Quotes About Enlightenment

H]ow can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?

even refer to?

One day, soon after the Buddha's enlightenment, a man saw the Buddha walking toward him. The man had not heard of the Buddha, but he could see that there was something different about the man who was approaching, so he was moved to ask, "Are you a god?

I]deas and beliefs are frozen views – fragments of Reality, separated from the Whole.

To a buddha … there's no habitual overlaying of perceptual experience with concepts, … ideas, … beliefs, notions, pre-formed habits of thought, that are used to explain existence.

Why would anyone want to awaken to the Reality that they're not even here in the first place?

I]t's not conceptualisation that's the problem, but getting caught up in it, mistaking our concepts for Reality.

It's not as if, when you see, the world winks out of existence.

Those who are aware," he said, "do not die. Those who are ignorant are as if dead already.

When we cease to be bound by our concepts, our paradigms, our grasping, our inclinations of mind, our doubt ceases as well, because our knowledge is no longer dependent on anything beyond immediate, direct experience.

The Zen master Seng-Ts'an was fond of saying "If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid great confusion?

If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men's minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our lives with our intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.

If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men's minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our live with intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.

The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question 'How can I be saved?' into the pragmatic 'How can I be happy?'—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

The dream at the dawn of the internet age that giving everyone a platform would birth a new Enlightenment seems cringeworthy today, now that we are living with bots, trolls, flame wars, fake news, twitter shaming mobs, and online harrasment.

Voltaire's Candide who asserts that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened