Quotes about Self

Die – you will have to die. But die gracefully. I am not saying die like a stoic, I am not saying die like a very controlled man. No, I'm saying die gracefully, beautifully, as if a friend is coming, knocks at your door, and you are happy. And you embrace the friend and invite him in, and you have been waiting for him so long....

If you can love death you become deathless; if you can understand non-being then your being becomes the very ground of being-hood, the very ground of God. If you can love non-being then nothing can destroy you, you have transcended time and space. Then you have become one with the total, and this is what holiness is – to become whole is to be holy.

Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

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.

Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

The animate earth – this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity

It's a relief, frankly, that in Buddhism, there is no self to save.

No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give.

That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

The only way to change is by changing your understanding.

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you?

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.

Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" — and find that there is no death.

The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.

None of these is you.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

A teacher of fear can’t bring peace on Earth. We have been trying to do it that way for thousands of years. The person who turns inner violence around, the person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. We are waiting for just one teacher.

You’re the one.

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

The voice within is what I'm married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes and no come from. That's my true partner. It's always there.
And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner.

The mind's job is to validate what it thinks.

I am the perpretor of my suffering - but only all of it.

The ultimate freedom from the nonexistent ego is to see that it is actually irrelevant.

When we really start to take a look at who we think we are, we become very grace prone.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what's left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.