Quotes & Sayings About Awakening Enlightenment

From human problems come human solutions, which in turn spawn inspiration, creativity, insight and enlightenment. Without life's problems, life would become stagnant, dull and boring. — Beth Johnson

Zen has a pronounced iconoclastic tendency, and regards the study of texts, doctrines, and dogmas as a potential hindrance to spiritual awakening, relying instead on humour, spontaneity, unconventionality, poetry, and other forms of artistic expression to communicate the idea of enlightenment — Damien Keown

Life is a series of awakenings. — Swami Mukerji

If you go to war with your mind, you will always be at war. — T. Scott McLeod

We are all born to fly. Instead, we sit on the branches afraid of the leap into the unknown. But the unknown is where enlightenment lives. Our true nature is the unknown. — Enza Vita

You can continue to cry over the same pain & complain about the same situations or you can expand your mind and you can grow. Maybe im not alone when I say, sometimes we all get a little confused and feel like we owe it to the people and places to try harder when in reality, most of the time lessons become lifelong if we don't learn the art of peaceful detachment early in the game. — Nikki Rowe

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man. — Gautama Buddha

There is nothing we could add to that which has already been created ... perfection. — Vivian Amis

It is the ultimate religion, through which all humans neuropsychologically morph into Buddhas, or Enlightened Beings. — Abhijit Naskar

Whoever does decide to awaken should put their whole effort, attention, and life into it, in order to make it succeed. — Belsebuub

No spiritual master who ever walked the earth has anything on you. You're the complete package, the real deal. You just don't remember it yet. — Carrie Triffet

You have eternity to experience your awakened self. So why not enjoy the dream while you're in it, even if it is limited? — Teresa Tsalaky

The point of the overall meditative path is to have Wakefulness (or Consciousness as Such) transcend and include all state-realms, so it ceases to "black out" or "forget" various changes of state (such as dreaming and deep sleep), and instead recognizes a "constant Consciousness" or ever-present nondual Awareness, the union (and transcendence) of individual finite self and infinite Spirit. — Ken Wilber

But if we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we may well be walking past one of the widest gateways to enlightenment. It is a misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace. Profundity in fact resides in what we see in the world. Spiritual awakening arrives from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other. It may even erupt from the fear and rage that we tiptoe around. The challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things that the spiritual path to awakening requires us to tend to as aspirants to peace. — Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Let one who seeks not stop seeking until that person finds. — T. Scott McLeod

What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided. — Adyashanti

Everyone is good if you see from good side. — Sushil Singh

The most fundamental exercise is self-observation, which is the catalyst for inner change, it will give self-knowledge and a clear mind and perception. Without it, the attempt to reach enlightenment and awaken consciousness is destined to fail. — Belsebuub

Evolve and see what comes with you anything that doesn't has taught you all you need to know. — Nikki Rowe

You will bring yourself the suffering you need to bring yourself so that you may awaken. — T. Scott McLeod

The degree to which your Consciousness expands, is the degree to which you understand yourself and the universe. — Gina Charles

An idea of awakening is not awakening. It's simply an idea. It's not the real thing. The real thing happens in our lives. — Belsebuub

Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous. — Bruce Lee

Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world. — Ramana Maharshi

Pico Iyer: And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps. — Krista Tippett

Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14) — Jean-Yves Leloup

True wisdom is being able to say 'it is what it is' with a smile of celebratory wonder on your face. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Those who are actively seeking enlightenment will not find it because the act of looking for it is the distraction from it. — Enza Vita

The bottom line remains the same: you're either awake or you're not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles. — Jed McKenna

We are all equally capable of spiritual awakening. It may not seem that way, at times. Some of us are so caught up in the drama of our day-to-day existence that we have lost track of who we really are. But eventually, all of us will make the discovery of our true nature. — Victor Shamas

Our lives are a divine expression no matter how messy and weird they may be. How much more meaningful can it get? The source is experiencing itself in form in a conscious, awake way. — Enza Vita

Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream. — Muso Kokushi

Death is not like going to sleep, it's more like waking up from a dream and realizing the person you were in the dream wasn't you, the problems you had in the dream weren't your problems and waking up from the dream to this world is like going back to sleep again and waking up in a dream world, forgetting who we are again and getting lost in the dream character, the character who we think we are and who has problems. Waking up in a dream and realizing we are not the dream character but the dreamer is enlightenment. — Emmanuel Diogu

Whatever happens, love that. — Matt Kahn

Only love can be shared, and the attempt to 'share' an illusion is literally impossible. — David Hoffmeister

