community beneath our skins would simply call it "health".

While evolution might sound fine and dandy in the ideal, when it comes to the "real deal" it can be messy and uncomfortable, particularly when we insist on holding on to structures (physical, mental and spiritual) that the forces of evolution are sweeping away because they have become obsolete in our lives.

~ Steve Behrman aka Swami Beyondananda

All the way to heavenisheaven.

~ Catherine of Siena

We have within us extraordinary creative potentials that have yet to be massively unleashed, leading to wide-scale cooperation, innovation, sustainability and peace. The solutions are available; it is only the human software that needs an upgrade.

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.

That will be the beginning.

~ Louis L'Amour

hat is why you fail."

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.

~ Richard Buckminster Fuller

The visionary is the only true realist.

~ Federico Fellini

All external sources of happiness are highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.

~ Schopenhauer

Joy and Happiness are the indicators of balance.

~ Walter Russell

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of write. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need.” While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way.

~ from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Only those who risk going too far will ever know how far they can go. ~ T.S. Eliot

The adventure of life is to learn.

The goal of life is to grow.

The nature of life is to change.

The challenge of life is to overcome.

The essence of life is to care.

The secret of life is to dare.

The beauty of life is to give.

The joy of life is to love.

~ William Arthur Ward

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform

the world.

~ Howard Zinn

Living with integrity means... behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values.

~ Barbara De Angelis

Ideas don't change the world. People who faithfully and tenaciously pursue and implement their ideas change the world.

~ Eugene Cho

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project,

All your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations,

Your consciousness expands in every direction,

And you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world.

Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself

To be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.“

Patanjali - approximately 200 BC

The Father of Yoga

Fame or Integrity: which is more important? Money or happiness: which is more valuable? Success or failure: which is more destructive? If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

~ Lao Tzu

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

~ John Manyard Keynes

Military weapons and wars are irrelevant. Issues and problems are increasingly global, not satisfactorily resolvable by individual nations. The real security threats to nations and humanity include: global warming, water shortages, epidemics that cross national boundaries, massive pollution sometimes carried by air and oceans around the world, piracy that can only be stopped by organized multi-national action, disintegrating economies, food shortages, and increased poverty. None of these problems can be solved by any nation alone; all require cooperation, conservation, sharing, mediation and diplomacy. War only exacerbates the problems and retards the most promising and necessary change. All of these problems mean that the wealthier people on the planet, for their own benefit, must not turn their backs to the increasing social and environmental needs of the less wealthy.

~ Alan Kay, Eliminating War

We already know that climate science is unambiguous and that every year the world defers action, the costs only grow. But focusing only on grim realities misses promising realities staring us right in the face. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 3 Report makes very clear we face an issue of global willpower, not capacity.

~ John Kerry, Secretary of State

~ Jimi Hendricks

Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

~Paul Hawken

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.

~ Frances Moore Lappé, Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Our government has forsaken its people – and the world – in the past. It is doing so again. We must demand that this cease and that those we elect protect the rights guaranteed by our Constitution – including the right to privacy and freedom of speech. Let the clarion call go out onAugust 15 that we will end the wars we are currently fighting and policies that keep expanding the gap between rich and poor, here at home and around the globe.

~ John Perkins

The planetary commons ... our atmosphere, our soil, our sea-life, the water, the forests … have no voice! That’s the bigger part of our world and definitely the biggest part of our future! We simply must expand our awareness to include the stage we all stand upon. Creating a comprehensive new global news format has to be near the top of the list for our world today.

We don’t need to wait to have governments lead us forward. They have some very vested interests in keeping things separate. It is critical to remember they are just social inventions like a county or a province or a territory. They are reported to have killed 160 million people last century because among other things they still, have too much ideology, patriarchy, hierarchy and just plain bloat.

~ Jim Channon, GO Planet

Creating the capacity for public wisdom in the 21st century is our task, our calling. We are the revolutionary founders of the new democracy.

~ Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom

You can’t change the world from the rear view mirror.

—Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

It began on the Internet social networks, as these are spaces of autonomy, largely beyond the control of governments and corporations that had monopolized the channels of communication as the foundation of their power, throughout history. By sharing sorrow and hope in the free public space of the Internet, by connecting to each other, and by envisioning projects from multiple sources of being, individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments. They came together. And their togetherness helped them to overcome fear, this paralyzing emotion on which the powers that be rely in order to prosper and reproduce, by intimidation or discouragement, and when necessary by sheer violence, be it naked or institutionally enforced. From the safety of cyberspace, people from all ages and conditions moved towards occupying urban space, on a blind date with each other and with the destiny they wanted to forge, as they claimed their right to make history — their history — in a display of the self-awareness that has always characterized major social movements.

Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope

Many experts now point to an imminent paradigm shift: a transformation in the way we conduct our business, engage with each other and relate to life itself. For instance, Professor Michael Porter stated when addressing a business leaders forum in October 2011 ‘the old models of corporate capitalism are dead…we are witnessing a paradigm shift’. In 2012 John Elkington, in The Phoenix Economy report, notes that ‘the time is ripe for a true paradigm shift to a more sustainable economy.’ So here we are in 2013; there is no time like the present. The paradigm shift is not going to happen five or ten years from now, it is happening as we speak.

~ Giles Hutchins, The Nature of Business

Business is about maximizing relationships; the money is just a tool.

~ Judy Wicks, from her new book: Good Morning Beautiful Business.

I have the feeling that a whole new way of life is growing in the cracks of the old order.

~ UTNE Reader Survey Question

Strive not to be a success but to be of value.

~ Albert Einstein

“Entrepreneurial quality - is by far the toughest (criterion for a social entrepreneur).. For every one thousand people who are creative and altruistic and energetic, there's probably only one who fits this criterion, or maybe even less than that. By this criterion...we do not mean someone who can get things done. There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.”

~ Bill Drayton

Fear is the easiest way to keep humanity from evolving. From the fear of God, to the fear of paying the mortgage, to the fear of not being seen as cool. It’s a lockdown. Our culture has us in a chokehold at any cost. It doesn’t care about you or me. And fear is its go-to position. But by being fearless and "ending the world as we know it", we can usher in a new era. My new single "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" is available now. Buy it on iTunes or listen in my store here.

~ Peter Buffett, "The Skin We're In"

The truth shall upset you free.

Explore ways to "metabolize" the "residoo-doo."

~ Swami Beyondananda

The whole of humanity is somehow represented in each and every cell of our body. None of the positive or negative experiences we have escapers the highly conditioned design of our hologram. Our conscious life is like the tip of an iceberg, the visible portion representing only 3-5% of the whole that we actually are. The submerged portion of the iceberg is the subconscious portion of our life, the one that permeates cells with information and memory. The subconscious operates as if it were behind a veil, conditioning our way of perceiving and responding.

Luis Diaz, Memory in the Cells, Founder, Change Agents University

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

- Joseph Campbell

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

~ Winston Churchill

“As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with those contemporary facts.”

~ Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

We've built a world based on the assumption that we will have endless energy to subsidize endless economic expansion, which was supposed to magically produce justice. That world is over, both in reality and in dreams. Either we begin to build a different world, or there will be no world capable of sustaining a large-scale human presence.

~ Robert Jensen

At the level of ordinary consciousness, we deny pain and paradox. We doctor them with Valium, dull them with alcohol, or distract them with television. Denial is a way of life. More accurately, it is a way of diminishing life, of making it seem more manageable. Denial is the alternative to transformation. Personal denial, mutual denial, collective denial. Denial of facts and feelings. Denial of experience, a deliberate forgetting what we see and hear. Denial of our capacities. Politicians deny problems, parents deny their vulnerability, teachers deny their biases, children deny their intentions. Most of all, we deny what we know in our bones. We are caught between two different evolutionary mechanisms: denial and transformation.

Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time

The promise is that we are at the threshold of a consciousness revolution. Some compare the opportunity to the cultural renaissance of 15th-century Italy, which made room for humanity in a world ruled by an omnipotent God. The new, spiritual, renaissance opposes our god—the power of the market and technology—and offers humanity a new social place.


In past centuries, humanity has enthusiastically pursued the discovery of everything that can be seen and touched. The overwhelming question regarding the “why” of our existence—the understanding of consciousness—was shoved aside for the sake of convenience. But that doesn’t mean evolution can escape the question. In fact, physicists have been discovering ever-smaller particles. There is no smallest piece of matter. It seems that matter is ultimately dissolving in energy. At the same time, recent brain research shows that our thoughts—the proof of our consciousness—are energy as well. So it may well be that the science of matter is leading to the question of consciousness and bringing us closer to our biggest “why?”
~ from The Intelligent Optimist

Read more about how the revolution in our own consciousness will change everything:receive The Consciousness Issue in digital format in your e-mailbox, free.

Optimism requires courage and is rooted in action. It does not sit by and complain about what others are or are not doing, but rather takes action that makes a difference. Thus, optimism is self encouraging, as it can see the difference it makes and is compelled to continue doing so!

~Debbie Ford

People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want, not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others, on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel.

In asserting our values we can then become the change we want to see.

~ George Monibot

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has their own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein they cannot be replaced, nor can their life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is their specific opportunity to implement it.

~ Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense. Authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”

~ Bruce Levine, Ph.D., Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

If you are going to journey with the aid of psychoactive substances, you must learn to discern the difference between manna from the gods and mental cole slaw. The former may set you on a new, luminous life path. The latter may send you down a rabbit hole. If there is to be a new, more free and conscious world, we will need not one, but several billon messiahs, each selflessly pulling together for the whole of humanity and planetary welfare.

~ Chris Kilham, http://www.realitysandwich.com/psychedelic_la_la_land

As a culture we seem to be approaching a certain awareness that things must change, and not just superficially. This awareness is arising, in part, because of the obvious decline in planetary health. But recent decades suggest that a sense of environmental ethics alone is not sufficient to provoke the level of change that is needed.

What does seem to be motivating people, however, is the growing awareness that many of the difficulties, problems and conflicts we experience as deeply personal—depression, poverty, joblessness, marital breakdown, loneliness, non-fulfilling work, sick children, the food we eat and medicine we are given—are related to the framework of beliefs and behaviors provided by our cultural world view or paradigm.

http://www.wakinguptogether.org/thegreattransformation.shtml

Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. And when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists – they don't want to ask for things. It's not easy to ask. … Asking makes you vulnerable.

~ Amanda Palmer, musician and Kickstarter success story

This we are now is not imagination, not a grief or joy,

an elation or a sadness. These come and go.

This is the Presence that doesn't.

