Quotes About Enlightenment

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.

Anything but enlightenment is pure pain; it is the lack of enlightenment. There are joys, of course, and they should be enjoyed. There are sorrows, and they should be passed over briefly.

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.

Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.

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

How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.

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

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.

In an evolutionary context, the goal of the spiritual life is not peace; it's perpetual development. Evolutionary enlightenment is about the ecstasy that compels us to create the future. And it's not a future that's going to unfold by itself while we go back to sleep. It's a future that we forge the hard way through direct, conscious, intentional engagement with the life-process itself.

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.

Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.

Our sexual lives are maintained by the shadow side and the light side, so the more we can understand and embrace enlightenment, the less need there is for chemical enhancement.

Every day is a new opportunity to work with what you have inside toward enlightenment.

Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.

We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees. (Gareth van Meer)

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

Reality is not the world as you perceive it. Reality is the world perceived through enlightenment. It's the same world; but it's not the same world.

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 is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.

O Lord, please fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff, and nudge me when I've said enough. Enlightenment is the "quiet acceptance of what is" I believe the truly enlightened beings are those who refuse to allow themselves to be distressed over things that simply are the way they are. - Wayne Dyer Learn the richness of solitude and quiet. That "still small voice" is yearning to be heard.

The secret teaching was the bodhisattva ideal, to live for others, for the welfare of all beings. That's enlightenment, not some flashy state of luminosity.

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.

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

The attainment of enlightenment makes you happy forever. It frees you from the mental and emotional pains that human beings experience every day. You live in a condition of ecstasy, brightness and joy all of the time.

...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.

Metaphysics is the study of how to shift the self. How to get outside the self-reflection and to just gaze with awe and wonder at the countless universes, the countless celestial radiances of mind, of life, of enlightenment, nirvana, or God, whatever you want to call it.

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding. Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind." Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing.

Enlightenment, don't know what it is. It's up to you, the way you think.

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

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 an emergent enlightenment appearing today, unique to no particular culture or ethnicity. Anyone who chooses to be, is its conduit.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.

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

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

Someone who wants to attain enlightenment must be brave. He must rush into the crowd of enemies with a dagger. In the practice of Zen, enemies are our delusive thoughts and passions.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

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

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.

Don't worry. These poses have nothing to do with meditation or 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.

A fully blossomed human potential is enlightenment. It is becoming a child again, and coming back to your original nature.

My "drop in the ocean" will contribute to the enlightenment of Europe, so to speak.