enlightenment

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people__ expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.

Find your bones. Believe in what you are.

I make time every day to think.

He who wishes to know, must seek to understand.

Rather than going after these walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them, and smell them and get to know them well. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build these walls: what are the stories we tell ourselves? What repels me and what attracts me? Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic or uptight about the investigation. Year after year, we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever arises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem to widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely.

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.

A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. _We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

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.

Never once, did Christ ever utter, "I came here to start a religion"Early Christians did not worship items, relics, wars, or governments.

If we recognize that Spirit is all powerful, and cannot be hurt, and that only Spirit exists, then nothing that happens here matters. And we see everyone and everything from the point of wholeness. Even the __eceitful_ thing that happened is probably to teach us a lesson not to value anything of this world, including the body. Miracles bring conviction for they demonstrate what you have just written _ the valuelessness of the body and world and the value of the Spirit, which is unchanging.

Life is a series of awakenings.

The world suddenly opened up, and she was coming to new realizations and a greater awareness, concerning the nature of reality, and the world, which her mortal mind had previously been unable to conceive. She smiled her radiant goddess smile and began to laugh. Her omnipresent peals of mirth resonated through the forest, seeming to echo to the edges of the universe and back. She was getting her first glimpses of the world, seen through the eyes of a goddess; the first sweet tastes of a consciousness empowered beyond all human levels of comprehension, and her spirit was in exultant bliss.

Just as someone obsessed with becoming a millionaire focuses on gaining riches and can miss out on living a fun, balanced life, so someone obsessed with being enlightened or being totally free of all difficulties can also miss out on life. Far healthier to just live a mindful, balanced life and fully participate in what life has to offer.

I have to remind myself that I've always known this: Evolution is not for everybody.

Even more than the time when she gave birth, a mother feels her greatest joy when she hears others refer to her son as a wise learned one.

If you take society__ definition of knowing oneself, you will become lost in the many translations.