Complete Appropriateness

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused,
and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens
with complete appropriateness.

Terence McKenna

Spiritual Authority

When you confer spiritual authority on another person,
you must realize that you are allowing them to
pick your pocket and sell you your own watch.

Alan Watts

Always Something

It just goes to show you,
it's always something.
If it's not one thing,

it's another.

Rosanne Rozannadanna (played by Gilda Radner)

Never Mind

Never mind.

Emily Litella (played by Gilda Radner)

The Named and the Nameless

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Lao Tzu

Does Anybody Really Care?

Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so, I can't imagine why.
We've all got time enough to cry.

Chicago Transit Authority/Chicago

The One Question

For those of you who are on your spiritual journey, regardless of whether you're at the beginning or on the path for many years, the one thing you need to be absolutely honest about, the one question you need to get really clear on is: "What is more important to me - do I want to feel good or do I want to know what's true? And the reason you need to ask yourself that question is this: the vast majority of truth seekers out there aren't really in it for the truth. They THINK they are, but they're not. They're in it to feel good, to feel better. And that's why the spiritual industry has turned into a multi-billion-dollar market designed to provide you with strategies on how to feel good about yourself. But it isn't about the truth, it never was, because truth doesn't always feel good. In fact, it rarely ever does and what feels good is rarely ever true. There are a million and one ways to feel good but only one way to see the truth. The question is: what do you really want? You may say you want the truth but can you handle the truth?

Shiv Sengupta

Why Not?

Start with "I don't know."
Why not start where
you'll end up anyway?

Adyashanti

Human Nature

It is human nature that when faced with the unknown we will find a way to pretend to know it.
It is human nature that when faced with uncertainty we will try to assert certainties.
It is human nature that when confronted with the void we will try and cover it up.

Shiv Sengupta

The Absurd

Man stands face to face with the irrational.

He feels within him his longing for happiness

and for reason. The absurd is born of this

confrontation between the human need

and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus

Your Choice

Let go or

be dragged.

Zen Proverb

Senseless, Absurd, Useless

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical,
and transcendental roots, man is lost;
all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

Eugene Ionesco

The First Truth

The absurd is the essential concept
and the first truth.

Albert Camus

I Say Let It Burn

If a truth burns down a relationship, a family,

a community, or a society it was only ever

held together by lies. And to that I say, let it burn.

I never want to live in a world where our need

for "comfort" supersedes our need to stand

on a foundation only the truth can provide.

Mark Groves 

Was It a Joke?

If you tell a joke

in the forest,
but nobody laughs,
was it a joke?

Steven Wright

End Quote

Sometimes I wish my first word was "quote," so that
on my death bed, my last words could be "end quote."

Steven Wright

So Far, So Good

I intend to live forever.
So far, so good.

Steven Wright

Just After You Need It

Experience is something you don't get
until just after you need it.

Steven Wright

Our Vast "Don't Know"

It is trust in our vast "don't know"
that allows room for the truth,
that allows the next intuition
to float to the surface.

Stephen Levine

As Though It Were the Last

Letting the last breath come.
Letting the last breath go.
Dissolving, dissolving into vast space,
the light body released from its heavier form.
A sense of connectedness with all that is,
all sense of separation dissolved
in the vastness of being.
Each breath melting into space
as though it were the last.

Stephen Levine

Just As It Is

When we recognize that, just like the glass,
our body is already broke, that indeed
we are already dead, then life becomes precious,
and we open to it just as it is,
in the moment it is occurring.

Stephen Levine

Our Quest for More

Sometimes less is more.
Our quest for more, then,
keeps us from it.

Jane Denise

More or Less

Less is more.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ol' Man River

There's an ol' man 

called the Mississippi

That's the ol' man

that I'd like to be

What does he care if

the world's got troubles

What does he care if

the land ain't free

Ol' man river
That ol' man river
He must know somethin'
But don't say nothin'
He just keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along

Oscar Hammerstein II

Anarchy

Don't know what I want,
but I know how to get it.

Sex Pistols (Anarchy in the UK)

Not Afraid of Death

I'm not afraid of death.
I just don't want to be there
when it happens.

Woody Allen

Suffering and Fear

Suffering is the curriculum
and fear is the teacher.

Shiv Sengupta

Your Own Myth

Don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi

Brave Enough

For there is always light,
if we're brave enough to see it,
if we're brave enough to be it.

Amanda Gorman

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice - 

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the rad full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognizes as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and

deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do -

determined to save

the only life that you could

save.

