Quotes About Enlightenment

This, of course, is the traditional Buddhist logic — It is X, it is not-X, it is both X and not-X, it is neither X nor not-X

The trouble with being an agnostic is that you are always wondering, a bit. That's what a-gnosis means: you lack the Inner Certainty of those Fully Enlightened Beings like the Pope or the Ayatollah or some Marxists we have all encountered.

Some lucky souls jump to Circuit V bliss without passing through the horrors of "chemicalization" and the "Dark Night of the Soul.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).

Is there some connection between waking up in the mystic sense, and learning to read (or to see paintings, say) in an alert, non-mechanical way? One Zen master, when asked what Zen is, always replied with the single word, Attention. What the hell did he mean?

Read the text right and emancipate the world. – Robert Browning

If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect today's geopolitics.

Does enlightenment lead to sorrowful disengagement or willing participation? Once you know where the roller coaster is going, are you still in for the ride?

R?jaus maldel?: ...... (vardas) toks pats tuš?ias, toks pat mylimas, toks pat b?simas Buda.

intellectuals have grown too comfortable with the achievements of the European Enlightenment and complacent with the beliefs that religious intolerance, violence, and wars are things of the past, and that religiously motivated violence or subjugation can be committed only by "others" against the West but not by the West against the other.

Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.

But why allow someone to make a bad choice when a little information might engender a better one? It's hard to wake up and see the sun if the blinds are pulled.

Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

A talib is a seeker. And the seeker's tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.

From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

Gurus Enable you to see new things. The trouble with Gurus is that you can rarely see beyond them.

Tat tvam asi.

The practice of the Name turns us in the direction of the light. The practice of the Name removes the dust from our eyes so that we can see the world as it really is: lit up by the light of the guru.

Attachment is the root cause of suffering, dear child. This is well known to you. Fix yourself in that knowledge now and take heart.

I am learning there is much more to the world than can be plainly seen.

I see the search for objectivity in the social sciences as something along the lines of Zen enlightenment: I don't personally expect to achieve either of them, but I do find the pursuit worthwhile.

Can't you give me brains?" asked the Scarecrow. "You don't need them. You are learning something every day. A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.

Seems to me, said Cap'n Bill, as he sat beside Trot under the big acacia tree, looking out over the blue ocean, seems to me, Trot, as how the more we know, the more we find we don't know.

The world circles us with light. Yert during every moment of life we are entirely lit from within. - The Tattooed Monk