Quotes
about our true nature and awakening
"Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers [and sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
- Thomas Merton -
“Oneness is experienced at the level that I call the heart. While the experience of oneness is transformational and profound, it is not itself the experience of no-self, it is the experience of unified, or universal self, self as everything and everyone.
The falling away of self is a falling away of even oneness into what is prior to unity. The trajectory is from self experiencing itself as ego, to self experiencing itself as oneness, to self dropping away altogether.
What is left cannot be described, because all descriptions are only relevant in terms of their opposites. And beyond self there is no opposite, not even unity or oneness, silence or presence. There is nothing that can be said about it, not even that it is freedom.
Where all words fail, that’s where it exists. It is the Pearl beyond price, and it is the only thing that is ever happening or ever could happen. I am not being purposely obscure, I am actually being as direct and concrete as I can."
- Adyashanti -
Why are you so afraid of silence?
Silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void,
a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.
- Rumi -
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
- ANAïS NIN -
"Grace is always present. You imagine it as something high in the sky, far away, something that has to descend. It is really inside you, in your heart. When the mind rests in its source, grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within you."
- Ramana Maharshi -
The state we call realization is simply being oneself ... All that we need do is to keep quiet. Peace is our real nature. We spoil it. What is required is that we cease to spoil it.
- Ramana Maharshi -
"You want something like a round-the-clock ecstasy. Ecstasies come and go, necessarily, for the human brain cannot stand the tension for a long time. A prolonged ecstasy will burn out your brain, unless it is extremely pure and subtle.
In nature nothing is at stand-still, everything pulsates, appears and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking -- birth and death everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life. If you seek the Immutable, go beyond experience."
Nisargadatta
"In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen.
In reference to the heard, only the heard.
In reference to the sensed, only the sensed.
In reference to the cognized, only the cognized.
That is how you should train yourself.
When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard,
only the sensed in reference to the sensed,
only the cognized in reference to the cognized,
then, Bahiya, there is no you in terms of that.
When there is no you in terms of that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two.
This, just this, is the end of stress."
- Bahiya Sutta. Udana 1.10:-
"In the world of Reality
There is no self.
There is no other-than-self."
- Jianzhi Sengcan (Third Chinese Patriarch) =
"In one sense, enlightenment is realizing that there is no separate self. We might hear that a hundred thousand times, “There is no separate self.” But what happens when we take it inside and seriously consider what it could mean? We would find it means that everything I as a separate self holds as true isn’t.The taste of no separate self is totally liberating. “No separate self” does not mean there is a spiritual experience that goes something like, “I have extended myself infinitely everywhere, and have merged with everything.” That’s a
beautiful, wonderful experience for a separate self to have, but that’s not what Oneness is. Oneness is not merging. Merging happens between two and since there is only one, then any experience of merging is one illusion merging with another, as beautiful and wonderful as that experience may be. Even when I experience having merged with the absolute, with the infinite, with God, it simply means that my fictitious self has merged with another fiction. Mystical experiences aren’t enlightenment.Oneness is when there isn’t another. Oneness is—there is only this. There is no that over there, there is only this. And that’s all there is. There is only this, and as soon as you say what this is, you’ve just defined what it’s not. This is only realized in the utter demolition of everything that it’s not. Then that awakening is an awakening outside of everything that comes and goes.It is a total waking up outside of time.
- from "Emptiness Dancing" by Adyashanti -
‘It is very difficult to see Reality in its totality. The mind sees it in pieces and tries to put those pieces together. By putting the pieces together, the mind hopes to capture Reality. But it can never experience Truth this way.
The mind cannot perceive Truth in its totality because it is conditioned by the process of thinking. Thinking and the thought are different entities for the mind. In reality, they are not so.
As soon as the mind realizes the thinking is not the medium for experiencing Reality, it becomes free. The awareness of the incapacity works a miracle. Of course, you must let that awareness operate."
- J.Krishnamurti -
LOVE ...
