Quotes About 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.

In the assemblies of the enlightened ones there have been many cases of mastering the Way bringing forth the heart of plants and trees; this is what awakening the mind for enlightenment is like. The fifth patriarch of Zen was once a pine-planting wayfarer; Rinzai worked on planting cedars and pines on Mount Obaku. . . . Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.

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.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We could also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.

Zen students see themselves as athletes. Their competitive sport is enlightenment; only with enlightenment do we compete.

Let's consider: at the time of the Buddha, when he attained enlightenment, according to the old texts, in the first watch of the night, he went through all of his past lifetimes. Then in the second watch of the night, his mind opened still further and encompassed the coming into being and dying and re-coming into being of all beings, everywhere. The third watch of the night, he realized interdependent origination. He realized interdependent origination because he saw it. It wasn't some theory he thought up. He saw it. That was his enlightenment experience. That was why he was a Buddha.

There was a famous Zen master whom people would seek out to become enlightened. He was strict and would occupy people with things having nothing to do with seeking enlightenment. You see, that is the only way to achieve enlightenment; by not focusing on achieving it. Then, one day it will just come to you.

Madness is not enlightenment, but the search for enlightenment is often mistaken for madness.

Since it is the practice of enlightenment, that practice has no beginning and since it is enlightenment within the practice, that realization has no end.

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?

They can't stop you if, in your heart, you seek enlightenment, empowerment, balance and knowledge.

To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist. One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.

Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.

By renouncing samsara, we renounce our habitual grasping, unhappy minds. And by renouncing samsara, we embrace our potential for enlightenment.

The recurrence during the eighteenth century Enlightenment of the aspiration to be the 'Newton of the moral sciences' testifies to the prestige not just of celestial mechanics, but of the 'experimental method' more generally.

Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures,With no reliance on words and letters.A direct pointing to the human mind,And the realization of enlightenment.

Understanding others is knowledge, Understanding oneself is enlightenment; Conquering others is power, Conquering oneself is strength.

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.

You saw me vacillating between error and truth, loving them equally because unable to distinguish the one from the other; the hour marked out by God for my enlightenment has come: He has shown me the powerlessness of reason, and the necessity of faith.

Through meditative techniques, one can free the mind of delusions and attain what we call enlightenment.

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.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

The United States cannot reshape other countries in its own image and that, with a few exceptions, its efforts to police the world are neither in its interests nor within the scope of its resources. This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable.

There's a source, there's a perennial source from which all things come forth. We call it the Godhead, Nirvana, the Tao, enlightenment. It's big; it's bright; it's perfect, as are all of its children, as are we.

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.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.

...photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot.

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.

There's many lanes on the highway of enlightenment, they don't have to be on the razor's edge like the yellow line dotted in the middle. Balance is appropriate, not too tight, not too loose, the Middle Way as we call it in Buddhist dharma teachings.

Enlightenment will be now the beginning, not the end. Beginning of a non-ending process in all dimensions of richness.

Every moment gives birth to the next moment and influences it. Getting out of that chain of perpetual being is getting off the wheel of birth and death. That is enlightenment.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.

The religious wars showed that the Christian faith was no longer Europe's unifying force. A new common ground was needed, and it was found in reason, which is something that is shared by all of mankind. This was one of the roots of the Enlightenment and its concept of universal human rights.

Neither my life of luxury in the palace -nor- my life as ascetic in the forest were ways to enlightenment.

If you seek to develop the mind fully, for the enlightenment process, you will benefit if your career is related to computer science, law, medicine, or the arts.

Enlightenment is the realization of the oneness of being, where otherness disappears.

Tantra is not sexual yoga. When the word tantra is used in the West, very often people immediately associate it with some kind of sexual yoga in which you use sex as a vehicle for enlightenment.

A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

Enlightenment is part of everything and so our minds have to be very big to encompass all things, to understand all things - To see the tao in a grape, the act of sexuality, meditation, work, play, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, being sick and hurting.

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

Teachers must be celebrated for moving civilization from ignorance to enlightenment, from apathy to responsibility.

Enlightenment requires discipline, balance, knowledge, power, happiness and a sense of responsibility and sacrifice, being able to do things with your life that you would not have done otherwise.

I am making an Enlightenment Capsule for the audience to meditate inside - virtual reality in which people can experience ancient ideas from the East... But I'm not interested in using ancient things; rather I want to connect them with contemporary life through the technology we have now.

Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.

One of my purposes is to use the television show as a voice to not only entertain people, as I did in the beginning, but as a source of information, as a source of enlightenment, wherever we can, and also as a source of lifting people up wherever you can.

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

When I meditate, people see manifestations of light when I go into samadhi and through the samadhis. Sometimes the energy of enlightenment is so clear that people don't realize that their attention has been elevated.

Right now we have obtained a human rebirth and have the opportunity to attain enlightenment through Dharma practice, so if we waste this precious opportunity in meaningless activities there is no greater loss and no greater foolishness.