~ Rumi

Ayahuasca has a very insistent message. It's one of those universals that almost everyone who drinks the brew, sooner or later reports. It's about the sacred, magical, enchanted, interconnected, infinitely precious nature of life on earth and the interdependence of material and spiritual realms. It and many other historical mind altering substances in Greece, India, Egypt, were used in responsible ways to help us balance our harmony with the universe and to remain aware of our spiritual connection to life. There is a war on consciousness today. We must have the adult right of sovereignty over consciousness to responsibly use visionary plants should we choose. Our destiny might be forestalled by this prohibition.

~ Graham Hancock

There is no more time to play along with the rules and engineered social scenery produced by the 'global old boys club' from the past. The old paradigm is not just getting chaotic - thankfully its dying and we now step forward over the threshold into potential for the goals sought by all previous generations: Truth, peace, justice, love and true representation.

~ Colin Andrews at Rio Rico, Arizona - 28 October 2009

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetised commonwealth that it consumes, the financial capital has turned to devour its own body: the industrial economy that it was supposed to serve.

~ Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

Our primary hope lies in changing our behavior and expectations. We must learn to live with less. Plan for economic stagnation or contraction. Share more. Create community. Policy makers should aim to shrink the financial industry, reduce economic inequality, stabilize and reduce population levels through family planning, decentralize food and energy systems, and build resilience throughout society. Replacing GDP with an economic indicator that measures quality of life and environmental integrity would also be a very useful tactic, as it would help policy makers shift their efforts to areas where social progress is still possible. Consuming more doesn’t necessarily make people happy, but beautiful neighborhoods where people know and trust one another, and communities where individuals have greater control over the circumstances of their lives, foster a sense of satisfaction that money alone can’t buy.

~ Richard Heinberg

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the

complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

~ Charles Mingus

The basic insight I see is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception is that there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better. The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy. And now the field is open. This is a very important achievement.

~ Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher, and Professor

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Until Now!

~ Caroline Casey's mantra when people get caught up in negative talk. Caroline is the brilliant host of the Pacifica radio show The Visionary Activist

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before. To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know."

- G.I. Gurdjieff

Cowardice asks the question: "Is it safe"?

Expediency asks the question: "Is it politic"?

Vanity asks the question: "Is it popular?"

But conscience asks the question: "Is it right?"

We have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living plant: to hurt it or to help it.

~ Ray Anderson, Founding Chairman of Interface, Inc.

Women know how much time, love and effort goes into raising a child. When war arises, all that is reduced to nothing . . . this is why women's active participation in conflict resolution is of great importance.

We have the power to alter our destiny...

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place.

[GNP] values, for example, bombs and bullets since they are things that are produced for money. It does not value the environment. It values salaries paid to teachers, but it does not value what people know -- how educated they are. It places no value on `human capital,' meaning people. It does not even place a value on the public infrastructure.

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.

~ Hazel Henderson, Futurist and Evolutionary Economist

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one what is right."

- Martin Luther King

"Presentism" has brought about the end of storytelling and completely changed branding, culture, politics and our personal lives. Much of what we are using to grow ourselves, our businesses, our families, and our organizations to the next level are artifacts of an old evolutionary paradigm based in duality, scarcity, and a Newtonian model of cause and effect – all of which have been shattered by discoveries in quantum physics, cutting edge brain science, and mind-body medicine. Even many sincere spiritual teachings of the ‘new age,’ when not combined with an understanding of this law, often lead to just ‘spiritual materialism’ — causing the same stress, struggle, fear, and failure that so many people suffer from. The “real-time, always-on, pervasive, and constant” nature of reality impacts companies, brands, political movements, societies--humanity. As we move into a more presentist society, we begin to see steady-state economic systems come into play. Think Etsy, but writ large. Peer-to-peer trading, local reinvestment, and nonpublic companies that are not required to grow.

Companies need to market by giving their customers and other constituents the facts they need to promote the brand to friends and others. All we’re looking for is what I call "social currency"--good excuses to share information with other people. So give us the ammo we need to use your brand as a badge of green, local, or some other form of social responsibility. And then give us the data we need to communicate this. We will do the work for you. Just give us the ammo we need to tell "our" story.

~ Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682643

The Law of Emergence: A Revolutionary Principle for Achieving Your Full Potential, is the first course to explain this evolutionary process; a process that will free you from the need to look outside for answers and authorities, from trying to add something to yourself, fill up places you perceive are empty, or even ‘attract’ things to you. It will reveal the secret of your true sovereignty and power, the fundamental principle great mystics have tried to teach, but that has been largely lost; a principle great leaders in every field have utilized to create masterpieces, build empires, and ignite revolutionary forces that have propelled society forward, yet it has rarely been understood or easily repeated.

At a time when so many people are living a prodigal life, feeling cut adrift, fearful, and spiritually impoverished, The Law of Emergence will bring you home again, where you will find peace, renewal, and the inspiration to fulfill the great purpose for which you were born.

~ Eric Rydell, http://lawofemergence.com

We spent the last century building a massive global economy to run on cheap liquid oil, not on solar or wind. We need to wean ourselves off our high-energy lifestyle. We’ve got to transition to a way of life that’s slower, more local, less plastic, more renewable, more . . . organic. Fortunately, our satisfaction and well-being do not depend upon maintaining unsustainable levels of consumption. If, as a society, we focus more on the quality of our communities and the integrity of our relationships, we’ll be far happier, even as we burn less petroleum. We’d be foolish to wait for events to settle the debate once and for all. Let’s say goodbye to oil; it’s saying goodbye to us.

~ Richard Heinberg, http://richardheinberg.com/museletter-242-our-cooperative-darwinian-moment

"When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up"

- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it."

- Gandhi

"Anything is one million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatorily: Does this path have a heart?"

- Don Juan Matus

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call *samsara* and which our Holy Bible calls *dust*."

- Jacob Needleman

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Genius is often expressed through a change of perception -- a modifying of context of paradigm. The mind struggles with an unsolvable problem, poses a question, and is open to receive an answer. The source that this answer comes from has been given many names, varying from culture to culture and time to time; in the arts of Western civilization, it’s traditionally been identified with the Greek goddesses of inspiration called the <em>Muses</em>. Those who are humble and grateful for illumination received tend to have the capacity to access genius; those who credit the inspiration to their own ego soon lose this capacity, or are destroyed by their success. High power, like high voltage, must be handled with respect. Genius and creativity then, are subjectively experienced as a <em>witnessing</em>; it’s the phenomenon that bypasses the individual self or ego. The capacity to finesse genius can be learned -- though often only through painful surrender -- when the phoenix of genius arises out of the ashes of despair after a fruitless struggle with the unsolvable. Out of the defeat comes victory; out of failure, success; and out of humbling, true self-esteem.

~ David R. Hawkins, "Power vs. Force"

National governments, once the proudest achievement of the biosphere, are now a planetary auto-immune disorder fighting the butterfly of a unified humankind as it liquidates the caterpillar to make room for wings. (Yes, “liquidates.” Economic crisis is a symptom of transformation. You can’t do that much mindless eating without having to reckon with your debt.)

~ Michael Garfield, paleontologist turned performing philosopher, his multimedia maps of the evolutionary landscape and our place in it are an attempt to demonstrate that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice. Follow him on twitter: @michaelgarfield or visit his website,

How do you say "thank you" for sunshine or health...for clear days or gentle rains...for happiness, joy or love? You say it by sharing what you have. You say it by making the world a better place in which to live.
~ Thomas D. Willhite

Being here means so much, and because all that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us / and strangely concerns us. To have been on earth just once -- that's irrevocable. Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about. / You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos / where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show / him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation / until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours.

Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less.

More being than I'll ever need springs up in my heart.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

"Don't worry about whether or not I am now happy. Today is

only chapter one. We have yet to write the book."

~ Lois Wyse

Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.

~ Dan Millman

The purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others."

~ Albert Schweitzer

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.
-Henry Miller

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
-Carl Jung

We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously.
-Epicurus

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
-Brenden Francis

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
-Aldous Huxley

Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward.
-Achaan Chah

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.
- Buddha

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-Goethe

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-Leonardo da Vinci

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
-Thornton Wilder

If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
-Lao Tzu

Let him that would move the world first move himself.
-Socrates

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.
-Saint Francis de Sales

Many writers, artists, and musicians have talked about having the experience of suddenly tapping into a dimension of their being where they could see the whole painting already done, or sense the whole book already done, or literally hear the completed song playing – and all they had to do was be a channel for it or take ‘divine dictation’. The word ‘human’ actually comes from a Sanskrit term meaning ‘the dispenser of divine gifts’. And that is what we’re here to do — to draw these patterns from the invisible and dispense them on earth. Self-actualization and true fulfillment are not about adding anything to you, but about ‘seeing’ your True Self, releasing everything it isn’t, and allowing your life to unfold according to its perfect pattern.

~ Derek Rydall, http://lawofemergence.com

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.”

~ John Donne

"We are currently in dire need of evolutionary advancement and don't have time for a slow,gradual evolution"

~ Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in Spontaneous Evolution

You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now.

~ Wallace D. Wattles fromThe Science of Getting Rich

I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

~ Mark Twain

Only by placing living above thinking can we get away from the re-breathed air of philosophy and recapture some of the freshness and naturalness of the true insight of the child."

The world as we have known it is coming to an end and a new world is being born. Our new world will have new technologies, new ways of doing business, new ways of people relating to each other, new forms of medicine, and new ways of participating consciously in our evolution. Humanity stands at the threshold of a new era with exciting and mind blowing new opportunities to dissolve old paradigms, painful challenges and terrible injustices.

~ Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. psychologist, anthropologist, author, founder of The Four Winds Society. (energy medicine)

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

The ultimate advantage is in adding value to others

~ Tony Robbins

The question at the heart of all my work: Life in service of business? Or business in service of life?

~ Gil Friend, Natural Logic

Success comes when you commit to make an impact on every life you touch! ~ Windy Lipton-Dibner

The Institute for Sustainable Engineering (www.ise-now.com) (Dr. Tony Pereira) envisions a prosperous, free, decentralized, sustainable world. “...the design, architecture and engineering of state-of-the-art sustainable, renewable, solar energy powered, organic food producing, and non-toxic built environment, homes, residences, offices, buildings, schools, cities and communities that are economical, safe to live in, long lived, low maintenance, use the smallest amount of energy and resources both for construction and life supporting service, produce their own energy and recycle their own waste, human waste included, collect and recycle water, all working in balance and harmony with the natural environment: air, water, soil and light.” ~ Dr. Pereira

"This is a state of love-filled delight in possibilities and eager joy at the prospect of actualizing them. Bright faith goes beyond merely claiming that possibility for oneself to immersing oneself in it. With bright faith, we are lifted out of our normal sense of insignificance, thrilled as we no longer feel lost and alone. The enthusiasm, energy, and courage we need in order to leave the safe path, to stop aligning ourselves with the familiar and convenient, arise with bright faith."

- Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

As physicists keep discovering ever-smaller particles, it seems that matter is ultimately dissolving in energy. At the same time, recent brain research shows that our thoughts--the proof of our consciousness--are energy as well. Some pioneering scientists link the two and propose that both matter and thought ultimately come from the same field--the Akashi field, the zero point field.

In this vision, that field links all of us, and all what we do. From that perspective there's nothing we can do that doesn't have an impact on all of us and on our environment. That growing realization will surely increase our consciousness. It will drive us to new ways of living and working together. That's why the exploration of our consciousness is the mission of our lifetime. There's no other and more sustainable way to the better world we seek. And the good news is that your next meditation practice, your next moment of mindfulness, or your next encounter of compassion will be adding to our joint understanding and discovery. We are on our way to becoming who we truly are.

~ Jurriaan Kamp

As the awareness of our interconnectedness with others and, beyond that, to the plant and animal kingdoms and the cosmos continually emerges, we will awaken to the fact that in the largest sense, there is only one of us here. Infinite forms of the one in every vibrant color of the rainbow. In that recognition lies the joy of understanding, the dissolution of separation and war, and the manifestation of peace on earth.

~ Jeff Hutner

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

~ Anonymous

The closeness of your relationships is directly proportional to the degree to which you have revealed the truth about yourself. It can be painful.

~Anonymous

Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see greatness within you even when you don't see it yourself. ~ Edmund Lee

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge That myth is more potent than history That dreams are more powerful than facts That hope always triumphs over experience That laughter is the only cure for grief And I believe that love is stronger than death.

~ Robert Fulghum

"Life is nothing to be very serious about. Life is a ball in your hands to play with. Don't hold on to the ball."

-- Ravi Shankar, sitar virtuoso

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these.

~ George Washington Carver

A text without a context is pretext.

~ Author Unknown

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our libertiesthan standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks tocontrol the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation,the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprivethe people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on thecontinent their fathers conquered.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ Abraham Maslow

It only takes one person to change your life--you.

~Ruth Casey

God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius.

~ Anna Pavlova

Change cannot be avoided...change provides the opportunity

for innovation. It gives you the chance to demonstrate your creativity.

~Felice Jones

Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard.

Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.

~Mary Anne Roadacher-Hershey

When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven

~ Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment,

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life...

~ Nisargadatta

An object is limited when it is believed to be separate and independent of Awareness but infinite when understood to be an expression of Awareness itself.
~ Rupert Spira

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Since everything is but an illusion, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing!

~ Longchenpa

Lift Each Other Up


We are put on this Earth with the ability to decide how we interact with those around us. By lifting each other up instead of putting each other down, we create a sustainable and flourishing support system and community. We allow our friends, loved ones and even strangers the space and room to shine. When we support those around us, we are in turn supporting ourselves and our world.

How can you lift those up around you? No act too big nor too small... please share with us how you lift others up in your life!


Click here to share your kind acts and words with us!

It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days,

but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze.

--Boris Pasternak, poet

I have been running so sweaty my whole life

Urgent for a finish line

And I have been missing the rapture this whole time

Of being forever incomplete

--Alanis Morissette, Incomplete

anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you

--David Whyte, poet

I found out that there weren't too many limitations, if I did it my way. 
--Johnny Cash,

I am not the person who is singing

I am the silent one inside. . . .

I am not my house, my car, my songs

They are only stops along my way. . . .

--Paula Cole, Me

Forget about good.

Good is a known quantity.

Good is what we all agree on.

As long as you stick to good,

you'll never have real growth.

--Bruce Mau, designer

If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree,

then it better not come at all.

--John Keats

I do not want to be folded

for where I am folded,

there I am a lie.

--Rilke

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight-- how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,

Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

--Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.

~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else-- your strengths. This doesn't mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you'll grow most where you're already strong.

--Marcus Buckingham, Now, Discover Your Strengths

The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder in modern life.

--Thomas Moore, Original Self

An integral being knows without going, sees without looking, and accomplishes without doing.

--Lao-tzu

Take a nap

Making the mountain water

Pound the rice.

-- Kobayashi Issa

Whenever there is enthusiasm, there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.

--Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

The longing for happiness and freedom from suffering expresses the great natural potential of mind.

--Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist lama

The one who asks questions doesn't lose his way. 
--African proverb

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius is the ability to receive from the universe.

--I Ching

You are what you think about all day.

--Allen Ginsberg

You can't change the world from the rear view mirror.

--Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

We can still astonish the gods in humanity

And be the stuff of future legends,

If we but dare to be real,

And have the courage to see

That this is the time to dream

The best dream of them all.

--Ben Okri, Mental Flight

How you get so high? . . . from not being afraid to fall out the sky.

--Jay Z, Beach Chair

There will always be suffering.

But we must not suffer over the suffering.

--Alan Watts, Zen master

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

--Aristotle

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

--Saint Thomas

Losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

A real tragedy?

That's the loss of the heart and soul themselves. If you've abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern.

Live your truth, losses be damned.

Just like that,

your heart and soul will return home.

--Martha Beck

The way is light and fluid for the man with no preferences.

--Lao-tzu

Love everyone. Trust few. Paddle your own canoe.

--Anonymous

When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion. To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.

--Stephen Levine

A lot of the time, it's better to quit than to be the hero.

-- Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson, authors of Rework

The entire universe is a great theater of mirrors.

--Alice Bailey

I am my best work-- a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

--Audre Lorde, poet

People who earn the label creative are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is that most schools and organizations train us out of those habits.

--Guy Kawasaki, Reality Check

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

--Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Education must teach us to deal with uncertainty.

~ Author Unknown

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

--Margaret Fuller

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets.

I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

--Osho

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

Your conformity explains nothing.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

If it looks good, you'll see it.

If it sounds good, you'll hear it.

If it's marketed right, you'll buy it.

But if it's true, you'll feel it.

--Kid Rock

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.

--Judy Garland

Rejoice and love yourself today

'Cause baby, you were born this way.

--Lady Gaga

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but it is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage.

--Seth Godin

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong. 
--Jack Kerouac

The market for something to believe in is infinite.

--Hugh MacLeod

Oh would some power the gift give us,

to see ourselves as others see us!

--Robert Burns

What is the why behind everything you do?

When we know this in life or design

It is very empowering

and the path is clear.

~Jack Canfield

In the name of the Fire,

The Flame

And the Light;

Praise the pure presence of fire

That burns from within

Without thought of time.

--John O'Donohue

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

--Albert Einstein

Quit thinking time is out there. Take ownership of time--acknowledge that you are where it comes from-- and it will stop owning you.

Claim time as yours and it will release its claim on you.

--Gay Hendricks

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

--Ayn Rand

Sales solve everything.

--Mark Cuban

I find it quite curious and distressing that the wage gap-- the disparity between what men and women make-- captures so much attention, when the far more insidious problem is our own proclivity to settle for less.

The real reason under-earners are in denial is that they are afraid. An admission of truth makes us accountable to change. Denial keeps us stuck. Recognition sets us free.

--Barbara Stanny, Secrets of Six-Figure Women

All the best things I did at Apple came from a) not having any money, and b) not having done it before, ever.

--Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple

Don't spend it before you have it.

-- Melody Biringer, self-proclaimed start-up junkie and founder of more than twenty businesses, most currently the CRAVE Company

Don't spend it when you get it.

--Robert Kent, photographer and philanthropist

Grow organically. 
--Rikia Saddy, marketing strategist

Follow the money.

-Plenty of people.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.

It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.

We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

--Albert Schweitzer

There is no union except in the same high effort.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

--Albert Einstein

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the

scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to

making you happy.

--George Bernard Shaw

Of all the fires, love is the only inexhaustible one. 
--Pablo Neruda

That I spent, that I had; that I gave, that I have; that I left, that I lost.

--Robert Byrkes, A.D. 1579

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

~ Albert Einstein

Give until it hurts.

--The Dalai Lama

Spiritual practice is returning again and again to softness.

--Stephanie Dowrick, Seeking the Sacred

That's why we're here-- to make a dent in the universe.

--Hugh MacLeod

Givers get given to.

--Russell Simmons

Now is blessed

The rest

Remembered

--Jim Morrison, Wilderness

Ready, aim, fire? Fire. Fire. Fire.

--Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Your way begins at the other side. 
Become the sky. 
Take an axe to the prison wall. 
Escape. 
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. 
Do it now. 
--Rumi

You're stronger, and you're better, and you're ready for whatever.

--Alicia Keys, Wait Til You See My Smile

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.

--Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . .

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again-- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.

--Seamus Heaney, poet

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

--Robert Hughes, art critic

If consensus is overrated, I think balance is, too.

I have no interest in living a balanced life.

I want a life of adventure.

--Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

~Dalai Lama

In the end, the quest for balance is bogus.

Love your burdens. Love them hard.

And when your loves knock you down or your weak ankles trip you up,

stop worrying about balancing -- 'cuz you're not-- and bounce.

--Kelly Diels, Cleavage

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest.

It's wholeheartedness.

--David Whyte, poet

Enough of these phrases, conceit and metaphors,

I want burning, burning, burning.

--Rumi

You are in the perfect position to get there from here.

--Abraham-Hicks

I forged you with my speech,

No longer bereft, you blaze.

--Emily Warn, poet

Capitalism, at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.”

~ Jon Ronson

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.
~ Franz Kafka

Joy does not come from what you do,

it flows into what you do and thusinto this world from deep within you.

~ Eckhart Tolle from Oneness With All Life

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you can't choose between two evenly balanced courses of action to take, choose the bolder.

~ General W.J. Slim

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

~ David Foster Wallace

Wherever I go, whomever I speak with, I sense a growing readiness for true evolutionary emergence – from state of emergency to state of emergent seeing. As Bruce Lipton says, crisis precipitates evolution, and as we look at our world, all forecasts indicate the chances of precipitation are 100%. In Swami’s words, it’s time for Humanity to “shift or get off the pot!” That shift involves us individually and collectively upshifting our focus from problems to solutions, from a you-OR-me reality to a you-AND-me Reality, from mere survival to full-on thrival. If this seems utopian, here’s what I learned writing Spontaneous Evolution: What you and I might think of as heaven on earth, the community of cells beneath our skins simply call “health.” It’s now time for us to become as smart as our cells, and make the shift together.

I call this exciting process of co-learning and co-evolving an “evolutionary upwising” because it involves waking up to our true potential, and activating wisdom – new and old – to make the necessary shift. And if we expect to “upshift” our game as a species, we must first do it as individuals.

