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Self is one’s consciousness of being separate from all other selves and things

• Self:  One’s consciousness of one’s own being or identity; the ego. American Heritage Dictionary
• Self:  The total, essential, or particular being of a person; the individual. American Heritage Dictionary
• Self: The union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person. Merriam Webster
• Free will,  Transcending the ego,  Freedom,  Choice,  Oneness,  Effortlessness,  Go with the flow,  Surrender,  Divine order,  Trust in God

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An agent is a doer, chooser, doer

• Agent: One that acts or has the power or authority to act. American Heritage Museum
• Agency: A person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved. Merriam Webster
• Choice,  Action

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We have a sense of being a separate self (agent) in charge

• A centralizing image of a personal self emerges as the belief of an individual personal self as an agent, i.e., the ‘thinker’ of thoughts, the ‘doer’ of actions, and the repository of guilt and self-blame. David R. Hawkins
• Control,  Transcending the ego

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We attach our identity to this sense of self

• I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-‘teleological activity.’ He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. Thorstein Veblen
• Transcending the ego

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In high states of consciousness, the sense of being an agent (a doer and chooser) falls away

• The body moved spontaneously and continued to perform activities that were autonomous as there was no ‘thinker’ to think, no ‘planner’ to plan, nor any ‘doer’ to do. All occurred of its own essence as potentiality expressed itself as actuality. The condition can best be described as the Unmanifest’s becoming Manifest. David R. Hawkins
• All conversations and interactions were merely witnessed as phenomena, not directed. It seemed like a strange vanity to have once believed that there had been a small self as the author of the body’s actions. David R. Hawkins
• The body seemed like a karmic wind-up toy run by all of its accustomed patterns and programs, not needing any attention in the slightest. It seemed to know what to do and did it very effectively and effortlessly. David R. Hawkins
• When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. A Course in Miracles
• Consciousness,  Enlightenment,  Awakening,  Illusion

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In this state, we realise life is just happening, arising in our awareness…

• Listen, there’s something I must tell. I’ve never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn’t matter a bit if you don’t understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don’t know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn’t being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It’s a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn’t happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play – exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatsoever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn’t anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn’t happen to anyone! There isn’t any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety. Alan Watts
• There is no walker, but walking occurs; no driver, but driving occurs; no thinker, but thinking occurs. Just because there is no practitioner (and never has been) does not mean that the practice will not take place. It is obvious for a particular spiritual practice to occur, then it will. If it is obvious to meditate, chant, journey, circumambulate, travel, set up an altar, eat certain foods, perform certain acts, or visit certain teachers, these will be done, as things have always been done, by the mysterious, non-locatable doer that is behind everything. Suzanne Segal
• In no way…am I suggesting that practices should not be done, only that there is no practitioner who is the doer behind them. This is true of every activity. … Just because there is no practitioner (and never has been)) does not mean that practice will not take place. If it is obvious for a particular spiritual practice to occur, then it will. Suzanne Segal
• God is not running the world. Then who is doing it?    All happens by itself…  All is a play in consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• I moved down the street like a cloud of awareness following a body that seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign. There was an incomprehensible attachment to that body, although it no longer felt like “mine”. It continued to send out signals of its sensory perception, yet how or where those signals wwere being received was beyond comprehension. Suzanne Segal
• There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that — in this sense — self is other and here is there. Alan Watts
• You don’t have to think about what needs to be done, it is just there, and you just watch the doing of it happen. You are not doing things at the direction of your ego, but at the direction of life itself, which is who you really are. Roger Stephens
• One is able to rest more deeply in awareness when realise it’s all just happening. The body and mind operate on their own. Anthony Lambert
• The body moved spontaneously and continued to perform activities that were autonomous as there was no ‘thinker’ to think, no ‘planner’ to plan, nor any ‘doer’ to do. All occurred of its own essence as potentiality expressed itself as actuality. The condition can best be described as the Unmanifest’s becoming Manifest. David R. Hawkins
• Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Basho
• What happens, happens spontaneously, without intentions — like digestion, or the growth of the hair. Realize this, and be free from the limitations of the mind. Douwe Tiemersma
• The spider dances her web without knowing there are flies that will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam gets caught without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them “It” dances. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed-more I cannot say. Eugen Herrigel
• You believe you are in control. In presence, it is revealed that life is just happening spontaneously. The “you” that you take yourself to be is also just a story arising spontaneously out of nowhere. There is no “you” to choose what is arising. Scott Kiloby
• Everything is already seemingly just happening. Do you have any choice in the matter? Who is there to have a choice? That apparent one, the apparent chooser, is just happening from time to time, as the thought that thinks it. It has no other reality other than the thought that thinks it and as such, has no more ability to control the situation than a table or a chair. Rupert Spira
• Life is God’s dream,  Awareness

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… and the body is just doing its thing like a karmic wind-up toy

• The inner state prevails and selfless action operates spontaneously and autonomously. It is the karmic ‘wind-up toy’. It can eventually even think and respond to the world without interrupting the state of silent peace. The persona is perceived by the world to be ‘you’, whereas it is only a linear functionality. It is like the ripples or waves of the ocean.   David R. Hawkins
• The body continues to function on its own, without any internal ‘doer’. Action occurs of its own without volition or intention. David R. Hawkins
• Thinkingness is intrinsically a vanity. Survival is spontaneous and autonomous, an automatic karmic consequence. Even when the mind becomes totally silent, the body goes about its business like a karmic wind-up toy. David R. Hawkins
• Let things happen. Let life dance. Osho
• The physical body continues to function on its own, spontaneously and autonomously. There is no ‘self’ or primary or causal agency to determine or decide its actions. It operates autonomously as a consequence of its interaction with the field of context. Its continuance is not a matter of interest, and it just seems to ‘know’ what to do all by itself. David R. Hawkins
• I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but—strange as this may sound—being breathed. Eugen Herrigel
• The body,  Karma

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The truth we come to realise is there is no separate self in charge

• Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self. Steven Pinker
• I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but—strange as this may sound—being breathed. Eugen Herrigel
• In Buddhism, much importance is given to what is known as the Five Aggregates, which are supposed to explain and constitute the mental and physical components of a person’s existence. They are, in order: form (matter), feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. What the Buddha thus ascertains is that given the nature of these five aggregates, no self can exist; despite these being the constitution of a person. The Buddha believes, much like Hume, that these five aggregates are entirely impermanent and very much out of our control. Kyle van Oosterum
• In the oneness of things, there are no separate individuals to do this or that. Everything is one flow of forms. Tim Freke
• It is a hindrance to consider that there is a personal self, or an ‘I’, or an ego that is doing the striving or seeking or that will become enlightened. It is much easier to realize there is no such thing as the ego or an ‘I’ identity that is doing any seeking, but instead, it is an impersonal aspect of consciousness that is doing the exploring and seeking. David R. Hawkins
• It is because of your illusion that you are the doer. In reality things are done to you, not by you. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Modern non-dual spirituality is often characterized by a complete denial of the reality of the individual self. A central claim is that awakening requires the understanding that there is ‘no doer’ with free will to choose and act. The idea of an individual agent with volition arises from the illusion of separateness. In reality everything is just happening and seeing this leads to the realization of ‘no self’, which is the ‘final truth’. Tim Freke
• So the Buddha has made his point. You—the “you” that experiences feelings and perceptions and entertains thoughts—isn’t really in complete control of these things. If you think that  somewhere  inside your  head  there’s  a  kind  of  supreme  ruler,  a  chief executive, well, there’s some question as to where exactly you would find it.  Robert Wright
• The Buddhists and Hume claim that there is no introspective evidence of a core self. They claim that when we look inside ourselves, we only find streams of sensations, impulses, thoughts, drives, feelings, memories, so we are simply a changing bundle of experiences. Carlo Filice
• The mind attempts to hoodwink us into believing that we are an individual “I” who runs the show of life. Suzanne Segal
• The personal pronouns that appear in this book do nor refer to a someone. There is no “me,” no “I”, no “mine.”  The descriptions that have been given are are simply a flavour of the vastness, the infinite experiencing itself out of itself – there is absolutely no someone to whom these descriptions refer.   Suzanne Segal
• There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the connection of those elements. Gautama Buddha
• There is no homunculus, no little person within the mind observing the play of perceptions, memories, fantasies and ideas as though on a movie screen. Such a postulation would imply yet another homunculus inside the first, and so on in series through an infinite regress.  WT Stace
• There is no independent manager in this body. Only a seeming one. Mooji
• There is no separate, independent Consciousness, how can there be a separate, independent thinker, chooser, doer, enjoyer, experiencer? Rupert Spira
• There is the appearance of thinking, doing, feeling and being without a ‘me’ doing the doing of all this. Leo Hartong
• There isn’t a you who has to decide what needs to be done in order for doing to happen. Suzanne Segal
• When the mind returns to the heart — when the separate self is divested of its separateness and stands revealed as the true and only Self of pure Awareness — it becomes clear that there was never a separate self to begin with, and therefore the question as to whether or not that separate self has choice is moot. Rupert Spira
• You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm. Sam Harris
• Truth,  Reality,  Transcending the ego,  Oneness

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There is no separate self that is the doer of actions

