Enlightenment Principles Quotes

Every road leads to sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful – friendship, love, art, and truth – will end. All aspects that make life hideous – pain, poverty, illness, betrayal, hate, crime, war – will also end. The fact that human life is a mere blip on a cosmic scale is no reason for personal angst as we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that birthed us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Enlightenment is the ultimate nourishment for body, mind, and soul. It is the ultimate freedom and ecstasy of life.

~ Amit Ray

Enlightenment is the moment when you are most alive and most compassionate.

~ Amit Ray

We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people’s expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The choices we make in life determine human identities. A person might choose to avoid or confront their deepest night terrors. A person can elect to live carefully or rashly. A person can embrace ignorance or incessantly work to acquire knowledge of the larger world filled with people, nature, and ideas. A person can live a placid life or boldly seek out vivid encounters is a world filled with anarchy, chaos, hazards, and incomparable beauty and slender. A person can hold onto attachments and fear death or live their life as a mere witness and perceive their personal death as part of the collective story and the culmination of a life will lived. A person can employ their time in a material world to enhance personal pleasures or to develop their innate skills and strive towards attaining self-realization. A person may perceive their existence as pitiful drudgery, or live a courageously, making a statement with their wounds and scars that life is a thrilling mystery filled with longing, love, and holiness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person experiments in life and reflects upon those events in order to discover how to lead a meaningful life. We conduct a quest searching for the source our essential being. What we seek is inside us waiting for us to discover. Until we realize the vital inner source that provides direction for our life, all our efforts are in vain. The ego with its craving and fearful protection strategies is what prevents us from perceiving the transparency of the world in which we belong. When we cease clinging to the past and no longer daydream of the future and unreservedly accept whatever is occurring while sacrificing ourselves in service of other people our sense of self vanishes and we exist only as conscious and nonjudgmental witnesses of reality.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Self-deception and vanity are grievous sin. The ego is the cause of all human suffering. We suffer from life only when we fail to examine the cause of our sorrow. Letting go of destructive illusions and freeing oneself from egotism of self-pity enables a person to sense the rich intertexture of their inner world, which is the only facet of reality that we exercise exclusive dominion and control.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When a person understands the problem that vexes them, and comprehends the choices that created them, they begin a journey of the mind seeking personal liberation from suffering.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Since we human beings are the cause of the environmental problems that we face today, we can also be the solution. We just need a shift in our thinking. We just need to move away from the paradigm of competition and domination. Then this world will not end. In fact, the world will prosper and return to its original place as the cradle of self-discovery and the advancement of human spirituality. And such a world is a true democracy.

~ Seung Heun Lee

Life surrounds us. Each day we witness the plenteous gifts of nature. Even following the most bitterly cold winter, new life waits feverishly to erupt. The flower head sown in the prior season quickens to bloom in the eternal spring of wilderness gardens. Each of us hankers to blossom. Life is the active resistance to disintegration and death. A state of grace comes from a life devoted to seeking the pinnacle of human attainment. None of us should suppress our own or another person’s quest for transcendence. Each day we must give full measure to our internal life force. With all our energy and intuition, we must determinedly seek out what is the best part of us. We must faithfully tap our potential for goodness, unapologetically rip ourselves apart if need be, bravely go where we fear, and boldly tread where we must go in order to carry out the sacred blueprint for leading a meaningful life that is imbued in the deepest alcove of our unbidden souls.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There exists a universal order that we each play a distinct role in carrying out. Light always struggles to emerge from darkness. Each of us is the bearer of our own lantern. We find ourselves when we realize our place in an interconnected world. The struggle to pierce the darkness that shrouds us from realizing a state of perceptive awareness is the biggest part of both our individual story and our communal storyline.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The elements of chemistry are many, but finite so are the techniques of enlightenment; everybody falls in love somehow.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

The road to enlightenment requires a life dedicated to self-study, accepting the minor tragedies of life as an ineluctable part of the human condition.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We cannot replicate other people’s lives. We must each institute and broker a personalized meaning to our exclusive existence. We must each serve as our own Zen master, awaken to our inviolate personal truth, and strive to fulfill our sui generis (unique) nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Suddenly you realize that you are the mother of the Universe, eager to protect, transform and care every soul of the world.

~ Amit Ray

Believing or not makes no difference to the Absolute of Things That Be. But it does to you. For you shall live and die accordingly. A wise person, or a fool. Choose.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Just a child is free to wander in one's father's garden, discovering little or big things; it is left to the seeker to grow unto the Nature of the Absolute.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

All personal god, yours or mine, are false. Unto existence nothing but an infinite oneness walks.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Simply put, That Which Is - what most of us call God - is not a physical person nor a this or that spirit etc. Is the Quintessence of All That Is.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Until you get it that in reality you, and the enemy you hate, are identically and inseparably 'One', of a single make, you're one big silly mistake.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The goal of any spiritual person is to strive towards attaining self-realization by living spontaneously in the present moment of physical reality, free from anxiety and distress, unencumbered by frivolous affections, and liberated from specious attachments.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person employs human reason and intellect to guide our earthly expedition. We can stumble through life satisfying the unconscious dictates of the mind or take control of our life by increasing our level of conscious awareness. Philosophy always commences with an act of consciousness. We must follow our moral passions. We create our reality by what we perceive as truth. We imagine a life that we wish to experience. Live the life that you envision. Do not allow other people or external determinates to control your conception of the self, because otherwise you are living someone else’s life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Only the shallowest person believes that they can attain true happiness by maximizing their wealth at any cost. In absence of morality, ethics, and a sustainable philosophy to guide us in an ethical search for happiness, we will always perceive life’s random countervailing forces of adversity and unpleasantness as inflicting a great personal injustice upon us. Through application of a deeply embedded personal philosophy, we can push back against the negative implications of a life of suffering. We can use a philosophical stance to gain the perspective needed to say 'yes' to all of life, both its rosy path of ineffable joys and a blackened trail of tears. We must learn to accept life as it truly is and not waste precious time in wistfulness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The transience of humanity frames the tragedy of all people. There are no happy conclusions to life, we all die, and until we die, we will experience both happiness and pain. Acceptance of the tragedy of humankind without remorse is a shattering experience; it enables us to relinquish mawkish misconceptions, destructive obsessions, and crippling attachments. Only by accepting the tragedy of life as an integral part of the incandescent beauty of life, will I understand what it means to rejoice in the indelible bloom of life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We cradle in our nucleus emotional ingots gathered through studied immersion of the incongruities of life. In an elusive quest to disinter meaning out of life, we must cull joy from our daily rituals while conscientiously striving to nourish the nucleus of our buried innate essence. By discovering inner peace blossoming amongst the rubble of daily life, while determinedly searching out the cytoplasm our innate essence, a person’s reveals their inspirational tranquility.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The biggest impediment to loving life is our inflated egos. Only by suppressing our ego and controlling our selfish thoughts can we truly comprehend the immaculate beauty of every day unfolding before us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The ego resists change. False pride is an impediment to change.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Ruthless destruction of an ego is a rather simple matter. Preserving the host deprived of an ego is a more delicate affair. How does a person engage in momentous battle with the self while simultaneously struggling to maintain their cerebral, emotive, and spiritual equilibrium in the thin air of consciousness? How assiduously does an agitated mind need to work in order to achieve the elusive degree of emotional and mental quietness that I seek?

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Enlightenment is coming out from the fear mode, victim mode and guilt mode of living to the mode of empowerment.

~ Amit Ray

At some magical instant you realize a deep Harmony with the universe. Enlightenment is that harmony.

~ Amit Ray

The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster