Awareness Law #2

This is the Law that can bring all the others into focus. Without Awareness, there is no first step towards Enlightenment... 

Cynthia F. Davidson from the Wisdom Wheel Awareness card 

The Law of Awareness is also known as the Law of Consciousness. 
Can you rate your own level(s) of consciousness??
What do you pay attention to? What do you choose to ignore? And why? 
What distracts you? Why?
For the next 10 days, make Awareness your watch word. 
Ask for it, first thing every morning and last thing every night. 
Write the word down, on your mirror, in your journal, on a rock or a Post It note. 
Talk about Awareness and consciousness with friends and family. 
Experiment with mental, emotional, physical, sensory & spiritual Awareness.
Look for news stories that celebrate it or demonstrate its lack. 
See what happens when you invite Awareness into your life. 
Share what you learn with us. 
(If you need a set of Wisdom Wheel cards or stones, visit our website, www.thewisdomwheel.com and click on the Welcome button.)

Here's some more wisdom from those who've paid attention to Awareness. 

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

Stanislav Grof

The question is not what you look at but what you see. …Millions are awake enough only for physical labor; and only one in a million for effective intellectually exertion; only one in a hundred million for a poetic or divine life. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

Henry David Thoreau, Journals

Stop identifying with your mind and start watching it. In that experience you (one thing) watch your mind (a second thing) (and)…you become conscious of the mind… As Awareness grows … (you) become aware of the insanity of identifying with the mind…its fantasies, its desires, its defenses….The more I ‘catch’ the mind slipping into itself, the stronger Awareness becomes.

Wayne Wirs, photographer and author, books include Fading Into Enlightenment

A sage is one who knowingly lives as consciousness. Since Awareness is impersonal and universal, there is only one sage beyond the apparent distinctions of race, gender, age, etcetera.

Francis Lucille

Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.

Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.

Georges Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men

This is the human problem; there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts, books include The Wisdom of Insecurity

Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, whereas whatever we ignore—no matter how important it may be—seems to fade into insignificance... Each of us chooses, by our ways of attending to things, the universe we inhabit and the people we encounter. But for most of us, this “choice” is unconscious, so it’s not really a choice at all.

B. Alan Wallace, PhD. The Attention Revolution

If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything... Knowledge is the greatest obstacle to awakening... (because) we are so attached to our knowledge, our habits, and our prejudices...

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

The mind’s first step in Awareness must be through the body.

George Sheehan

A mind that is not aware will produce illness.

Charlotte J. Beck in Every Day Zen

It is Awareness… of how you are stuck, that makes you recover.

Fritz Perls

Once a photograph of the Earth taken from the outside is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. 

Sir Fred Hoyle (1948)

The first day or so we all pointed to our countries.  The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents.  By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth.

Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, Saudi Arabian astronaut

 As we become increasingly aware of our global interdependence as a species, we can also deepen awareness of our spiritual interconnectedness. We cannot live in total isolation. The cross-cultural communion of awakened souls may be the key to co-creating a sustainable future and living in harmony with the earth.

Frances Vaughan in Shadows of the Sacred

At the deepest level of ecological awareness you are talking about spiritual awareness. Spiritual awareness is an understanding of being imbedded in a larger whole, a cosmic whole, of belonging to the universe.

Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics

Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being.

David Steindl-Rast

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Spirituality means waking up. Many of us, even though we don't know it, are asleep. We're born asleep, we live asleep, we marry in our sleep, we breed children in our sleep, we die in our sleep without ever waking up… What you are aware of, you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.

Anthony De Mello, in Awareness

Only total awareness can save us.  Complete attention is the closest thing to a perfect prayer.

Margareta Ekstrom in The Day I Began My Studies in Philosophy & Other Stories