• …life as usual continues to unfold; everything gets done, just as it did before the realization of the vastness occurred. Since there has never been a personal doer in any case, the realization of this truth does nothing to change how functioning occurs. Suzanne Segal
• …to say ‘I do’ is altogether false, because there is nobody who does; all happens by itself, including the idea of being a doer. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• All ideas about accomplishing spiritual awakening are based on the assumption that there is a someone, a you, who can perform the practices and accomplish the goal. But this someone doesn’t exist.  Take for example, the spiritual notion that we need to get out of the way so that the infinite can just flow through us.  It is predicated on a non-existent someone who can figure out how to surrender.  The idea that we are the doer behind our actions does not make us the doer, no matter how often we get hoodwinked into taking this idea to be truth. Suzanne Segal
• All works are being done by the Gunas (or the energy and power) of nature, but due to delusion of ego, people assume themselves to be the doer. The Bhagavad-Gita
• As the mind sees things getting done, it concludes that there must be someone who does them, otherwise doing would not occur. But the vastness has never waited for the mind that there is no doer for doing to occur.  Doing has always occurred out of a placeless origin that is confounding to a mind that thrives on interpretation and insinuation. Suzanne Segal
• But this doer is not an entity. It has no separate reality of its own. It is simply a thought plus a little cluster of sensations. Rupert Spira
• Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof. Buddha
• He who sees that all actions are performed in their entirety by Prakriti alone, and not by the Self, is indeed a beholder of truth. The Bhagavad Gita XIII:29
• In reality things are done to you, not by you. Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfilment or non-fulfilment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens including the fruits of the work. Neither is by you and for you  All is the picture exposed on the cinema screen, nothing in the light, including what you take yourself to be, the person.  You are the light only.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• It is because of your illusion that you are the doer. In reality things are done to you, not by you. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The deed is a fact, the doer a mere concept. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The deed there is, but no doer thereof. Gautama Buddha
• The doer and, while we are talking about it, the thinker, the feeler, the chooser, the lover, the decider, the enjoyer, the sufferer etc., etc., is considered to be this little separate entity that thought has artificially created within and divided from the totality. Rupert Spira
• The non-locatable doer is behind everything. Suzanne Segal
• The recognition of ‘no doer’ is waking me up to oneness. Except that there is no ‘Tim’ to wake up. The waking up is happening. Tim Freke
• The true seer perceives his soul as the silent witness, aloof from the body—the microcosm created by the cosmic vibratory force, Prakriti or Mother Nature. She alone is the performer of all physical and mental activities. Paramahansa Yogananda
• There is no little man inside my head who is choosing to say this or do that. There is no ‘doer’. Tim Freke
• There isn’t a you who has to decide what needs to be done in order for doing to happen. Suzanne Segal
• To say ‘I do’ is altogether false, because there is nobody who does; all happens by itself, including the idea of being a doer. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Why do you talk of action? Are you acting ever? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens, without being able to influence it in any way. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Action,  Choice

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Even science now increasingly agrees that our sense of self is an illusion

• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. Albert Einstein
• The current situation is ironic. Modern science, the declared enemy of a spiritual realm, is in this instance in the service of spirituality. The message of science—that the self is an illusion—is consistent with many great wisdom traditions and may be a step along one’s spiritual path. In this way, science has become an unwitting ally of spirituality. Larry Dossey
• The daily experience of the self is so familiar, and yet the brain science shows that this sense of the self is an illusion. Psychologist Susan Blackmore makes the point that the word ‘illusion’ does not mean that it does not exist — rather, an illusion is not what it seems. We all certainly experience some form of self, but what we experience is a powerful depiction generated by our brains for our own benefit. Bruce Hood
• Experiments have repeatedly proven that this seeming separation between ourselves and anything else is subject to point of view—what Einstein called a reference frame—and therefore has no inherent bedrock reality. Robert Lanza
• For decades, the idea of the self has been the victim of a demolition derby within science. A steady torrent of books from materialistic scientists has made war on the sense of self—one’s basic, essential sense of being, the object of one’s introspection, what makes me “me” and not someone else. These days, scientists seem to vie with one another as to who can do the most thorough job of trashing the whole idea. Larry Dossey
• Neuroscientists find no evidence of an individual self located somewhere in the brain. Instead they propose that what we call “I” is but a mental construct derived from bodily experience. We draw a distinction between “me” and “not me” and create a sense of self for the “me” part. From a biological point of view, this distinction is most valuable. Taking care of the needs of this self, is taking care of our physical needs. We seek whatever promotes our well-being and avoid those that threaten it. Peter Russell
• The consensus now is that there is no place in the brain where “it all comes together,” no spot in the brain where the sense of self or the soul resides. Soul and self are simply illusory constructs. These senses merely pop up—the in-word is emerge—when various parts of the brain are smoothly working together. Larry Dossey
• The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is — the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself — can be altered or entirely extinguished. Sam Harris
• The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East. Alan Watts
• As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious. There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Sam Harris
• Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems.  Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self. Steven Pinker
• Science,  Illusion

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As the conscious mind, we are not in charge

• At a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature. Robert Wright
• You as the conscious witness of your inner life are not making these choices and decisions. You can only witness these decisions.   Sam Harris
• Questions about how in control the conscious mind really is have now been raised from a lot of experimental angles. In a famous series of experiments first done in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, researchers monitored the brains of subjects while they “chose” to initiate  an action.    The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it.  Robert Wright
• This is a matter of nearly unanimous agreement among psychologists: the conscious self is not some all-powerful executive authority. Robert Wright
• If the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control? As we’ll see, the answer may be: nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest. In other words, it’s a jungle in there, and you’re not the king of the jungle. The good news is that, paradoxically, realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power. Robert Wright
• You can plan for a hundred years. But you don’t know what will happen the next moment. Neem Karoli Baba
• Character work, as prescribed by psychotherapy as well as some traditions, including Zen Buddhism, leads to a similar trap created by not seeing things to be simply what they are. Character work is based on the same erroneous belief that there is an individual doer who runs the show of life and can train itself to be a better “I”. Suzanne Segal
• How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. Andrew Sean Greer
• Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of “instinctual wisdom.” Thus, it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb — without verbalizing the process or knowing “how” it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience but being effortlessly aware of it. Alan Watts
• Everything a human does – including reporting on allegedly conscious states – might in theory be the work of non-conscious algorithms. Yuval Noah Harari
• Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation. Robert Wright
• The conscious you isn’t choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, won the prize of conscious recognition.  Robert Wright
• Your mind isn’t wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders. Robert Wright

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As the conscious mind, we are not the thinker of our thoughts

• As I pay attention to the moment, I’m conscious that my thoughts are just arising. I’m not doing the thinking. Thinking is happening. And as all of my volitional actions arise from my thoughts, that means that they are just happening as well. Tim Freke
• Our thoughts are cosmic events, no more controlled by us that the weather. Francis Lucille
• Take a look and notice that you cannot know what thought is going to come about until that thought arises. It arises naturally, spontaneously, and involuntarily out of nowhere. “You” did not bring it about. “You” did not even know what was coming until it came. Scott Kiloby
• The brain acts as a receiving set for energy patterns residing in the mind itself, which exist as consciousness expressed in the form of thought.25 It’s the vanity of the ego that claims thoughts as “mine.” David R. Hawkins
• The brain is just part of an immense universal machinery. If thoughts are generated by the mind (materialist paradigm) we must conclude it is the cosmos in its entirety that makes decisions. The brain is not an independent entity.  Francis Lucille
• The conscious mind doesn’t create thoughts, it receives them. Robert Wright
• The limited entity that claims authorship over thought is an imposter. It arises as a thought after the decision. It was not present while the decision was being made. Francis Lucille
• The mind controls the brain, which acts as a receiving station (like a radio) with thoughts being similar to radio waves and the brain being similar to the receiver. David R. Hawkins
• The mind identifies with its content. It takes credit and blame for what it receives, for it would be humbling to the mind’s vanity to admit that the only thing it’s doing is experiencing, and in fact, only experiencing experiencing.  The mind doesn’t even experience the world, just sensory reports of it.  Even brilliant thoughts and deepest feelings are only experiences; ultimately, we have but one function – to experience experience.  David R. Hawkins
• There is no inner ‘thinker’ behind thoughts, no ‘doer’ behind actions, no ‘seeker’ of enlightenment. Seeking occurs on its own when the time is right, and it emerges as a focus of attention. David R. Hawkins
• Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls it. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. David Bohm
• Thoughts think themselves. Modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creating of competing modules, they become thought thoughts – that is, they enter consciousness. The modules do their work outside of consciousness, hence the sense, while observing the mind during meditation, that “thoughts think themselves”.  As far as the conscious mind can tell, the thoughts are coming out of nowhere.   Robert Wright
• Thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. Robin Wright
• We may arrive at the insight that all of our thoughts are merely borrowed from the great database of consciousness and were never really our own. David R. Hawkins
• “Imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.” How would you be relating to these thoughts then? His point was that you wouldn’t be identifying with them. “The thought itself is appearing and disappearing like a sound, but being identified with it is something we’re adding.” Joseph Goldstein
• Whereas you might have thought all your life that you’re thinking thoughts—the thing you think of as ‘you’ is thinking thoughts — it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you. Robert Wright
• Thoughts literally try to capture our attention. Robert Wright
• Modules think thoughts. Or rather, modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts—that is, they enter consciousness. Robert Wright
• Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at a given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness. Robert Wright

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As the conscious mind, we are not the decider of our decisions

• If the conscious self isn’t a CEO, directing all the behavior it thinks it’s directing, how does behavior get directed? How do decisions get made? An increasingly common answer within the field of psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that the mind is “modular.” In this view, your mind iscomposed of lots of specialized modules—modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them—and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.  Robert Wright
• The closest thing to a self would be the algorithm that determines which circumstances put which modules in charge. And that algorithm can’t be what we mean by the “conscious self” in humans—the CEO self—because humans don’t consciously decide to go into romantic mode or fearful mode. Robert Wright
• It’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being, and it’s modules that then decide what you’ll actually do during that time. Robert Wright
• Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness. Robert Wright
• Though rational thought plays an important role inhuman motivation, it is in a certain sense never really calling the shots. When we decide to do something, we decide on the basis of a feeling. Robert Wright

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We realise the script for our life experience is orchestrated and mostly uncontrolled by us

• You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. Albert Camus
• Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written.  When experience will come to end your doubting has been set.  For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again; reviewing mentally what has gone by.   A Course in Miracles
• The one running the show is the one in which the show is taking place, out of which the show is made, by which the show is known. Rupert Spira
• You think you’re directing the movie, but you’re actually just watching it. Or, at the risk of turning this into a metaphor that’s impossible to wrap your mind around, the movie is directing you—unless you manage to liberate yourself from it. Robert Wright
• Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives. Robert Jenson
• If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans. Lyanla Vanzant
• Life is God’s movie

