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140+ Mindful Quotes About Nirvana
Welcome to our collection of thought-provoking quotes about nirvana. We hope you enjoy and gain from studying them - please share with anyone else you know who might be interested.
We mean nirvana the spiritual concept, not Nirvana the band. If you looking for the band, we have a collection of Kurt Cobain quotes here: Kurt Cobain Quotes.
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There's no glamour in Nirvana, no glamour at all, in fact.
--Michael Azerrad
The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.
--Jordan Peterson
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The state of nirvana means the blown-out state -- the relieved state - the sigh of relief. Nirvana may be translated into English as WHEW!
--Alan Watts
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Nirvana means to extinguish the burning fires of the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. This can be accomplished by letting go of dissatisfaction.
--Shinjo Ito
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Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
--Karen Armstrong
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He who walks in the eightfold noble path with unswerving determination is sure to reach Nirvana.
--Gautama Buddha
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The self, when confined into the usual wakeful state of consciousness, is human, but when enters into the transcendental state of Absolute Oneness, becomes God.
--Abhijit Naskar
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The self, when confined into the usual wakeful state of consciousness, is human, but when enters into the transcendental state of Absolute Oneness, becomes God. Basically, the human and the God are two sides of the same coin. Or to be more specific, the human self and the God self are both creations of molecules in the human brain.
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Your mind is nirvana.
--Bodhidharma
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Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
--Rabindranath Tagore
I dare us to give up -- maybe we'll reach nirvana by the time we're sixty.
--Hanako Stephens
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There is nothing we could add to that which has already been created....perfection.
--Vivian Amis
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We seek love in relationships, peace in security, and joy in material things...but these feelings are divine and not dependent on any outer circumstances.
If you could possibly understand how precious and powerful your experience of this one lifetime as yourself is, you wouldn't be trying to go anywhere else.
If you could know the perfection of time and space,
You would slow each moment down
To drain every possible nuance of juice and flavor from it.
When you leave this place, your body and mind and the earth which holds you, you will look back and only wish you had known the immense richness that you hurried through trying to find other better states of being.
But this is the best bite.
Heaven is here.
Nirvana is now.
As soon as you know that for sure
Your life will never be the same again.
In fact, in every way it seeks to get your attention. begs you to awaken to the magic right before your eyes.
--Jacob Nordby
And the Buddha pointed out that his confusion was justified, for 'the dharma is profound, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond the sphere of logic, subtle, and to be understood by the wise'. The reason for this is that it is not readily comprehended by one who holds a different view and has different learnings and inclinations, different involvements and instruction. It is clear from this statement that the conception of nibbāna in beyond logical reasoning, not because it is an Ultimate Reality transcending logic, but because logic or reason, being the 'slave of passions', makes it difficult for one who has a passion for an alien tradition to understand the conception of nibbāna.
--David J. Kalupahana
The Tibetan monks make mandalas out of dyed sand laid out into big, beautiful designs.
And when they're done, after days or weeks of work, they wipe it all away. They let it all go,
no pain, no regrets. That is happiness. That is bliss. The euphoria of Nirvana. We live for
that. Just for the experience. We paint a picture and we erase it.
--Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Your dream is to feel good; God's dream is for you to do good.
--Shannon L. Alder
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He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.
--Charles R. Cross
My experience of that liberation, what Buddha had called Nirvana, set me off in the path of scientific investigation of that Oneness, the thing people call, meeting with God. And that meeting triggered an unquenchable thirst in me to develop a proper scientific method to understand and further explore that apparently bizarre domain of Universal Consciousness.
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A culture which doesn't believe in region and religion is like a rock music, noise for old generation and nirvana for the young ones.
--Megha Khare
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The more emphasis we put on wanting things to change, the more unpeaceful we will be. The more emphasis we put on accepting and having gratitude for 'What is' the closer we are to arriving at Nirvana.
--Matthew Donnelly
The biggest problem is the moment you say spirituality, somebody starts talking about God, someone else about mukti, someone else about nirvana and someone else about the Ultimate. They are all already up there. You cannot do anything with people who are already up there. If somebody is down here, you can do something with them. You can only take a step if your feet are on the ground, isn't it? The moment you talk about God, you are not here anymore; you know it all. You can only start a journey from where you are. You cannot start a journey from where you are not. If you are willing to come down to where you are, then we can see what the next step is. If you are already on the third step to heaven, what can I do with you?
