Quotes about Reality

Nothing has to be changed, because all is beautiful -- that is enlightenment. All is as it should be, everything is perfect. This is the most perfect world, this moment lacks nothing -- the experience of this is what enlightenment is.

This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.

Religion has only one answer and that answer is meditation. And meditation means how to empty yourself.

Meditation means removing all your prejudices, putting all your conclusions aside, seeing without any hindrance, seeing without any curtains, seeing clearly without any mediation of any thought, seeing without Buddha standing between you and reality, or Krishna, or Christ.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

The practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceivable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses, yet again, on behalf of a mental ideal.

A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment. For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the land around us. This wild expanse has its own timing, its rhythms of dawning and dusk, its seasons of gestation and bud and blossom. It is here, and not in linear history, that the ravens reside.

Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled matter--something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.

Science has discovered much. The engineering is wonderful, epicycles and all. And yet, as we look at this vast, elaborate structure built on layer and layer of complex constituents, can we help but be reminded of the Land of Oz. Have we found the Emerald City? Is this what we were searching for? Is this the ultimate fabric of reality? Is this all there is?

In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.

Reality can be perceived when emotion is set aside.

Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.

I do believe that everything we see, everything that is in front of us is just the visible part of reality. We have the invisible part of reality, like emotions for example, like feelings. This is our perception of the world, but God is--as William Blake said--in a grain of sand and in a flower. This energy is everywhere.

Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points.

If I say, if I talk about, 'I want to be enlightened...' it implies a future. And there isn't any.

The end of suffering happens in this very moment, whether you're watching a terrorist attack or doing the dishes. And compassion begins at home. Because I don't believe my thoughts, sadness can't exist. That's how I can go to the depths of anyone's suffering, if they invite me, and take them by the hand and walk them out of it into the sunlight of reality.

I've taken that walk myself.

The only time we suffer  is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

Thoughts are just what is. They appear. They're innocent. They're not personal. They're like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. Thoughts arise like that, and we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop?

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

You don't get to vote on what is. Have you noticed?

You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.

I'm a lover of reality. When I argue with What Is, I lose, but only 100% of the time.

The Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no agenda.

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.

(Please don't) confuse symbol with reality...

Life is real only then, when "I am".

"Time and again human consciousness fixates, and slams the door on its greatest gift, the open-endedness of infinite possibility. As a result we do not experience reality but merely our concept of it."

In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter.  The split between inner and outer - subjective and objective - that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

We will need to look, beyond reality, to find the reality behind the axiomatic reasoning of mankind itself. Perhaps we even need to look behind Consciousness itself, to find what is the foundation of reality.