Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering—fear, anger, shame—in an instant. At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. Punctuating ordinary experience in this way makes al

The deeper purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience, both pleasant and unpleasant. The goal is to realize those qualities that are intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment, no matter what arises to be noticed.

G. I. Gurdjieff

The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. However, in the beginning, you are unlikely to understand just how transformative this shift in attention can be. You will spend most of your time trying to meditate or imagining that you are meditating (whether by focusing on your breathing or anything else) and failing for m

Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness,

it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.

we have ethical responsibilities toward other creatures precisely to the degree that our actions can affect their conscious experience for better or worse.

Whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness is the context in which the objects of experience appear—the sight of this book, the sound of traffic,

Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

This is not surprising, because the self is the very thing to which these contents seem to refer: not the body or mind per se but the point of view from which both body and mind seem to be “mine” in every present moment.