Quotes About Enlightenment

When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one's past, present and future, with one's physical and spiritual security and standing, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty; then the guru is not important, for the disciple has broken the shell of self-defense. Complete self-surrender is liberation by itself.

Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek or find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the "I am." Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge or, rather, it will take you in.

Know yourself as beyond space and time - in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable - you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy.

The innermost light, shining peacefully and timelessly in the heart, is the real guru. All others merely show the way.

When the shadow is seen to be only a shadow, you stop following it. You turn around and discover the sun which was there all the time - behind your back!

Self-realization definitely comes first. The mind cannot go beyond itself by itself. It must explode.

Reality is not the result of a process; it is an explosion.

Happiness is never your own; it is where the "I" is not.

The name given to the body is not your name. What are you beyond the body and its name? For a moment, see that you are without the body and its name.' This is termed 'waiting at the doorstep of God for a moment'. Say what you are without considering the body and its name. Look at yourself without the body and its name. Understand this point and you understand everything.

prior to consciousness,

The more we cloak our divinity, the dimmer the spark becomes. If we choose to shape our lives according to the lesser amount of light, rather than the boundless amount of light from the source, this becomes the yardstick by which all our experiences are measured.

Perhaps the Enlightenment itself was a psychotic break. The belief that all things could be measured

Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom.

The Buddha likened humans to the lotus flowers. Out of the deluded mud of human existence, filled with greed, hatred, and delusion, in a world where wars, oppression, and lust rule the masses, there are those who can and will rise above the muck and emerge victorious against suffering.

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

suddenly enlightenment, blinding and dazing as the light which smote Saul on the road to Damascus, burst upon her. Negation and disbelief would never cure the sickness of this world. You could never defeat evil by retreating from it. It must be faced and fought and overcome. Action, not futile sorrow, was what was needed.

Spiritual awakening is exactly dropping the sense of one's narrow separateness; it is essentially and profoundly altruistic.

So I cast my lot with him-not the one who claimed wisdom, Confucius; or the one who claimed enlightenment, Buddha; or the one who claimed to be a prophet, Muhammad, but with the one who claimed to be God in human flesh. The one who declared, 'Before Abraham was born, I am' - and proved it.

Augustine was right when he said that we love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us.

We shall give up the things of childhood -- gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets.

In some respects, the Scottish Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, had been an anticipation of later developments in Vienna: the same desire to systematise, to overthrow outworn structures, to rationalize. The secularisation of the Calvinist mind, and the secularisation of the Jews, gave early twentieth-century intellectual life its characteristic stamp.

Four Universal (Bodhisattva) Vows: "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them; the deluding passions are inexhaustible, I vow to destroy them; the Dharma gates are manifold, I vow to know them; the Buddha Way is supreme, I vow to master it.

he who has tasted it, who has stood at the watershed of this world and looked across into the new land, into the dwelling of the night ? truly, he will never return to the labours of the world, to the land where the light is housed in ceaseless unrest.

The true philosophical act is the slaying of the self; this is the real beginning of all philosophy, therein lies the requirement for all philosophic youths, and only this act answers all criteria and conditions for the transcendental deed.