Loch Kelly Quotes

Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought.

You are already the awakeness that you seek!

The big realization when we go beyond the ego is simply seeing that we've always been ok.

Many of us are concerned about social, political, economic, and environmental issues on this planet. I believe that taking responsibility to find our own true sense of compassionate interconnectedness, and then helping others do the same, can be a radical collective healing that can bring a better future for all of us.

shift into it as easily as you can now shift from being aware of reading to being aware of the sensations in your right hand.

We can learn to return home to our open hearts at any moment.

You will discover that essential wellbeing is not found by calming our minds or by changing our thoughts or attitudes, but actually by shifting out of our chattering minds and into a freedom that is already available.

We still have a fundamental difference between the perceiver and the perceived, between awareness or consciousness and everything that awareness or consciousness is aware of or conscious of. Next come the deeper states of realization, when the perceiver or the witness state collapses and when the perception of subject and object collapses. That is when we find our truth about the nature of our existence.3

After all, all weather comes and goes, and no storm ever hurt the sky.

Via Negativa does not mean being negative. It is a way of negating all the many things that obscure the living truth of our being. It is the spiritual practice of deconstructing, dissolving, and letting go of what is not our true nature. We learn how to rest until what binds and blinds us finally relaxes. The search for who you are begins with letting go of everything and seeing who or what is left.

The second is external, in our environment, such as other people, groups, physical spaces, nature, emotions, objects, and subtle realms often called psychic or spiritual. Subtle energy awareness is a normal human ability to internally and externally feel or perceive people, spaces, and things. I include this second type of subtle energy awareness of people, places, things, and other dimensions because it has historically been omitted from our Western psychological map or dismissed as if it were imagination or projection. Studies on highly sensitive people, mirror neurons, and what Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLA and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, calls “attunement”2 in interpersonal neurobiology are beginning to validate this category of awareness within the paradigm of scientific materialism. When I ask a group of students, “How many of you have ever walked into a room and felt that someone is upset without looking at their body language?” usually three quarters of them will raise their hands. (It’s important to note that without the grounding of awake awareness—type five—many highly sensitive people can get overwhelmed by subtle energy because, without awake awareness, we are still experiencing sensations and events from the view of a small self within a separate physical body.)

After direct recognition, there is a gradual unfolding as we reintegrate our emotions, thoughts, and ordinary functioning from awake awareness. The Mahamudra tradition has practices for yoking and mixing absolute awareness with our conventional physical life.

Recognition is our first glimpse of awake awareness. Realization is an identity shift, when we come to understand that we’re looking from awake awareness, which has become our ground of being. Stabilization begins when awake awareness is our primary way of knowing. Expression occurs when we have discovered open-hearted awareness and rewired our brains to create and relate from here.

Awakening is not a one-time event, but a series of shifts and a process of unfolding that moves us away from the habit of trying to maintain a center, a point of view, and the primacy of a separate sense of self.

When the heart doesn’t go out to look for love, but looks instead back to its source—the ground of Being—we can discover unconditional love as who we have always been.

different mental processes are mediated by different brain regions, and there is nothing to suggest the existence of any central controller.

There is “relative” bodhicitta, which is having positive intentions such as doing loving-kindness meditation to benefit all living creatures. Then there is “ultimate” bodhicitta: open-hearted awareness that is living from your natural awakened heart. Those who live from open-heartedness are sometimes called bodhisattvas, because they dedicate their lives to increased awakening, love, and wellbeing in all they meet.

Consciousness is the spontaneous expression and creative activity of awake awareness.

Distinguishing conceptual thinking from awake awareness has three steps: first, we glimpse awake awareness; second, awake awareness becomes primary and knows itself; and third, we know from awake awareness within our physical, emotional, and thinking consciousness.

Open-hearted awareness doesn’t consciously reference thoughts but instead rests deeply within an intelligence that is intuitively connected with all we know.

To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling.

Tolle’s story is an example of sudden, unintentional awakening. For me and for many others, the same process happened more gradually, through a series of shifts.

Eckhart says that it took him ten years to integrate his awakening. I know many people who’ve had similar experiences of awakening but were never able to integrate them. This kind of identity transition does not fit into our conventional cultural understanding of human growth, and so these individuals who experienced sudden awakenings had no context in which to place them.

Once you have a direct experience beyond ego-identification, questions of self and no-self are no longer of philosophical interest.

Awakening is not part of any one tradition and does not reveal any specific religious doctrine. Awakening and awake awareness are part of the human lineage we all share. Everyone can experience awakening and awake awareness while maintaining his or her own beliefs, philosophy, and theology.

Simply abiding in Being may permit painful emotions, beliefs, and strong subpersonalities to begin arising spontaneously to liberate themselves. Three images often used for spontaneous liberation are: 1) when an old emotion arises, you begin to feel like you’re seeing the face of an old friend; 2) uncomfortable emotions can also spontaneously unburden themselves in the way a coiled snake simply unfurls; 3) emotions arise, but there’s no one to react to them—as though thieves were breaking into an empty house.

During the transitional period, you’ll see defense mechanisms arise that were created to help your ego personality thrive and survive during your formative years. These defenses need to be welcomed, liberated, and reconfigured. Even when you’re caught in the grip of old patterns such as fear, guilt, shame, and anger, you can learn to step back more easily into the awake awareness and then realize it is inherent within everything.

If you take away nothing else, remember that in difficult situations the first step is to shift your level of mind.

As Being becomes the source of your identity, a new rewiring occurs that allows life energy to bubble up. If you can wait and trust, you’ll be freshly inspired to act and to do in a new way.

you must be willing to feel bored by peace at first. Because we’re used to a lot of stimuli from emotional drama and mental fascination, getting accustomed to peace and wellbeing can be a big transition—even though that’s what we truly want.

The identity that begins the journey is not who we know ourselves to be upon awakening.

the new wiring will lead to another way of speaking from open-hearted awareness. One person offered this description: “Speaking becomes like breathing. It’s easy and natural and just flows without needing to plan what you’re going to say.