Quotes About Existence

So the body which did not exist in sleep, "exists" now in "waking.

There is mischief, or ignorance, as long as there is an object apart from a subject:

For those in the Self, there is no [separate] seeing—only being.

The Self is all-pervasive; all "else" is absent.

Once the I-thought has completely died, there is not even the thought of "I am Self." [There is only Be-ing.]

When there is no one to "experience," where is there a question of an I? Only that which Is remains.

As a spark proceeds from fire, "individuality" emanates from the Absolute Self.

There are no "others": the Self is the one and only reality.

When once you realize your own Self, and that there is nothing other than this Self, you will come to look upon the whole universe as the Self.

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

he is that Self. Then, only, can he view everything as a form of the Self.

There is really no creation, and no dissolution.

The wise one lives without the feeling of I-ness or mine-ness. What is this I, or what is "mine"? Be devoid of the feeling of mine-ness and I-ness, knowing for certain that Nothing is—in Me, individual selves rise and disappear.

The immanent Reality alone is. It is infinite. There arises, from it, this finite [extension of] consciousness, taking on a limited form [mind].

Being omni-present—as every spiritual and religious tradition declares—it must of necessity be as immediate to us as is our every heartbeat, our every breath. Therefore, there is nowhere that we need to go, and nothing that we need to do, in order to be "in contact" with the Absolute.

When I understood this much about the People, I realized how truly different their reality was. My reality is made in my head; I create roles for myself, I create a structure that requires certain activities and prohibits others. I live in time; I have an agenda. Their existence had no reality until they lived it.

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as "divine" in some sense of the word?

So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn't really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that "form is not-self." We are not our bodies.

The evolutionary fusion of hierarchy and reciprocal altruism accounts for a good part of the average human life. Many, if not most, of our swings in mood, our fateful commitments, our changes of heart about people, institutions, even ideas, are governed by mental organs that this fusion wrought. It has done much to form the texture of everyday existence.

The old Rolling Stones lyric "I can't get no satisfaction" is, according to Buddhism, the human condition.

As more and more societies are reevaluated in the unflattering light of Darwinian anthropology, it becomes doubtful that any truly egalitarian human society has ever existed.

At the dawn of organic sentience

WRITER: But tell me before you go. What was the worst thing about being down here? AGNES: Just existing. Knowing my sight was blurred by my eyes, my hearing dulled by my ears, and my bright thought trapped in the grey maze of a brain. Have you seen a brain?

nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient.