329 quotes found
“Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enl...”
“He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.”
“If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.”
“Everybody is seeking to reach higher self but hardly anyone reaches.”
“It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.”
“I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come.”
“How can I know these trees, how can I know you, how can I know the other if I myself am unknown to me, if I am myself ignorant; when I do not know who I am.”
“The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with ever nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all th...”
“Hence there is no free admission to the process of enlightenment - it is always paid at a psycho-traumatic cost. Only such individuals as always already bring along much more injury than could be c...”
“Enlightenment isn't the end but the beginning, the start of a journey that a small group of people begun while the rest sleeps.”
“We believed in another world, but we admitted the feebleness of our senses. Then came 'enlightenment,' and made everything so very clear and enlightened, that we can see nothing for excess of light...”
“I am not my mind, because I can observe my thoughts. So the observer is different from the observed I am not my mind. he found that there is no atman, no soul, because this atma is nothing but you...”
“When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void. Then you can surrender; then you have surrendered.”
“Knowing it, you know the very heartbeat of existence. Knowing it, you have known all that is worth knowing, and you have achieved all that is worth achieving. It opens doors to all the mysteries of...”
“At some magical instant you realize a deep Harmony with the universe. Enlightenment is that harmony.”
“A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions...”
“We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to lifes tragic beauty.”
“I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me ...”
“Divinity never forces itself upon you. If you are willing, it is always there for you. If you are not willing, it is not there for you. So all you need to do is create the right kind of willingness...”
“Essentially, thought and emotion. If you make these two things unimportant, there is room for something to happen. Life is very, very simple and direct, but the mind is very complex and devious. If...”