~ Steve Behrman aka Swami Beyondananda

Remember this ancient Chinese blessing/curse? -- "May you live in interesting times!" In the third year of what we are calling The Decisive Decade, chaos reigns. From a whole systems perspective, we are in far-from-equilibrium conditions -- ecologically, economically, socially, and spiritually. Yet chaos is fertile ground for the emergence of deep creativity and transformation. If we pay attention to what matters most, we can learn to thrive on chaos and give birth to a new world that is sustainable, compassionate, and just. Our collective intention to joyfully connect with each other to increase love, wisdom, and happiness throughout the world can become "the difference that makes a difference."

Rick Ingrasci, M.D., Hollyhock, www.hollyhock.ca

“All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is acceptedas being self-evident.

~Schopenhauer

The Universe favors those who are in harmony with it.

~ Buckminster Fuller

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

—Peter Drucker

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The time has come to write a new story for our lives and to let go of those handed to us by our families, the culture and the generations that have gone before. These are not our stories; they do not belong to us. It is time to hand them back with love and write our own. We are no longer destined to live 'his-story,' or her story, but to instead create and live This Story – Our Story.

The highest evolved relationship seeks only peace and harmony, and all that supports the experience of such. A Higher Love is so, when the focus of the beloveds is no longer on Self, yet on the Service such a blessed Union can offer to the World.

~ Nicolya Christi

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

~ Joseph Campbell

This new awareness has radical implications for each and every one of us. For it reveals a wholly interconnected, conscious and holographic universe, a Cosmos where consciousness is primary--and where we are therefore both creator and co-creator.

Unity awareness is consciousness of the greater whole of which we are all a part and which we are now able to embody in human form.

~ Jude Currivan (The 8th Chakra)

The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.

~ Calvin Coolidge

We are all on an earnest and authentic search to understand our lives seeking answers to basic and profound questions that percolate in our subconscious landscape. Religion , Politics, corporations, bankers, Wall Street and psychiatrists all claim higher authority and use powerful symbol language to shortcut and control the seeking mind. They have the answers, pearls from a higher source that they will dispense for a piece. The price is your attention, consciousness and psyche.

In contrast to this manipulation, art abandons shortcut translations of symbols and offers instead, the invention of stand-alone worlds born out of imagination – the creative immortality of the individual. It doesn't close off life but opens endlessly. The antidote to the Matrix is art and imagination.

~ Jon Rappoport

An idea grows stronger when it is shared.

~ A Course in Miracles

I see that the New Era is moving us toward a more synergistic, cooperative, participatory form of democracy. It's a democracy that recognizes that we are facing a whole system breakdown and therefore we need to work toward a whole system shift. We need to become a democracy that takes its next step by developing synergistic rules of order to evolve Robert's Rules of Parliamentary procedure. By doing so we can better foster social synergy, cooperation and the liberation of human potential.

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, elder storyteller and visionary for Conscious Evolution

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

~ Albert Schweitzer

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.

~ E.B. White

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

~ Jonathan Swift

Returning to silence is returning to simplicity. Without silence, without simplicity, we believe everything we think and say, we live in the narrative created by thought and language. Even in our spiritual endeavors (I might say “especially”), we have to be careful of the trap of language. So many teachings, so many descriptions and definitions and explanations and recommendations — all in language. So many insights and understandings and revelations. So many certainties. So much dogma. All in language.

Silence is truly the mother tongue of all.

~ Robert Rabbin

It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.

~P.D. Ouspensky

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

~ Howard Thurman

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

~ C. S. Lewis, writer

Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself.

Cathy Guisewite, cartoonist

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once we abandon this obsessive fanaticism of absolute complete knowledge, we can continue on with our process of discovery without the headache of a deadline.

~ Henry Warwick

Doubt is not pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd

~Voltaire

There is absolutely nothing to transcend...only all of Creation to unite with.

– Jeffery Wolf Green

All things are possible once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.

– Norman Cousins

http://blog.johnspence.com/2012/06/90-quotes-change

Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life.

Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.

~ Krishna

Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times, it is the only time we have.

― Art Buchwald

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

― Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, Sayings Of Buddha

What a present it is to be able to drive past the future. (All these tenses in one sentence makes me tense).

― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

― Alan Wilson Watts

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.

Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.

~ David Allen

Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

― Winston S. Churchill

Have you noticed, she asked him, how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quietly unnoticed?

― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

― Margaret J. Wheatley, A Simpler Way

Superheroes see attachment to the known as a false sense of security and recognize that the striving for security (our traditional understanding of power) is, ironically, the basis of all insecurity. Superheroes do what needs to be done with impeccability and the highest motivation for the greatest good and leave the results to the unknown. Their focus is on the action, not the fruits of the action.

~ Deepak Chopra with Gotham Chopra from The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes

The word secure comes from two small Latin words: se meaning ‘without’ and cure meaning ‘care’—being without care, freedom from anxiety.

~ Eric Butterworth’s wisdom from Spiritual Economics

Be like the bird
That pausing in her flight
While on boughs too slight,
Feels them give way
Beneath her, and yet sings,
Knowing she hath wings.

~Victor Hugo

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other— above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

~ Albert Einstein

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.

~ Gen. Eric Shinseki

There is only one journey ... and that is going inside yourself.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In my dream the angel shrugged and said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination. And then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.

~ Bryan Andreas

I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another mans

~ William Blake

It's called the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

- George Carlin

All that you are attached to, all that you love,
All that you know, someday will be gone.

Knowing this, and that the world is your mind
Which you create, play in, and suffer from,
Is known as discrimination.

Discriminate between the Real and the Unreal,
The known is unreal and will come and go
So stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging, the Truth.

If you desire to be one with truth, 'you' must completely disappear.

~Papaji

Fantasy can inspire us, and our dreams can stimulate us toward trying new things. Creativity needs this, so some fantasy is excellent. But if we habitually seek refuge in some favorite fantasy (or two), it is likely that we are spending time avoiding some area of our real lives. Our favorite fantasies have much in common with belief systems that came down from ancient scriptures — they are rigid compared to reality. We get to be totally in control, which is what our lack of confidence craves, and seeking control is a large part of why modern humans resort to non-stop distractions, chit-chat, entertainments and daydreams. The dance of life is too dynamic for much control — it is an improvisational work in progress, featuring important relationships. It is a dance hall full of uncertainty, miscalculations and missteps. It’s risky, always risky. Fantasy is easy, available and tempting. But too much indulgence and your ability to make the right moves at the right time, with any kind of rhythm, is compromised. When it comes to feeling good overall, trying to stay in control doesn’t work. C’mon … let’s practice our dancing!

~ Paul O'Brian, author, The Visionary I-Ching

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

~ Steven Johnson

I am drawn — and audiences who think of themselves as outside the mainstream are drawn — to stories of outsiders. It’s O.K. if a lot of people don’t like it, as long as the people who love it are spreading word of mouth with passion and getting others excited. My conversations with students and filmmakers have in common a desire to get them to stop trying to please an imaginary internalized Professor or Studio Head and free themselves to say something original, fresh and useful — something constructively weird.

~ James Schamus, CEO, Focus Features,

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring

- Jung

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. ~ Pierre ~Teilhard de Chardin

If you seek small things to do, and do them well, great things will seek you, and demand to be performed ~ Anon

Do you think the universe is a friendly place to live?

This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.

For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.

God does not play dice with the universe,

--Albert Einstein

For if our words so

melt the heart they start the

Milk of Human kindness flowing

– so that every time we speak our mind

we set another flower growing –

then I believe, before our very eyes,

we human beings, like butterflies

will fully metamorphosize.

Laurel Airicawww.laurelairica.com

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Just as it is essential to know the difference between working hard and working smart, so we must understand the difference between creating something big, and creating something meaningful.

~Philip E. Humbert, PhD.

“To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.” ~ Ivan Illich, Introduction to Tools for Conviviality

Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.

~ Braveheart

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

~ Ayn Rand

Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.

~Lauren Bacall

Studies show that 65% of Americans are confused and the rest aren't sure. There are two kinds of mystics in the world - the optimystics and the pessimystics. The pessimystics are very much in touch with reality. But the optimystics are happier and live longer.

~ Swami Beyondananda

I said Somebody should do something about that. Then I realized I am somebody.

Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

~ Lily Tomlin

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

To be healthy is 'to be full of music'

~ Gaelic translation

History shows us that the people who end up changing the world--the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries--are always nuts, until they're right, and then they're geniuses.

~ Dr. John Eliot from Overachievement

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. ~ Apple's Genius Ad

Anyone who strives too far from the majority or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled arrogant, or a maverick, a wildman, weird, or even crazy.

~ Dr. John Eliot fromOverachievement from http://www.dreambuilders.com.au

When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied: I wish no gifts, only presence.

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.

~ Barbara Marciniak

Nothing is separate from anything else. Separation is impossible.

~ Burt Harding

If your inner energy is misdirected, so will your whole life be.

~ C. Astrid Weber

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

~ Carl Jung

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask yourself this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't then it is of no use to us.

~ Carlos Castaneda

Know yourself as wise, loving, intelligent, eternal consciousness that never needed to change or fix anything in the first place. Then see what happens.

~ Christine Breese

He does not seem to me a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

~ Cicero

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

~ Daniel Goleman

Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls it. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.

~ David Bohm

The goal of the Creator is for each entity to make a conscious choice to again seek Oneness, out of our own free will – not because anyone else forced us to. If we are told what to do and what to believe, then we have learned nothing and will not make any progress. Perhaps the single most basic realization to make is that we live in a loving Universe. If we are all One Being, then it is foolish for us to hate anyone, as we are only hating ourselves.

~David Wilcock

Changing mass consciousness is an individual responsibility.

~ Dennis Weaver

In truth it matters less what we do... than how we do it and why.

~Donna Farhi

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

~ Dr. Seuss

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Speaks)

Daily, I am deeply inspired by the exquisite luminosity of Nature's Design. The hum of the hummingbird. The Vibrant Hum of Souls. The synchrony of wings moving at different velocities. Unfolding symphonies of Life Awakening.

~ Sarah Drew

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

~ Emile M. Cioran

True, absolute silence and true, absolute love are not different. Absolute silent awareness overflows with simple, fulfilled absolute love. Objects – people, nature, emotions – may or may not appear. Objects are not needed and they are welcomed. The joy of this full silence is uncaused and unlimited. Always here, always discovering itself. It is the treasure, and it is hidden only when we refuse to keep quiet and find out who we are.

Gangaji (Hidden Treasure: Uncovering the Truth in Your Life Story)

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing – peace is the measure.

~ George Melton

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

~ Giacomo Puccini

The ego isn't actually an entity. Rather, it is the sense of being a separate individual. We feel like individuals, although we are in actuality manifestations, or expressions, of One Being...Encased in this human body, we have lost awareness of our true nature and are meant to rediscover the truth.

~ Gina Lake

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

~ H.F. Hedge

“This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.”

~ Hafiz

There can never be an enlightened person, there is only the realization that there is no separation.