Mary Oliver

Laughing in Atonishment

Let me keep my distance, always,

from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with
those who say "Look!" and laugh in
astonishment, and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver

Open Your Mind

Open your mind.
Your brain won't fall out.
but years of conditioning will.

Erin Chatters

I Didn't Need to Believe

The inside search was rewarding, and it was there
that I found that I didn't need to believe anything at all.
Everything that I needed was right inside me.
The outside was useful only when it helped me
to get in touch with what was inside.

Barry Stevens

Mountains Once Again

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years,
I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters.

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge,
I came to the point where I saw that mountains
are not mountains and waters are not waters.

But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest.
For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains,
and waters once again as waters.

Seigen Ishin

Then There Is

First there is a mountain,
then there is no mountain,
then there is.

Donovan

No World for Me

When I was small, I use to see a vision of the world, with people sticking out all over it sort of like straight-up hairs from a head, and each of the people was bowing to someone else. All of them. Nobody was doing what he wanted to. In such a world, everyone was left out. This was no world for me.

Barry Stevens

Only His Own Answer

It is a lie if anyone thinks

he has the right answer.

He has only his own answer.

Barry Stevens

Where I Foul Up

Where I foul up is in
letting other people
make choices for me.

Barry Stevens

Where Everything Happens

What I shall do here has got lost.
I'm doing it. I am out of the future,
where I can't do anything except
in fantasy, and into the present,
where everything happens.

Barry Stevens

Turn Your Back

To lead an orchestra,

you must turn your back

on the crowd.

Aristotle

A Good Traveler

A good traveler
has no fixed plans
and is not intent
on arriving.

Lao Tzu

Campbell on Nietzsche

Nietzsche is the one who did the job for me.

At a certain moment in his life, the idea

came to him of what he called "the love

of your fate." Whatever your fate is,

whatever the hell happens, you say,

"This is what I need." It may look like

a wreck, but go at it as though it were

an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring

love to that moment - not discouragement -

you will find the strength is there.

Any disaster you can survive is an

improvement in your character, your stature,

and your life. What a privilege! This is when

the spontaneity of your own nature will have

a chance to flow.

Joseph Campbell

Everything is a Miracle

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Who Am I?

I yam 

what I yam.

Popeye the Sailor Man

Experience Your Soul

Follow your intuition and eventually
you'll experience your soul, in your body,
as your personality.

Penney Pierce

Grasping the Paradox

When we grasp the paradox that nothing is fixed
and ordained nor is it random and accidental,
we have made the shift into truly living our mission.
We begin to see that our role is to engage with life,
to participate, to enjoy, and have fun.

Carol Adrienne

Turning Toward What We Don't Know

Eventually, if we are lucky, life gets painful enough
that we are forced to turn away from what we know
and turn toward what we don't know.

Carol Adrienne

Making the Truth Palatable

Nobody can stand truth if it is told to him.
Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it
yourself because then the pride of discovery
makes the truth palatable.

Fritz Perls

It Flows By Itself

Don't push the river,
it flows by itself.

Fritz Perls

There is No Reality

There is no reality. There are only people who know this
and people who don't know this and are therefore
being manipulated by the people who do know it.

Terence McKenna

Language Shapes Its Users

The corrupting or curious thing about language
is that like all tools, it shapes its user in ways
that are not suspected until it's too late.

Terence McKenna

It's True Enough

It means a great divide has been crossed when you can say that ["It's true enough"] because it means you understand now that you are no longer a fairy in a platonic super world but that you are actually a monkey with a brain full of mush trying to sort out, you know, what's right in front of you.

Terence McKenna

Willing to Be Aware

All you need to do to get free of pain, to get un-stupid, is to be willing to be aware of anything that enters your consciousness ... The way out, as hard as it may be to believe, is not by resisting further, by moving the furniture around, but by being willing to conceive of it - by loving it, in short. As we should have done in the first place ... My catch-all phrase is: "I wouldn't deny that experience to the One Mind."

Thaddeus Golas

Not Attainable

This is not attainable, to eliminate our humanity by reaching this exalted state. It is not attainable. The attempt to attain this unattainable state has become in itself a cause of depression for people. So it becomes one more layer where they're not enough, they've failed, they haven't got it, they're doing something wrong, and it becomes one more layer of imperfection and it just doesn't seem fair when life is hard enough.

Judy Cohen

What's Making the Plan?

Everything happens for a reason:
What's making the plan?
What being's reason?
What is doing this, if there is a reason?
What's plan are we following?

