Great Throughts Treasury

"Awareness is the greatest agent for change."

"Doing is never enough if you neglect Being."

"How “spiritual” you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness. This, in turn, determines how you act in the world and interact with others."

"How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself."

"If you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life."

"Knowing yourself has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind."

"Most people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless."

"Most people don’t inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one."

"Nobody can tell you who you are. It would just be another concept, so it would not change you. Who you are requires no belief. In fact, every belief is an obstacle."

"Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living."

"Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness."

"The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news, inexactly the same way: “Is that so?” He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody’s victim. He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness."

"Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on."

"The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion."

"The primary factor in creation is consciousness. Our state of consciousness creates our world. Consciousness itself is timeless and therefore does not evolve. Consciousness is the intelligence, the organizing principle behind the arising of form. Although the unmanifested realm of pure consciousness could be considered another dimension, it is not separate from this dimension of form. Form and formlessness interpenetrate. The unmanifested flows into this dimension as awareness, inner space, Presence."

"The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am."

"What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now."

"When you look upon what you do or where you are as the main purpose of your life, you negate time. This is enormously empowering. The negation of time in what you do also provides the link between your inner and outer purposes, between Being and doing. Whatever you do, you will be doing extraordinarily well, because the doing itself becomes the focal point of your attention. Your doing then becomes the channel through which consciousness enters this world."

"Ultimately all things are small because all things are transient."

"To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity."

"You cannot become successful. You can only be successful."