Quotes on Seeking, Awakening and Enlightenment

Read these inspirational quotes from the spiritual masters occasionally when you need some motivation. You can also use quotes like this to check your own spiritual development. Just see if you understand them or agree with them now compared to how you felt about them in the past.

Spiritual Seeking

Right here and now, you are in the realized state. But you try to judge it through desires and mind concepts, hence your inability to apperceive it and abide in it.
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.”
― Jed McKenna

“So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to dis-identify 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.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Does one really have to fret about enlightenment?
No matter what road I travel, I’m going home.”
― Shinsho

“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, The Enlightenment Project

“Looking forward” to what you think enlightenment might be at some grand point in the future keeps you from seeing the truth of its presence right now.”
― Enza Vita

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

“In order to know the Truth, you have to be out of your mind.”
― Vivian Amis

“No matter how strange things get, know that with every breath, you are becoming that which you have always been.”
― Eric Micha’el Leventhal

“Because of an innocent misunderstanding you think that you are a human being in the relative
world seeking the experience of oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”
― Adyashanti

“Whatever you think you are, that’s not 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, Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic

Keep quiet. Simply keep still. Don’t give any thought to your mind for one second. Don’t stir any thought and don’t make any effort, for just one second. If you understand what I speak about tell me what will happen when you don’t stir a single thought from the mind and you don’t make any effort. Just these two things; no effort and not giving any thought to the mind! Just for one instant. What will happen?
–Papaji

Awakening or Self-Realization

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

“When you are truly awakened, you have completely stopped trying to become awakened. You simply are. You know that you did not locate awakening; awakening located you.”
― Enza Vita

“You aren’t actually a someone, a person, who is conscious. You are the Awake space of awareness itself, within which all the “thought up” entities in your world appear. Out of all these imagined entities, you have simply made the mistake of thinking that one of them is you.”
― Enza Vita

“Realization is not about you, the wave, realizing it is ocean. The ocean realizes itself in you and reveals itself to have never been just a wave. Nothing changes except the falling away of a false belief.”
― Enza Vita

When the mind adjusts to simply staying here, then that mind is not called mind any more. It’s just Self. It’s only ever Self.
–Mooji

“Being here really is just the invitation to rest as Being. There is nothing you have to do. It is not an invitation to become. You will not be scrutinized, your actions compared with those of others. That’s just unicorn food. Let your river flow as it pleases. Simply observe and recognize that all is unfolding spontaneously when that inner journalist- the ego, is exposed as a myth.”

–Mooji

“Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?”
― Rumi

“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

“When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive it self so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.”
― Adyashanti, ‘The End of Your World’

“It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet, you just find your way between. When you fight, you invite a fight. But when you do not resist, you meet no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“A quiet mind is all you need.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Day by day become more and more intimate with the inner stillness, joy and love which is the fragrance your own pure heart. Keep quiet.”
–Mooji

Enlightenment, Satori, Moksha, Nirvana

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Knowing others is Wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment”
― Lao Tzu

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Anthony de Mello
“Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
― Anthony de Mello

“You cannot still your mind – it is the nature of mind to keep moving. You can only be the stillness that is beyond the mind and be free from thoughts, yet watch the mind experiencing the true essence of life. Transcending the mind is Sanyasa (detachment or renunciation) and freedom that comes with it is Nirvana (liberation).”
― Rashmit Kalra

“Being enlightened ironically means realizing that there is no separate entity that can be enlightened or unenlightened.”
― Enza Vita

“The moment you open yourself completely to the love that awaits your conscious embrace, you are no longer there to receive it.”
― Eric Micha’el Leventhal

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.
–Dogen

“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 pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”
― Adyashanti

“In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t.”
― Adyashanti

“Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.”
― Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

“God dwells in you, as you, and you don’t have to ‘do’ anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state.” Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way.”
–Sri Ramana Maharshi

“All religions are detours on your path to enlightenment”.
-Me