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We realise it’s all just happening as in a dream

• From one perspective I agree that everything is arising spontaneously as one, and when I first experienced this deep realization it was truly astonishing. All is the one flow of life. The writing of these words is happening as part of that one flow just as naturally as the sun rises each morning. On a deep level the oneness of awareness is doing everything, just as the dreamer is doing everything in a dream. Tim Freke
• Human beings actually have no more independence or autonomy in living their lives than do the characters in a dream. Neither do they have anything to do with the creation of the dream or anything in it. They are simply being lived along with everything else in this living dream of the manifested universe. The entire dream is unreal. Only the dreamer is real, and that is Consciousness itself. Ramesh Balsekar
• Dreaming,  Life is God’s dream

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This is not to say that consciousness (which we are in essence) is not inherently free…

• The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free. Swami Vivekananda
• Consciousness, that which we are, is freedom itself. We, as Consciousness, have absolute freedom. We are absolute freedom. Rupert Spira
• No, free will is not an ‘extra’; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity. Raymond Smullyan
• Everyone of these body-mind mechanisms is an instrument through which Totality functions. It is this Totality that is operative. It is this Consciousness that infuses these body-mind mechanisms. It is Consciousness that has designed each of these body-mind mechanisms in such a way that its natural reaction, in the moment, is to choose in a certain way. And because that body-mind mechanism has been given this sense of personal doership, it says, “I’m choosing.” But the choice is a function of the nature of the organism. Wayne Liquorman
• being free of the qualities of all experience, is itself inherently free. This gives rise to the intuition of free will and our longing for freedom which comes from our knowledge that what we truly are is absolute freedom itself.  Rupert Spira
• The truth is we are not a separate entity. We are consciousness.  And this has real freedom and is the one making the decision.  The consciousness making the decision is the same consciousness that makes it rain or snow.  The moment we take responsibility for our own thoughts, we must also take responsibility for everything else that occurs in the universe.  This is beautiful.  Thus we cannot claim anything is bad or good.  We can only claim it is our event.  Francis Lucille
• Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Ego is free to choose, but is never free. Self does not choose, but is ever free. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Freedom,  Consciousness

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… but this freedom does not belong to the separate self

• We have freedom but it’s not the possession of a separate person. The freedom that we feel is real. It’s just that it does not belong to an individual body-mind. It is the freedom of infinite consciousness echoing in our minds. Our body-minds can channel that freedom of infinite consciousness in certain directions. It is the role of the body mind to channel the freedom of consciousness in such a way that expresses and shares and celebrates love and beauty.  Rupert Spira

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Surrender all sense of being a separate self

• The ultimate meditation is: surrender to reality. The more you fight, the more you are in conflict with it, the more you will be a loser. In deep surrender, the ego disappears. And when the ego is not there, for the first time you become aware of that which has always been there. Osho
• If, in the exact passing moment of each instant, there is a complete willingness to totally surrender to it, one can suddenly, in a flash, transcend the ego, and the way opens for Realization wherein the Light of God as Self reveals the Source of all Existence and Reality. If the ego has neither past, present, nor future to focus on, it falls silent. It is replaced by the Silence of the Presence, and thus, the way to sudden enlightenment is available at all times. David R. Hawkins
• From the beginning nothing is. There really has never been any beginning, nor is there an end.  The universe is a dream. So is the one who is supposed to understand this!  Belief in oneself, is the only real obstruction to awakening from delusion. The Earth is but an infinitesimal fraction of the enormous illusion of the universe, not to speak of a mere person.  Yet, by identifying yourself with such a minute phenomenon as a body-mind organism with a personal sense of doership, you have forfeited your identity with the infinite Totality. Ramesh Balsekar
• The way to liberation lies through this realization of the Self, by God-communion and by remaining in this God-aware state of the soul while performing dutiful actions. Any individual can reach this supreme actionless state by the renunciation of all fruits of actions: performing all dutiful acts without harbouring in his heart any likes and dislikes, possessing no material desires, and feeling God, not the ego, as the Doer of all actions. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being. Eugen Herrigel
• The activities that you are engaged in are good. It is very good if you can perform them in a selfless spirit, renouncing egotism, giving up the idea that you are the doer. Through such action one develops love and devotion to God, and ultimately realizes Him. Sri Ramakrishna
• What can happen to this consciousness, the Life-l-am, the awareness I am? Naught but what can happen to God. And what can happen to Singleness, Omnipotence, Purity, Perfection? Nothing, nothing! I tell you the seeing of these words is God’s eternal Self-witnessing in action, already here, already now. No wait. No struggle. No suffering. No testing or waiting through the penlum’s dark swing in order to find a measure of relief the other end. The struggle has only to do with the fruitful, but not necessarily easy, task of letting go the old view of oneself as a; possessor of life, as the grand custodian and manipulator of experience.  William Samuel
• It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Aldous Huxley
• The divine eternal fullness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing and acting. Aldous Huxley
• The means by which in the circumstances of a particular human life, the T was purged away so as to make room for the divine ‘not-I.’ Aldous Huxley
• The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand) the desire for personal separateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginningless time. It creates the notion, ‘I am the actor, I am he who experiences.’ This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separateness is called Liberation. Shankara
• Even after the Truth has been realized, there remains that strong, beginningless, obstinate impression that one is the agent and experiencer… This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme Self. Sages call that cessation of mental impressions, “Liberation.” Add Shankara
• There is the emergence of the awareness that all takes place spontaneously as a consequence of the overall field plus intention, and ‘you’ as the imaginary causal agent were never necessary in the first place. David R. Hawkins
• There’s no person to answer personal questions. I listen to your question and I listen to the answer. The answer comes out of silence. John Klein
• Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time. Daniel Wegner
• Knowing that I am not is surrendering. Osho
• Surrender,  Letting go

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Surrender all sense of being an active agent

• There is no separate, independent Consciousness, how can there be a separate, independent thinker, chooser, doer, enjoyer, experiencer? Rupert Spira
• In reality things are done to you, not by you. Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfilment or non-fulfilment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Neither is by you and for you. All is in the picture exposed on the cinema screen, nothing in the light, including what you take yourself to be, the person. You are the light only. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. William James
• In a state of deep awareness, awareness is the agent in experience. Universal intelligence runs the life. Anthony Lambert
• The less the sense of agency and greater the surrender, the more universal intelligence is able to flow through the experience, blessing it with love, creativity, wonder and synchronicity. An unseen infinitely benevolent force takes over the experience. Anthony Lambert
• Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof. Buddha
• The film of life is already in the can and all I can do is view one frame at a time. I have no choice or free will. I am a character playing a role, dancing the divine dance, the way God wants. Independence and volition are part of the illusion. Merlyn Swan
• The movie is projected onto the screen. The movie cannot control the screen.  But from within the movie, there is the appearance of choice and control. The movie character appears to make choices, from within the movie, and appears to have a certain amount of control over his or her movie life events.  I can appear to control ‘my life’. But I cannot control life.  And beyond the movie of choice and control, the screen remains untouched.  Jeff Foster
• The ultimate meditation is: surrender to reality. The more you fight, the more you are in conflict with it, the more you will be a loser. In deep surrender, the ego disappears. And when the ego is not there, for the first time you become aware of that which has always been there. Osho
• All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature, but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor. Bhagavad Gita
• Doing brings ego. Ego is the shadow of action. And there is only one thing that is not doing and that is awareness, watchfulness. The only thing that is not part of the world of action is pure awareness. No shadow is created by pure awareness. It is so pure that light can pass through it – it is transparent and no shadow is created. Rajneesh
• Be as though you don’t exist. Let the bodily functions unfold, let thoughts come and go but don’t follow them. Be only the awareness. Something is unplugged, but you are still fully here. Senses are functioning normally. This was never the trouble. The mind rises up as resistances and doubts but they are mere thoughts. Mind in its psychological aspect can come full power, but you are not to be a traffic policeman inside your own head. Mooji
• That person who is thus rooted in God’s love must be dead to themselves and to all created things so that they are no more concerned with themselves than they are with someone who is over a thousand miles away. Such a person remains in likeness and in unity and is always the same… This person must have abandoned themselves and the whole world … Whoever entirely renounces themselves even for a moment would be given all things. Meister Eckhart
• All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. Aldous Huxley
• As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things. Become pure till you neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things. Meister Eckhart
• When you practice surrender, the energy that you emanate, and which then runs your life is of a much higher vibrational frequency than the mind energy that still runs our world. Eckhart Tolle
• Animal-brain processing sees things in terms of cause and effect and sees self as causal. The spiritual etheric brain sees self as a participant and is capable of seeing phenomena as the activation of potentiality. David R. Hawkins
• Inasmuch as the self is presumed to be a causal agent, it is therefore also the object of guilt, pride, fear, and all the emotions. David R. Hawkins
• Actions are the automatic consequence of the integration of context, field, and intention. All action is actually spontaneous and reflects karmic propensities and local conditions that may or may not favor expression. To depersonalize actions, it is only necessary to let go of the belief that there is a separate, independent causal agent called ‘I’ or ‘me’. This awareness allows for the development of the ‘nonaction of action’, which is possible by relinquishment of trying to control results. David R. Hawkins
• It is also progressively discovered that there is actually no ‘doer’ of actions, and one witnesses the autonomous unfoldment of karmic potentiality from a new paradigm of reality that is beyond the presumptive dualistic principle of causation. David R. Hawkins
• Drop nouns and pronouns and live only verbs. Osho
• There is doing but no doer. Osho
• Everything will naturally unfold as it must. There’s no Tim to do anything about it. Tim Freke
• There no longer is a volitional personal self nor its presumed inner causal-agent quality, and the sense of ‘I’ now includes all of Existence, beyond time, dimension, or linear description. There is no longer any feeling of ‘mine’, nor any feeling of having qualities of possession or control. All is Self-existent and Self-fulfilling. David R. Hawkins
• The experiencer is not a ‘who’ but an ‘it’. It is an autonomous functionality. It is comparable to a multifunctional processing-probe faculty. The ego/ self thrives on that ‘experiencer’ quality and is actually addicted to it. David R. Hawkins
• By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension . Eugen Herrigel
• Surrender,  Letting go

