enlightenment

To be taught to read__hat is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak__ut what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think__ay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

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.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Always remember that you are the observer and not the doer. Do not take life to be anything more than acting. Don__ identify yourself too much with the action.Whether you are a wife or husband, a businessman or client, don__ get too involved. Don__ lose yourself in it, for you are simply playing a role in the play. Keep outside of it, and within yourself. These are all necessary parts of life. You must go to work, it is necessary. The play is delightful if you see it as play, but it is fatal if you take it to be life. There is no reason so disrupt your life. You have to play the part that life has given you.

you feel what else is there to do in life apart from living? And even that is out of your control; it depends on an infinite number of factors. Everything is in your unconscious mind. Why sex desire arose in you, why you raised a family, how greed and anger entered you, why you were dishonest, why you accumulated wealth, why you made enemies _ you have no idea! You are just like a puppet, whose strings are being pulled by someone else. You imagine you are dancing, but in fact it is someone else who is making you dance.Look closely at your life and you will find that you are nothing more than a puppet. How can anything real happen in the life of a man who is not his own master, but merely a puppet?

This is the sinking womanwhose soul touched the ocean andcaused it to storm kisses.

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th_ empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule__hen drop into thyself, and be a fool!

There are no crash courses on __nlightenment_, you only crash in a course like that.

Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.

All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

If a man wanted to put the entire universe in his breast, he couldn't do it with his chest stuck out.

Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.

God__ love supersedes all religions and it is the core of all religions.

The secret of enlightenment is the absolute, unequivocal conviction that it exists.What does that mean? It means you have discovered an unshakable confidence in the fact of nonduality__n the perennial mystical revelation that IT_IS . . . and I_AM_THAT. A confidence in that which can never be seen or known is the very ground of the enlightened state. Being is ungraspable, it__ unknowable, it__ ever elusive, and yet it is the only place you can find true confidence in life. Why?_Because it is the very source of life itself.The conscious experience of Being, which is what enlightenment is, has always been the ultimate answer to the most fundamental spiritual questions: Who am I? and Why am I here? Those who have tasted enlightened awareness find that in that experience, any trace of existential doubt and all the questions that go along with it instantaneously disappear. It__ not even that they are answered, but rather, the questions lose their meaning. When you locate the nonrelative, or absolute, nature of consciousness in the depths of your own self, it is experienced as a clarity that is empty of content; a weightiness that is full of nothing in particular; a profound knowing that dissolves all questions. In that questionless state, you find yourself profoundly rooted and radically free, supported by an absolute confidence in the knowing of no-thing that changes everything. The experience of that empty ground is the answer__he one answer that always liberates each and every one of us. You simply know, unequivocally, before thought, that I am. That__ the only answer:_I_AM. There is no why.

Enlightenment doesn__ make us a better person if we seek it just for us. It doesn__ erase our desires or put an end to even our own suffering. In fact it is the suffering that ennobles us.