Stephen Levine Mind Quotations

Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.

Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.

Non-attachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.

The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise...when you can accept discomfort, doing so allows a balance of mind. That surrender, that letting go of wanting anything to be other than it is right in the moment, is what frees us from hell.

When we turn to our innate wisdom for the harmony of mind and gut, we heal the entrance to the heart as it seeks to beat in rhythm with the world.

Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.

Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.

We shall not cease from exploring,And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.