You know you are truly alive, when you care for every living thing. One day soon, it will be the norm to view others not as competition, but gifts to share this gorgeous planet with, and we will not be able to imagine the loss of but one. — Tom Althouse

I've heard that sometimes a version of you must die before another more enlightened version can be born. I think that's true after watching the corpse of myself walk around. — Julie Flygare

The irony of life is a twisted game; but my god you learn fast, the ins and outs of how to play your part the best you can. — Nikki Rowe

On any given day, you will reach to the state of realization; you will never find any other God, except you. You are the God, you are searching for, either externally or internally. — Roshan Sharma

There is no separate entity that could be enlightened or unenlightened. There are only innumerable expressions of the One Being (which we call people, animals, forms), mirror-like facets, reflecting being-ness back to itself. — Enza Vita

Question what you think is enlightenment. — Jon Bernie

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway ... Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing. — Natalie Goldberg

Judge not, lest ye miss out on all the fun. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are. — Adyashanti

Thoughts, by their nature, come and go endlessly in you. But you are not the thought; you are the one seeing the thought, so any thought of who you are cannot be the truth of who you are. — Enza Vita

The less human you feel, the more human you become. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Love awakens the soul. — A.D. Posey

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

The less you know, the more you will be known
The less you want, the more you will have
The less you are, the more you will be — Vivian Amis

Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.
- Sanskrit poem — Robin Craig Clark

I had less and became more. — Nikki Rowe

Whatever experiences we may come across in our spiritual journey we are not any of those experiences but rather the one who is witnessing them, the pure awareness cognizing them without thought. — Enza Vita

Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken. — T. Scott McLeod

Enlightenment, awakening or liberation can never be attained by seeking or desiring. It is realized only through experience. — Gian Kumar

Once you awaken, you will have no interest in judging those who sleep. — James Blanchard Cisneros

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is. — Alan Watts

Now, what's stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history. — Laurie Perez

The essence of death is discovered in the gap between one moment ceasing and another one beginning. That essence is the wakefulness that is our true nature. — Enza Vita

It is not you as the ego who moves through life, but that life flows before you, and you are the immutable awareness containing it all. — Enza Vita

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction. — Cynthia Occelli

I never realized it was all a game,
until I started winning. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Seeked of self love. — Nikki Rowe

Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God. — Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

Change is the very nature of Nature. if there's one thing that doesn't change, it is the fact that everything changes. In the Korean tradition of Tao, this is called impermanence. The teaching about impermanence can be summarized like this: Anything that has a beginning must have an end. Anything that is created will change. Impermanence is the very nature of things. Realizing that nothing is permanent is the true beginning of enlightenment. Suffering comes from attachment that wants to hold something permanently that is not permanent in its intrinsic nature. Awakening to the truth of impermanence frees you from attachment. — Ilchi Lee

Life gives you exactly what you need to awaken. — T. Scott McLeod

For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away. — Carl Sagan

There is a rose in every heart. Enlightenment is recognizing that rose. — Amit Ray

Love is that which gives of itself. — Vivian Amis

No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate "spiritual logic of late capitalism" uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates the permanent transgression of all rules, the violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to enlightenment; it overcomes old-fashioned "binary" thought, the dualism of mind and body, in claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) is the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from "saying yes" to all bodily needs, not from denying them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. The body is not something to be cultivated or crafted into an expression of spiritual truths, rather it is immediately the "temple for expressing divinity. — Slavoj Zizek

Knowing the Truth is not based on knowledge, but on being "it". — Vivian Amis

Realization is the direct seeing that this entity you have believed yourself to be has its roots in something infinitely vast and that this entity is not separate from that vastness, the source, the absolute. — Enza Vita

There is a Zen story (very funny - ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve "enlightenment" (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk's cell and said, "Come out here - I want to talk to you." "I can't get out," the monk said. "My horns won't fit through the door." I can't get out . . . At these words, the monk was "enlightened." Never mind what "enlightenment" means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us. EXERCIZES — Robert Anton Wilson

Awakening involves mind training. Step back and pay attention to the thoughts that come into awareness. Feel your desire for healing. Preferences are judgments, and as the mind yields to the nonjudgmental Perspective of the Holy Spirit, the Awakening is obvious. Observe that as long as appetites seem to exist there are the ego defenses of indulgence and repression. Neither is better or worse than the other, for they are the same illusion. The miracle offers a real alternative and when one is consistently miracle-minded, defenses are no longer needed. — David Hoffmeister