62 Adyashanti Quotes & Pointers

“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.”

“The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.”

“Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.”

“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.”

“The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.”

“Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.”

“Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.”

“The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.”

“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 itself 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.”

“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.”

“As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.”

“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.”

“Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.”

“When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.”

“Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.”

“Whatever you think you are, that’s not it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“This one question — ‘What do I know for certain?’ is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it’s meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions — things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.”

“The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.”

“Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret.”

“There is more truth and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all the shrines, scriptures and stories created to honor an idea of God.”

“that smallest point of light was a thought, just floating out there. And the thought was: ‘I.’ And when I turned and looked at the thought, all I had to do was become interested in it, in any way interested, and this little point of light would move closer and closer and closer. It was like moving close to a knothole in a fence — when you get your eye right up to it, you don’t see the fence anymore; you see what’s on the other side. So as this little point of ‘I’ came closer, I started to perceive through this point called ‘me.’ And I found that in that point called ‘me’ was the whole world. The whole world was contained within that ‘I,’ within that little point called ‘me.’ There wasn’t really an I, but an emptiness that could go into and out of that point, in and out of it, and it’s like the whole world could flicker on and off, and on and off, and on and off.”

“Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is.”

“When many of the old saints and sages say, ‘Your world is a dream. You’re living in an illusion,’ they’re referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.”

“Everyone around us sees themselves as essentially different from others, and from life in general. So we move in a world where almost everyone we meet will be reflecting back to us this egoic sense of consciousness. To find liberation, we must wake up from this dream that our mind creates, that we’re something separate than everything around us.”

“True Meditation is the space in which everything gets revealed, everything gets seen, everything gets experienced. And as such, it lets go of itself. We don’t even let go. It lets go of itself.”

“When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer. It’s not obvious until you look at it, but when we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in the world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. At that moment, we begin to experience a sense of isolation, where we no longer feel connected to each other in a very rich and human way, but we find ourselves receding more and more into the world of our minds, into the world of our own creation.”

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. 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 — from ourselves to the world.”

“With a true and authentic awakening, who and what we are becomes clear. There’s no longer a question about it; it is a done deal. In this way, one of the hallmarks of a true awakening is the end of seeking. You no longer feel the momentum, the push and the pull. The seeker has been revealed as the virtual reality it always was, and as such it disappears. The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task.”

“As I watched and observed, day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, one day I had an epiphany: ‘Oh my gosh! Adults believe what they think! That’s why they suffer! That’s why they get into conflict. That’s why they behave strangely, in ways that I don’t understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head.’

What I realized was that adults spent a lot of time thinking, and more important than that—and more odd, it seemed to me—they actually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.

All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one’s thinking and beliefs.”

“Who really wants to find out that we’re all addicted to qualities like approval, recognition, control, and power, and that none of these things actually brings an end to suffering? In fact, they’re the cause of suffering! So the truth is that most of us don’t really want to wake up. We don’t really want to end suffering. What we really want to do is manage our suffering, to have a little bit less of it, so that we can just go on with our lives as they are, unchanged, the way we want to live them, maybe feeling a little better about them.”

“When we start to suffer, it tells us something very valuable. It means that we are not seeing the truth, and we are not relating from the truth. It's a beautiful pointer. It never fails.”

“We realize — often quite suddenly — that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us, it has no center.”

“When someone tells you, ‘I love you,’ and then you feel, ‘Oh, I must be worthy after all,’ that’s an illusion. That’s not true. Or someone says, ‘I hate you,’ and you think, ‘Oh, God, I knew it; I’m not very worthy,’ that’s not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, ‘I love you,’ he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, ‘I hate you,’ she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views — literally.”

“Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?”

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

“Beyond even any teaching, though, the aspect of spiritual life that is the most profound is the element of grace. Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know. In this gap of not knowing, in the suspension of any conclusion, a whole other element of life and reality can rush in. This is what I call grace. It’s that moment of ‘ah-ha!’ — a moment of recognition when we realize something that previously we never could quite imagine.”

“When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.”

“One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, ‘Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.’ I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.”

“The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.”

“Whatever the image of yourself, it’s a mask and it’s hiding emptiness.”

“If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body—in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.”

“You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.”

“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.”

“I remember hearing a talk from a very famous Tibetan teacher, a man who had spent many years in a small, stone hut in the Himalayas. He was crippled, and so he couldn’t use either one of his legs. He told a story of how a big boulder fell on his legs and broke them, and he spent many years in a stone hut, because there was really nothing that he could do. It was hard for someone with broken legs to get around much in the Himalayas. He told the story of being in this small hut, and he said, ‘To be locked in that small hut for so many years was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was a great grace, because if it wasn’t for that, I would never have turned within, and I would never have found the freedom that revealed itself there. So I look back at the losing of my legs as one of the most profound and lucky events of my whole life.’ Normally, most of us wouldn’t think that losing the use of our legs would be grace. We have certain ideas about how we want grace to appear. But grace is simply that which opens our hearts, that which has the capacity to come in and open our perceptions about life.”

“The notion that we are separate is not really true; it’s all made up. It’s all conjured up in our mind. It’s one big dream that we have. The difficulty with this dream is that almost everybody around us is having the same dream. It’s essentially the collective dream of humanity. So it’s not just you or me that’s dreaming; almost all human beings are also having this dream of being separate, of being completely other than the world around them. What this means is that we really have to look within ourselves quite deeply, because we’re not only looking beyond our own deluded mind, our own misunderstanding; we’re looking beyond the delusion of the entirety of humanity.”

“By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you’ve got a very convincing, though divided, self.”

“Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.”

“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.”

“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. Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of conditioned mind. The problem is that when there is a demand, you completely miss what is now. Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand, and even to the demand for love. If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again. But as soon as you let go, there is knowing in that instant that there is love here already. The mind is afraid to let go of its demand because the mind thinks that if it lets go, it is not going to get what it wants - as if demanding works. This is not the way things work. Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love, and your heart becomes full. Stop trying to be a better person, and you are a better person. Stop trying to forgive, and forgiveness happens. Stop and be still.”

“I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.”

“TO BE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AT THE SAME TIME Is it possible to start to feel, in this very moment, that our bodies, our minds, and even our personalities are ways through which our spiritual essence connects with the world around us? That these bodies and minds are actually sensing organs for spirit? Our physical forms are the vehicle through which spiritual essence gets to experience its own mysterious creation—to be bewildered by its creation, shocked by it, in awe of it, and even confused by it. Spirit is pure potential that contains every possible outcome. From the standpoint of our spiritual essence, nothing is to be avoided. No experiences need to be turned from. Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.”

“In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.”

“It’s important to note, as well, that we do not become immune to misperception simply because we’ve had a glimpse of awakening. Certain fixations and conditionings will linger even after we perceive from the place of oneness. The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations — our hang-ups, you might say.”

“As we go through life, we eventually have enough experience to see that sometimes profound difficulty can also be profoundly heart opening. When you are in a tough position, when you are facing something hard, when you feel challenged, when you feel like you are at your edge, it is a gift to be willing to stop, to sit with those moments, and not look for the quick, easy resolution for that feeling. It is a kind of grace to be able and willing to open yourself entirely to the experience of challenge, of difficulty, and of insecurity.”

“Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it’s necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source.”

“The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.”