Quotes from Adyashanti

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.

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.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

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

Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.

Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.

We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.

Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

As I often tell my students, the person you'll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.

In the end it's all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don't.

As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you're willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the "me" is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

Because of an innocent misunderstanding you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.

We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.

Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you'll never have your freedom.

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.

Awareness isn't something we own; awareness isn't something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.