"To be present in and as all that is seen is to
participate in life, not as a fragment amongst
other fragments, but as Love, intimately one
with all seeming objects and selves"
~ Rupert Spira ~
"Yes, absolutely, you are being held, with all my heart. I went to bed happy, and this morning I woke up happy. How can this be? I’m in love with reality, and I don’t live in the false chaotic future mind of what isn’t and can never be real. This moment shows me everything I’m here to do. It’s so clear.
Also, I love that not only you and I have this power, but everyone does. The power of simply noticing what is now is to love what is always."
- Byron Katie -
"True love is synonymous with Truth. It's not different than Truth. It's not the love of going to the prom with the perfect person. That's fine, of course, but this is something different. The deepest essence of love doesn't fall in and out. Love is, period. It loves even people your personality might not like. This is not because we develop it or become holy, noble, or saintly. That has nothing to do with the love I'm speaking about. This love is a deep and simple recognition, something intuitively knowing and meeting itself in each experience, in each being, and in each pair of eyes. It meets itself in everything that happens. It's the love simply for the fact that there's anything happening at all, because that's the real miracle. It could so easily be that nothing exists, much easier to have nothing than something. It's a miracle that anything happens and we live in the abundance called life."
~ Adyashanti -
Emptiness Dancing
“If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body—in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.”
- Adyashanti - True Meditation -
"It's a curious place to be (especially in the beginning) not to be driven by anything--pleasure or displeasure, helping or hurting, loving or hating. The only thing that will move you (and I don't mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It's simply because the breeze blows that way. So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and that's the way you go. You don't ask questions anymore. You don't evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don't know why. And you know you can't know why. There's never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment."
- Adyashanti -
Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply.
I think, therefore I am really not there.
- Thich Nhat Hanh -
"Every person’s awakening is unique. The stillness of Ramana Maharshi looks very different compared to the wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa; the secular life of one of today’s nonduality teachers looks very different from the monastic life of a Buddhist monk. Inevitably, the outer expression of enlightenment is colored by history, geography, and biography, yet we often look at spiritual teachers, enlightened masters, mystics, and saints and try to model our enlightenment on what we see. We say, “Ah, this is what it looks like!” and the ego tries to make sense of it according to its own predispositions. Ego loves to package “truth” and then claim this package for itself. It’s a mistaken belief in a spiritual reward system that keeps us on the wheel of seeking. We often hop around from one teacher or teaching to another, looking for something that conforms to our idea of enlightenment.
But truth, like love, is uncontainable. It is untamable, unconditional, and universal. Perhaps because of my life circumstances, my personality, or my karmic predispositions, that which has revealed itself as the truth of who I really am has also revealed a vision for humanity. This vision is both a revelation of awakened consciousness as it emerges in the fullness of this present moment, and it is a revelation of an awakened world as it is emerging into a future possibility. I do not know exactly what this awakened world will look like, but I do know its fragrance intimately. It is the force of this invisible fragrance that moves me to share this vision with you.
I do not know what this awakening will look like in you. I don’t even know if you will awaken or not: it’s not for me to say. But I do know that I’m responding to life’s impulse by inviting you into a conversation that may trigger this awakening in you."
- Amoda Maa -
"It is true that … [the] spiritual search comes to an end with the deep experiential understanding that we are unlimited, unlocated, impersonal Consciousness, an experience that is sometimes referred to as enlightenment or awakening.
However, in most cases a further ‘process’ unfolds in which this understanding becomes progressively more stable at all levels of experience, that is, at the level of the mind, the body and the world. And this ‘process’ of stabilisation or, as it is sometimes referred to, self-realisation, often involves the asking and answering of questions.
It would be a misunderstanding to presume that such questions imply a personal ‘questioner’ or indeed that such questions arise from ignorance and are aimed at achieving a personal goal of enlightenment.
This misunderstanding is particularly prevalent in some areas of contemporary advaita where the mind is automatically equated with ignorance and indiscriminately dismissed."
- Rupert Spira -
