Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 1)

“In the process of waking yourself up, you quickly realize that there’s no outside authority. You have to verify everything yourself. If you adopt something someone else said, it’s only after you have verified it for yourself. If Jesus, Buddha, or Lao-Tzu made it, you can make it. There’s no choice about this; you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes

The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. A

(Q: “Why am I always so dissatisfied? Why can’t I ever just be content?” A: “You weren’t born to be content. Your discontent is the engine that drives you, be grateful to it.”

Neither Holy nor Wise When the mind is at peace, the world too is at peace. Nothing real, nothing absent. Not holding on to reality, not getting stuck in the void, You are neither holy nor wise, just an ordinary fellow who has completed his work. Layman P’ang

I always have the feeling that storms are spectacles for my personal entertainment and I feel a pang of guilt if I don’t pay attention to them. It’s no hardship to pay attention to them though, since they provide me such pleasure. I think of storms as boisterous sound and light shows put on by the universe for those who have the sense to appreciate

sky.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.” What he might have meant is that falseness exists only in shadow. Illumination by intellect “destroys” the untrue by revealing that there was never anything there to begin with. Just as light banish

It’s amazing how desperately we cling to our beliefs. As history shows, the fastest way to reduce otherwise decent people to a state of savagery is by tampering with their belief system. The word for someone who does so is heretic, and historically the punishments reserved for him are more brutal than for any other class of offender.

“Enlightenment isn’t when you go there, it’s when there comes here. It’s not a place you visit and then remember wistfully and try to return to. It’s not a visit to the truth, it’s the awakening of truth within you. It’s not a fleeting state of consciousness, it’s permanent truth-realization; abiding non-dual awareness. It’s not a place you visit f