Quotes from Adyashanti

One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, "Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.

The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that insecurity, and all wisdom will be yours.

Whatever the image of yourself, it's a mask and it's hiding emptiness.

As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." [Gospel of Thomas 70]

The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world.

The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.

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.

Whatever you think you are, that's not it.

Effortless doesn't mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this "effortless effort." We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON

Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don't go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.

There is an invitation beyond the wall of knowledge, which is not to some regressive state before the mind can operate, but a transcendent state that's beyond where the mind can go. That's what spirituality is. It's going where the mind cannot go.

You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.

When our minds start to open, we're no longer in a constant state of evaluation and judgment. Naturally, then, our senses open—and we can really see what is before us. Our eyes open in a different way, our hearing opens in a different way, our emotions open, our hearts open to all of existence. We see how judging and condemning actually close our hearts and harden us to our experience of life and others.

By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you've got a very convincing - though divided - self.

The first stage of the awakening journey is the calling. The calling arrives when we first feel that spiritual impulse that galvanizes our attention. All of a sudden we sense a greater mystery to life that we seek to experience more deeply; it literally calls us.

I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.

Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.

If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.

Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.

When you argue with reality, reality always wins

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

Live by truth or suffer. It's that simple.