Daly Bread

To be present to something is to allow the moment to influence us and even change us. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Instead, because of our fear, we allow the event to control us.

When you see through contemplative eyes, you refuse to identify with any one side. You hold the tension between what seems to be conflict and go beyond words, which are limiting, to experience, which has the potential to unify what seems to be contradictions.

Detached observation of ourselves helps us to recognize our own darkness and to deal with it, but only when ready.

The task of religion is to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you will know whatever it is that you need to know. When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple and at the same time, that hard. Too much religion has encouraged you to be unconscious, but God loves you more than that.

As long as you think you are fully in control, you are going to keep using your old learned responses. You need to rewire the old system and the only way to do that is by trusting that darkness will lead to depth, freedom, and love. Change happens when you are standing, at the same time, within both safety and conflict, tradition and newness.

Authentic spirituality is always seeking to feed our soul. Watch the lens through which we are seeing the moment or we will not see things as they are, but rather see things as we are! 

We make the mistake of feeling emotions are caused by something out there. We like to play the victim. “He made me do it,” or “My abusive parent made me the way I am.”  It takes real spiritual and emotional maturity to recognize that our response always and finally comes from us. 

Prayer is not changing God’s mind about us, but allowing God to change our mind about God and the reality right in front of us. 

The mistake we make is that we do not realize that it is how we see that determines what we see and how it will affect us and what our response will be. What and how we see the outer world is a mirror of our state of consciousness. Most of the time, we just do not see at all, but operate on cruise control.

Philosophers tend toward the universals and poets love the particulars, it is the mystics who teach us how to encompass both.

Those who don’t know what to do with this life are the ones who are bothered about what they are going to do with another life. One sign that you’re awake is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life. You’re not bothered about it; you don’t care. You are not interested. Forget the past. When you hear “Repent for your past,” realize it’s a great religious distraction...

Where’s the fire? Where’s the love? Where’s the drug uprooted from your system? Where’s the freedom? This is what spirituality is all about. If worship isn’t leading to the fire, if adoration isn’t leading to love, if the liturgy isn’t leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God isn’t leading to life, of what use is religion except to create more division, more fanaticism, more antagonism?...

Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore. You refuse to need any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call anyone your own. The birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through life. If you ever get to this state, you wi...

“We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever.” It’s only a flash and we waste it. The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave.

Information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness. You don’t change yourself, it’s not me changing me. Change takes place through you, in you.

If you want a road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. Try to hear them all. You’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged. That is extremely important for the process of change.

You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention. Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable.

When you have attained wisdom, who can enslave you? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. 

If you would die to the past, if you would die toevery minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death. We’re always dying to things. We’re always shedding everything in order to be fully alive and to be resurrected at every moment. Meditating on and imitating externally the behavior of Jesus is no help. It’s not a question of imitating...

The more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. The more you fight darkness, the more real it becomes to you, and the more you exhaust yourself. But when you turn on the light of awareness, it melts.

There is a difference between knowledge and awareness, between information and awareness. I

It’s not reality that matters, but what you’re saying to yourself about it. Words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if they’re not used properly.

If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people. When I die to the need for people, then I’m right in the desert. In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, you’ll suddenly discover that it...

Break out of this prison, this programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; break out into reality. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all. We’re too distracted with attachment. Temporarily, the world rearranges itself to suit our attachment. But hang on; it’ll change; you’ll be depressed tomorrow. Why...

An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy. Once you get convinced of that—and it gets into our subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being—you are finished.