Quotes About Enlightenment

Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

I think Buddhism is a wonderful philosophy. I've had the good fortune to meet many wonderful teachers from that society.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?

The teachings of Tibetan Buddhism have been passed down for a long time now. They have that system pretty well figured out.

Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

Moonshine. I get it now.

I thought I had died, and that I might not ever come back. I don't know what happened. All of a sudden, BAM!, there I was. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Thus empiricism directed attention away from abstract principles to the data of experience. Hence, while the philosophers of the pre-Enlightenment period favoured the geometric method, reasoning deductively from first principles, their successors worked by induction, first observing particular details and arriving eventually at general truths.

A wise man is free from passions, though Kant admits that, as the passions are so all-pervasive, we may have to search for this wise man in the moon.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!

An age of enlightenment is one in which people are free to think as their intellect guides them. No body, even the Church, can permanently restrict freedom of thought by prescribing what people must believe, now and for ever.

Another problem arises if we work with technique: we work with something which is manipulating the mind, whereas the purpose of meditation is to release the grasping action of the mind so that the inherently enlightened qualities can manifest.

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.

We have the assurance of the enlightened beings that reality is goodness, that reality is freedom from suffering, that reality is bliss. So we should never fear to open ourselves to reality, to cast aside our preconceptions and biases, and to open more and more to whatever turns out to be real. You can have faith in enlightenment, faith in evolutionary potential, faith in infinity, faith in your infinite self. (p. 222)

Buddhas have more fun.

A buddha is the butterfly that finally emerges from the cocoon of the human life-form. (p. 63)

The power of the enlightened being to affect his or her environment is immense. The enlightened mind can landscape worlds, preserve planets, save whole environments, create buddhaverses. The enlightened being is almost like a god. (p. 150)

Silence is the Buddha's greatest expression. It's the Buddha's great teaching, what the Hindus call "You are That" in the Upanishads. "You are the ultimate reality. You are God!" the Hindus boldly declare. But the Buddha's way of affirming that fact is by being silent, because if you are that, after all, if you are what the theists think is God, you already know it yourself. (p. 15)

Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear.

Clover is incapable of not nurturing. It can't do anything but nurture. Shakyamuni is capable of not nurturing. With a poisonous thought, he is a poisonous person. With an enlightened thought, he is an enlightened person. With his great realization, he is unlikely to slip back into poisonous ways, but he could, for he is human.

Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.