Quotes About Enlightenment

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive - that you can touch the miracle of being alive - then that is a kind of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is finding that there is nothing to find. Enlightenment is to come to know that there is nowhere to go. Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. You are already there - you have never been away. You cannot be away from there. God has never been missed. Maybe you have forgotten, that's all. Maybe you have fallen asleep, that's all.

If enlightenment comes first, before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or no color, which is ready to take form or color. This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this orginal truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

The people to become enlightened in Atlantis lit the "flame of enlightenment" on earth for the first time. The members of the various mystery schools have kept the flame alive by passing on the secret techniques for attaining enlightenment from the time of Atlantis to our present day.

Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment.

There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world. And I don't agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment - or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age. And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries.

The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them.

When? At this time, while you have all the opportunities, if you do not do your best to achieve the pure, stainless path to enlightenment when will you do it? If you don't meditate, don't practise the graduated path to enlightenment, especially bodhicitta, in this life, then when? When will you practise? When will you have this realization? If, in this life, you don't achieve renunciation, bodhicitta and sunyata, as well as the two stages of tantra, when will you? When will you have these attainments? When will you become enlightened? When will you perform perfect work for sentient beings?

There is no beginning to practice nor end to enlightenment; There is no beginning to enlightenment nor end to practice.

"Don't talk about enlightenment," Buddha would say. He was saying don't talk about the nagual. He'd talk about how to get to it.

It's one thing to have the attitude of enlightenment and another thing to act in an enlightened way, which is conduct or activity.

I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

One only passes from the darkness of ignorance to the enlightenment of science if one re-reads with ever-increasing love the works of the ancients. Let the dogs bark, let the pigs grunt! I will nonetheless be a disciple of the ancients. All my care will be for them and the dawn will see me studying them.

Two hundred years ago the forces of freedom challenged this idea. The children of the new enlightenment rose up to defy the tyranny of arrogant clergy and the censorship of pious bureaucrats. They boldly proclaimed that the state must be free from religious coercion and that religion must be free from state control. All individuals have the right to pursue the dictates of their own conscience. All citizens even have the right not to be religious at all.

Attachment is the main thing that is blocking your path towards enlightenment.

I meet people who neglect career. Their lives aren't centered at all. They don't have much money. They have this spaced-out look in their eyes. Their chances for enlightenment are very small, unless they change the way they live.

Because not even the least Dharma is there found or got at. Therefore is it called 'utmost, right and perfect enlightenment'. Self-identical is that Dharma and nothing is therein at variance. Therefore is it called 'utmost, right and perfect enlighten'

When there is no thought in the mind, no thought of thought, when the mind is quiet but fully alert, we experience a little bit of enlightenment.

The high-priests and priestesses of Atlantis had discovered many of the deepest secrets of the universe. They had come to understand all about reincarnation, karma, and the innermost workings of the Enlightenment Cycle.

The greatest obstacle to enlightenment is getting past your delusion that you are not already enlightened.

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.

As an enlightened teacher of Buddhism, I'd like to welcome you to the pathway to enlightenment. I'd like to encourage you to be more positive, to engage in the practice meditation, to learn how to do this wonderful thing - make your mind still in a crazy world.

Hip-Hop is my vehicle to scientific and universal enlightenment

There's a Buddhist story about the guy who wants to be enlightened, and then he gets a cow and a wife and a child, and all these things get in the way of his enlightenment. So, yeah, I have no chance of being enlightened.

Even if we profess to be non-judgmental, there's an inherent judgmentality and hierarchy in which the spiritual person, the conscious person, the mindful person, is more developed than the typical truck driver or waitress or heroin addict. This is a red flag, another problem built into the concept of spirituality. The truth is that every person you meet is in some way more developed than you are, and that the multiple modes of development that a human being can pursue require the whole of humanity to pursue. We're in this together. Enlightenment is a collective effort.

This is a time of great confusion, of great darkness; other networks are slipping in through other dimensional planes. Soon the network of enlightenment will leave this earth.

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

To start from the self and try to understand all things is delusion. To let the self be awakened by all things is enlightenment.

Meditation is not a way to enlightenment, Nor is it a method of achieving anything at all. It is peace itself. It is the actualization of wisdom, The ultimate truth of the oneness of all things.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

You remember, you are drawn back to the pathway to enlightenment, to meditation, and when you begin to meditate your past life knowledge returns to you.

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our Puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.

Everything aids everything, because all things are a reflection of the Buddha mind, of the mind of Enlightenment.

I think there is going to be a large paradigm shift in a few years, and it could either be to a new age of enlightenment and unity and we'll be raised to a new level of consciousness, or it could be a return to a dark age of kings and mass, open oppression followed by a die-off of human culture.

We live in a world of careers. Work, as Sri Krishna points out in the Bhagavad Gita, is a necessary path for everyone attaining enlightenment. It is something that we all do. Some people work very hard at not working.

God is your very being. So the first thing is, don't think about enlightenment as a goal.

When I was working at Omega, I took this Zen retreat, where you're quiet, you don't say anything for a week, and this guy there said, "You're going to be enlightened at the end of this week, that's my goal." I was the engineer, so I was recording everything at it was happening, but I was also participating, because I felt like it. So at the end of it, I did understand what enlightenment was, one-hundred percent.

You find this watered-down enlightenment sold in mass quantity at yoga studios, high-priced shamanism retreats, DJ-fueled Ecstatic Dance parties, ayahuasca ceremonies, and self-empowerment seminars. There's a hope for a quick fix - if only we have the money and right drugs for it.

There are two obstacles to enlightenment: 1. Thinking you know. 2 Thinking you don't know.

Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.

When Zen masters say `effortlessness` they are referring to the state when your enlightenment is well rooted. Now there is no need of any effort; now you can be relaxed and at ease, it will grow on its own accord. It will bring much foliage, and many flowers, and many blessings.

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.