Quotes About Enlightenment

Do you know what it's like, he asked at length, to feel that nothing is quite real -- including yourself? Susila nodded. It sometimes happens when one's just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It's like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high.

Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence.

It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.

Public health and social reform are the indispensable preconditions of any kind of general enlightenment

To the extent that there is attachment to 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' there is no attachment to, and therefore no unitive knowledge of, the divine Ground.

In the dark silence, in the void of all sensation, something began to know it. Very dimly at first, from immeasurably far away, but gradually the presence approached. The dimness of that other knowledge grew brighter ...

Do not strive to seek after the true," writes a Zen master, "only cease to cherish opinions.

When the phenomenal ego transcends itself, the essential Self is free to realize, in terms of a finite consciousness, the fact of its own eternity, together with the correlative fact that every particular in the world of experience partakes of the timeless and the infinite. This is liberation, this is enlightenment, this is the beatific vision, in which all things are perceived as they are "in themselves" and not in relation to a craving and abhorring ego.

Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion.

We can be educated for freedom—much better educated for it than we are at present.

Aldous Huxley

She knows too that this temple isn't what she still like to think it is - the house of Buddha. She knows it's just a diagram of her own unconscious mind.

Lenina uykuda öÄŸretilmiÅŸ parlak bilgeliÄŸini . . .

Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who 'have ceased to cherish opinions' even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.

sententiously.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

far loro perdere la fede nella felicità come Bene Sovrano e far loro credere, viceversa, che la meta è comunque altrove, in qualche punto al di fuori della presente sfera umana; che il fine della vita non è il mantenimento del benessere, ma qualche intensificazione della coscienza, qualche accrescimento del sapere.

The Diamond Sutra

Men find a new universe of thought and feeling, clearer and more comprehensible than the universe of daily experience.

Spiritual progress is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality. (Such knowledge, of course, is worthless if it is merely theoretical; to be effective, it must be realized as an immediate, intuitive experience and appropriately acted upon.)

Aldous Huxley

One of the first things that Homo Sapiens did with his newly developed rationality and self-consciousness was to set them to work finding out ways to by-pass analytical thinking and to transcend or, in extreme cases, temporarily obliterate, the isolating awareness of the self.