Adyashanti famous quotes

True freedom is to be free from the desire to be free from anything.
-- Adyashanti

#Desire #True Freedom

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion,you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.
-- Adyashanti

#Confused #Sadness #Thinking

The biggest embrace of love you'll ever make is to embrace yourself completely. Then you'll realize you've just embraced the whole universe, and everything and everybody in it.
-- Adyashanti

#Love You #Realizing #Embrace

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

#Flow #Harmony #Existence

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don't want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren't working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don't want to know what's not convenient. So we pretend not to know.
-- Adyashanti

#Growing Up #Needs #Looks

When the eternal and the human meet, that's where love is born -- not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union.
-- Adyashanti

#Love Is #Escaping #Humanity

Spirituality does not require that you work hard toward achieving a result in the future as much as it requires you to be fully present, sincere and committed now, with absolute honesty and willingness to uncover and let go of any illusions that come between you and the realization of Reality.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Honesty #Hard Work

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 pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
-- Adyashanti

#Enlightenment #Crumbling #Becoming

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it's about letting go of control.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Real #Meditation

What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have, right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment? If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Giving Up #What If

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

#Silence #Meditation #Different

True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Meditation

The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare.
-- Adyashanti

#Awakening #Belief #Barriers

If we would only see that all limitations are self imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once.
-- Adyashanti

#Self #Leap #Chosen

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Uplifting #Hate #Love You

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what's left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.
-- Adyashanti

#Ideas #World #Brightness

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

#Simple #Giving #Silence

Can you imagine if you really let it in that you are not a problem to be solved in any way? Imagine you knew that anything that would tell you otherwise is just a movement of thought in the mind that says "Whatever is, isn't the way it is supposed to be." So the biggest act of compassion starts within. And when the self is no longer seen as a problem, this is called "the peace that passes all understanding."
-- Adyashanti

#Compassion #Self #Understanding

Often life is a frantic avoidance of the truth.
-- Adyashanti

#Compassion #Life Is #Avoidance

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Jobs #Nice #Mean

It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.
-- Adyashanti

#Christian #Buddhist #Teaching

Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don't expect it to be easy or even noticed.
-- Adyashanti

#Heart #Easy #Goodness

The mind wants to land, to fixate, to hold a concept, but the only way you can be really free is by not fixating. That's part of true maturity, and it's one of the hardest things for spiritual people who have had true and powerful revelations to go through - to accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, "I am this." Every time you claim, "I am this", you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Spiritual #Powerful

True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks, and recognising itself in them all. With this love you can feel the walls of opposition come down naturally in the acknowledgement of deep connection. Not only do the walls of opposition fall, but love is felt for every human being and for life itself.
-- Adyashanti

#Wall #Fall #Love You

Have you noticed, with whatever quality of love you have experienced, that when true love arises, it opens up both your mind and emotions? It's an openness to whatever is happening.
-- Adyashanti

#Love #Mind #Quality

Most human beings spend their lives battling with opposing inner forces: what they think they should do versus what they are doing; how they feel about themselves versus how they are; whether they think they’re right and worthy or wrong and unworthy. The separate self is just the conglomeration of these opposing forces. When the self drops away, inner division drops away with it.
-- Adyashanti

#Thinking #Self #Division

One must be willing to stand alone - in the unknown, with no reference to authority or the past or any of one's conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility.
-- Adyashanti

#Humility #Past #Innocence

The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
-- Adyashanti

#Looks #May #Easy

Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being. 
-- Adyashanti

#Enlightenment #Natural #Ends

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?
-- Adyashanti

#Spiritual #Intimate

Fear is very often a part of the spiritual path. When people sit down and meditate it's not at all uncommon for fear to arise at some point.
-- Adyashanti

#Spiritual #People #Down And

What the universe will manifest when you are in alignment with it is a lot more interesting than what you try to manifest
-- Adyashanti

#Interesting #Trying #Manifest

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer.
-- Adyashanti

#Prayer #Goal #Meditation

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.
-- Adyashanti

#Spiritual #What Matters #Discovery

The proof of the depth and embodiment of your realization will be seen in your love relationship. That's where the proof is in the pudding. If it all collapses in your relationship, you have some work to do. And people do have a lot of difficulties in their relationships.
-- Adyashanti

#People #Love Relationship #Depth

At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form.
-- Adyashanti

#Giving #Confusion #Humanity

There's a great space in which this moment takes place. There's a great silence that is listening to the thoughts.
-- Adyashanti

#Space #Silence #Listening

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Thinking #Grace #May

The more honest and authentic we are, the more deeply we go into the mystery of our own being..
-- Adyashanti

#Positive Thinking #Being Positive #Honest

There is, quite literally, nothing to understand.
-- Adyashanti

This world is not my concern; it is myself.
-- Adyashanti

#World #This World #Concern

A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself.
-- Adyashanti

#Acceptance #Transcendence

Self-inquiry is a spiritually induced form of wintertime. It's not about looking for a right answer so much as stripping away and letting you see what is not necessary, what you can do without, what you are without your leaves.
-- Adyashanti

#Self #Inquiry #Answers

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Beautiful #Mean #Suffering

In Liberation, you stand alone. You stand alone because you need no supports of any kind. You need no supports because you have realized that the very notion of a separate you no longer exists; that there is nothing to support; that the whole ego experience was a flimsy illusion. So you stand alone but never, never lonely because everywhere you look, all you see is That, and You are That.
-- Adyashanti

#Lonely #Support #Ego

Gratitude is the appreciation of what is, of life, of existence, of anybody and anything, for just the way it is.
-- Adyashanti

