Quotes About Enlightenment

The demand to 'respect' religion is an attempt to push back the gains of the Enlightenment by forbidding the essential arguments that religious toleration allowed.

She is filled with a light she does not yet understand, my king.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

El progresista sueña en la estabulación científica de la humanidad.

Aufklärung es la traducción circunspecta de Gnosis.

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment...

Now it is all clear, and as plain as a pikestaff. Formerly—I don't know why—everything seemed veiled in a kind of mist. That is, I believe, because people think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea.

Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all.

You have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it. In fact, demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered.

Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person.

When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute.

Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.

The man who carries a parcel is anxious not to lose it -- he is parcel-conscious. The man who cherishes the feeling 'I am' is self-conscious. The jnani holds on to nothing and cannot be said to be conscious. And yet he is not unconscious. He is the very heart of awareness. We call him digambara clothed in space, the Naked One, beyond all appearance. There is no name and shape under which he may be said to exist, yet he is the only one that truly is.

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor non-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror; it becomes a part of living.

You do not tidy up a dark room. You open the windows first. Letting in the light makes everything easy. So, let us wait to improve others until we have seen ourselves as we are - and have changed.

Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only self-knowledge can help you.

The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. The "I am" is the door. Stay at it until it opens … It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail. I move in and out of consciousness easily and naturally and therefore to me, the world is a home, not a prison.

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it.

By focusing the mind on "I am," on the sense of being, "I am so-and-so" dissolves; "I am a witness only" remains and that too submerges in "I am all." Then the all becomes the One and the One - yourself

Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind and it will be flooded with light.

You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the 'I' is not.