“We are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. Indeed, the human mind is the most complex and subtle expression of reality we have thus far encountered. This should grant profundity to the humble project of noticing what it is like to be you in the present. However numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine—and only you can recognize it.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 206)
“In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 49)
Waking Up: A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion [Book]
Book Overview: From multiple New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, and “new atheist” Sam Harris, Waking Up is for the 30 percent of Americans who follow no religion, but who suspect that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history could not have all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. Throughout the book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experiences of such contemplatives – and, therefore, that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow. Waking Up is part seeker’s memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris – a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic – could write it.
“Buddhism is one of the most beautiful approaches—but it is incomplete. Something is missing. It has no mysticism in it, no poetry, no romance; it is almost bare mathematics, a geometry of the soul but not a poetry of the soul. And unless you can dance, never be satisfied. Be silent, but use your silence as an approach toward blissfulness. Do a few dancing meditations, singing meditations, music, so at the same time, your capacity to enjoy, your capacity to be joyful also increases.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 303)
“I have never doubted you for a moment, I have never doubted for a moment that you are the Buddha, that you have attained the goal, the highest, which so many thousands of Brahmins and sons of Brahmins are journeying to reach. You have found the deliverance from death. It came to you from your own seeking, on your own path, through thinking, through meditation, through knowledge, through illumination. It did not come through a teaching! And—this is my thought, O Sublime One—no one is granted deliverance through a teaching! You cannot, O Venerable One, impart to anyone, tell anyone in words and through teachings what happened to you in the hour of your illumination. The Teaching of the illuminated Buddha contains a great deal, it teaches many how to live righteously, avoid evil. But there is one thing that the so clear, so venerable Teaching does not contain: it does not contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself has experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. That is what I thought and realized when I heard the Teaching. That is why I am resuming my wandering—not to seek a different, better teaching, for I know that there is none; but to leave all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal alone or die.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 32)
“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 64)
For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether? And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.”
“A friend comes and holds your hand. Don’t miss this opportunity—because God has come in the form of the hand, in the form of the friend. A small child passes by and laughs. Don’t miss this, laugh with the child—because God has laughed through the child. You pass through the street and a fragrance comes from the fields. Stand there a moment, feel grateful—because God has come as a fragrance. If one can celebrate moment to moment, life becomes religious—and there is no other religion, there is no need to go to any temple. Then wherever you are is the temple, and whatever you are doing is religion.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 220)
“Everything you do in the day from washing to eating breakfast, having meetings, driving to work… watching television or deciding instead to read… everything you do is your spiritual life. It is only a matter of how consciously you do these ordinary things…”
Laurence Freeman, via Think Like A Monk (Page 77)
“Terrible is the situation of those who cannot perceive spiritual growth in themselves. They can see only physical life, which will disappear in time. When you understand your spiritual being and live with it, then instead of despairing you understand the joy that can never be destroyed, which always grows.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 371)
“I have no religion whatsoever. I believe that life is a process and that man is a self-made product. The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 76)
“To be perfectly frank, I really do not believe in God. If there is a God, he is within. You don’t ask God to give you things, you depend on God for inner theme.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 76)
“There is no death for the spirit; therefore, a person who lives a spiritual life is freed from death.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 188)
“Only he who accepts that the essence or meaning of his life is not material but spiritual can be free.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 187)