#Gratitude #Appreciation #Way

Completion comes when we not just wake up from all form, from all identification, but when love causes us to re-embrace it all.
-- Adyashanti

#Wake Up #Causes #Embrace

Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.
-- Adyashanti

#Reality #Grace #Challenges

In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because, if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better you will lose interest in what is true. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real, while corrupting one's deepest integrity.
-- Adyashanti

#Integrity #Real #Mean

When you inquire 'Who am I?' if you are honest, you'll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn't have an answer, so all of a sudden there is silence.
-- Adyashanti

#Silence #Brain #Answers

Reality is always true to itself. When you're in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law.
-- Adyashanti

#Pain #Stress #Reality

Actually, all paths lead away from the truth...how's that? All paths. There's no such thing as a path to the truth. The truth's already here, where are you going?
-- Adyashanti

#Path

You are not your story. They are not your story about them. The world is not your story about the world.
-- Adyashanti

#Stories #World

The Way of Liberation is not a belief system; it is something to be put into practice.
-- Adyashanti

#Practice #Way #Belief

You must choose between your attachments and happiness.
-- Adyashanti

#Positive Thinking #Thinking #Attachment

Love moves without an agenda. It just moves because that is its nature to move.
-- Adyashanti

#Love #Moving #Agendas

A meditative mind is at ease because it's not trying to acquire anything.
-- Adyashanti

#Mind #Trying #Ease

The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness.
-- Adyashanti

#Love #Spiritual #Philosophy

A quiet mind married to integrity of heart is the birth of wisdom.
-- Adyashanti

#Integrity #Heart #Mind

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 that you believe because you were taught or told they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.
-- Adyashanti

#Inspiring #Dream #Powerful

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.
-- Adyashanti

#Dream #Awakening #Awake

When you begin to become conscious, more aware, when your eyes begin to open, the first thing you see is how deluded you are and how much you're holding onto that which makes you suffer. This is, in many ways, the most important step: Are you willing to be aware?
-- Adyashanti

#Eye #Suffering #Important

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
-- Adyashanti

#Reality #Enlightenment #Bliss

Right now you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing - not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything. If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you. Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility.
-- Adyashanti

#Fall #Simple #Knowing

Wisdom without love is like having lungs but no air to breathe. Do not seek wisdom in order to acquire knowledge but in order to live and love more fully.
-- Adyashanti

#Life #Love Is #Air

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Love Is #Flames #Destruction

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?
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Reality #Ideas

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.
-- Adyashanti

#Truth Is

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Believe #Ideas #World

Truth has no finality to it. It is not something to be held on to. Truth is discovered minute to minute or not at all.
-- Adyashanti

#Truth Is #Minutes #Finality

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Students #Hardest Times #Opening

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

#Running #Agendas #Truth Is

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Hate #Love You #Important

We must become expressions of, not consumers of, realization.
-- Adyashanti

#Expression #Realization #Consumers

An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.
-- Adyashanti

#Men #Ordinary #Enlightened

When we're in our true being, the purpose of life is to feel that every moment is the purpose.
-- Adyashanti

#Purpose #Life Is #Moments

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Real #Two

The main requirement for spiritual growth: A yearning to know who you really are.
-- Adyashanti

#Spiritual #Growth #Requirements

Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.
-- Adyashanti

#Mean #Enlightenment #Wake Up

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it.
-- Adyashanti

#Spiritual #Believe #Teaching

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. You're Arguing with 'What Is' - Your demands keep you chained to the 'dream-state' of the conditioned mind. The desire to 'control'... is, ultimately, our unwillingness to just be awake.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Dream #Simple

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can’t really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.
-- Adyashanti

#Mind #May #Way

If you want to know something, go elsewhere. If you want to un-know everything, then sit and listen.
-- Adyashanti

#Attachment #Want #Elsewhere

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. There is no sense that anything needs to change, but it does change.
-- Adyashanti

#Light #Mind #Doe

Take the armor off, so the arrow of the Truth can penetrate you.
-- Adyashanti

#Arrows #Armor

Now don't think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.
-- Adyashanti

#Life #Thinking #Awakening

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Self #Ideas #Who We Are

The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Spiritual #Wisdom

There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don’t try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.
-- Adyashanti

#Thinking #Trying #Moments

The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking, and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don't know who you are; you lose your boundaries, you lose your separateness, you lose your specialness, you lose the dream you have lived all your life. Eventually you lose everything that your mind has created and awaken to who you truly are: the fullness of freedom, unbound by any identifications, identities, or boundaries.
-- Adyashanti

#Life #Dream #Spiritual

Silence is the only teaching and the only teacher that is there all the time.
-- Adyashanti

#Teacher #Time #Teaching

When you let go of the egoic self what you're getting in exchange is the whole universe.
-- Adyashanti

#Letting Go #Self #Universe

This awake silence is available to anyone in this moment. All you have to do is stop using your mind to look for it. It doesn't know where to find it.
-- Adyashanti

#Silence #Mind #Looks

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.
-- Adyashanti

#Love #Hate #Self

Meditation is not something restricted to times of formal seated meditation; it is most fundamentally an attitude of being-a resting in and as being. Once you get the feel of it, you will be able to tune into it more and more often during your daily life. Eventually, in the state of liberation, meditation will simply become your natural condition.
-- Adyashanti

#Attitude #Meditation #Tunes

The true heart of all human beings is the lover of what is.
-- Adyashanti

#Life #Heart #Lovers

When emptiness is still, that is eternity. When it moves, that is love.
-- Adyashanti

#Moving #Emptiness #Eternity