--Jaggi Vasudev
Dream of the impossible: dream of surpassing yourself, dream of nirvana, dream of moksha, dream of the kingdom of God. Only then will you start working and moving towards it, and only then with that dream, will your feet have the quality of dance.
--Osho
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When you are aligned with the truth of who you truly are, then you experience bliss.
If your consciousness is without form, without quality, and without characteristics of any kind, would that not imply that the consciousness in every other being is also formless? And if they are all without form, how can you distinguish their consciousness from your own? What forms would you use to compare them? Isn't the observing you exactly the same as the observing them?
--Joseph P. Kauffman
This witnessing consciousness, this formless dimension of yourself, is the awareness in which your experience happens, yet it remains untouched by this experience at all times. It is similar to the background of white on which you are reading these words. This white background allows any and every word to exist within it, yet it is not confined to any of these words. Similarly, your awareness allows any and every form to exist within it, but it is not bound to any of these forms.
No label can define the immensity of your True nature. You are the awareness that precedes every label, the awareness that is perceiving these words and turning them into thoughts, the awareness that creates the world with every act of observation.
Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarreling with one another. These theories, again, are based upon belief. One man says there is a Supreme Being sitting above the clouds governing the whole universe, and he asks me to believe that solely on the authority of his assertion. But if you actually attempt to realize what Christ realized, the entire structure of the Church would collapse.
It is because we feel that we are separate from nature that we also feel it is okay to manipulate it, pollute it, and cause it harm. We project our inner turmoil onto the planet, causing outer turmoil. Nearly all of the disasters of our time--war, famine, oppression, social injustice, environmental pollution, extinction--arise from this delusional belief that we have an existence independent of the world we live in. All of this misery, all of this destruction, all of this pain and suffering, is caused by our failure to realize that there is no separation and that really we are all one.
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If Christ attained the state of Absolute Divinity, so can you. And once you do, then only you will understand the true meaning of Religion and God.
We have become disconnected from our true selves, and naturally, this has produced a deep sense of lack in our lives, causing us to endlessly search for happiness in objects, experiences, and people to fill the emptiness and make us feel whole again. We crave pleasure, material riches, and stimulating experiences--anything that will distract us from this inherent lack of connection. But no matter how hard we try to escape it, eventually the sensation returns. And that is because we are looking for the answer to our freedom in all the wrong places. We are looking for freedom in the world, when the answer to ending our suffering lies within us. Until we heal the root cause of our suffering, and awaken to our true nature, our inherent confusion will continue to manifest itself in the world around us.
We cannot learn if we are stuck in our mind's conditioned way of thinking. We must be open to discovering the Truth, whatever it may turn out to be. This requires a state of openness, curiosity, and sincerity, a state of pure awareness, a state of observing reality without jumping to conclusions about what reality is.
This state of direct experience is known in Zen as beginner's mind, and it is essential to embody this state when we want to understand our experience.
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We often try to force the experience we want to have, instead of allowing the experience we were meant to have, and in doing this, we miss out on gaining any new insight or understanding.
Buddhist philosophy points out that the true nature of all forms is essentially formless. Forms do not have an existence of their own, but rather they arise together, and are mutually dependent on one another. Everything in the world of form is constantly changing, constantly dying, and constantly being reborn--which is why Buddhists say that there is no-self; no form that has an existence in and of itself.
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Subject and object are not separate--so-called objective reality is projected by our subjective Consciousness.
The consciousness inhabiting your body is exactly the same as the consciousness inhabiting my body. We are one. The delusion that we are separate beings comes from identifying with the world of form--with our names, our bodies, our roles, our beliefs, our thoughts, and all of the mental constructs that we have created; but even these are more connected to the universe than we realize.
Your body and my body are both totally made up of and dependent upon the elements of the earth--the water, the air, the heat, the land, the soil and the food it produces--as well as all of the elements that these elements are dependent upon--the sun, the stars, the galaxies, and a vast field of energy and space to contain them in. Nature is our extended body, and the elements outside of our skin are just as important to our health as the elements within our skin. Our bodies are connected to the universe as a whole, and consequently to each other and the many ways in which we influence our shared environment.
When we look at a tree, we do not see the tree for what it really is. We see how it appears to us on the surface, and we dismiss it as being just another form in the Universe. We fail to realize that the tree is connected to the Universe on every level; that all of nature is expressing itself through that single form. There can be no tree without the earth that it grows from, the sun that gives it energy, the water that nourishes its growth, and the millions of fungi and bacteria fertilizing its soil. Looking deeply into anything in nature, we realize that it is connected to the whole. We see that nature is one seamless web, and the notion that things have an existence of their own is merely an illusion.
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You do not have an existence independent of your environment, but rather you are your environment, and your environment is you.
Our beliefs shape how we perceive reality to be, and the belief that shapes our current perception of reality was adopted by the worldview of Newtonian physics, which asserts that reality is objective--that there is a material universe existing outside of our experience. But this isn't true; there is no material universe outside of you; the Universe takes form through you.
Samsara is one flower. Nirvana is another flower. Enlightenment happens when both the flowers blooms.
--Amit Ray
Every being experiences themselves as the center of their experience. Consciousness is what lies at our very core, and connects us all to each other. We may appear to be separate and individual because of the various forms our Consciousness inhabits, but below the surface the substance of our being is one and the same.
We are so fascinated by the complexity and beauty of the various forms in nature, that we have been led away from the formless dimension of Consciousness that lies at our very center. When you look at a person, you see many differences in their unique form, and often we compare, contrast, and judge one another because of the forms that we inhabit. But if you look beyond the various qualities and characteristics of form, and look another person in the eyes, you see a Being, and it is this Being that lies beneath the surface of form that connects us all. That is why the eyes are often referred to as the gateway to the soul, because they allow us to see and feel the presence of another Being, and realize our oneness.
Jehovah, the Christian name for God derived from the Hebrew Yahweh, (from the letters YHWH), is translated as I AM. YOU ARE the essence of life--the Cosmic Consciousness that creates, lives in, and destroys all things. In Buddhism, your true nature is referred to as your Buddha Nature. Muslims refer to it as Allah, Native tribes have often called it the Great Spirit, Taoists refer to it as the Tao, and numerous other cultures throughout history have all created their own distinctive names for it. But the one eternal reality that these cultures point to remains the same--and this reality is YOU.
We are only able to disrespect, mistreat, and harm one another when we forget that the other person is us; when we only see the objects of form, and not the subjective Consciousness that lies within. Lust, greed, violence, selfishness--all arise from perceiving others in terms of their individual differences, seeing them only as bodies, and what we can get from them as bodies, rather than acknowledging the Being that lies within the body.
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According to Zen Buddhists, all things have their existence in The Void. The Void is that which is no-thing, but contains all things within it, or as some Christian mystics state, "God is Nothing; He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID."
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God is the ultimate ground of Being, and this ultimate ground of Being is YOU. For one who realizes their true nature as God, as Consciousness, life becomes a joy without end.
In Advaita Vedanta, and in many other ancient wisdom traditions, the world is said to be an illusion. This illusion is commonly referred to as maya, a Sanskrit name which refers to the apparent, or objective reality which is superimposed on the ultimate reality in order to generate the phenomena of what we call the material world. Maya is the magic by which we create duality--by which we create two worlds from one. This creation is an illusory creation--it is not real--it is an imaginary manifestation of the one Universal Consciousness, appearing as all of the various phenomena in objective reality. Maya is God's, or Consciousness's, creative power of emptying or reflecting itself into all things and thus creating all things--the power of subjectivity to take on objective appearance.
Examples of fractals are everywhere in nature. They can be found in the patterns of trees, branches, and ferns, in which each part appears to be a smaller image of the whole. They are found in the branch-like patterns of river systems, lightning, and blood vessels. They can be seen in snowflakes, seashells, crystals, and mountain ranges. We can even see the holographic and fractal-like nature of reality in the structure of the Universe itself, as the clusters of galaxies and dark matter resemble the neurons in our brain, the mycelium network of fungi, as well as the network of the man-made Internet.
We are like waves in the ocean, each with a unique character and quality on the surface, but deep down we are eternally connected to one another and to the ocean as a whole. If you practice looking beyond the surface of appearances, you will begin to see the true Being that lies within each form. You will see your Consciousness looking through the eyes of another, and it is when you see yourself in another that you cannot help but develop compassion for them; because in Truth, there is no them, there is only YOU, experiencing yourself from an inconceivable amount of perspectives.