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You are not a self but the universe acting through you

• Once you have seen this you can return to the world of practical affairs with a new spirit. You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real “you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. Alan Watts
• You are not part of the universe. You are the universe experiencing and creating from the point of view of a person. Anthony Lambert
• Once Consciousness has chosen, out of its own inherent Freedom, to identify itself with a fragment, the only freedom available to it is to disidentify itself from that fragment, to know itself again as it always is. It is for this reason that the statements ‘You have no freedom’ and ‘You have complete freedom’ are both true, from different points of view. Rupert Spira
• The universe,  Oneness,  Unity

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Allow thoughtless, choiceless awareness to take over the running of your life

• Those whose spiritual awareness has been awakened never make a false move. They don’t have to avoid evil. They are so replete with love that whatever they do is a good action. They are fully conscious that they are not the doer of their actions, but only servants of God. Ramakrishna
• If you develop a detachment, through thoughtless awareness, God will take over, He will do your work. He will look after you.  You should have faith in God that is the main thing which people don’t understand what it means to have faith in God. That He is almighty, He does everything, He looks after everything, why should we worry?  This is a very good way of life, is not to worry.  Nirmala Srivastava
• While the ordinary ego is programmed to ‘getting’, spiritual intention now shifts to ‘allowing’, similar to floating in the water rather than flailing about or swimming in it. David R. Hawkins
• The contemplative lifestyle facilitates transfer of the sense of identity from body/ mind to witness/ observer, which is more primary and closer to the Truth of the Self and Reality. The next step is the withdrawal of the sense of ‘I’ from the witness/ observer, where it moves to the faculty of consciousness/ awareness itself, which is a quality rather than a personage. There is the emergence of the awareness that all takes place spontaneously as a consequence of the overall field plus intention, and ‘you’ as the imaginary causal agent were never necessary in the first place.  David R. Hawkins
• Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling — mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore; spontaneous right action happens, and “you” are not doing it. Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works. Eckhart Tolle
• If the I is identified with the body and person, then it becomes the persons responsibility to take care of the bodily life. But if the I becomes identified as consciousness, then it is the universes responsibility to take care of the body and the body’s life and it will do a better job than your mind can do. Mooji
• The “you” that is observing and is aware of what is happening always stays the same. As you become more and more aware of the changeless witness within, you begin to identify with that level of consciousness. You become progressively primarily the witness rather than the experiencer of phenomena. You get closer and closer to the real Self. David R. Hawkins
• Sink into the mystery of the moment and become conscious of being conscious. Be awareness . . . witnessing a flow of colours, shapes, sounds, and thoughts.   Let go of the idea of yourself as a ‘doer’ of anything, and instead passively witness everything happening.   Recognize that your experience is one evolving event in which everything is unfolding as it must.   Your eyes are reading these words as a natural part of the one flow of appearances.   Your thoughts and reactions are arising as a natural part of the one flow of appearances.   Your separate identity as a person is an integral part of the impersonal play of forms.   From this perspective there is no ‘you’ choosing to do this or that. You are awareness passively witnessing the world.   All is one and you are that oneness.  Tim Freke
• Choice,  Awareness

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Surrender all to God

• According to Christian doctrine, we must surrender ourselves to God—we must surrender our ego self and its desire for security and control, to the eternal awareness and presence that we are. To truly surrender your ego to the greater intelligence that operates through you and through all beings is an act of faith, which brings with it a sense of trust in the course of nature, and a relationship with the intelligence of the universe. It is a beautiful experience that allows us to let go of the weight we carry and trust in our original nature.   Joseph P. Kauffman
• Good morning, this is God. I will be handling all of your problems today. I will not need your help, so have a miraculous day. Wayne Dyer
• Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me? Michael A. Singer
• Don’t seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness. Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
• Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. William James
• If you develop a detachment, through thoughtless awareness, God will take over, He will do your work. He will look after you. Nirmala Srivastava
• Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you.  Exhale, and you approach God.  Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.  Krishnamacharya
• Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He can deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their soals, and pour out peace. Ezra Taft Benson
• One enters the kingdom not through truths or teachings but moment-to-moment surrendering to the Mystery. John Kehoe
• Performing his obligatory duties without any desire and attachment, offering the fruit of his actions to God, surrendering himself completely to him, fully devoted to him, and absorbed in him, he surely achieves liberation and union with the Supreme Self. Bhagavad Gita
• Surrender is a constant process of not resisting or clinging to the moment but instead, continuously turning it over to God. The attention is thus focused on the process of letting go and not on the content of the ‘what’ that is being surrendered. David R. Hawkins
• The core of the three great pathways of ‘heart’, ‘mind’, and ‘action’ is the process of surrender. This is activated by intention and the attitude of willingness. Progressively, each thought, feeling, impulse, idea, or belief is recognized and then released and surrendered to God. Each is an illusion, a program, a symbol, and an impediment to the clarity of the unobstructed awareness of the Self. David R. Hawkins
• The experience of the presence of God is available and within at all times, but awaits choice. That choice is made only by surrendering everything other than peace and love to God. In return, the divinity of the Self reveals Itself as ever present but not experienced because it has been ignored or forgotten, or one has chosen otherwise. David R. Hawkins
• The simple intention to surrender control is all you need to experience miracles. Gabrielle Bernstein
• The soul acts, to be sure, but the activity of the soul is not independent. It acts itself, but the Lord causes it to act. Moreover, the Lord in causing it to act now has regard to its former efforts, and He also caused it to act in a former existence, having regard to its efforts previous to that existence. Adi Shankara
• There is no way to find God’s love other than to surrender to Him. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. William James
• Surrender,  God

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Surrender all sense of being a doer and allow God to perform actions through you

• You are that being, that Awareness, in whose presence actions, perceptions, and thoughts take place. When you say, “I perform action”, it is not Awareness that performs any action. It is the eyes which see, the thoughts which move in the mind, all in Awareness, in consciousness. Swami Dayananda
• All doing is contained in being. When the attention is shifted from doing to being, the doing takes care of itself without any intended doing and in the absence of a doer. Wu Hsin
• By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning. Lao Tzu
• Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out! The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. It must be as if the bowstring suddenly cut through the thumb that held it. You mustn’t open the right hand on purpose. Eugen Herrigel
• Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” he exclaimed. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. Eugen Herrigel
• Don’t do a thing. Just rest. For your separation from God is the hardest work in the world. Hafiz
• Dressing happens and interviewing happens and it happens without me, without the idea of me. Jim Carey
• Everything has already been accomplished, and so, having overcome the sickness of effort, one finds oneself in the self-perfected state: this is contemplation. Chogyal Namkhai Norbu
• Get rid forthwith of doership, your self-identification, that is, with the agent, a distorted vision of yourself which stops you from resting in your true nature, and by identification with which you, who are really pure consciousness and a manifestation of joy itself, experience samsara with all its birth, decay, death and suffering. Sankara
• He who sees that all actions are performed in their entirety by Prakriti alone, and not by the Self, is indeed a beholder of truth. The Bhagavad Gita XIII:29
• In a state of deep awareness, actions are not determined by the person. Actions become actions of the universe. Mooji
• Just keep it simple. Non-dual… Not two… One! Whatever ‘you’ think, it is Oneness thinking AS you. Whatever ‘you’ do, it is Oneness doing it AS you.  Leo Hartong
• Nothing to do or undo, nothing to force, nothing to want, and nothing missing –Emaho! Marvelous! Everything happens by itself. Lama Gendun Rinpoche
• Practice not-doing. And everything will fall into place. Lao Tzu
• Sit back and enjoy the passing show. Watch it all get done. Choices get made. Planning and intentions arise. Actions arise.  There is a sense of all being possible. There is a sense of delighted curiosity and total freedom.  Anthony Lambert
• So long as the feeling ‘I am doing’ is there, one must experience the result of one’s acts, whether they are good or bad. Ramana Maharshi
• The devotee who feels God as the only reality existing within him, and himself existing in God, is united with God, one with God in unconditional union. That devotee inwardly perceives: “When I eat, I am eating for Him. When I serve, my hands are His. When I speak, my voice is His. It is God who is feeling and loving through me.” Such a devotee looks after the body as the temple of God. He realizes that it is God who has incarnated in the body. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The master is not a doer. He has learned the greatest secret of life: let-go. The master has drowned his ego and the idea of separation from existence itself. Rajneesh
• The notion that “I am the doer” is merely a delusion, because it is difficult to trace who this “I” is. If one carefully analyzes this “I”, the real “I” dissolves in God. Our identification with the body, mind, intellect, and so on, is simply a delusion created by ignorance. Swami Turiyanada
• The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfilment, but brace yourself for failure. Eugen Herrigel
• The soul acts, to be sure, but the activity of the soul is not independent. It acts itself, but the Lord causes it to act. Moreover, the Lord in causing it to act now has regard to its former efforts, and He also caused it to act in a former existence, having regard to its efforts previous to that existence. Adi Shankara
• The true seer perceives his soul as the silent witness, aloof from the body—the microcosm created by the cosmic vibratory force, Prakriti or Mother Nature. She alone is the performer of all physical and mental activities. The soul is actionless, the reflection of the transcendental, nonvibrational God the Father beyond creation. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Transformation cannot be brought about, it can only happen. Indeed, practicing meditation is itself bondage! Transformation presupposes the total absence of any doer practicing anything. Ramesh Balsekar
• When it becomes clear that there is no personal reference point, it also becomes clear that there never was a personal reference point and that everything is done and has always been done by an unseen doer, This doer doesn’t start doing only when only when it is seen to be the doer. It has always been the doer; the personal self has never been the doer.  Thus life, as usual continues to unfold; everything gets done, just as it did before the realisation of the vastness occurred.  All the functions continue as before – thinking, feeling, acting, relating.  The difference is that they have never referred or belonged to a someone.  Suzanne Segal
• When you act you are one with the action, it is only afterwards that the ego appropriates the act from which it was absent, and says “I have done this”. At the moment of acting there is only acting, without an actor. Jean Klein
• While the functions continue to function, it is now seen that they have always been engaged not for a personal purpose, but to do whatever the vastness deems obvious in the service fo freedom. The vastness has its own non-personal desire to perceive itself directly through itself using the circuitry of every human being.    Suzanne Segal
• You are that being, that Awareness, in whose presence actions, perceptions, and thoughts take place. When you say, “I perform action”, it is not Awareness that performs any action. It is the eyes which see, the thoughts which move in the mind, all in Awareness, in consciousness. Swami Dayananda
• You must learn to wait properly… By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension. Eugen Herrigel

