Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.
AdyashantiRead
The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that true understanding comes from experiencing our nature rather than overthinking it. It emphasizes the idea that enlightenment is a realization of the inherent connection to divinity.
Adyashanti's quote delves into the idea that our true nature is often obscured by the mental chatter and preconceived notions we hold about ourselves. He encourages us to move beyond the distractions of thought and self-concept to experience a direct connection with the divine, indicating that enlightenment is a playful realization of our unity with the universe. The notion of 'cosmic humor' implies that this awakening brings a lightness and joy that contrasts with the seriousness with which we often approach life.
Themes
SelfEnlightenmentDivinityExperienceCosmic HumorNature
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a meditation retreat to encourage participants to experience themselves beyond their thoughts.
More from Adyashanti
All quotes →If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.
AdyashantiRead
Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.
AdyashantiRead
The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things. We don't come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don't come to clarity by avoiding confusion.
AdyashantiRead
Our illusions-the beliefs we hold on to-are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them without grasping or pushing away. We must not believe them, but we must not run away from them either. We need to see each moment of apparent bondage as an invitation to freedom. Then it becomes an act of love, an act of compassion, to stop running away.
AdyashantiRead
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?
AdyashantiRead
Similar quotes
You can't help the poor by being one of them.
Abraham LincolnRead
On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
Thomas JeffersonRead
There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history's clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where this end has justified that means, where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace. Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative.
Douglas MacarthurRead
This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
Willa CatherRead
There will be no major solution to the suffering of humanity until we reach some understanding of who we are, what the purpose of creation was, what happens after death. Until those questions are resolved we are caught.
Woody AllenRead
No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.
A. J. LieblingRead