Enlightenment Quotes - Page 11

• Enlightenment is a journey. It is a journey that is made alone. It is a journey that is made with a teacher.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Journey, Made

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• What makes a difference is when we take our mind and put it into the scriptures, when we read the Buddhist Canon, the Pali Canon, when we read the Tibetan books, when we read anything inspiring - somebody else's journey into the world of enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Book, Journey

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• So in the world of Enlightenment, things are just things, except they're not things. We're in nirvana. There is no debating team.

  Frederick Lenz

  Team, World, Nothingness

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• On the pathway that leads to enlightenment, only your heart can tell you what is right.

  Frederick Lenz

  Heart, Pathways, Intention

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• Enlightenment is not about being political. It is not a social club. Ashrams often turn into that, I know. Societies of enlightenment often just become cliques.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Political, Clubs

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• Zen is a very quick path. Zen is the path of meditation. The word Zen means emptiness or fullness, meditation. Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Mean, Meditation, Path

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• Zen was an attempt to get back to the purest teachings of the Buddha -enlightenment without strings.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teaching, Strings, Introduction

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• Each of the small enlightenments that a Zen practitioner has, which are known in Zen as "Satori experiences," provides deeper insights into the nature of existence and helps a person prepare for complete enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Helping, Satori, Existence

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• In Zen the emphasis is on meditation and developing your body, mind and spirit to find inner peace, strength, clarity and enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Meditation, Inner Peace, Mind

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• From the highest state of mind you have a window whereby you could perhaps move beyond all states of mind, to enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Moving, Mind, Window

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• By god the Buddhist means that from which the universe was born, the unborn of the Buddhist scriptures, and by soul that factor in the thing called man which moves towards enlightenment. Why need more be said of it, at any rate those who are not content with scholarship, but strive to attain that same enlightenment?

  Christmas Humphreys

  Buddhist, Moving, Mean

  Christmas Humphreys (1969). “An Invitation to the Buddhist Way of Life for Western Readers”

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• In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

  Susan Neiman

  Plato, Effort, Belief

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• You must continue to go back to the beginning, to the foundation, and question the foundation. Even once you‘ve reached Samadhi you must go back so you can create it at will. Samadhi is the beginning of spiritual growth, not the end. You must always be questioning. Enlightenment comes as an accident at first, then you have to learn to recreate it.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Spiritual, Growth, Foundation

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• When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

  Idries Shah

  Prayer, Mean, Emotional

  Idries Shah (1991). “Seeker After Truth”, p.22, Octagon Press Ltd

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• Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it's been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big - and takes on that damned capital C - they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)
  Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.

  David Gerrold

  Sacrifice, Past, Self

  "The Man Who Folded Himself". Book by David Gerrold, 1973.

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• Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pay, Elegance, Glad

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.87, Penguin

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• The role of the artist is like that of an explorer and a teacher - a teacher of seeing. No one is more capable of conveying this enlightenment than the artist.

  Ken Danby

  Teacher, Teaching, Artist

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• Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

  Allan Bloom

  Keys, Self, Common

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.167, Simon and Schuster

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• The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.

  Paul Tillich

  Bridges, Atmosphere, Bourgeoisie

  "The Courage to Be" by Paul Tillich, (p. 116), 1952.

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• The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

  Clive Barker

  Age, Desire, World

  Clive Barker (2001). “The Inhuman Condition”, p.164, Simon and Schuster

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• Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Numbers, Doe, Illusion

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.7, Verso

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• I am who I am who I am who am I Requesting some enlightenment Could I have been anyone other than me?

  Dave Matthews

  Who I Am, I Am Who I Am, Has Beens

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• If we really prefer basic sanity or enlightenment, it's irritatingly possible to get into it.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Sanity, Ifs

  Chogyam Trungpa (2008). “Ocean of Dharma: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa”, p.304, Shambhala Publications

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.

  Murray Rothbard

  Opposites, Groups, Doctrine

  "Are Libertarians 'Anarchists'?". Faith and Freedom, unpublished, mid-1950s.

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