~ Halina Pytlasinka

Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain.

~ Hallaj

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

~ Hans Kung

“You must exist in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find eternity in each moment.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.”

~Henry Miller

The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware.

~ Herb Goldberg

The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

~ Herbert Agar

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

~ Howard Thurman

We are all Spirit experiencing a process set up to facilitate its (each Spirit's) understanding of its true identity and, through that understanding, to revert to its pristine state.

~Ian Gardner

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Every tear has a smile behind it.

~ Iranian Proverb

I am my own heaven and hell!

~ J.C.F. von Schiller

Enjoy doing nothing without falling asleep-meditation. In the beginning you will fall into the gaps in between thoughts - after practicing for years, you become the gap.

~ J.Kleykamp

Thoughts are not the problem… it’s the thing that goes out and grabs them and makes them ‘yours’ that’s the problem.

Jac O’keeffe

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.

~ James Allen

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

~ James Thurber

The opportunity for brotherhood presents itself every time you meet a human being.

~ Jane Wyman

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.

~ Jean Klein, I Am

Each time a man looks into your eyes, he is only searching to find himself; for he knows already, that he is part of you [and you are him].

~ Jeremy Aldana

Beloved one, if you know already that you are whole, complete, awakened, knowledgeable, rich, abundant, then it doesn't matter whether you stay here or you go there, because you're going to be who you are wherever you are.

~ Jeshua

The separation never happened. Hear me well. The separation is not real. The separation is but a figment of imagination, and nothing more.

~ Jeshua (from THE OTHER VOICE by Brent Haskell)

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.

~ Krishnamurti

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

~ Jimi Hendrix

“God is always connected, you are the one who's always getting disconnected”

~Jo Chui

Man is always seeking a power, a power to overcome something or destroy something; and therefore he is not living in the awareness of God, because in the realization of the presence of God there is no need to overcome, to destroy, or to do anything.

~ Joel S. Goldsmith

That which is creative must create itself.

~ John Keats

Two basic motivating forces exist: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and hope for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

“The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn’t saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me.”

~ John Lennon

Every visible and invisible creature is an appearance of God.

~ John Scotus Erigena

I would define love very simply: as a potent blend of openness and warmth, which allows us to make real contact, to take delight in and appreciate, and to be at one with----our selves, others, and life itself. Openness----the heart's pure, unconditional yes----is love's essence. And warmth is love's basic expression, arising as a natural extension of this yes----the desire to reach out and touch, connect with, and nourish what we love.

~ John Welwood

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and the we'll need no other light.

~ John Wolfgang Von Goethe

When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Time and again human consciousness fixates, and slams the door on its greatest gift, the open-endedness of infinite possibility. As a result we do not experience reality but merely our concept of it.

Who owns your time owns your mind. Change your time and you change your mind. Change your mind and you change your world.

~ Jose Arguelles

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

~Jose Ortega y Gasset

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

~ Judith Wright

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.

~ Julie Sarah Powell

The truth is, you already are, it is finished. It is absolutely and totally possible, and freely available, to step out of this limitation of the Self and rest as your true nature right now. Life all through has become a consistent karma yoga session. There is no-one who requires thanks for the service and there is no-one who is getting the benefit of going against the usual selfish, self-serving, immature, self-gratifying, agenda ridden movement of the Self or mind-body package. It is just service because there is no other.

~ June McLeod

As our awareness begins to shift, old patterns are beginning to break down and we lose our familliar points of reference. We need to let go and flow with events, not knowing the outcome but trusting in divine purpose. When I see myself in others, I have no enemy.

~ Juno Cristi

The person who makes all cares into one care the care for simply staying present will be cared for by that presence which is creative love.

~ Kabir Helminski

The truly great man is he who would master no one, and who would be mastered by none.

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness; and knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

~ Kahlil Gibran

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”

~ Kalu Rinpoche

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

~ Karen Armstrong

Once the Self is known, that Self which sees with eyes open or shut, all sorrows end.

Let the five senses and the mind they serve become still. Let awareness itself cease all activity and become watchful. Then you have begun your journey to the highest path.

~ Katha Upanishad

The question is how the questioner exists.

~ Kedar Joshi

A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them.

~ Keith Miller

I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now -- unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future.

~ Ken S. Keyes jr.

The lesson is acceptance of differences. Don't forget you are a part of everything and everything is a part of you. If every human being recognized the power of the love and forgiveness principle, all consciousness on earth would change instantly.

~ Kuan Yin

Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.

Be truly whole, and all things will return to you.

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

~ Lao Tzu

God Transcends all concepts. Only ego presumes that the All Pervading Divine Presence could be reduced to words.

~ Leland Lewis

No words. No thoughts. Just being. Freedom from the known. Embracing the infinite moment. Wake up. You are home.

~ Jeff Hutner

We are on a journey of becoming that which we already are. That is the impossible paradox of our lives.

“If you can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it, touch it, or smell it, you can be present with it. It is of the present moment, and so it brings to you the opportunity to be present with it.”

~ Leonard Jacobson

Notice what happens as you let go of what you think you know and allow what is absolutely so to reveal itself. The truth of cosmic oneness is unalterable.

Understand what reality is and know there is nothing to fear.

You only see what you are ready and willing to accept.

What if being free, loved, and accepted is already reality? In stillness, something is receptive and nothing is listening. Trust the universe only ever supports you. As the light of wisdom arises, the mind of the perceiver is seen as it is.

Notice how you feel as you realize existence is contentment itself, as you recognize self-concern for what it is, as you know you are complete as you are. Why fear being One with everything right now?

~ Liara Covert

A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I'm sure that's true, but they aren't willing to make healing a high priority. They aren't willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it.

~ Lindsay Wagner

Oneness is very simple: everything is included and allowed to live according to its true nature. This is the secret that is being revealed...

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive inter-dependencies.

~ Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

~ M.C. Escher

Our world is pretty messed up. With all the violence, pollution and crazy things people do, it would be easy to turn into a grouchy old man without being either elderly or male. There's certainly no shortage of justification for disappointment and cynicism. But consider this: Negative attitudes are bad for you. And gratitude, it turns out, makes you happier and healthier (...) if you can find any authentic reason to give thanks, anything that is going right with the world or your life, and put your attention there, then statistics say you're going to be better off.

~ Ocean Robbins

All things that ever were, that are, or that will be, having; their record upon the astral light, or tablet of the unseen universe, the initiated adept, by using the vision of his own spirit, can know all that has been known or can be known.

~ Madame Blavatsky

“All higher dimensional understanding comes from the oneness that exists within a frequency of bliss-charged love. For it is this frequency that allows your DNA to spin and take you to worlds far beyond three-dimensional physicality.

~ Magenta Pixie

When one withdraws all desires as a tortoise withdraws his limbs, then the natural splendor of the world soon manifests itself.

~ Mahabharata

There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune.

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

~ Mahatma Ghandi

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

~ Marcel Proust

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

~ Marilyn Ferguson

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart—messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you’ll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.

~ Martha Beck

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.

~ Martha Washington

If thou art master to thyself, circumstances shall harm thee little.

~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.

~ Martin Luther

One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle their honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are – beyond all ideas.

Without a need to constantly remain attached to ideas and beliefs, the clarity of your formless form recognizes the truth of itself -- with nothing to confirm or ever deny.

You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence.

~ Matt Kahn

What actually matters is you, who you are within yourself. Societes are structured in such a way as to prevent you from finding yourself.

It all comes down to connecting with all the people around you.

~ Max Igan

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk. The eye with which I see God is the same eye [seeing] with which God sees me.

The eyes that see God are the same eyes through which God sees me.

Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest to all of us.

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.

~ Meister Eckhart

[The void] It's that place in our lives where what we've been hanging onto . . . clinging to for dear life . . . is stripped away. It's that place in us where we let go of what we know, what we think we know, and what we want and surrender to the unknown. It is the place of saying and meaning, 'I don't know.' It means standing there with our hands empty for a while, sometimes watching everything we wanted disappear; our self image, our definition of who we thought we should be, the clones we've created of ourselves, the people we thought we had to have, the things we thought were so important to collect and surround ourselves with, the job we were certain was ours, the place we thought we'd live in all our lives. . . Surrender control to the supreme wisdom and authority of God and to the Divine in your soul. Step into the void with courage. Learn to say, I don't know. That's not blind faith. It's pure faith that will allow God and your spirit to lead you wherever your soul wants and needs to go.

~ Melody Beattie

Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.

~ Michael Bierut

How do we break this cycle of adding to the unconsciousness on the planet? The answer lies in seeing that our true nature consists ONLY of love, and so that is ALL we have to give [and see] when we know ourselves as that...

~ Michael Jeffries

“Memories are of the ethereal, and not the material world, that is how I know I am forever.”

~ Michael Poeltl

We are all Earth Angels and our souls are the place where heaven and earth meet. By knowing yourself you change the world for the better and live your higher self.

~ Michael Teal

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but saves himself.

When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas [or inner knowing] more clearly.

~ Michel de Montaigne

Though we may be genetically wired for temporary happiness, we’ve also been gifted with the ability to recognize within ourselves a more profound and lasting sense of confidence, peace, and well-being. Among sentient beings, human beings appear to stand alone in their ability to recognize the necessity to forge a bond between reason, emotion, and their instinct to survive, and in doing so create a universe—not only for themselves and the human generations that follow, but also for all creatures who feel pain, fear and suffering—in which we are all able to coexist contentedly and peaceably.”

~ Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

You are the harmony within which all things move. They are just illusion.

The game is not set. There are so many layers that it is being perceived on. As your own consciousness becomes more refined, the game changes.

You are the light of consciousness and also the witness of this light. You are pure awareness.

Everything takes you back to yourself. When you get there, you know you never left. You only dreamt you left. You have never been other than that. You are only dreaming due to the idea of 'I am the body.'

~ Mooji

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.

~ Morihei Ueshiba

...all the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them...

~ Muhammad Asad

One who meditates, all his knots of his heart, the bondages are opened; all the doubts are eliminated and one becomes gradually free from the fetters of action with ego.

~ Mundaka Upanishad

The human race is governed by its imagination.

~ Napoleon

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

~ Nathaniel Branden

The hurt of one is the hurt of all. The honour of one is the honour of all.

~ Native American Saying

You are not a human being. You are not your body, you are not your mind, and you are not your soul. These are things that You have. The You that has these things - indeed, that has given your Self these things - is far bigger than any of them, and even all of them put together.

First, we become aware of that which is Divine around us. Then we become aware of that which is Divine within us. Finally, we become aware that all is Divine, and that there is nothing else. This is the moment of our awakening.

“People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.

~ Neale Donald Walsch

I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.

~ Nicolaus Copernicus

It doesn't matter what's happening... what matters is how you touch it.

