Quotes About Enlightenment

As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception.

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.

The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Only God can enlighten the mind and open the heart to His gospel. So

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; If you seek them, they do not hide; If you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

The great quest of Hinduism, Buddhism and Gnostic Christianity is to seek and find the means for liberating oneself from the bonds of the material, illusory, world.

The Gnostic Christ (and the historical Jesus), like the Buddha, like Krishna, like Lao Tzu, taught that all material things are impermanent—whether they be riches, or one's own body. Attachment to that which is impermanent causes suffering. Give up attachment and suffering ceases.

The Great Way has no gate, there are thousands of paths to it. If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone. Wu-men—Chan Buddhist

The highest achievement results from mastering one's senses. Wisdom comes when we are no longer interested in worldly things.

They spoke, at length, about the realms "above" this one. Levels at which the progressing soul becomes at one with God—formless, independent of time and substance though still aware of personal identity.

Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.

Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. . . .

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

the Twelve Steps, however, believes that sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. What an enigma!

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again--but now on a new level.

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will only see what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. . . . So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say.

Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or "resurrection." This is the "pattern that connects" and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It's more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude.