Enlightenment Quotes

When I did a therapist education in USA 1984, one of the course leaders – who had given personal and spiritual guidance to thousands of seekers of truth from all over the world, and who I consider to be one of the best spiritual therapists in the world – said that I was going to get enlightened, that I would ”disappear into the silence”. I did not really understand what he meant then, and it was totally absurd for me when other course participants congratulated me afterwards. The thought that I was going to be enlightened was totally absurd for me. For me enlightenment was something that happened to special and chosen persons like Osho, Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tzu and Krishnamurti. I did not feel either special or chosen. I did not feel worthy of being enlightened.

~ Swami Dhyan Giten

At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it. I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as being due for a second coming, millions in our postsecular society would embrace such a thing uncritically, leaving Enlightenment rationalism huffing and puffing in the rear. We are a puzzled and confused generation, embracing any and every kind of nonrationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay.

~ N.t. Wright

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

~ Amit Ray

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

Live a life that you do not need to take a vacation from. Live in a way that makes yearly resolutions unnecessary. Make the kind of choices that leave you Happy and Healthy... where all of your needs are satisfied. Live a life where your only ‘wants’ are for others to feel as good as you do.

~ Gary Hopkins

Pain in the body is a clear indication, Something in the energy fields are blocking inner growth.

~ Nikki Rowe

You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way. The pathway to enlightenment and transformation and liberation is the heart not the mind.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Love is that which gives of itself.

~ Vivian Amis

He who fights is powerless, but he who loves is power itself.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The fearful seek to serve themselves by mastering the world, while the fearless seek to serve the world by mastering themselves.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

It doesn't matter how you conceive of divinity. It only matters that you see it in everything, including yourself.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

We must empower our weak to be strong, and teach our strong to be compassionate. This will open a door to oneness.

~ Gary Hopkins

Even more than the time when she gave birth, a mother feels her greatest joy when she hears others refer to her son as a wise learned one.

~ Thiruvalluvar

I have to remind myself that I've always known this: Evolution is not for everybody.

~ Daniel Pinkwater

Just as someone obsessed with becoming a millionaire focuses on gaining riches and can miss out on living a fun, balanced life, so someone obsessed with being enlightened or being totally free of all difficulties can also miss out on life. Far healthier to just live a mindful, balanced life and fully participate in what life has to offer.

~ Shamash Alidina

The world suddenly opened up, and she was coming to new realizations and a greater awareness, concerning the nature of reality, and the world, which her mortal mind had previously been unable to conceive. She smiled her radiant goddess smile and began to laugh. Her omnipresent peals of mirth resonated through the forest, seeming to echo to the edges of the universe and back. She was getting her first glimpses of the world, seen through the eyes of a goddess; the first sweet tastes of a consciousness empowered beyond all human levels of comprehension, and her spirit was in exultant bliss.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Never once, did Christ ever utter, I came here to start a religionEarly Christians did not worship items, relics, wars, or governments.

~ Justin Kyle Mcfarlane Beau

If we recognize that Spirit is all powerful, and cannot be hurt, and that only Spirit exists, then nothing that happens here matters. And we see everyone and everything from the point of wholeness. Even the ‘deceitful’ thing that happened is probably to teach us a lesson not to value anything of this world, including the body. Miracles bring conviction for they demonstrate what you have just written – the valuelessness of the body and world and the value of the Spirit, which is unchanging.

~ David Hoffmeister

Life is a series of awakenings.

~ Swami Mukerji

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.

~ Cynthia Occelli

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

~ Henry David Thoreau

A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.

~ Tom Wolfe

You know you are truly alive, when you care for every living thing. One day soon, it will be the norm to view others not as competition, but gifts to share this gorgeous planet with, and we will not be able to imagine the loss of but one.

~ Tom Althouse

Rather than going after these walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them, and smell them and get to know them well. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build these walls: what are the stories we tell ourselves? What repels me and what attracts me? Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic or uptight about the investigation. Year after year, we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever arises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem to widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely.

~ Pema Chödrön

He who wishes to know, must seek to understand.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I make time every day to think.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

~ 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

Enlightenment is nothing but to experience your own mind. The experience of the self too is experiencing the intrinsic nature of the mind.

~ Roshan Sharma

In Hindu parlance he had 'realised the Self'; that is to say, he had realised by direct experience that nothing existed apart from an indivisible and universal consciousness which was experienced in its unmanifest form as beingness or awareness and in its manifest form as the appearance of the universe.

~ David Godman

When a man does not dwell in self, then things will of themselves reveal their forms to him. His movement is like that of water, his stillness like that of a mirror, his responses like those of an echo.

~ Zhuangzi

The man who has forgotten self may be said to have entered Heaven.

~ Zhuangzi

I have travelled many places but still I find that perhaps the greatest journey is through one's own mind.

~ Anonymous

There is nothing we could add to that which has already been created....perfection.

~ Vivian Amis

The moment you open yourself completely to the love that awaits your conscious embrace, you are no longer there to receive it.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth.

~ Jed Mckenna

To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.

~ Veronique Vienne