Have you ever had a dream that you were certain was real, only to wake up and realize that everyone and everything in the dream was really you? Well this is how many mystics describe the nature of our reality, as a dream in which we think we are individual personalities existing in the physical universe. But eventually, like in all dreams, we will wake up. Except in this dream we do not wake up to realize we are still in the world, we awake from the world to realize that we are God.
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You are just as connected to the Universe as a finger is to a hand, or as a branch is to a tree. The entire cosmos is expressing itself through your being.
Naked I Dance (A Sonnet)
Naked I dance here in delight,
I am not wearing name, fame or stature.
All I am wearing is a smile of humaneness,
Isn't that what matters in human nature!
I need no faith, nation or intellect,
Nor do I need illusive pomp and ceremony.
I am happy being a human above all,
I'll stay that way forever exuding harmony.
Tried a lot many countries, races and religions,
To tie me up with their rugged exclusivities.
But my heart is too grand for any one sect,
So I dance naked without any cultural amenities.
Come join me if you like my sisters and brothers,
United we'll free the world of all tribal attires.
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Meditation is not what your mind does: whether it is silent or not. Meditation is what you do with your mind.
--Satish Tripathi
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The day you realize your emptiness, will be the day you realize your wholeness.
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In emptiness lies wholeness.
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Every setback is a pitstop en route to nirvana.
--Stewart Stafford
That Nirvana and Samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe; but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality. For ordinary, nice, unregenerate people to accept this truth by hearsay, and to act upon it in practice, is merely to court disaster. All the dismal story of antinomianism is there to warn us of what happens when men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all.
--Aldous Huxley
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The Matrix is everywhere-except in deep sleep.
--Bert McCoy
The unification or yog of all humans in the psyche of the humans, that rises through simple human action or karma, with pure nonconflicted devotion or bhakti to the action and the self, while learning through healthy, effort-less effort or hatha and knowledge or gyana, is the king of all yoga, that is, raja yoga. This unification among humans is the real samadhi or nirvana in the civilized society of thinking humanity, for it brings true oneness with your fellow beings which leads to a real, actual, genuine paradise on earth, without the need for theorizing and philosophizing.
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To me -- the scientist, the preacher, the entrepreneur, the janitor, the showgirl, the sex worker and all others are one and the same human spirit in which I see the image of my own self.
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Changing the family given name to a Sanskrit based name, doesn't make a person either free or holy -- by doing so, one only exchanges one prison for another.
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When true awareness is at play, the pedestrian becomes the path and the path becomes the pedestrian -- the aware becomes the awareness and awareness becomes the aware.
Samsara is the universal flux wherein beings are doomed to wander for as long as the ego-born delusion of independent existence persists, our world being but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Nirvana is the ultimate being-non-being beyond human conception and not to be attained until the last shred of ego-delusion has been discarded. Yet samsara and Nirvana are not two! There is no going from one to the other, nor are there any individual beings to make the journey; there is only a falling away of illusion, a sudden recognition of things as they really are, a revelation of the true nature of the self and of all selves that ever could be. To employ a simple analogy--a child born and reared in a pitch-dark room must conceive of his surroundings as devoid of colour and visual form; then light appears and everything seems gloriously different; yet the room is the same, nothing has changed but the child's conception of his surroundings.
--John Blofeld
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Don't just sit there trying to make a sense of this world. Be a part of the nonsense.
--Vineet Raj Kapoor
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I just want to sleep the sleep of ages, to know again the Great Rest, the perpetual bliss, to hear the songs the stars sing on the shores of the great sea.
--Roger Zelazny
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The man who cares about nothing is either depressed or in a constant state of nirvana.
--Marty Rubin
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I confronted my demons and one day I stood in front of myself.
I confronted (each of) my demons and (finally one day) I was standing in front of myself.
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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Only when the seeker is lost, the truth is there. Seek, and you will miss. Seek not, and you will find. The very seeking becomes a barrier to truth, to the ultimate experience.
--Swami Dhyan Giten
For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-
self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-
self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of
other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the
categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant.
But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands. This is what I have thought and realized, when I have heard the teachings. This is why I am continuing my travels--not to seek other, better teachings, for I know there are none, but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die. But often, I'll think of this day, oh exalted one, and of this hour, when my eyes beheld a holy man.
--Hermann Hesse
Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.
When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.
--Namkhai Norbu
What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?
--U. G. Krishnamurti
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The purpose of life is the lesson.
Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. Awakening into that state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean.
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Pray within.
Stay within.
Seek, find the Within.
For, there's no heaven or hell or god anywhere but herein.
--Fakeer Ishavardas
Various fascinating psychological elements are involved in the transcendental state of human consciousness. One may lose the ability to distinguish one's self from the rest of the world in transcendence, but still it is the human brain that constructs that state of mind. Hence, even in that altered state of consciousness one is not totally devoid of one's beliefs, conjectures, ideas and fantasies. In fact, these ideas fill up the transcendental experience with all kinds of fanatic stories that happen to be unique, based on the person's inner urges and drives.
Often, during times when I am in a state of absolute bliss and gratitude, those are the times that people will ask me, Are you happy or are you sad? It's funny, because when you are happy in a way that most people are happy in, that is, when you are jumping up and down and laughing and smiling and giggling, people will recognize that as happiness. But when you go beyond that state and on into the state of blissfulness-- nirvana-- only a very few number of people are going to be able to recognize and understand that. Why? Because only very few people have gone beyond the level of obvious happiness, to experience actual nirvaana. Nirvana is what I describe as being in a state of worship; you see, you go beyond just feeling happy and grateful, and you enter into a state of mind that allows you to worship what you have been given or what you have attained or achieved, or whatever circumstance you are in that is making you happy. You stop and you worship the person, the place, the thing, the feeling. I'm easily flung into that state, so, I often find it strange that I can be in an absolute state of bliss, meanwhile, the other person can be asking me if I am either happy or sad. But I am worshipping.
--C. JoyBell C.
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Nirvana is entire body experience of complete knowingness that our lives are enriched with abundance in the present moment and that it will continue to be going forward.
Meditation, godliness, enlightenment, nirvana, they all came into being through love, because through love a glimpse was achieved. And when the glimpse was there, daring souls went on an adventure to find the source from where this glimpse comes.
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The transcendental state of Absolute Oneness sets the human mind free.
Murky Water, Dusty Mirror
Murky water is turbid; let it settle and it clears. A dusty mirror is dim; clean it and it is bright.
What I realize as I observe this is the Tao of clarifying the mind and perceiving its essence.
The reason why people's minds are not clear and their natures are not stable is that they are full of craving and emotion. Add to this eons of mental habit, acquired influences deluding the mind, their outgrowths clogging up the opening of awareness -- this is like water being murky, like a mirror being dusty. The original true mind and true essence are totally lost. The feelings and senses are unruly, subject to all kinds of influences, taking in all sorts of things, defiling the mind.
If one can suddenly realize this and change directions, wash away pollution and contamination, gradually remove a lifetime of biased mental habits, wandering thoughts and perverse actions, increasing in strength with persistence, refining away the dross until there is nothing more to be refined away, when the slag is gone the gold is pure. The original mind and fundamental essence will spontaneously appear in full, the light of wisdom will suddenly arise, and one will clearly see the universe as though it were in the palm of the hand, with no obstruction.
This is like murky water returning to clarity when settled, like a dusty mirror being restored to brightness when polished. That which is fundamental is as ever: without any lack.
--Liu Yiming
The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.
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Your true being, as Consciousness, is ever at peace, ever at rest, eternally existing in the dimension of here and now. It is the formless and eternal quality within you that expresses itself through the world of form.
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The more a person is united within himself or herself and inwardly simple, the more and higher things he or she understands, because he or she receives the light of understanding from within.
The modern scientist attempts to step outside of himself in order to observe himself, an attempt that is always doomed to failure. You cannot make an object out of your subjective experience, but you know that consciousness exists, simply because you exist.
You cannot be aware of yourself, for you are awareness itself. How can a witness witness itself? That is like trying to see your own eyes without a reflection, or cut a knife with the tip of its own blade--it is impossible. The subject can only observe the object; it cannot make an object out of itself. But by the very act of observing, you indirectly know yourself as the observer, as the subject. No witnessing of the witness is needed to prove its existence.
We find Nirvana rendered by annihilation (no one stops to ask of what?), though the word means despiration, as Meister Eckhart uses the term. I accuse the majority of Christian writers of a certain irresponsibility, or even levity, in their references to other religions. I should never dream of making use of a Gospel text without referring to the Greek, and considering also the earlier history of the Greek words employed, and I demand as much of Christian writers.
To THE NEW ENGLISH WEEKLY, LONDON -- January 8, 1946.
--Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Everyone and everything a fluid living sea
Universal Consciousness as both you and me
being in rapturous love with all life and every person
but this wasn't maintained and things were about to worsen
ego crept back in believing it was Enlightened
it turns out consciousness only temporarily heightened
a momentary samadhi can sometimes deceive
if untold by a Master because our mind is naïve
ask enlightenment teachers today about their ego death
don't even need to for their answer we can already guess
are they right this moment experiencing Allness?
the spiritual ego is crafty and teaches regardless
their words proceeding from the intellect, Power is lacking
a Divine Transference is required to send the ego packing
if inspiration hits by all means share
but state your current un-State or others you'll ensnare
True Teachings are on a whole different level
a powerful quieting effect, they silence the mental
make no bones about it--dying to God is involved
if not ready for this step then observe truths lesser evolved.
--Jarett Sabirsh
Photo Credit: Paul Gilmore
The human self and the God self are both creations of molecules in the human brain.
We only suffer when we falsely identify with the objects that arise in our awareness, rather than with the awareness itself--when we identify with our thoughts, with our emotions, our personal history, and the many stories we tell ourselves. When you reconnect to your source--the essence of your being, the pure and impartial witness--you become free from all of the troubles of the material world; free from the world of form. You no longer feel the desire to cling to forms or depend on them for your happiness. Instead, you are free to enjoy form, free to let form be, and free to allow all forms to come and go as they please. All forms are impermanent and changing, but your consciousness, being formless, is eternal, and exists regardless of the forms that it gives life to.
Until we heal the root cause of our suffering, and awaken to our true nature, our inherent confusion will continue to manifest itself in the world around us.
Because we feel ourselves to be separate from the world in which we live, we have also grown to feel quite alone in this world. Our sense of loneliness and isolation not only makes us feel depressed and miserable, but it also causes us to be anxious and afraid of the world and everyone in it. Because of this inherent fear, we put up all kinds of barriers to protect us from the world--barriers that we have created to keep us safe, but that really end up making us feel more alone, more miserable, and more afraid, as they prevent us from being our natural selves.
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Nirvana is too simple an experience to be depicted by diagrams.
I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All I could consciously perceive in that state of mind was absolute oneness. I felt being one with the banyan tree, under which I was sitting. I felt one with the corns in the field. I felt one with the sky and the clouds in it. As if everything was me, and I was everything. I didn't have any perception of time or space. All that there was, was an all- pervading eternity -- a state of non-dualism.
When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering.
The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva -- the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
--Joseph Campbell
Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.
--Joss Sheldon
That truth which cannot be lived in daily life, cannot be true.
You are not a small and unimportant creature confined to the form of this physical body, contrary to popular belief. At the core of your being you are pure awareness, and this awareness is the same source from which everything in the Universe arises, exists as, and returns to. Consciousness is the dimension of yourself that you have forgotten you are, and of which you long to return to.
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Everything exists as information in a field of infinite possibilities, and it is our Consciousness that renders the information and causes it to appear as the material world.
Everything we perceive to be solid and static is made up of almost entirely empty space.
When we see one another as different aspects of ourselves--as ourselves experiencing a different situation and circumstance--we develop a love, a connection, and a unity that allows us to see beyond the various forms, as well as the various ways that someone may act out when they have forgotten their connection and their formless nature. If you look at another in this light, you will see a Being that is just like you, looking back at you.
We fail to see the oneness of all things, and because of this, we unknowingly cause a lot of harm to ourselves. We pollute the Earth that we live on, cut down the trees that produce our oxygen, destroy the ecosystems of nature and the animals that maintain them, and we mistreat and harm each other, thinking that these destructive actions will not have a direct effect on us.
The world exists because your mind exists. If your mind didn't exist, there would be no world. As you look at these words, you see them in what appears to be a reality outside of you. What you are really seeing is the image that your mind is creating from the electrical signals being sent to your brain. While they may appear to be outside of you, this is an illusion, they exist within your own mind, and are being projected to appear as if they are outside of you. This apparent reality that is projected by our minds, is maya, and to believe that maya is the ultimate reality is a result of ignorance, or avidya in Sanskrit.
All of Nature follows perfectly geometric laws. The Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Peruvian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures were well aware of this, as Phi--known as the Golden Ratio or Golden Mean--was used in the constructions of their sculptures and architecture.
