Quotes from Jed McKenna

No one can push you, pull you, or go with you. All thoughts, ideas, feelings, concepts, and systems of knowledge and belief boil down to this one unequivocal distinction; sewer or sunshine, dungeon or daylight, ego or surrender, obstruction or flow, segregation or integration, vertical entrenchment or horizontal progress.

You observe events and you allow the flow of things to do the steering and you go where you go.

Ask yourself. Who am I? If you do it, you will become enlightened. There is no possible alternative. The only way self-inquiry can fail to work is if you fail to do it.

Nobody likes to have their cherished beliefs dumped on, but dumping on cherished beliefs is the name of the game.

One who has seen his true nature no longer regards life as being full of menace and misery as most people do. His previously mistaken sense of personal volition and responsibility has disappeared in such freedom and joy that life is now just an amusing spectacle like a game or a dream, in which he has no real part. Ramesh Balsekar

The misconception about enlightenment stems from, or is at least compounded by, the fact that most of the world's recognized experts on the subject of enlightenment are not enlightened.

Everything is exactly as it should be, including your belief that it is not

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. Antisthenes

An easy way to distinguish between caterpillars and butterflies is to remember that the enlightened don't attach importance to anything, and that enlightenment doesn't require knowledge. It's not about love or compassion or consciousness. It's about truth.

To surrender is to relinquish the illusion of control, which initiates the death part of the death/rebirth process, which is the transition from the bondage of the womb-like Segregated State to the freedom of the ever-expanding Integrated State. No faith or belief is required to accomplish this act of surrender, only clear-seeing. When one begins to understand ego and fear for what they really are, then this process becomes as easy and natural as dropping a heavy weight.

Maya is the fear that permeates us so fully that we don't know it's there. Maya is the organizing principle of emotional energy in the fear-based, segregated state, and Maya is inherently mysterious.

To those who would argue, correctly, that the teachings of the East offer deeper, richer levels of subtlety and sophistication than the more youthful and boisterous Americans, I'd reply that waking up is a youthful, boisterous business and that those who seek ever deeper layers of understanding are merely fulfilling ego's agenda of stagnation and self-preservation.

Be careful what you wish for, not because you'll get it but because you'll be turned into the thing that can get it. It's not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it's a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.

The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can't do that while it's still in your head.

I am well aware that a great many of the world's most popular spiritual doctrines advocate a heart-centered approach to spiritual development, but popularity among the soundly asleep may not be the best criterion by which to judge a method for waking up.

Yes, I have an ego and it looks similar to the one I dropped to, as you say, achieve nirvana. But then I came back all enlightened and everything, and I needed something to wear. I look around and there's my discarded ego lying in a pile on the floor so I slip into it and here I am.

Jane Roberts said that miracles are nature unimpeded, which is a good way of saying that if you take your hand off the tiller, the boat will steer itself and do a vastly better job of it than you ever could.

If something needs doing, there will come a time when I feel like doing it. If that time doesn't come, it doesn't get done and didn't need doing.

Jane Roberts said that miracles are nature unimpeded, which is a good way of saying that if you take your hand off the tiller, the boat will steer itself and do a vastly better job of it than you ever could. Julie seems to have that ability to relax into the moment and let the universe do the driving. If there was a secret to happiness in life, I'd say that was it.

The subject of enlightenment itself is one of the biggest arenas of naiveté, ignorance, self-deceit, and confusion in contemporary spirituality. A close second to enlightenment is the category of "mystical" or "spiritual" experiences.

Infinity is beautiful; it destroys everything it touches. It annihilates all concepts, all beliefs, all sense of self. No teacher, teaching, book or practice could ever be as effective as simply allowing the thought of infinity to slowly devour you.

Waking up is not a scholastic pursuit or a conceptual challenge. The ability to open the next door is the only thing that matters, and the key can come in any package; a book, a stubbed toe, an advertising jingle, a leaf of grass. If your intent is in place, then the universe will act as your librarian and you'll always have you what you need when you need it.

I'm not saying you can live with it, I'm saying

To say that the individual can do nothing to break free of dualistic perception because it results in nondualistic perception is nonsensical, like saying a living being can't step off a cliff because it results in death, or that a dreamer can't wake up because he's dreaming.