~ Nirmala

I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says I am everything. Wisdom says I am nothing. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

You are not in the world...the world is in you, what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world, that is, there is no you that is real or in any world. The world is in you means that the world is in your mind and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]

I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning--it is not as hard as you think.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be...stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

That whisper you keep hearing is the universe trying to get your attention.

~ Oprah Winfrey

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.

~ Oswald Chambers

Your nature is to keep quiet. You came from silence and you have to return to silence… you are dancing only for a little while you see… a little while you are dancing.

Who is journeying for freedom? The one who is already free. Thoughts are impediments to seeing your own face. Don't give rise to any thought, and discover who you are.

I am your own self and the self of all beings that exist.

~ Papaji

The so-called miraculous powers of a great master are a natural accompaniment to his exact understanding of subtle laws that operate in the inner cosmos of consciousness.

~ Paramahansa Yogananda

“There is no map that can show you how to leap. The map for this is somewhere in our own imagination.

Paramananda

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it.

~ Pat Obuchowski

Peace can be reached through meditation on the knowledge which dreams give. Peace can also be reached through concentration upon that which is dearest to the heart.

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

~ Patanjali

Me, I will throw away...

~ Patrick Cavenaugh

“The best scholar is one who has realized the meaning of no-self. The best monk is the one who has tamed his own mind. The best quality is a great desire to benefit others. The best instruction is always to watch the mind. The best remedy is to know that nothing has any inherent reality. The best way of life is one that does not fit with worldly ways. The best accomplishment is a steady lessening of negative emotions. The best sign is a steady decrease of desires.”

~ Patrul Rinpoche

Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning.

~ Paul Lam

You know at this point you have everything you need. It's available to you from the inside and you see you are supported in many ways. You realize that there is more to this dimension, to this reality, than you have seen before. You see you are being taken care of, you are being loved, you are being looked after. All that's needed is to go inside, become still and listen.

~ Paul Lowe (The Experiment is Over)

The presence of advanced attention is the only thing that really changes us, and the benefits of receiving it are always extraordinary.

~ Paul Richards

“Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.”

~ Paul Tillich

What we do flows from who we are.

~ Paul Vitale

Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal. The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive. Repeat that to yourself every morning: 'I've arrived.' That way you'll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day.

~ Paulo Coelho

“To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe”

~ Peggy Jenkins

If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that - then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

~ Pema Chodron

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

~ Philip Levine

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

~ Pierre Corneille

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force.

~ Prentice Mulford

“I'm aware people I have loved and have died are in the spirit world looking after me.”

~ Princess Diana

Man is the measure of all things.

~ Protagoras

The search for self-worth begins by finding what is indestructible inside, then letting it be.

~ Prudence Kohl

From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.

~ Publilius Syrus

The biggest advances are not made by being a great teacher; they are made by being a great student.

~ Pursah (from The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard)

Great doubt will eventually lead to great awakening.

~ Rabia al-Adawiya

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Be ever so still, all movement is mind- one thought is a cloud, do not stir it about the sky.

~ Rafael Stoneman

“The only journey is the journey within.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

What lies behind and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

“The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.”

~ Ralph Waldo Trine

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. The next message you need is always right where you are.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear. We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.

Inspiration is God making contact with itself.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

The next message you need is always right where you are.

Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.

~ ~ Ram Dass

If you can give up all thoughts, you will right here and now atain the realization of oneness with all.

~ Ramayana

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

~ Ray Bradbury

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'

~ Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Your outer circumstances are the mirror of your inner world. Change your inner world, and you change your outer world.”

~ Remez Sasson

“The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.

~ Rhonda Byrne

Realisation of Buddha Nature is synonymous with being in the flow of Qi -the universal life force.

~ Ricardo B. Serrano

“There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.”

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

~ Richard Bach

And you know, when you've experienced grace and you feel like you've been forgiven, you're a lot more forgiving of other people. You're a lot more gracious to others.

~ Rick Warren

I choose things by how they resonate in my heart.

~ Rita Coolidge

Awareness is empowering.

~ Rita Wilson

We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror.

~ Robert Brault

Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

~ Robert Moss

“The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.”

~ Robert Valett

Silent harmony is the gift you give yourself... As you push past the infinite, you can feel your own music, your own frequency, beginning to project itself past you, beyond infinity, into nowhere, starting to generate its own star.

See and feel who you are. Love like you have never loved before. The practial point is to live and enjoy from where you are. You can feel every movement because you are not here. The logic is only important to the body-mind.

Our gift to the world is to receive because when we receive, it becomes part of the world... It will turn many things upside down for you. That is what its supposed to do because what we have been using is a brain that tells us what's wrong. The solidarity you have is what's missing. This infinite trust that is goes through everything forever. It sits with you in a magic way to solve everything before it even gets to you... Remember nothing. Do nothing. It just is.

The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that.

~ Robert Young

There is Nothing wrong with you. Be Who You Are.

~ Robin Rice

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

~ Rudolf Arnheim

It was our Creator who led us through the stages of evolution, from the animal state to the human. His purpose was to make us intelligent and aware, so that we might know Him.

The world is like a courtroom, with God as our judge. We are called upon to fulfill our covenant with God, who asked, Am I not your Lord? To which we answered, Yea. And since here on earth we are on trial, our every word and action form the witness to and the evidence of that agreement.

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

If the spiritual universe and the way to it were shown, No one would remain in this world for a single moment.

Kill the cow of your ego as quickly as you can, so that your inner spirit can come to life and attain true awareness.

To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life.

What you seek is seeking you.

“Out beyond the rightdoing and wrongdoing is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

~ Rumi

Shiva's tribute to Shakti: With thee I can create all things Without thee I am powerless.

~ S'Mrimad Devi Bhagawatam

You seek too much information and not enough transformation.

~ Sai Baba

Everything is the content of space.

~ Sailor Bob Adamson

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

~ Saint Augustine

Saint Jerome

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

What you seek is already within you. You uncover it by shedding all that is untrue within you.

You are not what arises, but that which witnesses ALL that arises.

~ Sampo Kaasila

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.

~ Samuel Beckett

Sanaya Roman

Spiritual growth means increasing your awareness of beauty, opening your heart, and experiencing more love and compassion.

Santosh Kalwar

“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.”

Sarada Devi

...if you want peace, do not find fault with others. Rather, see your own faults. No one is a stranger...the whole world is your own.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.

Satguru Siva Yogaswami

Only one task to do here: find out who you are. How do you find out who you are? Dive into the silence and see.

Scott Adams

“You don't have to be a person of influence to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.”

Scott Morrison

Just let awareness have its way with you completely.

Seneca

Tranqility is a certain quality of mind, which no condition or fortune can either exalt or depress.

Shakti Gawain

... my life has been dedicated to my growth and evolution as a conscious being. ... becoming more aware of all that was taking place within me and around me; how my inner world affected my outer world and vice versa. I realized that the more awareness I have, the more choice I have in how I create or respond to the circumstances of my life.

Our bodies communicate to us clearly and specifically, if we are willing to listen to them.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, allow our natural channel to open.

Shankara

“The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.

Sharon Lee

“The moment you say 'I know everything' is the end of your growth.”

Shinjo Ito

What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

Shrii Shrii Anandamurti

“You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars guides you too.”

Shunru Suzuki

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

Shyamananda

“When you can see through the mist of Maya (illusion) to the Self, that mist has not disappeared. You have just learned to see through it.

Sidney Lanier

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Siva Sutras

One who is established in a comfortable posture while concentrating on inner Self naturally becomes immersed in the Heart's ocean of bliss.

Sogyal Rinpoche

...we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .

Sol Luckman

Mastery of Intention is a deeply personal process that always occurs in the present. No technology, guru or savior, however advanced, can do for us what only a commitment to evolving and operating out of our own divine consciousness and physiology can achieve.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves?

Solange Nicole

Bringing to light what had been hidden in darkness should not overwhelm you, but EDUCATE you.”

Sonia Choquette (The Answer is Simple...)

We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and to remember our Divine nature.

Sri Atmananda

At the time a thing is being done, there is no thought or feeling that one is doing it. This is further proof that one is not a doer. Claiming to have done a thing after the doing cannot make one a doer.

Sri Aurobindo

Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

Sri Bhagavan

Oneness is inner silence, which remains undisturbed by external factors. This silence is not the opposite of noise. That is inner Oneness.

Sri Chinmoy

Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness.

Sri Lakshmana Swami

If you have a mind then the earth, the sky, and the stars will exist, and you will be able to see them. When the mind dies there will be no earth, no sky, no stars, and no world. The world of objects, names, and forms is only the mind, and when the mind dies, the world dies with it. Only the Self then remains. > Seeing everything as the Self gives the impression that the Self is equally distributed everywhere. This is also an idea in the mind. When the mind finally dies you realize that there is no distribution and no everywhere. > So, I go off now to be in the effortless thought fee state, with no desires for anything or nothing...

Sri Muruganar

Awareness is not a quality of the Self. The Self is without qualities. Awareness is not an action of the Self. The Self does nothing. The Self, our Being, IS Awareness.

Sri Neem Karoli Baba

The whole universe is your home. All are your family.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There is no such thing as unconsciousness for it is not experienceable. We infer unconsciousness when there is a lapse in memory or communication.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things; that is, of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them, then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve the silence?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

How far to heaven? Just open your eyes and look. You are in heaven.

Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

Knowing all objects to be impermanent, let not their contact blind you, resolve again and again to be aware of the Self that is permanent.

St. Francis of Assisi

Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.

St. John of the Cross

If a man wishes to be sure of the path he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

St. Thomas Aquinas

We can't have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence for ourselves.

Stanislav Grof

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Stephan Bodian

When you awaken, you realize that the separate person you took yourself to be is just a construct, a mental fabrication...

It's a pathless path because it's unique to each seeker and keeps changing as the journey unfolds. Even more essentially, it isn't really a path at all, because there's nowhere to go and nothing to discover; everything you need to know and be is right here and now--indeed, it is the very here and now that you are.

Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Story Waters

“Everything is your reflection. There is nothing we are not. This is about re-integration. It is all energy. We are all one.

Stuart Wilde

The more you establish quiet time and mediation as part of your daily discipline, the more you go through the rotation into mirror (dream) worlds.

Sue Atchley Ebaugh

How I relate to my inner self influences my relationships with all others. My satisfaction with myself and my satisfaction with other people are directly proportional.

Sue Patton Thoele

Intuition is a heart message minus the static.

Sun Bu'er

The secret of the receptive Must be sought in stillness; Within stillness there remains The potential for action.

Susan Jeffers

By learning to trust your intuition, miracles seem to happen. Intuitive thoughts are gifts from the higher self.