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True Love is when you are able to see yourself in another, when you recognize that there is no separation between you and any other Being in the Universe.
Now and then we know a moment of supreme bliss, when we ask nothing, give nothing, know nothing but bliss. Then it passes, and we again see the panorama of the universe moving before us; and we know that it is but a mosaic work set upon God, who is the background of all things. Vedanta teaches that nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realization of the Self, and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality. Having eyes, we must see the apparent, but all the time we know what it is; we have found out its true nature. It is the screen that hides the Self, which is unchanging. The screen opens and we find the Self behind it.
--Swami Vivekananda
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You may see the light, but the light is not the result of your eyesight.
--Walpola Rahula
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Once you are alive to liberation, liberation would be alive in you.
Real enlightenment is not at all free from all sorts of ignorance, but it is at all times aware of that ignorance as well as all the shortcomings of the self, whereas in the so-called enlightenment fueled by mysticism, the self gets consumed by the illusion of knowledge, which is worse than ignorance.
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You may discover that when there is no resistance to totally being in hell, heaven opens up and samsara reveals its true nature as nirvana.
--Joan Tollifson
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The way to Nirvana sublime;
Tread the way to end the play,
Now is the moment in time.
Tread it now or tread it never
Know thou weary traveller,
Spread the happy news far and near;
The Mara's reign is over.
--Banani Ray
He who has realized the Truth, Nirvāna, is the happiest being in the world. He is free from all 'complexes' and obsessions, … He does not repent the past, nor does he brood over the future. He lives fully in the present. … As he is free from selfish desire, hatred, ignorance, conceit, pride … , he is pure and gentle, full of universal love, compassion, kindness, sympathy, understanding and tolerance. His service to others is of the purest, for he has no thought of self. He gains nothing, accumulates nothing, not even spiritual, because he is free from the illusion of self, and the 'Thirst' for becoming.
--Walpola Rahula Thero
This association of the idea of the orgasm and the idea of dying is a universal one. On the basis of these typical clinical examples, we arrive at the following conclusion: the striving after non-existence, nirvana, death, is identical with the striving after orgastic release, i.e., the most essential experience of the living organism. Thus, an idea of death stemming from the actual demise of the organism does not and cannot exist, because an idea can reflect only what has already been experienced. No one, however, has ever experienced his or her own death.
--Wilhelm Reich
Beyond culture, beyond tradition, beyond all dogmas and doctrines, there lies a beautiful valley full with real liberty and real harmony -- in that valley, diversity is no cause for discrimination or hatred, rather it provides colors to the collective life of humanity as one family -- in that valley, the best creed is to have no creed -- the best path is to have no path -- the best ideology is to have no ideology.
The extinction of desire, the extinction of hatred, the extinction of illusion. … The extinction of 'thirst' is Nibbāna.
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Nirvana; closing the eyes to see the world inside.
--Vikrmn
The journey into the vast unquiet universe, watched by faces in railway compartments, tolerant and incurious. In the nights Ravi curled up on luggage racks and slept to the soft beat of the rails. The names of railway stations changed, their scripts changed. Then on the road, up the high ranges, past hairpin bends in gasoline-perfumed buses. The roadway dust changed colour, sunrise and sunset changed places, directions were lost in an assailing infinity. The journey took him through cheerless suburbs, through streets of sordid trades, past cacti villages and lost townships of lepers, and ashramas where, in saffron beds, voluptuous swaminis lay in wait for nirvana.
--O. V. Vijayan
Samsara and nirvana are perhaps best understood as points of view. Samsara is a point of view based primarily on defining and identifying with experiences as either painful or unpleasant. Nirvana is a fundamentally objective state of mind: an acceptance of experience without judgements, which opens us to the potential for seeing solutions that may not be directly connected to our survival as individuals, but rather to the survival of all sentient beings.
--Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Mindfulness is the purest mindlessness. It is the great and perverse desire to annihilate consciousness and exist in an eternal now of unthinking perception of nothing at all. It is the most nihilistic vision there has ever been. It is nirvana -- absolute nothingness, the state of infinite anti-consciousness.
--Jack Tanner
Recognizing the dissatisfactory nature of our existence and renouncing the world in which transitory sense objects contact transitory sense organs to produce transitory feelings, none of which are worth grasping at, we seek instead the everlasting, eternally joyful realizations of enlightenment or nirvana.
--Thubten Yeshe
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All phenomena of samsara and nirvana are your own mind.