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Surrender life’s unfolding and timing to God…

• I surrender my anxiety and my sense of urgency. I allow God to guide me in the pacing of my life. I open my heart to God’s timing. I release my deadlines, agendas, and stridency to the gentle yet often swift pacing of God. As I open my heart to God’s unfoldings, my heart attains peace. As I relax into God’s timing, my heart contains comfort. As I allow God to set the tone and schedule of my days, I find myself in the right time and place, open and available to God’s opportunities. Julia Cameron
• Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. Lao Tzu
• God has orchestrated the world that we live in, and He is wanting to be the orchestrator of your life as well. You have to give Him your life and future though. Hunter Greene
• To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. James A. Baldwin
• Go with the flow,  Life is a process,  Life is a journey

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… surrendering your will to God’s will for your life

• The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders and interfering with God’s work within us. W. Tozer
• A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfil the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing. Meister Eckhart
• A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own. Meister Eckhart
• All real pleasure comes from doing God’s Will. This is because not doing it is a denial of Self.  A Course in Miracles
• Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God’s order. John-Pierre de Caussade
• Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go. Swami Vivekananda
• Holiness, on the contrary, is the total denial of the separative self, in its creditable no less than its discreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God. Aldous Huxley
• I had been trying to use my spiritual practice to get what I wanted, when spiritual practice is actually about being with reality as it is. I had been trying to satisfy my own will instead of opening to God’s will. No wonder my practice had been such a struggle! Kim Boykin
• I want very little, and what I do want I have very little wish for. I have hardly any desires, but if I were to be born again, I should have none at all. We should ask nothing and refuse nothing but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us. St. Franfois de Sales
• In that breaking-through, when I come to be free of my own will and of God’s will and of all His works and of God Himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Meister Eckhart
• Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen. Thomas Merton
• Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life—call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will—there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized. William James
• Resign every forbidden joy; restrain every wish that is not referred to God’s will; banish all eager desires, all anxiety; desire only the will of God; seek him alone and supremely, and you will find peace. Francois Fenelon
• Surrender of the personal will to the Will (Wisdom) of God (or Providence, Higher Power) signifies relinquishment of control. David R. Hawkins
• The basic lesson that each Religion teaches is to surrender to the sovereign-will of God and leave the consequences of deeds, well done, to the Lord Himself. It is His will and your only duty is to shape yourself into a fit instrument. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• The hand that stretches the bow must open like a child’s hand opens. What sometimes hinders the precision of the shot is the archer’s over-active will. He thinks: “What I fail to do will not be done”, and that’s not quite how things work. Man should always act, but he must also let other forces of the universe act in their own due time. Eugen Herrigel
• The only reality is the Will of God which eternally extends itself. A Course in Miracles
• The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer. William James
• There is no question but one you should ever ask of yourself: Do I want to know my Father’s Will for me?’  A Course in Miracles
• To lose ourselves in God is simply to give up our own will to Him. When a soul can truly say Lord I have no other will than Thine it is truly lost in God and united to Him. Saint Francis de Sales
• We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can / namely, surrender our will and fulfil God’s will in us. Teresa of Avila
• We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him…we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will,whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations. Brother Lawrence
• What happens when you give up all desire to have ‘my’ own will, ‘my’ own way? ‘My’ consciousness is altered. It changes from self-consciousness, which is the selfish way of the chooser, to consciousness no longer fixated on self but focused increasingly within. After a transitional period which may take many years, the consciousness becomes pure Consciousness. ‘I’ merges with the pure intellect and realises God. I am then one with God, the source. I have no choice in my life. I am one with God’s will, the only will, which is every moment, now. I want for nothing. All is provided. I am complete. For now. For in truth, there is no end, no end to God.   Barry Long
• What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. Eugen Herrigel
• When we go out of ourselves through obedience and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself. Meister Eckhart
• You cannot fulfil God’s purposes for your life while focusing on your own plans. Rick Warren
• Free will

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Surrender all sense of free will to God

• What we call free will is the perceived freedom to choose. But our choices are extremely limited. We choose what we think will give us pleasure and choose to avoid what we think will cause us pain. Our other choices are about trying to correct the negative effects of past choices. All this gives us a sense of free will. When of course it is bondage, the bondage of most of humanity. We never make the right choice for long. What we don’t want today is the result of what we once chose. The next choice or decision we make will eventually lead to discontent or unhappiness. The word ‘free will’ is an invention of the choosing human mind. The term is a cover-up for deception similar to the device of countries calling themselves democratic republics ­ you know immediately they are not democratic.  Barry Long
• In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle the eyes. And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?  Khalil Gibran
• Next came a willingness to hold desires in abeyance and surrender personal will at every moment. As each thought, feeling, desire, or deed was surrendered to God, the mind became progressively silent. David R. Hawkins
• We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live. Aldous Leonard Huxley
• Deliverance is out of time into eternity and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a “state of grace.” All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it. Aldous Leonard Huxley
• Lord, thou hast given me my being of such a nature that it can continually make itself more able to receive thy grace and goodness. And this power, which I have of Thee, wherein I have a living image of Thine almighty power, is free will. By this I can either enlarge or restrict my capacity for Thy grace. Nicholas of Cusa
• I desire not to desire, for my will is without value, since I am ignorant in any case. Therefore, choose Thou for me what thou knowest to be best and do not put my perdition in what my autonomy and free choice prefer. Bayazid Bastami
• Many people have criticized Islam for being just automatic, having no individuality, just surrendering your will to God, but we Muslims know very well that every moment of the day we have to practice the fact that to surrender one’s self to God is an act of free will. Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a ‘state of grace.’ Aldous Huxley
• . . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done. Teresa of Avila
• Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• God is always working through you; the important thing is to become conscious and co-operate. Mother Meera
• It is the Higher Power which does everything, and the man is only a tool. If he accepts that position, he is free from troubles; otherwise, he courts them. Ramana Maharshi
• To insist on immediate freedom of choice and action will merely postpone recovery. Accept your destiny and fulfil it — this is the shortest way to freedom from destiny. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Man holds dominion and was given free will but the irony is that he must learn to surrender his will — as life carries him through circumstances that prove he has no true power at all Kate McGahan
• There was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it. Daryl Gregory
• Surrender,  Free will

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Realise the illusion of being a free and active agent can be a kind of bondage

• There cannot be any such thing as free will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation. Everything that we know, or can possibly know, must be subject to causation, and that which obeys the law of causation cannot be free.” “The only way to come out of bondage is to go beyond the limitations of law, to go beyond causation.” [by self-identifying with soul or spirit] . . . . This is the goal of the Vedantin, to attain freedom while living. Swami Vivekananda
• You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Nothing perceivable is real. Your attachment is your bondage. You cannot control the future. There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Life is unafraid and free. As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you: The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Freedom

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Surrender all illusion of control …

• The condition of beingness replaces all sense of past, present, or future so that there is nothing to anticipate or try to control. David R. Hawkins
• When we resist change or try to assert a false sense of control over the external world it always leads to struggle. We must learn to embrace change, work with energies and “allow” circumstances, opportunities and events to manifest according to divine providence. Christin Sander
• Return to the root is called Quietness; Quietness is called submission to Fate; What has submitted to Fate has become part of the always-so; To know the always-so is to be Illumined. Lao Tzu
• Serious spiritual work is a continuous willingness to let things go as they arise. It is the willingness to surrender wanting to control everything as it arises, the willingness to surrender wanting to change it, and to have it our way. David R. Hawkins
• Enlightenment is right here, in this instant. The reason you’re not experiencing this state of total peace and timelessness is because it is being resisted. It is being resisted because you are trying to control the moment. If you let go of trying to control your experience of the moment, and if you constantly surrender it like a tone of music, then you live on the crest of this exact alwaysness. Experience arises like a note of music. The minute you hear a note, it’s already passing away. The instant you’ve heard it, it’s already dissolving. So, every single moment is dissolving as it arises. Let go of anticipating the next moment, trying to control it, trying to hang on to the moment that has just passed. Let go clinging to what has just occurred. Let go trying to control what you think is about to occur. Then you live in an infinite space of non-time and non-event. There is an infinite peace beyond description. And you are home.   David R. Hawkins
• Man thinks he lives by virtue of the forces he can control, but in fact, he’s governed by power from unrevealed sources, power over which he has no control. Because power is effortless, it goes unseen and unsuspected. David R. Hawkins
• Enlightenment is not something that occurs in the future, after 50 years of sitting cross-legged and saying “OM.” It is right here, in this instant. The reason you’re not experiencing this state of total peace and timelessness is because it is being resisted. It is being resisted because you are trying to control the moment. If you let go of trying to control your experience of the moment, and if you constantly surrender it like a tone of music, then you live on the crest of this exact always-ness. Experience arises like a note of music. The minute you hear a note, it’s already passing away. The instant you’ve heard it, it’s already dissolving. So every single moment is dissolving as it arises. Let go of anticipating the next moment, trying to control it, trying to hang on to the moment that has just passed. Let go clinging to what has just occurred. Let go trying to control what you think is about to occur. Then you live in an infinite space of non-time and non-event. There is an infinite peace beyond description. And you are home. David R. Hawkins
• It’s weird, huh? It’s like the minute you kinda give up control you just know what to do without doing anything. Aubrey Plaza
• By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good or evil to disturb his inward economy, but rather falls in with what happens and does not add to the sum of his mortality. Chuang Tzu

