Spirituality Quotes

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.

~ Jay Michaelson

Life gives you exactly what you need to awaken.

~ T. Scott Mcleod

The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusion that we draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the bodhichitta teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in the unconditional openness of the prajna, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.

~ Pema Chödrön

There were so many beliefs which we had about the world, which then influenced everything, everything, about how we saw the world and interacted in the world and were with others. Everything. It was profound to me, amazing, the ramifications, the implications, the far-reaching impact that one’s beliefs could have on the world. It was actually mind-blowing for me. Figuratively speaking. Like, it was just, holy shit. Look at that. And nobody, hardly anybody sees it. They’re just ideas. Ideas. And yet, I’d believed them for so long, and still, was still shirking free of them. How was it that we believed in them, so readily, so easily?

~ T. Scott Mcleod

When I was young, I lacked certainty, too,” he says. “I have the certainty, now, of not needing certainty. I have the certainty, of uncertainty. The peace, with being uncertain. All is good. All is holy. Whatever you choose, it can be fine. Hatred never ceases with hatred, but with love alone is healed. Rejection never ceases with rejection, but with acceptance alone is healed.

~ T. Scott Mcleod

To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is.

~ Robert A.f. Thurman

Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.

~ Walpola Rahula

Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

~ Mark Helprin

The feeling was less like chemical intoxication than being drunk on life. Spinning round and round, he experienced absolute bliss— unadulterated and unconfined—in which he transcended his own personality and became one with everything he perceived.

~ Sol Luckman

Ego is like a street urchin, born of fear and wanting and left to its own devices....

~ Kathleen Dowling Singh

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of negative growth.

~ Eckhart Tolle

When you enter the House of God, you leave your ego at the door and embrace purity as if your life depended on it.

~ Sufian Chaudhary

No time is better spent than that spent in the service of your fellow man.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I just have to make it to the Tuichi' I mumbled to myself, 'I just have to make it to the Tuichi'.Alone, deep in the jungle, so small and insignificant, pitted against nature, still I sensed someone was watching me. Or watching over me.Someone could see me, someone was providing for me

~ Yossi Ghinsberg

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The though of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thsu incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new forms again and again. At present we are living in an era when many of the basic tenets of Christianity, which has supported Western spiritual values for almost two thousand years, have come into conflict with the conclusions of science and philosophy. While religions have lost much of their power, science and technology have not been able to generate convincing value systems to replace them.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In spiritual moments we nearly perceive a grand, divine conspiracy of interconnectedness between us and everything.

~ Bryant Mcgill

People perceive the divine according to their own biases. That doesn’t make the experience any less real.

~ James Rozoff

And so people ask God for signs and wonders. Yet when signs are given and wonders are performed, most can't even see them! I therefore believe that it's not signs people should be asking God for; but you should be asking God for Sight!

~ C. Joybell C.

The goal is not to answer these questions. The goal is to be present to them with all that we are. In a way we are following the poet Rilke's advice when he counseled the young artist, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along into the answer.

~ Adam Bucko

We sacrifice our potential because we do not know that we are pure potential.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened.

~ Hermann Hesse

Children are everything we could have been.

~ Bryant Mcgill

When is the last time your computer restarted you? Don't forget about nature. Recreation means to re-create yourself.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Success is not only in the hand, it is in the heart.

~ Bryant Mcgill

When someone is hard on you it may have very little to do with you.

~ Bryant Mcgill

No one can set your level of worthiness except you.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The old saying that, you are what you eat extends beyond the body, and includes experiences.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Be as light as a feather and when they reach for you — you will blow right by their grip, you will effortlessly flow to safety.

~ Bryant Mcgill

When you are speaking to someone else you are really speaking only to yourself.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

~ Idries Shah

The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else – EVERYTHING else – is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who’s just going about their normal human existence undistracted by the larger questions, that rubbish and debris is everything that makes them who they are. But to someone who wants to get to the truth, who they are is what’s in the way. All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of that hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about the breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole.

~ Jed Mckenna

Enlightenment is when a laptop comes to know that it is a laptop.

~ Girish Kohli

We're shadows! of naught - living, dying! for what's not.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Forms come and go. You, the quantum non-entity behind your human identity, comes nor goes.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

No spiritual master who ever walked the earth has anything on you. You're the complete package, the real deal. You just don't remember it yet.

~ Carrie Triffet

We effect more than we can possibly know. With every mood, every thought, every word, every gesture, we change our lives and our universe.

~ Maharishi Sadasiva Isham