When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier-it can flow in ways you never imagined.
ADYASHANTIWhat 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?
More Adyashanti Quotes
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What am I, really? The beautiful thing…is nobody can tell us what we are. Nobody can really tell us. Not in a way that’s going to be satisfactory to us. Our true nature is self-authenticating. When we bump into our true nature,
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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.
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Most people don’t get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘that wasn’t appropriate’.
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The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.
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The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?
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Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed.
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Many Sages have said, “Your world is a dream. You’re living in an illusion.” They’re referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality.
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Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation.
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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.
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The teaching must not only consume you, but consume itself as well. All must be burned to ash, and then the ash must be burned. Then, and only then, is the Ultimate realized.
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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.
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Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.
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Once again, we find ourselves back in the unknown – not in the idea of the unknown, but in the lived reality of it. It’s the mind humbled, on its knees, with bare feet and free of the known.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world.
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You don’t awaken, what has eternally been awake realizes itself. That which is eternally awake is what you are.
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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.”
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What you run away from owns you. You are the dog on a leash. The most you can do is to tug against the leash.
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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.
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The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things.
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As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing but a thought.
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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.
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Take one step backward into the unknown.
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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.
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