• The desire to move the body, say the idea to get up and make a cup of tea, comes in the form of a thought. Do we control the appearance of that thought? Does it not come to us spontaneously just like the weather? In other words, do we choose our thoughts and therefore our decisions? Rupert Spira
• Imagine someone asks us, “Would you like tea or coffee?” We answer, “Tea please.” The thought “Tea” just comes to us. If the thought “Coffee” had come to us, we would have answered “Coffee!” And if we think, “Now, let me decide, I’m not quite sure which to have…” that thought in turn just comes to us. In other words, we have no control over the thought that seems to decide or choose. Rupert Spira
• Illusion,  Control

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… and allow God to direct and manage your life

• How can the body-mind, a temporary cluster of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions, guide its so-called existence in any meaningful direction? Like all beliefs, this is also illusory. It would be like a cloud thinking it can control the direction it will float in the sky. Will Wright
• Manifest the divinity within you and everything will be harmoniously arranged around it. Swami Vivekananda
• Once we surrender our mind to God completely, HE will take care of us in every way. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• If you give up and surrender to the lord, He will guide you and guard you. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• Synchronicity is choreographed by a great, pervasive intelligence that lies at the heart of nature, and is manifest in each of us through intuitive knowledge. Deepak Chopra
• Return to the root is called Quietness; Quietness is called submission to Fate; What has submitted to Fate has become part of the always-so; To know the always-so is to be Illumined. Lao Tzu
• Life is God’s movie. Let him direct it.  Anthony Lambert
• Questioner: You do not mean to say that the people in a picture have destinies! They belong to the story, the story is not theirs. ‎Nisargadatta Maharaj: And what about you? Do you shape your life or are you shaped by it?  Questioner: Yes, you are right. A life story unrolls itself of which I am one of the actors. I have no being outside it, as it has no being without me. I am merely a character, not a person.  ‎Nisargadatta Maharaj: The character will become a person, when he begins to shape his life instead of accepting it as it comes and identifying himself with it.
• With each new experience of letting God be in control, we gain courage and reinforcement for daring to do it again and again. Gloria Gaither
• Unless you’re doing some kind of God conscious thing and you know that He’s the one who’s really in charge, you’re just building up a lot of karma and not really helping yourself or anybody else. George Harrison
• We hand over the idea that we are in full control of our lives, and instead we allow a higher energy – be it our higher self or our soul – to guide our lives. Connie Chapman
• This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you. Hafez
• I believe the appearance that we’re separate from God leads us to think that we can control our life. In truth, because our life is the life of God, It can manage itself.   Michael Beckwith
• What if we truly believed that there is a beneficent order to things, a force that’s holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see, in our daily lives, the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us somehow and cared for us, and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax? Marianne Williamson
• Though we can’t always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves. Swami Satchidananda
• Let no defenses but your present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only your defenses would conceal. A Course In Miracles
• We must not wish anything other than what happens from moment to moment, all the while, however, exercising ourselves in goodness. Catherine of Genoa
• Trust in God.  Divine order

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Surrender all illusion of being a chooser and allow universal intelligence to make choices through you in choiceless awareness

• If we face a situation without any intention, free from fear and desire, this openness paves the way for an intuition that will lead to a decision or an action in total harmony with that situation. Such a decision may bring about an apparent change, but this change is not an escape from or an avoidance of the situation; it doesn’t originate from the person; it emanates from intelligence. Francis Lucille
• There is no you to make any choice. Yet somehow, we are able to move through this life. So, who or what is making all the decisions? You are life itself, and life lives itself. Life lives life. Will Wright
• Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born, and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan? Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• There are no decisions; there is only interaction with what is in front of you. Decisions come because you have attachments, desires and fears. The only thing that will help you is to let go. If you let go of your stuff, there are no decisions – there is just Life. Michael Singer
• Desire drops away when we’ve had enough of the experience of the pain of apparent choice. Barry Long
• There is no choice. Just choosing. And I rest in awareness and enjoy the process of choices being made. Awareness suffuses the process with abundant intelligence and a sense of peace. Anthony Lambert
• The moment to moment experience here is that it is a choiceness life because there is no one choosing. Actions are never preceded by thoughts or feelings or by any attempt to figure things out. Everything is very immediate.  Choicelessness is the experience of the obvious in a moment to moment way.  Suzanne Segal
• Consciousness means choicelessness, and to be choiceless is to be free from all desire, is to be free from all projection, is to be free from all imagination, is to be free from future. Rajneesh
• Don’t choose. If you choose, you will be in the quagmire. Don’t choose! A choiceless awareness is the goal. Just remain aloof; don’t choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind. Rajneesh
• Meditate, become more aware and then you will see: choices disappear, a choicelessness arises. And it is such a tremendous joy to have a choiceless spontaneity. It is such a freedom. Choice is such a burden. Rajneesh
• I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise. I want to decide otherwise, because I want to be at peace. I do not feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him. I choose to let Him, by allowing Him to decide for God for me.  A Course in Miracles
• There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. Jean Klein
• There is no little man inside my head who is choosing to say this or do that. There is no ‘doer’. Tim Freke
• If there is no “you” controlling the thoughts and actions that arise or making choices, what does that mean for all your grand plans for the future? See that this reflection is pointing towards a total surrender to what is in this moment. Scott Kiloby
• Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Choice in every form is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Choice

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In a state of presence, allow all doing and choosing to arise spontaneously

• In a state of presence, actions are not determined by the person. Actions become actions of the universe. Mooji
• Everything in life happened by synchronicity, evolving in perfect harmony; the miraculous was commonplace. The origin of what the world would call miracles was the Presence, not the personal self. What remained of the personal “me” was only a witness to these phenomena. The greater “I,” deeper than my former self or thoughts, determined all that happened. David R. Hawkins
• Presence,  Awareness

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Recognise God as the ultimate cause of all things

• Everything causes everything. The totality causes the totality at every moment. Rupert Spira
• We can say that everything arises spontaneously out of Consciousness and that Consciousness is therefore its sole and ultimate cause. Rupert Spira
• And so it is true in this sense that there is essentially but one religion, the religion of the living God. For to live in the conscious realisation of the fact that God lives in us, is indeed the life of our life, and that in ourselves we have no independent life, and hence no power, is the one great fact of all true religion, even as it is the one great fact of human life. Religion, therefore, at its purest, and life at its truest, are essentially and necessarily one and the same. Ralph Waldo Trine
• God

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Make service to God your primary motive

• Make it your goal to serve and love God, rather than to attain enlightenment. David R. Hawkins
• Out of an unrestricted love for God arises the willingness to surrender all motives except to serve God completely. To be the servant of God becomes one’s goal rather than enlightenment. To be a perfect channel for God’s love is to surrender completely and to eliminate the goal seeking of the spiritual ego. Joy itself becomes the initiator of further spiritual work. David R. Hawkins
• Service,  Making a difference,  Giving

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Become an instrument for God to bless the world through

• During the years spent in inner silence, the strength of the Presence grew. Life was no longer personal; a personal will no longer existed. The personal “I” had become an instrument of the Infinite Presence and went about and did as it was willed. People felt an extraordinary peace in the aura of that Presence. Seekers sought answers but as there was no longer any such individual as David, they were actually finessing answers from their own Self, which was not different from mine. From each person the same Self shone forth from their eyes. David R. Hawkins
• The pain of sacrificing our old selves is nothing compared to the joy of Christ living in us in our transformed lives. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• The Christ in you is very still. He knows where you are going, and He leads you there in gentleness and blessing all the way. A Course in Miracles
• ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.’ Or perhaps it might be more accurate to use the verb transitively and say, ‘I live, yet not I; for it is the Logos who lives me – lives me as an actor lives his part. In such a case, of course, the actor is always infinitely superior to the role. Aldous Huxley
• Had Jesus remained content merely to have a personality, like the rest of us, he would never have exercised the kind of influence which in fact he did exercise, and it would never have occurred to anyone to regard him as a divine incarnation and to identify him with the Logos. That he came to be thought of as the Christ was due to the fact that he had passed beyond selfness and had become the bodily and mental conduit through which a more than personal, supernatural life flowed down into the world. Aldous Huxley
• It is not I but the Father within me who does the works. And “I can of my own self do nothing. Jesus
• God is always working through you; the important thing is to become conscious and co-operate. Mother Meera
• I no longer live but Christ lives in me. St Paul, Galations
• While the functions continue to function, it is now seen that they have always been engaged not for a personal purpose, but to do whatever the vastness deems obvious in the service fo freedom. The vastness has its own non-personal desire to perceive itself directly through itself using the circuitry of every human being.  Suzanne Segal
• Become an instrument for God

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Trust in the divine order of the universe

