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You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.

Stephen Levine

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Stephen Levine
Age: 78 †
Born: 1937
Born: July 17
Died: 2016
Died: January 17
Poet
Screenwriter
the United States of America
Stephan Levine
Idea
Enlightenment
Use
Short
Cutting
Means
Comfortable
Ideas
Health
Mean
Wisdom
Call
Word
Sanity

More quotes by Stephen Levine

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Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)
Stephen Levine
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Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It's an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent.
Stephen Levine
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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
Stephen Levine
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We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.
Stephen Levine
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Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.
Stephen Levine
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Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness.
Stephen Levine
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How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
Stephen Levine
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Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.
Stephen Levine
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Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.
Stephen Levine
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When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
Stephen Levine
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Oxygen plays a pivotal role in the proper functioning of the immune system. We can look at oxygen deficiency as the single greatest cause of all diseases.
Stephen Levine
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Gratitude is the state of mind of thankfulness. As it is cultivated, we experience an increase in our sympathetic joy, our happiness at another's happiness. Just as in the cultivation of compassion, we may feel the pain of others, so we may begin to feel their joy as well. And it doesn't stop there.
Stephen Levine
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Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering. We almost never directly experience what pain is because our reaction to it is so immediate that most of what we call pain is actually our experience of resistance to that phenomenon. And the resistance is usually a good deal more painful than the original sensation.
Stephen Levine
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If you want the other person more than anything else in the world, you're in major trouble and the relationship is a wobbly pivot. It's different if the thing you want most in the world is truth, and your partner is the person you want most in the world.
Stephen Levine
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Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
Stephen Levine
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The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise...when you can accept discomfort, doing so allows a balance of mind. That surrender, that letting go of wanting anything to be other than it is right in the moment, is what frees us from hell.
Stephen Levine
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We've all been should upon enough.
Stephen Levine
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[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
Stephen Levine
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I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
Stephen Levine
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Death is just a change in lifestyles.
Stephen Levine