Susan Velasquez

There is alchemy at work when our past, our present, and our future convene in the present moment.

Susanna Thorpe-Clark

We have been slowly preparing for our Soul (our Higher Self) to come and join us in our physical body, and we are clearing out the space, by releasing attachments, fears and limiting thoughts so that this powerful part of ourselves can get in. This is the time when Spirit really begins to MERGE with physical matter, and it is a truly Divine and joyous moment. Remember this when the going gets tough. Remember this when you feel you want to give up. Just hold the thought of the magic and wonder that lies just ahead if you continue. The struggle, the opposition, the frustration, the lack of abundance, the ill health and the emotional and physical pain will all be gone FOREVER. So just keep focused, stay centred and continue to LET GO.

Suzanne Segal

To see things for what they are is to see with the eyes of the vastness itself.

Swami Krishnananda

Our prosperity, our friends, our bondage and even our destruction are all in the end rooted in our tongue, says a famous adage.

Swami Premodaya

You go from reacting to observing. There is an emotional disconnection that must take place; non-attachment. This doesn't mean not feeling anything, but being okay with whatever outcome manifests.

Swami Rajneesh

being aware of awareness itself only consciousness can get you there to the truth of yourself the immortal inner being...

Swami Satchidananda

We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody

Though we can't always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves.

We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati

It makes no difference whether you worship God, Jehovah, Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Christ or Krishna- it is still and always one and the same God.

Swami Shivananda

Patient and regular practice is the whole secret of spiritual realization. Do not be in a hurry in spiritual life. Do your utmost, and leave the rest to God.

Swami Venkatesananda

By introducing you to yourself it enables you to discover for yourself the true meaning of life and thus enrich every moment of it. Such self-discovery can lead to greater understanding of fellow-beings and therefore to true love.

Swami Vivekananda

...oneness is the secret to everything.

“BY the study of different RELIGIONS we find that in essence they are one.”

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.”

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish in the future can be produced by our present actions; se we have to know how to act.

“All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.”

Sylvia Plath

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

T. S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”

Tao Te Ching

If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something,you must first allow it to flourish If you want to take something,You must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.

Tarthang Tulku

The world will be balanced when we are balanced.

Tarun Sardana

Enquiry doesn't lead one to the truth. Enquiry leads to dissolving of the one who is seeking the truth.

Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)

The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

“Through awareness, you get a certain attitude. That’s the way, you see, to achieve more peaceful, more compassion, more friendship through that way.”

A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware.”

“To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities.”

To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else.

Teri Degler

If you have picked up this book and begun to read, chances are you have experienced the power of the creative spirit. This power is not a figment of your imagination; it is not an abstract concept. It is real. It is a force that manifests itself, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically. If you don't believe this, the next time you feel the urge to create, sit with the feeling. Go to a place of stillness, become completely in touch with your body, bring your consciousness to bear on this urge, and you will feel it in your body: a sensation, perhaps almost imperceptible, that begins in the nest of your pelvis, then rises up, reaches your heart and throat, and bursts into an aching, a longing, a profound need.

The Matrix Reloaded

We're all here to do what we're all here to do.

The Power of One

Any question you have the answer you find it in nature.

Thich Nhat Hanh

May we awaken from the dream that we are different.

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

“If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you.

Thomas Carlyle

Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Thomas Jefferson

I like to see the people awake and alert.

Thomas Mann

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected - in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

Thomas Merton

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Thor Heyerdahl

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thornton Wilder

“The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.”

Thrangu Rinpoche, Transcending Ego

There are several realms which ordinary persons do not perceive. Because they cannot see them, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. One of these realms is the sambhogakaya that can only be visited by highly realized Bodhisattvas. In the pure realm of the sambhogakaya, the Dharma is continuously taught. One sambhogakaya realm is Tushita, which is presided over by the next Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha. Buddha Shakyamuni dwelled there before coming to earth to give Dharma teachings.

Thubten Chodron

We are fortunate now to become aware of the contents of our mind. With that knowledge we will be able to change the aspects that lead to confusion and misery in our lives.

Tony Samara

“Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity”

Trinity to Neo in The Matrix

It's the question that drives us Neo. It's the question that brought you here. The answer is out there. It's looking for you... and it will find you.

Tsunetomo Yamamoto

It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all Ways and be more and more in accord with his own.

Tyler Zabel

The Self is All and the All is Selfless.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Unknown Author

Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all.

Upanishads

Approach life with a mind sharpened by your practices, and see the One in the many.

Ursula K. LeGuin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Valclav Havel

Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

Vanna Bonta

A heart needs only its own voice to do what is right.

Vernon Howard

It is utterly useless to try to change the outer world, for it is but a reflection of inner causes. The true seeker seeks to change himself.

Victor Hugo

“It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”

Vincente Alexandre

Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.

W. Clement Stone

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

W.E. Henley

I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Walt Whitman

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You.

“I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walter Russell

Security and contentment can come only through interdependence of every man upon every other man.

Knowledge in not acquired from without but merely recollected from within. The recollection of knowledge from within is an electro-magnetic process of thinking Mind...

Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

When our knowing exceeds our sensing, we will no longer be deceived by the illusions of our senses.

Wayne Dyer

“Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Wilfried Fink

The only thing which has to heal is the illusion of being separate.

William Blake

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The eye altering, alters all.

William Butler Yeats

When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.

William Glasser

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

William Hazlitt

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

William James

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

“The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.”

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William Newton Clarke

“Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see”

William Penn

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Yasutani Roshi

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yoda

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.

Yogavasistha Maharamayana

The same undivided and indivisible space is outside and inside of a thousand pots. Likewise the Self pervades all beings.

Yogi Bhajan

If you can't see God in All, you can't see God at all.

Yogi Ramacharaka

Prana (life energy) colored by the tought of the sender may be projected to persons at a distance, who are willing to receive it, and the healing can be done this way.

Zen Master

“When I heard the bell ring, suddenly, there was no 'I' and no 'bell', just the ringing.

Zora Neale Hurston

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

Featured Book

Coming Soon Self-Mastery Series Book 2 Be Yourself

Magenta Pixie

“All higher dimensional understanding comes from the oneness that exists within a frequency of bliss-charged love. For it is this frequency that allows your DNA to spin and take you to worlds far beyond three-dimensional physicality.

Mahabharata

When one withdraws all desires as a tortise withdraws his limbs, then the natural splendour of the world soon manifests itself.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune.

Marcel Proust

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

Marilyn Ferguson

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Martha Beck

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart—messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you’ll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.

Matt Kahn

One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle their honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are – beyond all ideas.

Without a need to constantly remain attached to ideas and beliefs, the clarity of your formless form recognizes the truth of itself -- with nothing to confirm or ever deny.

You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence.

Max Igan

What actually matters is you, who you are within yourself. Societes are structured in such a way as to prevent you from finding yourself.

It all comes down to connecting with all the people around you.

Melody Beattie

[The void] It's that place in our lives where what we've been hanging onto . . . clinging to for dear life . . . is stripped away. It's that place in us where we let go of what we know, what we think we know, and what we want and surrender to the unknown. It is the place of saying and meaning, 'I don't know.' It means standing there with our hands empty for a while, sometimes watching everything we wanted disappear; our self image, our definition of who we thought we should be, the clones we've created of ourselves, the people we thought we had to have, the things we thought were so important to collect and surround ourselves with, the job we were certain was ours, the place we thought we'd live in all our lives. . . Surrender control to the supreme wisdom and authority of God and to the Divine in your soul. Step into the void with courage. Learn to say, I don't know. That's not blind faith. It's pure faith that will allow God and your spirit to lead you wherever your soul wants and needs to go.

Michael Jeffries

How do we break this cycle of adding to the unconsciousness on the planet? The answer lies in seeing that our true nature consists ONLY of love, and so that is ALL we have to give [and see] when we know ourselves as that...

Michael Teal

We are all Earth Angels and our souls are the place where heaven and earth meet. By knowing yourself you change the world for the better and live your higher self.

You are the light of consciousness and also the witness of this light. You are pure awareness.

Everything takes you back to yourself. When you get there, you know you never left. You only dreamt you left. You have never been other than that. You are only dreaming due to the idea of 'I am the body.'

Morihei Ueshiba

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.

Muhammad Asad

...all the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them...

Mundaka Upanishad

One who meditates, all his knots of his heart, the bondages are opened; all the doubts are eliminated and one becomes gradually free from the fetters of action with ego.

Napoleon

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Jeff Hutner

It is within the space beyond the mind where the heart and soul meet that the infinite is contacted and once contacted, it is a struggle to return to our former life. But we do so. Our life therefore is about remembering and forgetting until we forget to remember and simply are nothing and everything.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says I am everything. Wisdom says I am nothing. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning--it is not as hard as you think. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

You are not in the world...the world is in you, what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world, that is, there is no you that is real or in any world. The world is in you means that the world is in your mind and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]

Nathaniel Branden

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

Native American Saying

The hurt of one is the hurt of all. The honour of one is the honour of all.

Neale Donald Walsch

First, we become aware of that which is Divine around us. Then we become aware of that which is Divine within us. Finally, we become aware that all is Divine, and that there is nothing else. This is the moment of our awakening.

Oscar Wilde

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Papaji

Your nature is to keep quiet. You came from silence and you have to return to silence… you are dancing only for a little while you see… a little while you are dancing.

Who is journeying for freedom? The one who is already free. Thoughts are impediments to seeing your own face. Don't give rise to any thought, and discover who you are.

I am your own self and the self of all beings that exist.

Pat Obuchowski

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it.

Patanjali

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Patrul Rinpoche

The best scholar is one who has realized the meaning of no-self. The best monk is the one who has tamed his own mind. The best quality is a great desire to benefit others. The best instruction is always to watch the mind. The best remedy is to know that nothing has any inherent reality. The best way of life is one that does not fit with worldly ways. The best accomplishment is a steady lessening of negative emotions. The best sign is a steady decrease of desires.

Paul Lam

Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning.

Paul Lowe (The Experiment is Over)

You know at this point you have everything you need. It's available to you from the inside and you see you are supported in many ways. You realize that there is more to this dimension, to this reality, than you have seen before. You see you are being taken care of, you are being loved, you are being looked after. All that's needed is to go inside, become still and listen.

Paul Tillich

Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

Paul Vitale

What we do flows from who we are.

Paulo Coelho

Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal. The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive. Repeat that to yourself every morning: 'I've arrived.' That way you'll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day.

Peggy Jenkins

To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe

Pema Chodron

If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that - then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

Philip Levine

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

Pierre Corneille

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Prentice Mulford

Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force.

Prudence Kohl

The search for self-worth begins by finding what is indestructible inside, then letting it be.

Publilius Syrus

From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.

Rachel Naomi Remen

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.

