“The Buddha taught that those who hear and learn of enlightenment will never be satisfied with anything else and, therefore, the end is certain.”

— Quote from David Hawkins: The Eye of the I From Which Nothing is Hidden - Chapter 3: The Nature of the Quest - The Desire for Enlightenment

“When I was nineteen, I read a book — I think it might have been by Alan Watts — and I came across the word enlightenment. I had no idea what it was, but something clicked inside me. I absolutely had to know more about it. At that instant, I felt this sense that my life was no longer mine. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but I knew that some force had woken up inside me, and I just knew the life I’d thought I would have wasn’t going to be my life at all. The knowledge was thrilling, but also frightening.”

— See citation below

“Waking up from the dream of ‘me’ and seeing the oneness of all things. That’s what I mean by ‘reality’: that oneness. The truth is that you are that unity. You are not simply a particular person in a particular body with a particular personality; you are that one reality, which manifests itself as all these seemingly separate things.”

— See citation below

“One day, when I was thirty-three … I heard the call of a bird outside, and a thought came up from my gut, not from my head: Who hears this sound? The next thing I knew, I was the bird, and I was the sound, and I was the person listening; I was everything. I thought, I’ll be damned … I got up and went into the kitchen to see if I was the stove, too. Yeah, I was the stove. Looking for something more mundane, I went into the bathroom. What do you know: I was the toilet, too. Paradoxically I also realized that I am nothing, less than nothing. I am what is before nothingness. And in the next moment even that disappeared. The “I” disappeared completely. All of this — the oneness, the nothingness, and beyond both oneness and nothingness — was realized in quick succession. It all exists simultaneously. This was a sort of pure, unemotional, clear perception of reality that got more and more ordinary over time.”

— All 3 Quotes from the Dec. 2007 issue of The Sun Magazine - Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me” by Sy Safransky & Luc Saunders

“An individual is essentially Brahman, or identical to Universal Consciousness, and direct realization of that truth is called enlightenment.”

— Enlightenment without God: Mandukya Upanishad, pgs. 12-13

“Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy would raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away. Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei raised up his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened.”

— The Gateless Gate, by Ekai, called Mu-mon, translated by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps [1934]

“Seeing the peach blossoms in bloom, [Lingyun] suddenly understood the way.”

“[Xiangyan] dropped everything and the great matter was suddenly perfectly clear.”

- These last two are well known Zen stories collected in multiple places, including Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo, and can be found online here and here

“I parked my motorcycle and sat on an outcrop of rock about two-thirds of the way [up Chamundi Hill overlooking Mysore, India]. This was my ‘contemplation rock.’ It had been for some time now. A purple berry tree and a stunted banyan had put down tenacious roots into a deep fissure in the rock surface. A panoramic view of the city unfolded before me.

Until that moment, in my experience, my body and mind was ‘me’ and the world was ‘out there.’ But suddenly I did not know what was me and what was not me. My eyes were still open. But the air that I was breathing, the rock on which I was sitting, the very atmosphere around, everything had become me. I was everything that was. I was conscious, but I had lost my senses. The discriminatory nature of the senses simply did not exist anymore. The more I say, the crazier it will sound because what was happening was indescribable. What was me was literally everywhere. Everything was exploding beyond defined boundaries; everything was exploding into everything else. It was a dimensionless unity of absolute perfection.

My life is just that moment, gracefully enduring.”

- Inner Engineering, pg. 8

“There is only one calamity … ignorance. And there is only one solution … enlightenment.”

“The Only Calamity”, Isha Foundation, June 2017 - See Here

“The last barrier fell and … subject and object alike disappeared. The Universe was extinguished … Nothing remained but existence. The soul was lost in Self. Dualism was blotted out. Finite and infinite space were as one.”

- The Life of Ramakrishna by Romain Rolland, pg. 60

“Discover inner space by creating gaps in the stream of thinking. Without those gaps, your thinking becomes repetitive, uninspired, devoid of any creative spark, which is how it still is for most people on the planet. You don't need to be concerned with the duration of those gaps. A few seconds is good enough. Gradually, they will lengthen by themselves, without any effort on your part. More important than their length is to bring them in frequently so that your daily activities and your stream of thinking become interspersed with space …

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension.

Be aware of your breathing. Notice the sensation of the breath. Feel the air moving in and out of your body. Notice how the chest and abdomen expand and contract slightly with the in and out breath. One conscious breath is enough to make some space where before there was the uninterrupted succession of one thought after another. One conscious breath (two or three would be even better), taken many times a day, is an excellent way of bringing space into your life ... Breathing isn't really something that you do but something that you witness as it happens. Breathing happens by itself. The intelligence within the body is doing it. All you have to do is watch it happening. There is no strain or effort involved. Also, notice the brief cessation of the breath, particularly the still point at the end of the out­ breath, before you start breathing in again.”

- A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose; Chapter 8: The Discovery of Inner Space, pg. 148-9; first published 2005

"I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.”

“Why now is bliss”; Telegraph Magazine, Sept. 29, 2003 - See here

“Enlightenment means that the former personal identity and all that had been believed about it have been erased, removed, transcended, dissolved, and displaced. The particular has been replaced by the universal, qualities have been replaced by essence, the linear has been replaced by the nonlinear, and the discrete has been replaced by the unlimited. Position in time or space has become Allness and Foreverness. Intention has been replaced by spontaneity, and the limiting perception of duality has been removed as the Radiance of Oneness illuminates the Reality and the Truth of nonduality. The essence of Divinity stands forth in its Self-revelation. Mentation has ceased, and in the Silence, the Knowingness of Omniscience radiates forth unasked. Emotion has been replaced by Peace … The stop frame of form is replaced by the continuity of universal essence. Nothing is incomplete, undone, or unfinished. All is continuously complete as total self-identity. The essence of all that appears to exist is Divinity. All is God in the fulfillment of the potentiality of Creation.”

- I: Reality and Subjectivity, pgs. 346 - 347

“Realization is not acquisition of anything new, nor is it a new faculty; it is only removal of all camouflage … The ultimate truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. That is all that need be said about it.”

- Talks with Ramana Maharshi from Nov. 13, 1935; pg. 70

“From the recorded experiences of Christian mystics such as St. Paul, St. Francis of Assissi, St. Teresa, Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Catherine of Siena, Suso, and others, and from Sufi masters including Shamsi-Tabrez, Rumi, Abu Yazid, al-Nuri, and al-Junaid, and from the experiences of Yoga-adepts such as Kabir, Guru Nank, Shankaracharya, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi to name a few, it is obvious that in the basic essentials the experience is the same.

During the ecstasy or trance, consciousness is transformed and the yogi, sufi, or mystic finds himself in direct rapport with an overwhelming Presence. This warm, living, conscious Presence spreads everywhere and occupies the whole mind and thought of the devotee; he becomes lost in contemplation and entirely oblivious to the world …

Even a momentary contact with the divine is a stupendous experience. Some of the most famous men on earth — the greatest thinkers and the ablest writers — such as Plato, Plotinus, Parmenides, Dante, Wordsworth, and Tennyson had the experience. Emerson and many, many other renowned men and women had this singular experience thrust upon them, often to their grateful amazement. Most of them had undergone no spiritual discipline, and there were even some who had no firm belief in God. For even when unexpected, the experience leaves a permanent mark on life which uplifts the individual and grants him [or her] insights into the nature of things that are not possible for those who never see beyond the veil.

The experience always has the same basic characteristics. It is incredible that so many learned men and women, both scientists and scholars, should ignore a phenomenon as widespread as mystical experience has been. The phenomenon becomes even more surprising when we observe that all great founders of religion and some of the greatest philosophers, writers, and artists were endowed with beatific vision. All of them recognized it for what it was — a fleeting glimpse of another life and another world.”

- “The True Aim of Yoga,” from What is Enlightenment? pgs. 155-156

“No doubt we should not speak of seeing but, instead of seen and seer, speak boldly of a simple unity. For in this seeing we - neither distinguish nor are there two. The man ... is merged with the Supreme, one with it … Beholder was one with beheld . . . he is become the unity, having no diversity either in relation to himself or anything else . . . reason is in abeyance and intellection, and even the very self, caught away, God-possessed, in perfect stillness, all the being calmed.”

- Enneads Books VI, IX and XI, as collected in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) by Walter Terence Stace; ch. 2: The Problem of the Universal Core, pg. 104

“The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. I who am Divine am truly in you … I am in you and you are in Me, we could not be any closer. We two are fused into one.”

- Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg by Sue Woodruff, p. 42 (1982)

“In durchbruch [breakthrough], I learn that God and I are one.”

- Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times by Matthew Fox, pg. 49

“Ignorance can be cured only by knowledge; darkness can be destroyed only by light — no amount of argument or threat or persuasion can compel darkness to move away. A flash of light, that is enough; darkness is gone. Prepare for that flash of illumination; the light is there already in you. But, since it is heavily overladen by repressing factors, it cannot reveal itself. ‘The liberation from night’ which happens when the Light is revealed, is called Moksha. Everyone has to achieve it, whether he is striving for it now or not. It is the inevitable end to the struggle, the goal towards which all are proceeding … How do you prepare yourself for that stage? I must tell you that the answer is in that very word, moksha, itself. It is self-explanatory. ‘Mo’ indicates ‘Moha’ (delusion; being deluded by the scintillating, the gaudy, the transitory, the temporary …); and ‘Ksha’ means ‘Kshaya’ (decline; disappearance; destruction). It requires you to keep the flights of your mind away from these deluding attractions and on the straight path towards liberation.”

- Divine Discourse, Feb. 19, 1964. See Chapter 9 here

“All things in creation suffer fana (or annihilation), and there remains the face of the Lord in its majesty and bounty.”

