Adyashanti Quotes & Sayings

We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us. — Adyashanti

Our own intuition of what we're called to is reality speaking to us individually and perfectly. We have to listen to how the Infinite talks to us and leads us. Reality, Life the Infinite, God, has a way of leading us in just the perfect way, if we will only just listen to it. — Adyashanti

Myth isn't about factual or historical truth, but about a deeper truth. In ancient times, people saw myth in a very different light - as a vehicle that can transmit and carry a subtlety and richness of experience that simply cannot be conveyed by linear, conceptual forms of language. — Adyashanti

There is profound responsibility in being Love ... more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they'd be crushed by the realization of it. — Adyashanti

Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom. — Adyashanti

Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it. — Adyashanti

Has it ever occurred to you that you are seeking God with His eyes? — Adyashanti

The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere. — Adyashanti

In the end it's all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don't. — Adyashanti

Fear is very often a part of the spiritual path. When people sit down and meditate it's not at all uncommon for fear to arise at some point. — Adyashanti

There is a very Simple Secret to being happy. Just let go of your 'demand' on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. You're Arguing with 'What Is' - Your demands keep you chained to the 'dream-state' of the conditioned mind. The desire to 'control' ... is, ultimately, our unwillingness to just be awake. — Adyashanti

Again, the only way to know that we've seen into the true nature of something is that the story we're telling ourselves releases. — Adyashanti

It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living. — Adyashanti

As you peel it back, in the heart of nothing, that is love. You are what you are seeking. Life is a set up so that each of us can actually see in ourselves the truth for ourselves. What gets taken away are all the exterior means we thought we wanted love to come to us. You have the choice to notice the perfect set up to see love is exactly what you are. — Adyashanti

Only when the pursuit ceases, is it possible to recognize what comprises you: pure being. — Adyashanti

Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself. — Adyashanti

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation. — Adyashanti

My experience of fundamental Truth is that it's a place of extraordinary intelligence. It's a place from which great intelligence arises. I call it a place of absolute infinite potential. — Adyashanti

When emptiness is still, that is eternity. When it moves, that is love. — Adyashanti

The most challenging thing for the spiritual seeker to do is to stop struggling. — Adyashanti

In the heart of a human being,
emptiness becomes love.
When we touch that Source,
instantly the love is present.
Literally, the divine becomes human
and the human becomes divine. — Adyashanti

True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks, and recognising itself in them all. With this love you can feel the walls of opposition come down naturally in the acknowledgement of deep connection. Not only do the walls of opposition fall, but love is felt for every human being and for life itself. — Adyashanti

The word parable comes from a Greek word meaning "comparison or analogy" and is essentially a very brief story that conveys a spiritual truth. A parable is a bit like a riddle: it has a meaning you can't completely understand with the logical, conditioned mind. A parable is meant to present your mind with something that pushes you to go beyond your current level of understanding in order to comprehend it. — Adyashanti

Jesus is saying, Come, come into the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven exists on the face of the earth, and men and women do not understand it. — Adyashanti

If we look at the world around us, we see that we are conditioned to not listen deeply. Because isn't that what silence is? It's a listening, a deep wordless listening. — Adyashanti

All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are. — Adyashanti

Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don't go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are. — Adyashanti

What am I, really? The beautiful thing ... is nobody can tell us what we are. Nobody can really tell us. Not in a way that's going to be satisfactory to us. Our true nature is self-authenticating. When we bump into our true nature, it authenticates itself. Something inside us knows. This ... is what has been sought for, longed for, looked for. This is it. Usually, it's not what we expected ... — Adyashanti

Refuse to disconnect from love and every relationship will be totally transformed; even the relationship with yourself. — Adyashanti

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. — Adyashanti

The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned — Adyashanti

Ego is nothing more than the beliefs, ideas, and images we have about ourselves - and so it is actually — Adyashanti

Retreat is a response to the call of the heart-that call which beckons us toward reality, to the truth of our being, to that which is truly sane, really real and liberating ... When a group of people come together as a response to that kind of inward call, it creates a very powerful environment, where truth is held in the highest esteem and the reality of our being responds to that deepest intention. — Adyashanti

Effortless doesn't mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this "effortless effort." We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness. — Adyashanti

If you prefer smoke over fire
then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing
with more sooty knowledge.

No, I have something else in mind.
Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.

For God is in a mood
to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty
that all that will be left of you
will be a tendency to shine.

So don't just sit around this flame
choking on your mind.
For this is no campfire song
to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.

Jump now into the space
between thoughts
and exit this dream
before I burn the damn place down. — Adyashanti

Reality is always true to itself. When you're in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. — Adyashanti

A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself. — Adyashanti

We must become expressions of, not consumers of, realization. — Adyashanti

Through the whole trajectory from birth to childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal spark within. At the beginning it may be felt as a very subtle, almost incomprehensible intuition, but when we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of what's the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter and brighter in our lives. — Adyashanti

Nobody can give us what we really already are. Wouldn't it be terrible if somebody could give you what you really are? ... 'cause if they could give it to you, they could take it away. — Adyashanti

If we would only see that all limitations are self imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once. — Adyashanti

Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it. — Adyashanti

The first stage of the awakening journey is the calling. The calling arrives when we first feel that spiritual impulse that galvanizes our attention. All of a sudden we sense a greater mystery to life that we seek to experience more deeply; it literally calls us. — Adyashanti

Take one step backward into the unknown. — Adyashanti

Time to cash in your chips
put your ideas and beliefs on the table.
See who has the bigger hand
you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind's shit
off your shoes
undo the laces
that hold your prison together
and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose. — Adyashanti

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can't really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought. — Adyashanti

Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.' — Adyashanti

Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions,
but actually, the opposite is true.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to
answer your questions, but to question your answers. — Adyashanti

Love moves without an agenda. It just moves because that is its nature to move. — Adyashanti

Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That's the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart. — Adyashanti

When you realize what you are now, the issue of death will solve itself. — Adyashanti

As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that's unreality. Life doesn't need to decide who's right and who's wrong. Life doesn't need to know the "right" way to go because it's going there anyway. — Adyashanti

When you inquire 'Who am I?' if you are honest, you'll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn't have an answer, so all of a sudden there is silence. — Adyashanti

What would happen if you were to allow everything to be exactly as it is? If you gave up the need for control, and instead embraced the whole of your experience in each moment that arose? — Adyashanti

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it's about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control. — Adyashanti

Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story. — Adyashanti

There's only one guarantee that Jesus gave: if you can receive and awaken and embody what he is speaking about, then your life will never be the same again. Then you will realize that you're already living in the Kingdom of Heaven. — Adyashanti

What you run away from owns you. You are the dog on a leash. The most you can do is to tug against the leash. — Adyashanti

Actually, all paths lead away from the truth ... how's that? All paths. There's no such thing as a path to the truth. The truth's already here, where are you going? — Adyashanti

Whatever you want, be it. If you want connection, it's because you are connection. Be what you want, and then it happens all around you. If you want love, be it. You'll have more love than you know what to do with. Whatever you are inside, you receive a thousandfold on the outside. — Adyashanti

No matter what spiritual path you've walked or what teachings you've followed, they must lead you back to no path and no teaching. A true teaching is like a blazing fire that consumes itself. The teaching must not only consume you, but consume itself as well. All must be burned to ash, and then the ash must be burned. Then, and only then, is the Ultimate realized. — Adyashanti

In the original Greek, one of the meanings of sin [hamartia] is simply to miss the mark. — Adyashanti

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. — Adyashanti

The light of awakeness itself is the deepest transformative agent, and the deepest alchemy takes place in the willingness to stay conscious to our own unconsciousness. — Adyashanti

Thoughts are just moving through consciousness. They have no power. Nothing has reality until you reach it, grab it, and somehow impregnate it with the power of belief. — Adyashanti

No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being. — Adyashanti

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It
has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the
crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing
through the facade of pretence. It's the
complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true. — Adyashanti

A quiet mind married to integrity of heart is the birth of wisdom. — Adyashanti

Such grace is never held in abeyance, never earned or deserved. It is not given to some and not to others. Grace is ever present; it is only our openness to it that comes and goes. In one sense, The Way of Liberation is a means of opening up to grace. — Adyashanti