--Padmasambhava
When realization occurs you should definitely be free from samsara, so that your disturbing emotions naturally subside and become original wakefulness. What is the use of a realization that fails to reduce your disturbing emotions?
Q: What is nirvana and do many people attain it?
Lama: When you develop your powers of concentration such that you can integrate your mind into single-pointed concentration, you will gradually diminish your ego's emotional reactions until they disappear altogether. At that point, you transcend your ego and discover an everlasting, blissful, peaceful state of mind. That is what we call nirvana. Many people have attained this state and many more are well on their way to it.
Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas -- joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties.
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
--Khalil Gibran
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Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
To find happiness or peace or enlightenment, we do not have to create some artificial world, a world apart from this world. We have to understand the nature of this world. And the nature of this world, when we do understand it, is revealed to us through our understanding, not from some other person just showing us something. Our own understanding reveals the nature of the world to us as the great bliss state of emptiness and openness. The nature of this world is super bliss, intertwined and indivisible.
--Robert A. F. Thurman
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Those who with a clear mind have seen this truth,
Those who are wise and ever watchful,
They feel the joy of watchfulness,
The joy of the path of the great.
Watchfulness is the path of immortality:
Unwatchfulness is the path of death.
Those who are watchful never die:
Those who do not watch are already as dead.
And those who in high thought and in deep contemplation
With ever living power advance on the path,
They in the end reach nirvana,
The peace supreme and infinite joy.
These are the three stages of enlightenment, the three glimpses of satori.
1. The first stage enlightenment:
A Glimpse of the Whole
The first stage of enlightenment is short glimpse from faraway of the whole. It is a short glimpse of being.
The first stage of enlightenment is when, for the first time, for a single moment the mind is not functioning. The ordinary ego is still present at the first stage of enlightenment, but you experience for a short while that there is something beyond the ego.
There is a gap, a silence and emptiness, where there is not thought between you and existence.
You and existence meet and merge for a moment.
And for the first time the seed, the thirst and longing, for enlightenment, the meeting between you and existence, will grow in your heart.
2. The second stage of enlightenment:
Silence, Relaxation, Togetherness, Inner Being
The second stage of enlightenment is a new order, a harmony, from within, which comes from the inner being. It is the quality of freedom.
The inner chaos has disappeared and a new silence, relaxation and togetherness has arisen.
Your own wisdom from within has arisen.
A subtle ego is still present in the second stage of enlightenment.
The Hindus has three names for the ego:
1. Ahamkar, which is the ordinary ego.
2. Asmita, which is the quality of Am-ness, of no ego. It is a very silent ego, not aggreessive, but it is still a subtle ego.
3. Atma, the third word is Atma, when the Am-ness is also lost. This is what Buddha callas no-self, pure being.
In the second stage of enlightenment you become capable of being in the inner being, in the gap, in the meditative quality within, in the silence and emptiness.
For hours, for days, you can remain in the gap, in utter aloneness, in God.
Still you need effort to remain in the gap, and if you drop the effort, the gap will disappear.
Love, meditation and prayer becomes the way to increase the effort in the search for God.
Then the second stage becomes a more conscious effort. Now you know the way, you now the direction.
3. The third stage of enlightenment:
Ocean, Wholeness, No-self, Pure being
At the third stage of enlightenment, at the third step of Satori, our individual river flowing silently, suddenly reaches to the Ocean and becomes one with the Ocean.
At the third Satori, the ego is lost, and there is Atma, pure being. You are, but without any boundaries. The river has become the Ocean, the Whole.
It has become a vast emptiness, just like the pure sky.
The third stage of enlightenment happens when you have become capable of finding the inner being, the meditative quality within, the gap, the inner silence and emptiness, so that it becomes a natural quality.
You can find the gap whenever you want.
This is what tantra callas Mahamudra, the great orgasm, what Buddha calls Nirvana, what Lao Tzu calls Tao and what Jesus calls the kingdom of God.
You have found the door to God.
You have come home.
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Through the practice of concentration and various techniques, we silence the mind and we enter into a flow of perfect light. We go outside of the parameters of mind and thought and experience nirvana.
--Frederick Lenz
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To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana.
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Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.
--M. Scott Peck
I don't believe in nirvana. If nirvana was handed to us on a silver platter, this would be the first day of our struggle to keep it.
--Holly Near
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He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.