Quotes from Adyashanti

What myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.

With a true and authentic awakening, who and what we are becomes clear. There's no longer a question about it; it is a done deal. In this way, one of the hallmarks of a true awakening is the end of seeking. You no longer feel the momentum, the push and the pull. The seeker has been revealed as the virtual reality it always was, and as such it disappears. The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task.

Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.

O que quer que você evite na vida irá retornar, repetidamente, até que esteja disposto a encarar isso, a olhar com profundidade para a sua verdadeira natureza.

Spiritual people always think the Truth is hidden from them. It is not hidden. What gets in the way is the idea of what it is going to be.

Such grace is never held in abeyance, never earned or deserved. It is not given to some and not to others. Grace is ever present; it is only our openness to it that comes and goes. In one sense, The Way of Liberation is a means of opening up to grace.

As I delved deeper into these Christian mystics, I was beginning to question in my own mind if I needed to make a path change from Zen Buddhism to Christianity. It had been many years since I'd been to my first Catholic mass, and I decided to go back a second time.

This is how I love you, and this is how you shall love all beings and all things.

A good ritual is meant to evoke the mystery of being, the mystery of our own existence, the mystery of life, the mystery of God. It's meant to evoke that sense of eternity that shines through the latticework of time and space. That's really what ritual is for—to put us in touch with that sense of eternity, with the sense of the sacred.

As I listened to this priest, all the presence and mystery disappeared from the room and everything returned to the relative world.

It's not your ego that realizes it's God, but your true essence. It might be more accurate to say God within you realizes it's God; the radiance realizes that you are the radiance.

Seeing Jesus through the lens of the spiritual revolutionary is powerfully transformative; if we can embody that spirit within ourselves, we can begin to break down the internal walls that separate ourselves from each other, from the world, and from our own divinity.

There's just a simple, profound intimacy with all things, and with all beings, and with that which transcends all things and all beings. Life is experienced in all of its original completeness and unity.

I think the churches in this country need to be revitalized; they need that challenging presence of Jesus that says, "It's important that you realize the truth of your being. There are profound consequences to living in darkness." As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Relinquishment is what spiritual teachers mean when they say, "die before you die.

The very last phase of spiritual awakening is what I call "the transmutation." Transmutation is what transfiguration and relinquishment make possible. In it, your orientation to life is entirely selfless. It's not that you want to be selfless or you're practicing being selfless: rather you're selfless in the sense of no self.

Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself.

There is a scripture in the Buddhist tradition called the Heart Sutra, which says that there is no birth, no old age, and no death, and no end to birth, old age, or death. This is a very important part of the sutra. There is no birth, no old age, and no death. This is true from the absolute point of view. But unless we've also realized, simultaneously, that there is no end to birth, old age, and death, then our realization is not complete.

The truth, I would suggest, is that you poured yourself willingly into form out of infinite love in order to redeem the entirety of this life. When seen from that perspective, all of a sudden life looks very different. You stop holding back from life, your inner life or the life around you, because the kingdom of heaven is within and all around you. That's the message of the Jesus story.

Jesus said, "Blessed is he who came into being before he came into being.

As soon as you break your fidelity to Truth, you kick yourself out of the freedom of Truth. As soon as anything—power, praise, person, place, thing, outward love, respect, acknowledgment—becomes more important than Truth, you will begin to suffer and feel separate. There is only room for Truth in the Truth. This means there is only room for seeing the Truth, choosing the Truth, and loving the Truth. A fierce commitment to Truth is a moment-to-moment choice.

The heavenly state is the context of eternity in which the world resides.

Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it's necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source..

The light of awakeness itself is the deepest transformative agent, and the deepest alchemy takes place in the willingness to stay conscious to our own unconsciousness.