Quotes About Enlightenment

A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.

Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.

our everyday waking consciousness "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states," one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They "return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.

Mysticism," he likes to say, "is the antidote to fundamentalism.

The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.

There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.

It's always better to know more rather than less, even when that knowledge complicates your life.

quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.

free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment

I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one's repertoire of conscious states.

The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure.

Aren't we identical with our ego? What's left of us without it? The lesson of both psychedelics and meditation is the same: No! on the first count, and More than enough on the second.

The clue arrived a year later, in the form of an article in a scientific journal describing the behavior of rats given a newly discovered compound called LSD. Hubbard tracked down the researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception.

There is no sin but ignorance.

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

I'm still learning new things every single day.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

What's right with America and what's right with Islam have a lot in common. At their highest levels, both worldviews reflect an enlightened recognition that all of humankind shares a common Creator - that we are, indeed, brothers and sisters.

In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

Those who love and who have a sense of purity live in a very luminous band of awareness.

The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.