Judy Cohen

On Someone Else's Program

One of my main critiques of so-called "spirituality" is that it allows for almost a perfect escapism. I mean, you create this other world in the imagination that the Buddha or whoever attained, and now you're on that path and you spend your whole life walking the path and that is how you avoid the actual living of this moment. You're on someone else's program. And you find a teacher who teaches you his or her program and you believe it and now you're actually living a second-hand life.

Robert Saltzman

What Else Can We Do?

What else can we do?
We're either enjoying it 
or enduring it. Those are
the only options, really,
as long as we're alive.
And I guess the question
for me would be: is it possible
to find any, any, any
beauty at all even in pain?
Or does it have to be
gritted teeth and bulled through?

Judy Cohen

Depending on No Thing

Depending on no thing,
you must find your own mind.

Diamond Sutra

Being Exactly Right

A buddha would see you all as being exactly right;
just where you are, all of you are buddhas.
Even for those of you who do not know it,
it is right for you not to know it at this moment.

Alan Watts

Rigged in Your Favor

Live life as if everything
is rigged in your favor.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi

It's Here!

While we're waiting for realization,
while we're waiting for understanding,
it's here! We don't need to understand this,
we really don't. It's here already. And
whether we get it or not, still here!

Judy Cohen

You're Never Here

This very moment, this very world,
this very body is the point. Now You see?
But, if you're seeking something beyond
all the time, you never get with it,
you're never here.

Alan Watts

Get Out of Your Own Way

When you are not getting in the way of yourself,
you will begin to find out that all the great things
you do are really happenings. All growth is something
that happens. For growth to happen, two things

are important. You must have the technical ability

to express what happens. And secondly,

you must get out of your own way.

Alan Watts

It's a Happening

I consider it all a happening
and not an attainment.

Judy Cohen

Just the Bliss Please

Here is existence, consciousness, awareness,
whichever word you want to put on it,
providing this vast range of experience,
not just bliss, and here we are saying
"Yeah, OK, but I just want the bliss please."

Judy Cohen

Nothing Else is Possible

Think of the worst thing you ever did.
Go into it as deeply as you can, from the
perspective of the person you were at the time.
With the limited understanding you had then,
weren't you doing the best you could?
How could you have done it any differently,
believing what you believed?
If you really enter this exercise,
you'll see that nothing else is possible.

Byron Katie

Such As They Are

If you understand, things are such as they are;
If you do not understand, things are such as they are.

Gensha

No Mistake

It's not possible to have the concept "mistake"
unless you're comparing what is with what isn't.
Without the story in your mind, it's all perfect.

Byron Katie

That's Been Done

One of the things that I have found and was a great relief for me when I came to see this was that the experience of this existence, there are so many versions, it's completely infinite and so whatever you have discovered for yourself in terms of what bliss is, what enlightenment is, what understanding is, that's been done. It's not going to look like that for anybody else.

Judy Cohen

Come at It Sideways

Aiming for bigness,
good luck with that.
You have to come
at it sideways.

Judy Cohen

Driven by Preferences

The aim for bliss leaves out

a whole lot of experience.
When we are driven by

our preferences for happiness
and bliss, this [something bigger]

becomes less available to us.

We're eliminating vast quantities

of experience that consciousness

has no problem with. The drive to

bliss is a human-limiting, often

comes with pain, non-essential.

Judy Cohen

The Love Religion

The inner space inside
that we call the heart
has become many different
living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,

a monastery for Christian monks,

a temple with Shiva dancing,

a kaaba for pilgrimage.

The tablets of Moses are there,

the Qur'an, the Vedas,

the sutras, and the gospels.

Love is the religion for me.

Whichever way love's camel goes,

that way becomes my faith,

the source of beauty, and a light

of sacredness over everything.

Ibn Arabi

Whatever Insults the Soul

If blasphemy is possible in this experiment
to know and live what is, perhaps it is in
whatever insults the soul.

Coleman Barks

The Nature of the Universe

The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind. To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still, that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

The Truth I Try to Follow

The world is so amazingly interesting,
I want to be completely here for its moment.
That longing is the truth I try to follow,
rather than religion's iconography.

Coleman Barks

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell

Sage Wisdom

It's all bullshit.

Al Sans Souci (my neighbor's dad)

Not the Boss

You can't aim for joy and happiness
and expect to reach it.
You're not the boss of that.

Judy Cohen

Time to Not Hurl Ourselves

If this dream hurts and you don't want it to hurt anymore,
maybe it's time to not hurl ourselves at that wall.

Judy Cohen

What's Here is Good Enough

The key to whether [something] is torture or painful

or not, as you are accomplishing and as you are

getting to do things, the difference to whether that

hurts or not has to do with whether what's here is

good enough.

