Adyashanti Quotes

If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.

The Way of Liberation is not a belief system; it is something to be put into practice.

Whatever you want, be it. If you want connection, it's because you are connection. Be what you want, and then it happens all around you. If you want love, be it. You'll have more love than you know what to do with. Whatever you are inside, you receive a thousandfold on the outside.

True freedom is to be free from the desire to be free from anything.

True intelligence does not derive from thought. True intelligence uses thought.

True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks, and recognising itself in them all. With this love you can feel the walls of opposition come down naturally in the acknowledgement of deep connection. Not only do the walls of opposition fall, but love is felt for every human being and for life itself.

If you want to know something, go elsewhere. If you want to un-know everything, then sit and listen.

When you stand in your own authority, based in your own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness, you do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you're willing to be disturbed. You're willing to be amazed. You're willing to be surprised. You're willing to realize that maybe everything you've ever thought about yourself really isn't true.

Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.'

To be here, all you have to do is let go of who you think you are. That's all! And then you realize, "I'm here." Here is where thoughts aren't believed. Every time you come here, you are nothing. Radiantly nothing. Absolutely and eternally zero. Emptiness that is awake. Emptiness that is full. Emptiness that is everything.

There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don’t try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.

In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind.

If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that's not it.

What will carry us into living freedom is not the holding of attention so much as the holding of appreciation.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you has a liberating effect on others.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control.

There is a very Simple Secret to being happy. Just let go of your 'demand' on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. You're Arguing with 'What Is' - Your demands keep you chained to the 'dream-state' of the conditioned mind. The desire to 'control'... is, ultimately, our unwillingness to just be awake.

We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.

True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.

The Truth doesn't answer anything. The Truth IS everything!

Stop all delays, all seeking and all striving. Put down your concepts, ideas and beliefs. For one instant be still and directly encounter the silent unknown core of your being. In that instant Freedom will embrace you and reveal the Awakening that you are.

Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom.

If you filter my words through any tradition or '-ism', you will miss altogether what I am saying. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond—awake and present, here and now already. I am simply helping you to realize that.

No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being.

Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don't expect it to be easy or even noticed.

Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true. It is the way Life suggests that you are not in harmony with what is.

If we look at the world around us, we see that we are conditioned to not listen deeply. Because isn't that what silence is? It's a listening, a deep wordless listening.

The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it's so unimaginably immediate.

There is, quite literally, nothing to understand.

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

The truth is you can't try to let go. Trying is the opposite of letting go. To let go is to relinquish trying. To let go is much more like to let be.

You must choose between your attachments and happiness.

A meditative mind is at ease because it's not trying to acquire anything.

What is really important you can't understand with your mind.

This one question-'What do I know for certain?'-is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.

There's a fierceness about life that calls for a fierceness to not anxiously solve it but to allow it to transform you.

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer.

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?

As you peel it back, in the heart of nothing, that is love. You are what you are seeking. Life is a set up so that each of us can actually see in ourselves the truth for ourselves. What gets taken away are all the exterior means we thought we wanted love to come to us. You have the choice to notice the perfect set up to see love is exactly what you are.

I often describe the Absolute as Pure Infinite Potential, prior to being or becoming anything. It is forever unborn, yet gives birth to all of existence. About our ultimate nature nothing can be said; it must be revealed.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. When you start to see the light that you really are, the light waking up in you, the radiance, you realize it has no intention to change you. It has no intention to harmonize. It has no agenda. It just happens. The Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no agenda. Everything else will have an agenda.

Faith is a withholding of conclusion so that you allow what is to arise.

Grief, unresisted, is grace. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt anymore, it doesn't mean it doesn't rip your heart out....In great grief, there's an incredible love in it. In love there's a tinge of bitter. In true love. My teacher used to say 'all love is bittersweet'. All things experienced fully, reveal their opposite.

Our yearning for truth actually comes from truth.

Right now you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing - not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything. If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you. Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility.

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.