Quotes on Awakening

Being discontented, we either seek a different job or merely succumb to environment...instead of causing us to question life, the whole process of existence.

In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing.

It is only in a very quiet mind that great things are born; and a quiet mind does not come about through effort, through control, through discipline.

As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead. So right through life don't accept a thing, but inquire, investigate. Then you will find that your mind is something really extraordinary, it has no end, and to such a mind there is no death.

Goodness, generosity, or love does not come into being save through the search for reality.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action, which is relationship.

A mind that practices love cannot love.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

By withholding the knowledge of [the Scriptures] from children, we deprive ourselves of the best means of awakening moral sensibility in their minds.

The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind.

You can measure the depth of a person's awakening by how they serve others

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

Anger may bring extra energy, but it eclipses the best part of our brain: its rationality. The energy of anger is almost always unreliable.

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. There is no sense that anything needs to change, but it does change.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what's left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.

Those who awaken never rest in one place. Like swans, they rise and leave the lake. On the air they rise and fly an invisible course. Their food is knowledge. They live on emptiness. They have seen how to break free. Who can follow them?

There is no inherent awakening power in cultural forms that have become dissociated from the wisdom and practicality that gave birth to them. They turn into illusions themselves and become part of the drama of religious culture. Although they can make us happy temporarily, they can't free us from suffering, so at some point, they become a source of disappointment and discouragement. Eventually, these forms may inspire nothing more than resistance to their authority.

I am the perpetrator of my suffering - but only all of it.