Rafael Stoneman

Be ever so still, all movement is mind- one thought is a cloud, do not stir it about the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The only journey is the journey within.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Ralph Waldo Trine

A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.

Ram Dass

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. The next message you need is always right where you are.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear. We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.

Inspiration is God making contact with itself.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

The next message you need is always right where you are.

Be patient. You'll know when it's time for you to wake up and move ahead.

Ramayana

If you can give up all thoughts, you will right here and now attain the realization of oneness with all.

Ray Bradbury

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'

Remez Sasson

Your outer circumstances are the mirror of your inner world. Change your inner world, and you change your outer world.

Rhonda Byrne

The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.

Ricardo B. Serrano

Realisation of Buddha Nature is synonymous with being in the flow of Qi -the universal life force.

Richard Bach

There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

Rita Coolidge

I choose things by how they resonate in my heart.

Robert Brault

We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror.

Robert Moss

Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

Robert Valett

The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.

Robert Young

Silent harmony is the gift you give yourself... As you push past the infinite, you can feel your own music, your own frequency, beginning to project itself past you, beyond infinity, into nowhere, starting to generate its own star.

See and feel who you are. Love like you have never loved before. The practical point is to live and enjoy from where you are. You can feel every movement because you are not here. The logic is only important to the body-mind.

Our gift to the world is to receive because when we receive, it becomes part of the world... It will turn many things upside down for you. That is what its supposed to do because what we have been using is a brain that tells us what's wrong. The solidarity you have is what's missing. This infinite trust that is goes through everything forever. It sits with you in a magic way to solve everything before it even gets to you... Remember nothing. Do nothing. It just is.

The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that.

Robin Rice

There is Nothing wrong with you. Be Who You Are.

Rumi

Kill the cow of your ego as quickly as you can, so that your inner spirit can come to life and attain true awareness.

What you seek is seeking you.

Out beyond the right doing and wrong doing is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Sai Baba

You seek too much information and not enough transformation.

Saint Augustine

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Saint Jerome

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

Sampo Kaasila

What you seek is already within you. You uncover it by shedding all that is untrue within you.

You are not what arises, but that which witnesses ALL that arises.

Samuel Beckett

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.

Sanaya Roman

Spiritual growth means increasing your awareness of beauty, opening your heart, and experiencing more love and compassion.

Santosh Kalwar

We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.

Sarada Devi

...if you want peace, do not find fault with others. Rather, see your own faults. No one is a stranger...the whole world is your own

.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.

Satguru Siva Yogaswami

Only one task to do here: find out who you are. How do you find out who you are? Dive into the silence and see.

Shinjo Ito

What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

Shrii Shrii Anandamurti

You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars guides you too.

Shunru Suzuki

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

Shyamananda

When you can see through the mist of Maya (illusion) to the Self, that mist has not disappeared. You have just learned to see through it.

Sidney Lanier

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Siva Sutras

One who is established in a comfortable posture while concentrating on inner Self naturally becomes immersed in the Heart's ocean of bliss.

Sogyal Rinpoche

...we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .

Sol Luckman

Mastery of Intention is a deeply personal process that always occurs in the present. No technology, guru or savior, however advanced, can do for us what only a commitment to evolving and operating out of our own divine consciousness and physiology can achieve.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves?

Sonia Choquette (The Answer is Simple...)

We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and to remember our Divine nature.

Sri Aurobindo

Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

Sri Bhagavan

Oneness is inner silence, which remains undisturbed by external factors. This silence is not the opposite of noise. That is inner Oneness.

Sri Chinmoy

Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness.

Sri Lakshmana Swami

If you have a mind then the earth, the sky, and the stars will exist, and you will be able to see them. When the mind dies there will be no earth, no sky, no stars, and no world. The world of objects, names, and forms is only the mind, and when the mind dies, the world dies with it. Only the Self then remains. > Seeing everything as the Self gives the impression that the Self is equally distributed everywhere. This is also an idea in the mind. When the mind finally dies you realize that there is no distribution and no everywhere. > So, I go off now to be in the effortless thought free state, with no desires for anything or nothing...

Sri Neem Karoli Baba

The whole universe is your home. All are your family.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things; that is, of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them, then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve the silence?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

How far to heaven? Just open your eyes and look. You are in heaven.

Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

Knowing all objects to be impermanent, let not their contact blind you, resolve again and again to be aware of the Self that is permanent.

Stanislav Grof

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution. Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Stephan Bodian

When you awaken, you realize that the separate person you took yourself to be is just a construct, a mental fabrication...It's a pathless path because it's unique to each seeker and keeps changing as the journey unfolds. Even more essentially, it isn't really a path at all, because there's nowhere to go and nothing to discover; everything you need to know and be is right here and now--indeed, it is the very here and now that you are.

Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Story Waters

Everything is your reflection. There is nothing we are not. This is about re-integration. It is all energy. We are all one.

Sue Atchley Ebaugh

How I relate to my inner self influences my relationships with all others. My satisfaction with myself and my satisfaction with other people are directly proportional.

Sue Patton Thoele

Intuition is a heart message minus the static.

Sun Bu'er

The secret of the receptive Must be sought in stillness; Within stillness there remains The potential for action.

Susan Jeffers

By learning to trust your intuition, miracles seem to happen. Intuitive thoughts are gifts from the higher self.

Susan Velasquez

There is alchemy at work when our past, our present, and our future convene in the present moment.

Susanna Thorpe-Clark

We have been slowly preparing for our Soul (our Higher Self) to come and join us in our physical body, and we are clearing out the space, by releasing attachments, fears and limiting thoughts so that this powerful part of ourselves can get in. This is the time when Spirit really begins to MERGE with physical matter, and it is a truly Divine and joyous moment. Remember this when the going gets tough. Remember this when you feel you want to give up. Just hold the thought of the magic and wonder that lies just ahead if you continue. The struggle, the opposition, the frustration, the lack of abundance, the ill health and the emotional and physical pain will all be gone FOREVER. So just keep focused, stay centered and continue to LET GO.

Suzanne Segal

To see things for what they are is to see with the eyes of the vastness itself.

Swami Krishnananda

Our prosperity, our friends, our bondage and even our destruction are all in the end rooted in our tongue, says a famous adage.

Swami Premodaya

You go from reacting to observing. There is an emotional disconnection that must take place; non-attachment. This doesn't mean not feeling anything, but being okay with whatever outcome manifests.

Swami Rajneesh

being aware of awareness itself only consciousness can get you there to the truth of yourself the immortal inner being...

Swami Satchidananda

We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody

Though we can't always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves.

We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody.

Swami Shivananda

Patient and regular practice is the whole secret of spiritual realization. Do not be in a hurry in spiritual life. Do your utmost, and leave the rest to God.

Swami Venkatesananda

By introducing you to yourself it enables you to discover for yourself the true meaning of life and thus enrich every moment of it. Such self-discovery can lead to greater understanding of fellow-beings and therefore to true love.

Swami Vivekananda

...oneness is the secret to everything. By the study of different RELIGIONS we find that in essence they are one.

Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish in the future can be produced by our present actions; se we have to know how to act.

All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.

Sylvia Plath

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

T. S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Tarthang Tulku

The world will be balanced when we are balanced.

Tarun Sardana

Enquiry doesn't lead one to the truth. Enquiry leads to dissolving of the one who is seeking the truth.

Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)

The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

Through awareness, you get a certain attitude. That’s the way, you see, to achieve more peaceful, more compassion, more friendship through that way.

A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware.

To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities.

Teri Degler

If you have picked up this book and begun to read, chances are you have experienced the power of the creative spirit. This power is not a figment of your imagination; it is not an abstract concept. It is real. It is a force that manifests itself, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically. If you don't believe this, the next time you feel the urge to create, sit with the feeling. Go to a place of stillness, become completely in touch with your body, bring your consciousness to bear on this urge, and you will feel it in your body: a sensation, perhaps almost imperceptible, that begins in the nest of your pelvis, then rises up, reaches your heart and throat, and bursts into an aching, a longing, a profound need.

The Matrix Reloaded

We're all here to do what we're all here to do.

Thich Nhat Hanh

May we awaken from the dream that we are different.

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you.

Thomas Carlyle

Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Thomas Jefferson

I like to see the people awake and alert.

Thomas Mann

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected - in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

Thomas Merton

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Thor Heyerdahl

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thornton Wilder

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

Thubten Chodron

We are fortunate now to become aware of the contents of our mind. With that knowledge we will be able to change the aspects that lead to confusion and misery in our lives.

Tony Samara

Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity.

Trinity to Neo in The Matrix

It's the question that drives us Neo. It's the question that brought you here. The answer is out there. It's looking for you... and it will find you.

Tyler Zabel

The Self is All and the All is Selfless.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Unknown Author

Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all.

Upanishads

Approach life with a mind sharpened by your practices, and see the One in the many.

Ursula K. LeGuin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Valclav Havel

Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

Vanna Bonta

A heart needs only its own voice to do what is right.

Vernon Howard

It is utterly useless to try to change the outer world, for it is but a reflection of inner causes. The true seeker seeks to change himself.

Victor Hugo

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Vincente Alexandre

Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.

W. Clement Stone

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

W.E. Henley

I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Walt Whitman

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You.

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walter Russell

Security and contentment can come only through interdependence of every man upon every other man.

Knowledge in not acquired from without but merely recollected from within. The recollection of knowledge from within is an electro-magnetic process of thinking Mind...

Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

When our knowing exceeds our sensing, we will no longer be deceived by the illusions of our senses.

Wayne Dyer

Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Wilfried Fink

The only thing which has to heal is the illusion of being separate.

William Blake

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The eye altering, alters all.

William Butler Yeats

When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.

William Glasser

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

William Hazlitt

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

William James

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

“The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.”

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William Newton Clarke

“Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see”

William Penn

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Yasutani Roshi

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yoda

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.

Yogavasistha Maharamayana

The same undivided and indivisible space is outside and inside of a thousand pots. Likewise the Self pervades all beings.

Yogi Bhajan

If you can't see God in All, you can't see God at all.

Yogi Ramacharaka

Prana (life energy) colored by the tought of the sender may be projected to persons at a distance, who are willing to receive it, and the healing can be done this way.

Zen Master

When I heard the bell ring, suddenly, there was no 'I' and no 'bell', just the ringing.

Zora Neale Hurston

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842

R. Buckminster Fuller

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

The People's Peace Movement is an idea whose time has come. All people with access to a computer at home, at a friends or at an internet cafe can sign the People's Peace Charter. Once a billion of us fellow humans have signed, we have already changed apathy to power and make no mistake, the people have the power even though it appears the people in charge do. That can change in the twinkling of an eye and is about to.

Jeff

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.” ..primarily the individual is going to study at home.

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.