Quotes about Enlightment

Many spiritual seekers get "stuck" in emptiness, in the absolute, in transcendence. They cling to bliss, or peace, or indifference. When the self-centered motivation for living disappears, many seekers become indifferent. They see the perfection of all existence and find no reason for doing anything, including caring for themselves or others. I call this "taking a false refuge." It is a very subtle egoic trap; it's a fixation in the absolute and all unconscious form of attachment that masquerades as liberation. It can be very difficult to wake someone up from this deceptive fixation because they literally have no motivation to let go of it. Stuck in a form of divine indifference, such people believe they have reached the top of the mountain when actually they are hiding out halfway up its slope.

Enlightenment does not mean one should disappear into the realm of transcendence. To be fixated in the absolute is simply the polar opposite of being fixated in the relative. With the dawning of true enlightenment, there is a tremendous birthing of impersonal Love and wisdom that never fixates in any realm of experience. To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true nonduality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true Emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. I say, Wake up! Then, your heart will be flooded with a Love that you cannot contain.

Sitting peacefully on a cushion day and night seeking to attain Buddhahood, rejecting life and death in hopes of realizing enlightenment, is all like a monkey grasping at the moon reflected in the water.

Every single human being in the world at some time thinks that "if only" this or that one of our conditions could be met then we'd be happy. "If only I had a girlfriend/boyfriend/million bucks, then I'd be happy." Or in the case of the more spiritually minded: "If only I were enlightened, then that would settle everything once and for all." Think again.

An old Chinese Zen Master once said, "From birth to death it's just like this!"  

Wherever you go in the world of human beings is pretty much the same. Only the details are different. All of my gaijin teacher friends who wanted to get out of Japan and back to the "real world" have discovered that the "real world" is hardly any different than the place they were leaving.  

We always want to believe that somewhere there's a perfect situation, if only we weren't barred from it. But that's not the reality.  

We always imagine that there's got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now, the great "Somewhere Else" we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there's no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here.