Quotes About Enlightenment

Overall, the people from the more commercialized societies are much more willing to cooperate outside of narrow kinship circles. The core message is that commerce and advanced market societies tend to breed trust and reciprocal cooperation. It is no accident that such hypotheses were common among eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, such as the Frenchman Montesquieu, and others who were observing the rise of commercial society on a massive scale for the very first time.

God or Enlightenment is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, and all that stuff are just variations of the same theme: permanent happiness. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long; it would be destroyed. Wanting a fictitious permanent state of happiness is actually a serious neurological problem.

I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize -- that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize -- and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?

freedom exists not in finding answers, but in the dissolution of all questions.

The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people. The Father of his Country, in his Farewell Address, uses this language: Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

Spiritual growth yields lasting joy, peace which passes all understanding.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?

Canto XXI. Visvámitra's Speech.

Association with the wise, abandonment of latent impressions, self-enquiry, control of breathing — these are the means of conquering the mind.

Everything, that she was saying, now, everything that she saw and heard, took place in a deep numbness, in which all the senses are stilled and a person exists not in one's own life but with some emergency life that is stuck onto one. In such situations fear, pain, surprise and enlightenment come later, and until such time as one comes to one's senses, this sober, sturdy, and almost unfeeling mechanism takes over.

Keep an open mind. Only an open mind is big enough to contain the secrets of the universe.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Every day that you attempt to see things as they are in truth, is a supremely successful day.

We are slaves to whatever we don't understand

The great master is within you.

Remember: when you are "You" - That is enlightenment.

To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.

He knows he only has the choice of going crazy or going inside and finding his own mind, which is what Buddhism is all about. Buddhism maintains that one's reality is part of one's own mindset, and that through discovering your own mind, even in the direst situations you can make your world a pure realm.

the light shines to only those that need it

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

We live surrounded by God's pattern but we aren't high enough to see it. You can elevate yourself, of course. That's the whole point of education, of meditation and prayer. The more one lifts oneself up, the more of the pattern he is able to make out, though only an enlightened few have a perspective lofty enough to see the outline whole.