Quotes About Enlightenment

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

Ashrams often become places where there is a hierarchy and a pecking order and not much enlightenment. That is what some people are drawn to. But that has nothing to do with enlightenment.

You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free. Maybe it will. But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one.

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.

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

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

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

The miracle of enlightenment is that you take the self and let it dissolve in the white light of eternity.

Without enlightenment, everything in life is harsh. Sooner or later you see everyone you love die, unless you die first, of course. This causes you to suffer.

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.

I think it's so important to have a practice, because the consciousness isn't perfection or enlightenment or any of that bullshit. The consciousness is, "Oh, I'm walking down the street and I'm doing nothing."

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'

Broadly speaking, I learned to recognize sin as the refusal to live up to the enlightenment we possess: to know the right order of values and deliberately to choose the lower ones: to know that, however much these values may differ with different people at different stages of spiritual growth, for one's self there must be no compromise with that which one knows to be the lower value.

Every human being has consciousness, but not every human being has the same amount. The potential for each one of us human beings is infinite consciousness. This is called supreme enlightenment, and it just needs unfolding by transcending each day. The more consciousness we have, the better life is.

You discover the goal of existence by living it. The present is the only time when you can evolve, experience the divine, expand your awareness, or reach enlightenment. But this cannot be a haphazard journey that falters and wanders off the path. It's easy for that to happen when a crisis develops. Sudden losses and setbacks shake everyone up; those who keep moving forward are buoyed by knowing that their path cannot be destroyed, only interrupted.

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.

Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags... Those are the things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science. Computers, vaccines, space stations... Even the divine miracle of creation. Matter from nothing... In a lab. Who needs God? No! Science is God!

Don't care what anybody says about enlightenment, except the enlightened and those who seek it.

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.

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.

When we want a cup of tea our main wish is to drink tea, but to fulfill this wish we naturally develop the secondary wish to find a cup. In a similar way, the main wish of those who have great compassion is to protect all living beings from their suffering, but to fulfill this wish they know they must first attain Buddhahood themselves and so they naturally develop the secondary wish to attain enlightenment.

The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.

Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.

There comes a time when a race of beings makes a decision. When they chose to reject enlightenment, it's the end of their world because the karma is inevitable. They have to destroy themselves.

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

Books simply help you to see what is already within your self. That's what enlightenment is all about.

Aging is like enlightenment at gunpoint. Before I had cancer, I lived my life for my art. After I had cancer, I lived my art for my life. I’ve always said dance is the breath made visible. That covers about everything because once you stop breathing and the breath is no longer visible, you stop moving.

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.

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

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 is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal, something we want to become.

One should study the Bible alongside other intellectual traditions - such as British constitutionalism, Enlightenment liberalism, and classical republicanism - in order to truly understand the American founding.

It is not after we understand the truth that we attain enlightenment. To realize the truth is to live - to exist here and now.

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.

There is no one way to salvation, whatever the manner in which a man may proceed. All forms and variations are governed by the eternal intelligence of the Universe that enables a man to approach perfection. It may be in the arts of music and painting or it may be in commerce, law, or medicine. It may be in the study of war or the study of peace. Each is as important as any other. Spiritual enlightenment through religious meditation such as Zen or in any other way is as viable and functional as any "Way."... A person should study as they see fit.

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

In Nepal, I realized a certain part of my spiritual search had come to an end. I wasn't ever going to live in a Himalayan cave (I like electricity and a soft bed way too much), and I sure wasn't going to find enlightenment so easily.

Enlightenment is the journey back from the head to the heart.

Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.

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.

Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)

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.

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.

The Zen of doing anything is doing it with a particular concentration of mind, a calmness and simplicity of mind, that brings the experience of enlightenment and, through that experience, happiness.

Knowing your own ignorance is the first step to enlightenment.

Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death.