Quotes from Jed McKenna

Suffering just means you're having a bad dream. Happiness means you're having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone. What then is a Master for? To make you see the uselessness of having one. Anthony de Mello

Maybe the meaning of your life is what your life means to you now. It's hard to understand that time doesn't exist because we have such a clear experience of past, present and future, but we don't really experience past and future, only present. Past and future are just ideas in the present. This means that there is only now, but what is now? We can't say what now is because there is no not-now. It's always now. There is only now.

Nothing false will survive. Nothing true will perish.

The belief that something is wrong is the fire under the ass of humanity," is how I explain it to Sarah.

The fundamental conflict in the spiritual quest is that ego desires spiritual enlightenment, but ego can never achieve spiritual enlightenment. Self cannot achieve no-self. That's why anyone who wants to sell enlightenment must first reduce it to more manageable proportions; to something ego can achieve. Enlightenment Lite: Less demanding, feels great. Enlitenment.

Self is ego and ego resides exclusively in the dreamstate. If you want to break free of the dreamstate, you must break free of self, not stroke it to make it purr or groom it for some imagined brighter future.

The American dream of freedom and abundance is just a child's rendering of true freedom and abundance, and serves only to convince people who haven't gone anywhere that they've already arrived.

Both In and Out of the Game   Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.   Walt Whitman

Karma and hell and suffering aren't things in their own right but disturbances in this flimsy substance of false self. The problem isn't in the disturbing things but in the thing disturbed. The thing disturbed is the false thing and if it weren't there, there'd be nothing to be disturbed. Nothing to get pierced or burned or dried out. Nothing to be wounded or slain.

book and magazine publishers aren't in the business of enlightenment. They're in the business of selling books and magazines, not truth, and they know that seekers will gladly pay to be reassured that, common sense aside, they can wake up and stay asleep; awakening within the dreamstate being a much more marketable solution than waking up from it. Such

Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls.   Walt Whitman

It's like I can hum a few bars but I have forgotten most of the words. I can't stand in line at the grocery and carry on a normal conversation if it gets much past the weather.

Try to take it one step at a time. Even looking two steps ahead can be very intimidating, know what I mean? Breathe more deeply, drink more water, meditate more often. Take it easy. You're not struggling to climb from hell into heaven, you're just having an in-the-body experience. It's not evil, it's just life, and when it's over, you die; easy as falling off a log.

Self-deceit is the hardest habit to break cuz it tells us we ain't self-deceived.

Think for yourself and figure out what's true. That's it. Ask yourself what's true until you know.

Let us forget the lapse of time; let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the infinite, and take up our positions there. Chuang Tzu

Think for yourself. That's the golden rule. Think for yourself. Make it your mantra. Tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids.

Sag Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor, Mystic, New Bedford, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard.

The Savage Rocks of Eternal Mind   Seizing my life in your hands, you thrashed it clean on the savage rocks of Eternal Mind.   How its colors bled, until they grew white! You smile and sit back; I dry in your sun.   Rumi

It's very simple: If Buddhism is about awakening, people should be waking up. If it's not about awakening, they should change the name.

The fabric is rent. Whatever stories at whatever degree of belief these people use to shield themselves from reality have just been structurally destabilized. The stories may survive for weeks or months or years, but their demise is now assured and the time will come when each of these people gets what they came here for; a direct confrontation with reality.

A common example of Spiritual Dissonance would be; If God loves us, why does He allow so much suffering? The certainty of God's love is the internal belief. The obviousness of human suffering is the external reality. Is God unable to end suffering? No, we must answer, because He can do whatever He wants. Therefore, He must allow or even cause suffering. But how can that be if He loves us? Something somewhere has to give or, preferably, we avoid asking the question in the first place.

Who we think we are can be stripped away forever," I make a poof gesture, "just like that. Right now, well fed, unthreatened, we have the luxury of pretending the Donners and the Nazis and the gang-bangers are someone else, but they're not. They're us; a veil's breadth away. There are no good guys and bad guys. People are people, all the same; only the circumstances change.