• All is well. This experience is exactly as it’s meant to be. Anthony Lambert
• What do I want? For this moment to be exactly as it is.  For this experience to enfold exactly as it enfolds.  Anthony Lambert
• What does God want to experience through this form? Exactly the experience that is arising now.  Anthony Lambert
• This moment is as it’s meant to be and could be no other way. All is well. Anthony Lambert
• The mind should normally be in abeyance – incessant activity is a morbid state. The universe works by itself – that I know.  What else do I need to know?  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• I need not worry about words and actions. They just happen and leave me unconcerned, for in my world nothing ever goes wrong. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• There is an inner harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order in which everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what is and the way it is. Eckhart Tolle
• In reality, everything occurs of its own, with no exterior cause. Every thing and every event is a manifestation of the totality of All That Is, just as it is at any given moment. Once seen in its totality, everything is perfect at all times and nothing needs an external cause to change it in any way. From the viewpoint of the ego’s positionality and limited scope, the world seems to need endless fixing and correction. This illusion collapses as a vanity. David R. Hawkins
• Nothing in the universe happens by chance or accident. The universe is a coherent concurrence and interaction of innumerable conditions attendant on the infinite number of energy patterns… Everything influences everything else and is in perfect balance.  David R. Hawkins
• In Reality, everything is automatically manifesting the inherent destiny of its essence; it doesn’t need any external help to do this. With humility, one can relinquish the ego’s self-appointed role as savior of the world and surrender it straight to God. The world that the ego pictures is a projection of its own illusions and arbitrary positionalities. No such world exists. David R. Hawkins
• This process asks us to trust that there is a larger part of us that can see the big picture. There is a part of us that knows what is right for us, and is constantly trying to lead us to it. This higher part of us communicates to us through our intuition, and so following the divine plan is about listening to our inner guidance and courageously following where it is asking us to go. Connie Chapman
• Trust,  Divine order

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Trust in the flow of life’s experiences as they unfold

• By flowing with life, I mean acceptance – letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, you are to whom it happens. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Dancing with life is moving into the flow of our experiences – good or bad – with a feeling of harmony, trust, guidance and love. Susan Jeffers
• Thoughts, emotions, sensations, states, and experiences are happening spontaneously. Life is happening all on its own. Instead of going into thought to try to figure this out, just notice the thoughts and everything else spontaneously arising. Notice that what is noticing is not a thought. It is the source itself. One glimpse of this can change everything. The notions of choice and control are seen as illusory in that glimpse.  Scott Kiloby
• This is one of the hidden gifts of serious illness or loss. It pushes us right to our edge, where we may have the good fortune to realize that our only real option is to surrender to our experience and let it just be. Ezra Bayda
• Equanimity is the resounding voice in our guts that remind us this, too, shall pass. It is the intelligence in us that knows change is the only constant on earth, and somewhere along the way, we must yield to it, surrender control of everything outside of ourselves and head into the day choosing to accept the moment as it arrives. Danielle Robinson
• You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. Albert Camus
• To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of a stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. Bertrand Russell
• I think there’s an invisible principle of living too. If we believe we’re guided through every step of our lives, we are. It’s a lovely sight, watching it work. Richard Bach
• There is a sense that now is enough and there is a trust that outcomes will take care of themselves. Rupert Spira
• It is only the belief that we must control reality which keeps us from seeing that life knows better than we what it is about. Roger Stephens
• Experience,  Life is God’s experience

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Surrender to Life and allow it to live you…

• Contentment comes as the infallible result of great acceptances, great humilities–of not trying to make ourselves this or that, but of surrendering ourselves to the fullness of life–of letting life flow through us. David Grayson
• Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer and you are the dance. Eckhart Tolle
• There is no you to make any choice. Yet somehow, we are able to move through this life. So, who or what is making all the decisions? You are life itself, and life lives itself. Life lives life. Will Wright
• Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen. Arianna Huffington
• What a relief to be empty! Then God can live your life. Rumi

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…going with the flow, allowing life to drive

• When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive it self so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you. Adyashanti
• When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. Lao Tzu
• Go with the flow,  Letting go

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Ask life what it wants of you

• Instead of asking “What do I want from life?”, a more powerful question is, “What does life want from me?” Eckhart Tolle
• Don’t ask what is the meaning of life, but what is life asking of me. Victor Frankl
• To discover what your purpose is, all you need do is ask one question: “How is Life calling me to serve it?” If you hold this question in your heart, eventually the answer will come to you much clearer than if you try to figure it out using your mind. Michael Jeffreys
• There is only one prayer: Oh God, please tell me what to do. Sky McCain

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Allow Life to create through you

• The highest level of creativity consists in being, not doing. When the being is intense enough, when the words are spoken enough, when the thoughts are thought enough, the doing will automatically follow. Marianne Williamson
• Forget the dancer, the center of the ego; become the dance. That is meditation. Rajneesh
• Creativity,  Inspiration,  Creative expression

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Have purpose and intentions if you wish but let go of all attachments to them

• You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off. Eugen Herrigel
• You must learn to wait properly… By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension. Eugen Herrigel
• …being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension…without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, as see what comes – and how it comes! Eugen Herrigel
• You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind! Eugen Herrigel
• The right art,” cried the Master, “is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. Eugen Herrigel
• Purpose,  Intention,  Let go of attachment to outcomex

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Freedom is to sit back in the seat of awareness and allow life to live you …

• In a state of presence, actions are not determined by the person. Actions become actions of the universe. Mooji
• Souls were detachable, had separate destinies; things could happen to them. To consciousness as such nothing can happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative of ‘content’ in an Experience of which the peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of content takes place… William James
• Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Choice in every form is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery.  Jiddu Krishnamurti
• True awareness is a state of pure witnessing, without the least attempt to do anything about the event witnessed. Your thoughts and feelings, words and actions may also be a part of the event; you watch all unconcerned in the full light of clarity and understanding. You understand precisely what is going on, because it does not affect you. It may seem to be an attitude of cold aloofness, but it is not really so. Once you are in it, you will find that you love what you see, whatever may be its nature. This choiceless love is the touchstone of awareness. If it is not there, you are merely interested — for some personal reasons. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Suppose you walk from one place to another: you do not attend to the steps you take. Yet you find yourself after a time at your goal. You see how the business of walking goes on without your attending to it. So also with other kinds of work. Ramana Maharshi
• Be content with what thou hast received, and smooth thy frowning forehead, for the door of choice is not open either to thee or me. Hafez
• Awareness,   Presence and free will (Scott Kiloby)

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… allowing thinking, planning, choosing and deciding to arise in consciousness when they do

• Practical thoughts, amongst others, will still occur and some of these may involve planning, but the plans will no longer revolve around a separate entity. They will simply appear in the same impersonal way that everything appears, like the sound of the rain or the traffic. In other words, if your thoughts contain the personal entity, see clearly that the personal entity around which they revolve is non existent, and, as a result, drop the thought. If the thought does not contain the belief in such an entity, allow it to unfold and likewise allow its fulfilment to unfold, even if this may involve some careful planning!  Rupert Spira
• Let life play out as your destiny. That is, just allow everything to appear as it is. But remember that your own thoughts and feelings are also part of what is appearing, and the responses and actions that may result from your thoughts and feelings are themselves also part of what is appearing.  So, it is not a matter of either letting life play itself out or being more proactive. Rather, it is abiding as Awareness in which everything including your own thoughts, feelings, responses, activities etc. appear, and allowing all of that to be just as it is. Be knowingly the allowing space in which everything is already taking place. Above all see that there is no individual orchestrator, no individual entity at the helm, controlling everything.  Having said that, if a decision is required of your mind or an action of your body in any given circumstance, think, feel and act as best you can in line with the understanding that you are impersonal Presence and that this one Presence is shared by all. This attitude will keep your thoughts, feelings, activities and relationships safe and always in line with love and understanding. In this way give yourself total freedom to stand back and observe or to be actively involved and engaged, freely moving from one position to the other, always responding in the moment, with no fixed idea of how things should be or of what your responses should look like. This will keep your activities spontaneous and intimately tailored to the moment.  Rupert Spira
• A core paradox of Buddhist meditation practice: accepting that your self isn’t in control, and may in some sense not even exist, can put your self—or something like it—in control. Robert Wright
• Choice,  Decision making,  Planning

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Freedom is to realise that everything in the universe is determined by God who is none other than your own Inner Being…

• The place you are right now, God circled on a map for you. Hāfez
• Everything is predetermined. Ramana Maharshi
• There is an unseen life that dreams us. It knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change. John O’Donohue
• One of my favorite Sufi poems… says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. Elizabeth Gilbert
• Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced. Baruch Spinoza
• On the chessboard of his godforsaken existence, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn’t get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you. Free will was such bullshit. R. Ward
• Nothing happens except by Divine dispensation. Ramana Maharshi
• You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you. Lisa See
• Being

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… and to rest in the realisation that all is well, for everything in the universe is as it is meant to be

• Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. Steve Jobs
• The fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him—this is something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony. Schopenhauer
• The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes. Eckhart Tolle
• There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Max Ehrmann
• Nothing in the universe happens by chance or accident. The universe is a coherent concurrence and interaction of innumerable conditions attendant on the infinite number of energy patterns.  In the state of Awareness, all this is obvious and can be clearly seen and known.  Outside that level of awareness, it could be likened to innumerable, invisible magnetic fields which automatically coalesce or repel one’s position and which interact according to the positions and relative strengths and polarities.  Everything influences everything else and is in perfect balance.   David R. Hawkins
• If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned and interdependent, how can will alone be free? Walpola Rahula
• Nothing happens at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity. Leucippus, 5th century BC
• Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride. Umberto Eco
• Divine order

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Transcending the illusion of free will brings freedom …

• A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.  Sam Harris
• Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• My gift to you will be to take away your freedom of choice for a while. Freedom can be very unhealthy and unproductive. Instead, you’ll have freedom from choice. Amanda Filipacchi
• Freedom,  Transcendence

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… allowing the mind to release the burden of its exaggerated sense of control and responsibility …

• Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next – and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, ” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable. Kurt Vonnegut
• Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Control,  Responsibility

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… allowing us to ease into the stream of life’s events

