Quotes About Enlightenment

Further, if Spirit has any meaning at all, then it must be eternal, or without beginning or end. If Spirit had a beginning in time, then it would be strictly temporal, it would not be timeless and eternal. And this means, as regards your own awareness, that you cannot become enlightened. You cannot attain enlightenment. If you could attain enlightenment, then that state would have a beginning in time, and so it would not be true enlightenment.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment.

Enlightenment happens only in that moment when there is no complaint in you,when you are not going anywhere, not desiring, not condemning, not judging.You simply exist and with total acceptance. This moment there is 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.

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.

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.

After enlightenment, the laundry.

You have to come to the world of enlightenment with open hands, not clinched fists, without an agenda.

We do not slight the idea of enlightenment, but the most important thing is this moment, not some day in the future. We have to make our effort in this moment. This is the most important thing for our practice.

The fountain of information lies at your fingertips and is accessible anywhere at anytime and schools need to emphasize this. We are no longer in a world where you need to go seek enlightenment, it is everywhere.

There's a path in enlightenment called the path of negation where we intentionally throw ourselves into experiences that are extremely transient. In other words, we do all the stuff you're supposed to normally avoid to become enlightened, intentionally.

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

Relaxation is the point. And if you can relax with an enlightened person his enlightenment will start penetrating you, because when you are relaxed you become porous. When you are tense you are closed; when you relax he will enter

Enlightenment is not so much a hard-won achievement, much less a "creation," but instead is deep relaxation and recovery of our natural condition. You come to see the evolution of the soul, the soul's journey, as a realization of what has always been there in the first place.

If there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to 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.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

This is a world that defines everything backwards, a world in which good is called bad, brightness is called darkness, up is called down, enlightenment is called abnormal behavior and abnormal behavior is applauded as reason.

I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly, as he proclaimed, a savior. Not the savior, not the one and only Son of God. Rather Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.

When we recognize that the seemingly object nature of reality is nothing different than the subject nature of mind, which is rigpa, it is called enlightenment.

The Bible has been used as a way of making us accept our situation, and not to bring enlightenment to the poor.

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

These are the mysterious ways of knowledge, power and enlightenment. I can only allude to them in words. I cannot possibly explain what this process is like.

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.

Those who greatly enlighten delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about enlightenment are sentient beings.

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.

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 soon as the mouth is opened, evils spring forth. People either neglect the root and speak of the branches, or neglect the reality of the 'illusory' world and speak only of Enlightenment. Or else they chatter of cosmic activities leading to transformations, while neglecting the Substance from which they spring--indeed, there is NEVER any profit in discussion.

Art is a necessity, an essential part of our enlightenment process.

Unity is divinity, purity is enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the Goal - Love is the Game - Taking steps are the rules!

My own experience has taught me not to underestimate the power of those who protest against cruelty. I'd also say that there may be a tendency to view the animal-rights opposition in somewhat distorted fashion as a new development, as the product of a very recent enlightenment about the rights due to animals.

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.

Godliness is the fragrance of the man who has attained enlightenment.

Climbing is the lazy man's way to enlightenment. It forces you to pay attention, because if you don't, you won't succeed, which is minor - or you may get hurt, which is major. Instead of years of meditation, you have this activity that forces you to relax and monitor your breathing and tread that line between living and dying. When you climb, you always are confronted with the edge. Hey, if it was just like climbing a ladder, we all would have quit a long time ago.

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.

Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.

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.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

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.

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.

I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move. There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened. All potential experiences are within you already. You can open up to them at any time.