Quotes About Enlightenment

I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, 'Is there enlightenment?' but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.

Enlightenment is construed as seeing things as they really are rather than as they appear; it is a direct insight into, and discernment of, the nature of reality that is apprehended only by wisdom, which transcends and is prior to the activity of discriminative thought. In this view, delusion is defined as all that is opposed to enlightenment.

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.

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.

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

Authenticity is fundamental, more fundamental than spiritual enlightenment. Without authenticity, no genuine spiritual enlightenment is possible. Authenticity is the state of being committed to truth. Truth is simple. And no matter how simply a truth is stated, only those who have walked the path of understanding and evolution on their own can know and understand it authentically. The path of truth is the path least traveled. Authenticity is the clarity of being in which there is no self-deceit.

"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.

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.

Don't judge others. Always be open to them. Avoid the cult mentality, you know, the super-slick, "I'm superior because I meditate, because I'm on the pathway to enlightenment," the subtle ego nonsense, terrible trap.

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

Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.

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."

The most fundamental challenge of the anthropocene concerns agency. For those who lived the Enlightenment dream (always a minority but an influential one), agency was taken for granted. There were existential threats to agency (e.g., determinism) but philosophy mobilized to refute these threats (e.g., by defending libertarianism) or to defuse them (e.g., by showing that they were compatible with agency).

Enlightenment, the old teachers say, adds nothing, except maybe the recognition of a need for and a commitment to the work that still needs to be done.

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

Enlightenment isn't found with a full stomach, or on a soft pillow.

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.

I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition.

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 road to enlightenment is paved with authenticity, not imitation.

Once you have personally experienced enlightenment, you will see beyond the ocean of death to the everlasting shores of immortality.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

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

When light engages the heart, it causes an illumination of the path, a purification of the consciousness, an enlightenment of the intellect and an establishment of the foundations of dhikr and shukr and of beautiful worship.

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

You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your inner enlightenment.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.

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.

Enlightenment is just the beginning, later on come other skills . . . patience, a forgiving nature, extreme attention . . . .

Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn't it?

Sahaja samadhi means that you have just gone back and forth so many times that there is no back and forth. All you see is enlightenment in this world and the other side. There is no other side anymore. It means that you are wakeful.

Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.

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.

A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass

I think Enlightenment as an epistemic ideal involves rejecting the appeal to a fundamental stratum of non-conceptual self-evidence.

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

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!

We can step out of our small sense of self and awaken to this reality. One of the reasons people get confused about freedom, enlightenment, and liberation is because this awakened consciousness has different facets or different dimensions, a bit like a crystal. If you hold this luminous crystal up to the light and turn it, it will take a beam of white light and refract it into the many colors of the spectrum.

Know that originally none of us are from Earth. We all have natural origins off the planet. We are having human experience, but one thing we're going to have to come to understand - and I know that's a lot for some people - is that our heritage is within the galactic origin. We are going to come into alignment with that by remembering our individual origins - and that's going to be a very important part of our enlightenment process.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that.

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

In the new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be - so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it's going.

All souls do not reach enlightenment. Some souls reach a certain point and stay there. Some souls actually decline and go into different cycles.

There's also something that is often mistaken for enlightenment which is a kind of insanity. Often, people will have some kind of weird experience which is quite abnormal and think, "Oh my God, that's it, I understand everything" because they start seeing things in a very weird way and think that's how enlightened people see things as well.

I'd like to say is that we shouldn't have an idea that the goal of spiritual practice is to annihilate ones ego, that would be a mistake. In the early years of enlightenment, psychologists were afraid of Hindus and Buddhists meditating because they thought they were going to shatter their egos and then they'd have to wear diapers or something, like they'd lose their toilet training or what have you. They were really afraid of it.

Enlightenment is your ego's greatest disappointment.

If you seek enlightenment, then career is a very important idea on your agenda. Approach your career from this standpoint and you will have a very different career. You will be successful.