“The only way to enter silence is on its own terms. You can’t go there with something, only with nothing. You can’t be somebody, only nobody. Then entrance is easy. But this nothing is actually the highest price we ever pay. It’s our most sacred commodity. We will give our ideas, our beliefs, our heart, our body, our mind, and our soul. The last thing that we’ll give is nothing. We hold on to our nothingness because that’s our most sacred commodity, and somewhere inside we know this. Only the nothing enters the silence; that’s the only thing that gets in. The rest of what we are just bangs at the nonexistent door. As soon as you want something from the silence, you are moved outside the silence again. Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret. Its secret is itself. That’s why I say all the words, all the books, all the teachings, and all the teachers can only get you to the door, and perhaps entice you to enter. Once there, you start to feel the presence of silence very powerfully. When this happens, something spontaneously arises that’s willing to enter it without being somebody. That is the sacred invitation. Inside you find that silence is the final and ultimate teacher and the final and ultimate teaching. It’s the only teacher that won’t speak to you. Silence is the only teacher and teaching that keeps our humanness on its knees all the time. Silence is the ultimate and best teacher, because in silence is the neverending welcoming to do that which our human heart truly desires, which is to always be with our knees on the floor, always be in that sort of devotion to Truth. Silence is the only teaching and the only teacher that is there all the time. Every minute that you are awake, every minute that you are alive, every minute that you breathe, it’s right there.”
~ Adyashanti
Emptiness Dancing
When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.
-Adyashanti
Stay without ambition,
without the least desire,
exposed, vulnerable, unprotected,
uncertain and alone,
completely open to
and welcoming life
as it happens…
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
‘The day I became enlightened’ simply means the day I realised that there is nothing to achieve, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be done.
Osho
Be empty. That’s it. When you’re empty, you’re the most powerful, because you’re present. You’re awake. You’re alive. And you’re nothing.
Mooji
The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming. Lost in our mind’s imagined world of judgments, beliefs, and opinions, we are literally caught in a waking dream. For some it is a nightmare, for others a temporary reprieve in some imagined heaven. For most it is something in between.
But no matter what the current status of your dream may be, it will all come to an end someday when you least expect it. Suddenly the plot of your life will change or end altogether, and you will find yourself disoriented and wondering what happened and where it all went.
Such abrupt changes in the direction and texture of our lives is one of the few certainties we have, and yet we keep believing that what we think about life has anything whatsoever to do with what life actually is.
Adyashanti
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’… He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature… Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
Albert Einstein
“This life is a dream. To call it a dream is not to disparage it; that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. It’s no different from dreams you have at night. You wake up from your dreams into this dream we call life, and when you go to sleep, you wake up in another dream world. But that which is awake in both worlds, the dreamer, is always the same. Awareness is always present. That’s the reality. What doesn’t come and go, even in the dream state? That’s who you are.”— Adyashanti