• A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it. Ursula K. Le Guin
• Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together and do so with all your heart. Marcus Aurelius
• Fate is irrevocable, and invincible, and an unchangeable decree; a necessity of all things and actions, according to eternal appointment. Seneca
• Fate is the union of the moment with eternity. Keiji Nishitani
• Freedom is freedom from worry. Having realised that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don’t give them the nourishment of interest and attention. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• I am a firm believer in fate. That no matter what we feel or what we may think we want or even what’s best for us, that it is all predetermined. And most importantly, fate is completely out of our hands. Therefore, I decided long ago to let life happen as it happens. I also strongly believe that we are all here for a reason, something to be learned, and by simply letting life take its course than we shall learn what that is. Wanda F. Ross
• Love Your Fate, which is in fact your life. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Our life is determined for us–and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do. George Eliot
• We are truly free to enjoy the unfolding of life, including our own lives, unencumbered by the acquired, often guilt-ridden sense of control, and the obsessive need to avoid messing up. We can relax, because we’ll automatically perform anyway. Tony Lanza
• What will not happen will never happen, whatever effort one may put forth. And what will happen will not fail to happen, however much one may seek to prevent it. This is certain. The part of wisdom therefore is to stay quiet. Ramana Maharshi
• What would happen if we respected the flow of life and used our free will to participate in what’s unfolding, instead of fighting it? What would be the quality of the life that unfolds? Michael A. Singer
• While the ordinary ego is programmed to ‘getting’, spiritual intention now shifts to ‘allowing’, similar to floating in the water rather than flailing about or swimming in it. David R. Hawkins
• Go with the flow,  Letting go

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By surrendering all illusion of agency, you allow God to enter

• There is no independent manager in this body. Only a seeming one. Mooji
• Light and darkness cannot coexist any more than God and creatures can. If God is to enter, then the creatures must leave. Meister Eckhart
• Spiritual grace cannot be received continuously or in its fullness, except by those who have willed away their self-will to the point of being able truthfully to say, ‘Not I, but God in me.’ Aldous Huxley
• Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? A Course in Miracles
• I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. St Paul (Galatians 2:20)

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By surrendering all illusion of agency, you become one with God

• You should know (God) without image, unmediated and without likeness. But if I am to know God without mediation in such a way, then “I” must become “he”, and “he” must become “I”. More precisely I say: God must become me and I must become God, so entirely one that “he” and this “I” become one “is” and act in this “isness” as one, for this “he” and this “I”, that is God and the soul, are very fruitful. Meister Eckhart
• The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for, until the cord be broken, the bird cannot fly. So the soul, held by the bonds of human affections, however slight they may be, cannot, while they last, make its way to God. St. John of the Cross
• Souls which have come to the unitive knowledge of God are, almost nothing in themselves and all in God. Benet of Canfield
• Oneness

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By surrendering all illusion of agency, your actions become effortless

• In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it. Alan Watts
• Give up the burden of all deeds to God. Give all, both good and bad. God helps those who do not help themselves. Swami Vivekananda
• A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us, that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary, and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Effort,  Effortlessness

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Surrender raises your level of consciousness and in so doing, transforms the world

• Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection. Eckhart Tolle
• Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in —or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life. When you do, the energy that you emanate and which then runs your life is of a much higher vibrational frequency than the mind energy that still runs our world —the energy that created the existing social, political, and economic structures of our civilization, and which also continuously perpetuates itself through our educational systems and the media. Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into this world. It creates no suffering for yourself, for other humans, or any other life form on the planet. Unlike mind energy, it does not pollute the earth, and it is not subject to the law of polarities, which dictates that nothing can exist without its opposite, that there can be no good without bad. Those who run on mind energy, which is still the vast majority of the Earth’s population, remain unaware of the existence of spiritual energy. It belongs to a different order of reality and will create a different world when a sufficient number of humans enter the surrendered state and so become totally free of negativity. If the Earth is to survive, this will be the energy of those who inhabit it. Eckhart Tolle
• Transformation,  Change,  Consciousness,  Surrender

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Surrendering all illusion of agency creates deeper awareness which paradoxically brings the appearance of greater freedom of choice

• Between stimulus and response, you have the freedom to choose your response based on self-awareness, your imagination, your conscience and your independent will. Stephen Covey
• With awareness, we have choice, the freedom to choose, free will. It is choice that gives us power. Power which is energy. Energy that allows us to move forward in alignment with our choices. Laura Kangas
• Whether we know it or not, we are always this open, free, unlimited Consciousness, and yet sometimes we forget this. It is our freedom to forget. Once we have forgotten, no other freedom is available to us, save the freedom to remember again. Rupert Spira
• Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change. Stephen Covey
• Consciousness, that which we are, is freedom itself. We, as Consciousness, have absolute freedom. We are absolute freedom. Rupert Spira
• The more conscious we are, the more freedom of choice we experience. Tim Freke
• Freedom,  Choice

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Surrendering all illusion of agency frees you of tension and fear

• And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away. William James
• The compensation for the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all FEAR from one’s life, the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner SECURITY, which one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget. William James
• Fear,  Anxiety,  Stress

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Surrendering all illusion of agency brings freedom from guilt, shame and arrogance

• I’m free from judgement, because there is no one to blame. I’m free from guilt, because there is no one to reproach. I’m no longer a seeker on a spiritual quest, because there’s no one to be lost or enlightened. And that realization is enlightenment . . . but it’s not happening to anyone . . . and that’s very funny. Tim Freke
• Inasmuch as the self is presumed to be a causal agent, it is therefore also the object of guilt, pride, fear, and all the emotions. David R. Hawkins
• Guilt,  Shame,  Arrogance

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Surrendering all illusion of agency brings joy and bliss

• Joy and pleasure are also awesome in their non-personal appearances. To live in the vastness of the naturally occurring state is to bathe in the ocean of the non-personal pleasure and joy.  This joy and pleasure, which belong to no-one, are unlike any joy or pleasure that appear to refer to or
• Once the mind let go, the non-personal, indescribably joyful flavour of the vastness experiencing itself moved radically to the foreground forever. Suzanne Segal
• All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception that you have the ability to usurp the power of God. A Course in Miracles
• A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own. Meister Eckhart
• The source of joy stems from the inner subjective experience of the innate source of one’s existence itself, unimpeded by the limitation of presuming the personal self to be a causal or primary agent. David R. Hawkins
• Joy,  Happiness

Surrendering all illusion of agency causes circumstances and people to become helpful

• When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. You rest in God. Eckhart Tolle

Surrendering all illusion of agency allows a deep universal intelligence beyond the mind takes over and manages your life

• M: The rest will be done for you. Q: By whom?  M: By the same power that brought you so far, that prompted your heart to desire truth and your mind to seek it. It is the same power that keeps you alive. You may call it Life or the Supreme.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Place your burden at the feet of the Lord of the universe who is ever victorious and accomplishes everything. Remain all the time steadfast in the heart, in the Transcendental Absolute. God knows the past, present and future. He will determine the future for you and accomplish the work. What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry. Abide in the heart and surrender your acts to the Divine. Ramana Maharshi
• Sometimes the subconscious mind manifests a wisdom several steps or even years ahead of the conscious mind, and has its own way of leading us toward our destiny. Nathaniel Branden
• Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one’s breath away. Michael Novak
• Intelligence

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The truth is we do not know what is best for us

• I don’t perceive my own best interests. A Course in Miracles
• Ignorance

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The sense we have of being a separate agent may be an illusion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t embrace it and enjoy it as times

• Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen. Arianna Huffington
• Is the movie that God is living through me already in the can (predetermined) or do I, as God, become the director of my own life? Whichever option I prefer!  Free will, whether it is an illusion or not, certainly appears real in the experience of life, especially if I believe myself to be a separate agent. I am fully invited to embrace the arising of conscious choice and direct the movie of my life and turn it into something wonderful. A different approach is for the mind to surrender all sense of being an active agent and to surrender my life completely to The Divine Director within, thus allowing my Inner Being to manifest and run my life.  The great paradox is that the more the mind surrenders, the greater the sense of possibility that seems to arise from moment to moment.  While sitting back in the seat of awareness, I watch choices arising and being made effortlessly with access to a powerful intelligence beyond the mind.  It is as if Life is living me.  There is an exhilarating sense of freedom and a falling away of all worry and care.  My deepest understanding is that my life is not predetermined. The Divine Director, my Inner Being, is manifesting the movie of my life in real time according to my level of consciousness.  The lower my level of consciousness, the more limited The Divine Director is in its ability to come up with creative and beautiful plots for my life because the plot is limited by the inherited conditioning of my form. However, at high levels of consciousness, The Divine Director within has almost unlimited freedom to create experiences of beauty and love and joy.  Life still has its ups and downs to make it interesting and provide opportunities to deepen still further, but divine intelligence guides the way through all obstacles. Anthony Lambert
• Become the director and star of the movie called your life

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In this mode of consciousness, we become co-creators with God

• We are co-creators with God, not puppets on a string waiting for something to happen. Leo Booth
• Taking responsibility as a co-creator with God presupposes a basic understanding of how creation works. Carl Johan Calleman
• For ye are a corpuscle in the body of God; thus a co-creator with Him, in what ye think, in what ye do. Edgar Cayce
• God is constantly creating anew. And God also, invites us to be re-created and join the work of God as co-(re)creators. . . . Imagine the Kingdom of God as the creative process of God reengaging in all that we know and experience. . . . When we employ creativity to make this world better, we participate with God in the recreation of the world. Doug Pagitt
• Remember the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker. Madeleine L’Engle
• When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. Marianne Williamson
• Music is mere tuning a song with words; to some degree you have a beautiful endeavor of cosigning God’s blank checks and you’re actually co-creating. You’re certainly not the creator with the capital C, but you’re embarking on an endeavor, you’re using the building blocks that have been given to you by the author of time and space. Jon Foreman
• We become a Co-worker with God at every step of the spiritual path. This is a universal law. There is great hope here for those who are sincere in finding out who and what they are, becoming a Co-worker with God, and realising the Kingdom of Heaven while still living in the body. The key lies within you. Harold Klemp
• Man must be a co-worker with God in making this earth a garden. Joseph Hertz
• The Grace of God and the human will are co-operant, but not on equal terms. Grace has the pre-eminence. William Burton

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• There is no separate, independent Consciousness, how can there be a separate, independent thinker, chooser, doer, enjoyer, experiencer?
• If God is dreaming Godself to be me, am I responsible for my dream actions?