offerings from scientists, philosophers and mystics …
Nothing is left to you at this moment
but to have a good laugh!
– Zen master
Here is just emptiness. There is no getting my ego out of the way, and all that stuff. There is just the seeing, shining in great brilliance and clarity.
Face to No Face
– Douglas Harding
Summing up the long history of the struggle for “liberation,” all that can be stated with finality is that sentient beings must always appear as such, objectively extended in a space-time context, but that what they are non-phenomenally, other than objectivised concepts, can never be either perceived or conceived since cognizing cannot cognize what is cognizing, and what is cognizing is what they are.
Open Secret
– Wei Wu Wei
When there is a watcher it is merely the past watching, and that is not watching, that is just remembering and it is rather dead stuff. Watching is tremendously alive, every moment a vacancy. Watching without a single thought, watching every reaction, watching without identity, only endlessly watching, you are not really awake, you are absent minded, not all there; you are not you but watching. There is no thinker watching the thought, the thinker is the thought. Somebody passes by you and wonders what you are watching. You are watching nothing, and in that nothingness everything is.
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
– J Krishnamurti
I only know myself as a human entity; the scene so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and it is no more I than it is you.
This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That.
– James Broughton
The Self is the witness, all perfect, free, one consciousness, actionless, not attached to any object, desireless, ever tranquil. It appears through illusion as the world.
Enlightenment is beyond self-improvement and spiritual seeking. It is the final resolution of a case of mistaken identity. It is the direct recognition of your eternal nature and the seeing through of who you have falsely believed yourself to be.
From Here To Here
– Gary Crowley
Please understand that there is only one thing to be understood, and that is that you are the formless, timeless unborn.
There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don’t disturb your mind with seeking.
The Wisdom Teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj
– Edited by Matthew Greenblatt
Thinking that you are an awakened one, or that it is possible that you might become an awakened one, or that your teacher is an awakened one, or that there is at least one awakened one in a cave in the Himalaya somewhere, is called being asleep. Awakening means popping out of the context in which awakening makes any sense.
Perfect brilliant Stillness
– David Carse
Jesus of Nazareth (Gospel of St Thomas)
Whoever discovers the true meaning of these sayings will never die: Let the seeker not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be greatly troubled. And after he has been troubled, he will be astonished, and he will reign over the All.
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.
Spontaneous Awakening
– Adyashanti
The only truth which is not a concept is the sense of presence, here and now.
‘I am,’ not ‘I am Joe or Jane.’ This impersonal sense of presence in the present moment is the only truth.
When the apparent but illusory identity called a person has disappeared into the awareness of total potentiality that it is, and has always been, this is called enlightenment.
Who Cares?!
– Ramesh Balsekar
Awakening is disidentification of Awareness from the “I”-concept, and therefore also from the sense of personal doership.
With awakening comes the awareness that there is no person or entity, and there never has been any person or entity.
Consequently, there are also no other objects, and there never have been any other objects.
Since there is no doer, there is no regret, guilt, or shame for the past; or worry, anxiety, or fear for the future.
With awakening also comes the awareness that Reality, which is what You are, has never been affected by either conceptualization or identification.
course in consciousness
dialogue in consciousness
Stillness or peace is realization. There is no moment when the Self is not. Doubt or the feeling of non-realization is due to the identification of the Self with the non-Self. When the non-Self disappears, the Self alone remains. To make room, it is enough that the cramping be removed; room is not brought in from elsewhere. Your duty is TO BE and not to be this or that. I AM THAT I AM sums the whole truth: the method is summarized in BE STILL.
A sudden perception that Subject and object are one will lead you to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding – you will waken to the truth of Zen.
If you form a concept of the true nature of anything as being visible or audible, you allow a dharma of distinction to arise. Let me repeat that the perceived cannot perceive. Can there, I ask you, be a head attached to the crown of your head?
The Zen Teaching of Huang-Po
– John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
You make this extraordinary journey from existence to nonexistence. You discover the truth of your own nonexistence, the nothingness, the void where you as a human being no longer exist. It’s completely intoxicating and this outer world falls away. You experience that the physical world is only one among many worlds.
Your nature, and the infinite universe
are none other than one and the same:
Indescribable, but eternally present.
Simply open yourself to your own True nature.
– Lao Tzu
The moment this constant nondual consciousness is obvious in your case, a new destiny will awaken in the midst of the manifest world. You will have discovered your own Buddha Mind, you own Godhead, your own formless, spaceless, timeless, infinite Emptiness, your own Atman that is Brahman, your Keter, Christ consciousness, radiant shekinah – in so many words, One Taste. It is unmistakably so. And just that is your true identity-pure Emptiness or pure unqualifiable Consciousness as Such – and thus you are released from the terror and the torment that necessarily arise when you identify with a little subject in a world of little objects.
The Simple Feeling of Being
– Ken Wilber
Primal Awareness always “is” as it is. It is the default awareness that is always present. Like when we open our eyes we “see” without anything we need to do to make “seeing” happen. Or when we hear sounds, there is nothing we do to make “listening” happen. Both of these perceptual aspects are there by default. This State of Awareness is also just there. No practice or preliminaries can make this default awareness be more present than it already is. It requires no purification or maintenance. It is always on the “on” position. And it is fully on right now.
– Jackson Peterson
Glimpse After Glimpse
– Sogyal Rinpoche
You wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you’, all of you – higher self, lower self, soul, Atman, conscious, subconscious – all of that. You come to a point, and then you say ‘I need time’. So Sadhana (inquiry and religious endeavor) comes into the picture and you say to yourself “Tomorrow I will understand.” This structure is born of time and functions in time, but does not come to an end through time. If you don’t understand now, you are not going to understand tomorrow. What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state – it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.
The Natural State
– U G Krishnamurti
This term [enlightenment] is much confused and misused. It is self-ignorance that prevents recognition of the truth about our nature and that of reality. Enlightenment takes place in the mind of a person when self-ignorance has been eradicated. It is true (in absolute reality) that we are already ‘free’ – there is only ever the non-dual reality so how could it be otherwise? It is not t rue that we are already enlightened (in empirical reality), as the seeker well knows. Enlightenment is the event in time when the mind realizes that we are already free.
Nondual awareness occurs when we no longer divide our consciousness into subject and object,
and perceive inner projections as outer reality.
– Edward Plotkin
the awakened eye 