existential awakening Quotes

When I first saw the light of day on this planet, it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep.

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

Heaven and hell are not geographical; they are not something outside you, they are something that belongs to your interiority. If you are awake, then you are in a totally different universe; it is as if in your awakening the whole existence becomes awakened. It takes a new color, a new flavor, a new fragrance. When you are asleep, the whole existence sleeps with you. It all depends on you.

Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.

Any moment that opens us up to the reality that life is good is a parable of the supreme end for which we were made.

People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it's not. It's an unraveling - a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're 'supposed' to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.

You know something?" He lifted his head, and when he turned to me, he had this strange look in his eyes. Almost as if he was really seeing me for the first time. "I don't think I ever really lived until this. I've never done anything that mattered before, but now I'm fighting to save my life, and yours. And I know it sounds really cheesy and lame, but I don't think I ever really felt alive. Not until I met you.

You reach a certain age -- sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's forty-six -- and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn't working.

Both the forces of good and evil will keep the universe alive for us, until we awake from our dreams and give up this building of mud pies.

They're basically moments in which you're in touch with the meaning of life, when your relationship to the rest of the universe makes sense.

The world isn't what I've believed it to be, and I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

We are but shadows: we are, not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.

He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis)

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

Reminding people what in reality it is all about, giving them a theme on which to ponder, creating a shock within them, pulling them out of the delusion of non authenticity, enabling them to become aware of their true possibilities.

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.

Many people don't realise until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.