- 55. 26–27

“Having achieved the ultimate goal, knowing everything that needs to be known, and enjoying eternal and supreme bliss, the Omniscient, Effulgent Soul, rests permanently in the Highest State (of liberation).”

- Puruşārthasiddhyupāya (224)

“Who I believed myself to be was a hopeless case.

I would wake up in the mornings, notice I was still breathing, and hate God for keeping me alive.

I would constantly think of killing myself, but I had three children, so that wasn’t a possibility.

I was clinically depressed. I was agoraphobic. I was full of rage, so paranoid that I slept with a gun under my pillow.

I would go for days and weeks at a time when I couldn’t even bathe or brush my teeth. My self-esteem was so low that I slept on the floor, because I didn’t believe I deserved a bed.

One morning, in 1986, as I lay asleep on the floor, a cockroach crawled over my foot.

And I opened my eyes out of this dead sleep — a 43-year-long sleep — and in place of all that darkness was a joy that I can’t describe …

In that moment I was absolutely unidentified, so I can’t say “I.” It was without identification. There was no time or space. There was nothing separate. All that was left was amazement and joy …

Love is the best word I can find for it. It had been split apart, and now it was joined.”

All but the last paragraph is from this interview (Ray Hemachandra Dec. 3, 2013)

The last two sentences are from A Thousand Names for Joy, pg. 199

“Concerning the causes and condition of this Great Matter, [Buddha-nature] is intrinsically within everyone; as such, it is already complete within you, lacking nothing. The difficulty is that, since time without beginning, seeds of passion, deluded thinking, emotional conceptualizations, and deep-rooted habitual tendencies have obscured this marvelous luminosity. You cannot genuinely realize it because you have been wallowing in remnant deluded thoughts of body, mind, and the world, discriminating and musing [about this and that]. For this reason you have been roaming in the cycle of birth and death. Yet, all Buddhas and ancestral masters have appeared in the world using countless words and expedient means … to clarify the doctrine … All of these expedient means are like tools to crush our mind of clinging and realize that originally there is no real substantiality to … [this small sense of] ‘self.’

What is commonly known as practice means simply to accord with [whatever state] of mind you’re in so as to purify and relinquish the deluded thoughts and traces of your habit tendencies. Exerting your efforts here is called practice. If within a single moment deluded thinking suddenly ceases, [you will] thoroughly perceive your own mind and realize that it is vast and open, bright and luminous, intrinsically perfect and complete. This state, being originally pure, devoid of a single thing, is called enlightenment … The essence of your mind is like a mirror and all the traces of deluded thoughts and clinging to conditions are defiling dust of the mind. Your conception of appearances is this dust and your emotional consciousness is the defilement. If all the deluded thoughts melt away, the intrinsic essence will reveal in its own accord … when the defilement is polished away, the mirror regains its clarity.”

- Essentials of Practice and Enlightenment for Beginners

Translation by Guo-gu Shi

“No one can become enlightened. No one can be liberated, for the you that thinks it can be liberated doesn’t even exist. There is no you. There is no person. There is no human being who is a human being one day and the next day becomes liberated. There is only the liberated Self, and you are That.”

- Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams, pg. 206 (1997)

“The process of realization is removal, not adding. Removing this and removing that. Removing all concepts and all preconceived ideas. Removing all of your thoughts, no matter what kind of thoughts they are. Good thoughts, bad thoughts, they all must go. And what is left will be nothing — no-thing. You are that. You are that no-thing …

There is a Power and there is a Presence which I like to call The Current That Knows the Way, that takes care of everything. It is all part of the grand illusion. And even in this illusion which appears in front of your eyes, there is a Presence and a Power that lifts you up. It will lift you up as high as you can allow It to. Until it lifts you up completely out of your body, out of your thoughts, out of the universe, to a completely new dimension.

You’ll appear to be the same person as always to people, but you’ll not be that person any longer. For that person is gone, no longer exists. You have become Brahman. You have become all-pervading. You have become your Self without trying to do so.

You must always have gratitude for the way you are. Do not feel sorry for yourself. Love yourself just the way you are. By loving yourself just the way you are, you will transcend those things that have appeared to annoy you, to bother you, to cause you pain. They will all go. You’ll no longer be aware of them. Let go of everything. Have no desires whatsoever. Dive deep within the Self … All is well.

When you are without thoughts, without needs, without wants, without desires, then you are God. You are the universe. You are Divine Love. You are beautiful.”

- Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams (1997)

“I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me.”

- Galatians 2:20

“Enlightenment is not a singular ecstatic experience but an unavoidable fact of human existence.”

- Ambivalent Zen: A Memoir, pg. 16-17 (1997)

“Enlightenment is the absolute reason of the universe and the essence of Buddhahood, and therefore … to obtain Enlightenment is to realize in one’s inner consciousness the ultimate truth of the world which for ever is.”

- Essays in Zen Buddhism, pg. 54 (1927)