Judy Cohen

A Lot of Peace

There's a lot of peace in
not being the one in charge.

Judy Cohen

Rarely Kind

There's nothing wrong with thought,
except that it's rarely kind.

Judy Cohen

All the Rest is Thought

When people do experience "This is it,"
which is simply true, breathe in, breathe out,
all the rest is thought.

Judy Cohen

Be a Connoisseur

Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi

The Paradox

When you get to a point where you just say,

"Screw it, here now, this is it," paradoxically,

there is a relief that comes with that kind of

surrender to what is, instead of what we want.

Judy Cohen

Thoughts About Inquiry

As a way to make the dream world less painful, it's great. And why wouldn't you want to do that? If you did nothing but that, fab! If we can find a way to not hurt, why wouldn't we want to do that?

(Luckily, eventually Judy came to see that the methods she was trained and certified in actually perpetuated, strengthened, the sense of self as damaged.)

Judy Cohen

This Doesn't Do Words

What this is, doesn't do words. 
We don't need to put words on it.
When we put words on it,
we make it small. So,

we don't need them.

Judy Cohen

It Doesn't Want To

You can't get free of the self via the self. You can't question the self and expect to get beyond it. How would that work? You can't solve the issues of the mind, the problems that appear in our lives, that mind has created, problems that thought has created, you can't solve them with thought. It doesn't want to, or it wouldn't have created these issues to begin with.

Judy Cohen

Seeking Something Else Later

You can't get content and accepting and fully

in the present while you are busily seeking

something else later. Because inherent

in the seeking is a disregard, disapproval,
a lack of respect for the present.
"This isn't OK, I need enlightenment!"
So, if you define awakening by fully embracing the present,
then how are you going to get it by chasing it?
It makes no sense.

Judy Cohen

Not Through the Lens of Ego

Most people think enlightenment is like an unending satori experience. But that misunderstanding will get you to do more "tail chasing" than you ever dreamed possible. In the end, enlightenment has very little to do with enlightenment experiences. It is simply not perceiving through the lens of ego.

Adyashanti

After, I continue ...

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed;
after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.

Anthony de Mello

It Comes and Goes

Do not mistake bliss for awareness -
it comes and goes; it's not always there.

Rupert Spira

Only This Exists

There is no permanent state of clarity. We don't wake up forever. We wake up only now. People have these wonderful experiences of spiritual opening, and that's not it. As soon as they think, "I want this to last forever," they've moved into the future and lost the reality. THIS is it, right now. It's that simple. Only this exists.

Byron Katie

Nothing is Left Out

Ultimately it is recognized that boundlessness is equally present as tension, contraction, dullness, boredom, depression, anxiety, restlessness, agitation, anger, worry, upset, addiction, and all other forms of overcast, cloudy, turbulent, or stormy weather. Nothing is left out. Waking up is not a perpetually sunny day.

Joan Tollifson

That Which Is

You are already that which is.
But your mind is frightened to let go
and still has an idea that something
special should happen.

Tony Parsons

Pretend That There Is

There is never anything to be gained, though
the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Alan Watts

I've Fallen in Love

My life isn't always perfect; it's full of highs and lows,
just as I suspect your life is. We share the same dilemmas.
I've fallen in love with my tender, vulnerable, wounded
humanity, just as it is, in all its glorious ambiguity.
I've fallen in love with my wonderful, terrifying,
everyday life, in all its bittersweet splendor.

Tim Freke

A Love Affair With What Is

Nothing changes [after enlightenment].
Eat, shit, grow old. Get cancer.

Scream in pain in the middle of the night.

None of that stops. This isn't about living

in some New Age fantasy world.

This isn't about taking on comforting concepts.

This is reality at its most raw.

Nothing can be blocked out anymore.

It's the end of control.

It's a love affair with what is.

Jeff Foster

Human Frailties

I have never yet met a saint or sage
who did not have some human frailties.

Alan Watts

I Attained Nothing

I truly attained nothing from
complete, unexcelled Enlightenment.

Buddha

Life Couldn't Care Less

Reality is the sum total of all experiences
and doesn't restrict or make preferences
for any particular set. In short,
life just couldn't care less.

Shiv Sengupta

Just Another Lens of Perception

Whether I am awake and aware
or just a hopelessly conditioned person
is of absolutely no real consequence
to reality itself. It is only of consequence
to me and perhaps those with whom
I come into contact. But in truth, all
I am is just another lens of perception.

Shiv Sengupta