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it's so unimaginably immediate. — Adyashanti

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 — Adyashanti

Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence. This is something that many people are looking for without even knowing it. Almost everybody is looking for intimacy - a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union. When we open to life in this way, we begin to find an inner stability simply because we're no longer at odds with our experience. — Adyashanti

What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have, right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment? If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being. — Adyashanti

To be here, all you have to do is let go of who you think you are. That's all! And then you realize, "I'm here." Here is where thoughts aren't believed. Every time you come here, you are nothing. Radiantly nothing. Absolutely and eternally zero. Emptiness that is awake. Emptiness that is full. Emptiness that is everything. — Adyashanti

Life itself is nothing but relationship. — Adyashanti

There's a great space in which this moment takes place. There's a great silence that is listening to the thoughts. — Adyashanti

Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive. — Adyashanti

Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don't expect it to be easy or even noticed. — Adyashanti

When the eternal and the human meet, that's where love is born
not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union. — Adyashanti

As I often tell my students, the person you'll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally. — Adyashanti

True intelligence does not derive from thought. True intelligence uses thought. — Adyashanti

If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that's not it. — Adyashanti

How do I integrate spirituality into my everyday life? Throw out the concept of "spiritual life" and "everyday life." There is only life, undivided and whole. — Adyashanti

The more honest and authentic we are, the more deeply we go into the mystery of our own being.. — Adyashanti

When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing. We are simply acting out of deep programming. But once we have seen the true nature of things
once Spirit has opened its eyes within us
we suddenly know what we're doing. There's a much more accurate sense of whether we're moving or speaking or even thinking from truth or not. When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it's much more painful than we we didn't know our actions were untrue. When we say something to someone that we know is untrue, it causes an inner division that is vastly more painful than when we said the same thing and thought it was true. — Adyashanti

It is easy to imagine that the Buddha, the awakened one, is something or somewhere other than here or that awakening to reality will happen sometime other than now. But as long as we continue to think in terms of time we will deceive ourselves. The you who is chasing enlightenment will never become enlightened.
Instead of striving towards some distant goal that you will never reach, I invite you to stop and ask: How am I avoiding the enlightenment that is already present in each moment? How am I seeing separation where it doesn't exist? — Adyashanti

Awareness yields to itself, to its inherent creativity, to its expression in form, to experience itself. — Adyashanti

One Zen master said, The whole universe is my true personality. This is a very wonderful saying ... If you want to see what you truly are, open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression of your inner reality. Can you embrace all of it? — Adyashanti

Stop all doing and be still. Let the fire of stillness burn everything and reveal That which is Openness. — Adyashanti

Most people don't get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says 'you can't say that' or 'you shouldn't say that' or 'that wasn't appropriate' so most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says that just to be who we are is not OK ... Most human beings have an imprinting that if they're real, if they're honest, somebody's not gonna like it. And they won't be able to control their environment if they tell the truth. — Adyashanti

A meditative mind is at ease because it's not trying to acquire anything. — Adyashanti

Often life is a frantic avoidance of the truth. — Adyashanti

Silence is the only teaching and the only teacher that is there all the time. — Adyashanti

In True Meditation, we're in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself. — Adyashanti

Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself. Imagine your birth as an act of pouring yourself forth into life as a loving means of redemption. Imagine your human life as what you have come to redeem. And when you've fully awakened to all of it, then you've fully redeemed your human incarnation. — Adyashanti

An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary. — Adyashanti

I often describe the Absolute as Pure Infinite Potential, prior to being or becoming anything. It is forever unborn, yet gives birth to all of existence. About our ultimate nature nothing can be said; it must be revealed. — Adyashanti

The mind wants to land, to fixate, to hold a concept, but the only way you can be really free is by not fixating. That's part of true maturity, and it's one of the hardest things for spiritual people who have had true and powerful revelations to go through - to accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, "I am this." Every time you claim, "I am this", you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling. — Adyashanti

When you let go of the egoic self what you're getting in exchange is the whole universe. — Adyashanti

In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind. — Adyashanti