Quotes about Liberation

You are what you want to become. Why search anymore? You are a wonderful manifestation. The whole universe has come together to make your existence possible. There is nothing that is not you. The kingdom of God, the Pure Land, nirvana, happiness, and liberation are all you.

"What joy is ours that the Lord not only forgives our sins ,but allows the soul to know Him, so soon as she humbles herself.  The poorest wretch can humble himself and know God in the Holy Spirit.  There is no need of money or posessions in order to know God, only humility.  The Lord gives Himself freely, for His mercy's sake alone.  I did not know this before but now every day and every hour every minute, I see clearly the mercy of God.  The Lord gives peace even in sleep, but without God there is no peace in the soul."

"The prince of this world blinds people who then walk like blind men, feeling their way and because of this they are constantly falling into one bog after another.  Science is fraud when its facts are taken as something absolute, for tomorrow's scientific knowledge will contradict today's; most art is a deliberate distortion; politics has always been full of deceit, lies, crimes.  Here everything must be understood in reverse---what they call life is but superficial, horrible pettiness, emptiness, lies with out end; in a word, it is the 'age of falsehood,' the kingdom of the prince of this world."

from Abbot Nikon: Letters to Spiritual Children

"The proud man thinks he can comprehend everything with his mind. The Lord does not grant this ... The Lord does not manifest Himself to the proud soul. Pride is difficult to detect in oneself, but the Lord leaves the proud to be tormented by their impotence until they humble themselves." -- St. Silouan of Mount Athos

"At the beginning of the call to the spiritual life,the Lord visits a person with His grace and various consolations,but afterwards He withdraws them and casts him into the fire of diverse temptations and sorrows,so that our self-loving and glory-loving disposition would be commpletely reduced to ashes by the fire of temptation,and would not trust in itself and its works but in the mercy and love of God.Humility is a great blessing."

From Living without Hypocrisy: Spiritual Council from the  Elders of Optina http://www.skete.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=1483

We will find the key to our liberation only when we accept that what we once did to survive is now destroying us.

And he who has considered all the contrasts on this earth, and is no
more disturbed by anything whatever in the world, the Peaceful One,
freed from rage, from sorrow, and from longing, he has passed beyond
birth and decay.

And for a disciple thus freed, in whose heart dwells peace, there is
nothing to be added to what has been done, and naught more remains for
him to do. Just as a rock of one solid mass remains unshaken by the
wind, even so, neither forms, nor sounds, nor odors, nor tastes, nor
contacts of any kind, neither the desired, nor the undesired, can
cause such an one to waver. Steadfast is his mind, gained is
deliverance.

The Buddha shared his teachings so that everyone, without exception, could reach the same supreme state of liberation that he had attained through practice and effort.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

There is neither unwisdom nor ignorance; neither bondage, nor liberation. There is but one pure consciousness.

There are four gate-keepers at the entrace to the Realm of Freedom [moksha].

When a person understands what sort of existence a human being is, and what exactly the "self" is, that person has been liberated forever.

The past: our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." 

A Chinese allegory tells how a monk sets off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He spends years and years on his quest and finally he comes to the country where the Buddha lives. He crosses a river, it's a wide river, and he looks about him while the boatman rows him across.
There is a corpse floating on the water and it's coming closer. The monk looks. The corpse is so close he can touch it. He recognizes the corpse, it is his own.
The monk loses all self control and wails.
There he floats, dead.
Nothing remains.
Anything he has ever been, ever learned, ever owned, floats past him, still and without life, moved by the slow current of the wide river.
It is the first moment of his liberation.

so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together.

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.

Under the right circumstances, it is not difficult to have a powerful experience of meditation, to taste the indescribable peace, bliss, rapture, and stillness of the Ground of Being-like a still forest pool, in which you sink ever more deeply, where your mind is not moving at all. It is very important to taste the inherent liberation of your own infinite depth, but that kind of experience in and of itself will not necessarily teach you how to have a liberated relationship to the chaos of your own mind and emotions. Sinking to the depths of your own self is always profoundly inspiring, but it's not enough. It is equally important to know how to stay on the surface when a storm is raging and have no relationship to the chaos. And that is what the deliberate practice of meditation is all about. For most of us, learning to do that is ultimately a source of greater confidence and soul strength than the spontaneous experience of infinite depth. And in fact, from an absolute or nondual perspective, being at the surface is no different from being at the very bottom of the pool. Even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, in time you will come to understand that it is the same. That is the secret of freedom.

To arouse oneself from the state of sleep and take the first step toward liberation, one must attain a thorough understanding of the meaning of the Permanent Witness (or Ego-Consciousness) and see in that it differs from mere brain-consciousness.

            We shall then be able to understand hoe this personal conscience, though it needs to be awakened, is nevertheless a part of Personality whose aims are in general opposed to those of the Spiritual Self.

            The Personality wants:

            •  Continuity on earth
            •  The relative values of this temporary existence
            •  Intellectual information put at the service of worldly interests (a social, scientific, or commercial career)
            •   Mediocrity – since rash extremes can never expect to win public approval and gain social and worldly advantage
            •   Utilitarianism, meaning everything that fits in with mundane computation and logical reason
 

            The Spiritual Witness on the other hand, desires:

            •   To unite with the human and thus transmute it into an immortal being
            •   Absolute values which are indestructible
            •   To open the “heart” to intuitive knowledge
            •   The sense of excess, as a springboard from which to overleap human limitations and convert the fall of man into an opportunity of evolution
            •   Unalterable love of reality
            •   Love of life for its own sake
            •   Love of impersonal Love

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.' 

As you learn to leave alone the activity of unconsciously trying to be the mindbody that you think that you are - the mindbody that this "you" is currently flowing through - and you learn to move as this one that you truly are - this "you" of you; the very heart of existence - steadily, consciously and momentarily, the continuity of the ever deepening of this innermost as it keeps on entering its manifestation, through this mindbody that you find yourself flowing through, allows you to simply bubble in the sheer joy, pleasure, peace, delightfulness and stillness that this "you" of you is.

All effort is ignorance.

It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.

The ultimate liberation is to be liberated from the identification with being a woman.  My womanhood is not the deepest thing that can be said about me.  The deepest thing is that I'm a living trajectory of divine purpose and compassion moving through this time and space dimention in this form, and one of the names that I bear is woman.  But it is not the whole of the consciousness.

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth.  No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

"If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn."

"I am breathing in and liberating my mind.  I am breathing out and liberating my mind." One practices like this.

"The pain in those chakras is meant to be felt; experienced. You are going to feel it (the sadness, and despair) move. It's part of the "push-through". The energy in the solar plexus, especially, needs to move...Balance. Practice. Meditating upon my form. These are three excellent spiritual practices to put my teachings in place. I want people to know that spirituality is a focus, a commitment, not a punishment. It's liberating."