Adyashanti is an American spiritual teacher and author. He has been on the path to enlightenment since his 20s when he started studying Zen Buddhism for 14 years. On his spiritual journey, he grew to know about the real sense of self, what it is to let go of the attachments to the materialistic world, and what enlightenment truly is. Today, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. He says, “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine.” In this article, we have collected 50 enlightening Adyashanti quotes to inspire your spiritual awakening and to assist your spiritual journey.
50 Adyashanti Quotes
#1
“To be free of fear is to be full of love.” ~ Adyashanti
#2
“Freedom and love arise when you die into the unknown mystery of being.” ~ Adyashanti
#3
“You must choose between your attachments and happiness.” ~ Adyashanti
#4
“Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.” ~ Adyashanti
#5
“Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening.” ~ Adyashanti
#6
“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” ~ Adyashanti
#7
“Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control.”~ Adyashanti
#8
“The good news is that at the essence of who and what we are, there is a deep and fundamental goodness.” ~ Adyashanti
#9
“Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti Quotes
#10
“Whatever you resist you become.” ~ Adyashanti
#11
“Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes. As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.” ~ Adyashanti
#12
“Suffering is caused by identification with egoic consciousness.” ~ Adyashanti
#13
“When you inquire ‘Who am I?’ if you are honest, you’ll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn’t have an answer, so all of a sudden there is silence.” ~ Adyashanti
#14
“The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, the resistance disappears.” ~ Adyashanti
#15
“We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.” ~ Adyashanti
#16
“One can’t find true, lasting happiness outside of themselves.”~ Adyashanti
#17
“We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.” ~ Adyashanti
#18
“When we identify with egoic consciousness, we go unconscious or become unaware of our true nature as conscious spirit.” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti Quotes
#19
“You must want to know the truth more than you want to feel secure in order to fully awaken to the fact that you are nothing but awakeness itself.” ~ Adyashanti
#20
“When we start to suffer, it tells us something very valuable.” ~ Adyashanti
#21
“Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That’s the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart.” ~ Adyashanti
#22
“Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.” ~ Adyashanti
#23
“Beyond even any teaching, though, the aspect of spiritual life that is the most profound is the element of grace. Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know. In this gap of not knowing, in the suspension of any conclusion, a whole other element of life and reality can rush in. This is what I call grace. It’s that moment of “ah-ha!”—a moment of recognition when we realize something that previously we never could quite imagine.” ~ Adyashanti
#24
“The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.” ~ Adyashanti
#25
“When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.” ~ Adyashanti
#26
“Suffering is how life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true.” ~ Adyashanti
#27
“Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don’t go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti Quotes
#28
“Stop seeking something more or better or different, and turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.” ~ Adyashanti
#29
“The end of separation is the salvation for all.” ~ Adyashanti
#30
“If we would only see that all limitations are self-imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once.” ~ Adyashanti
#31
“As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.” ~ Adyashanti
#32
“Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. Welcome it.” ~ Adyashanti
#33
“The biggest embrace of love you’ll ever make is to embrace yourself completely. Then you’ll realize you’ve just embraced the whole universe, and everything and everybody in it.” ~ Adyashanti
#34
“Every human being… the way they move in life, how they act, is completely dictated by what they value.” ~ Adyashanti
#35
“Whatever happiness you find outside of yourself, can be taken away.” ~ Adyashanti
#36
“If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti Quotes
#37
“Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.” ~ Adyashanti.
#38
“When someone tells you, “I love you,” and then you feel, “Oh, I must be worthy after all,” that’s an illusion. That’s not true. Or someone says, “I hate you,” and you think, “Oh, God, I knew it; I’m not very worthy,” that’s not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, “I love you,” he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, “I hate you,” she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views—literally” ~ Adyashanti
#39
“As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.” ~ Adyashanti
#40
“The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.” ~ Adyashanti
#41
“We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.” ~ Adyashanti
#42
“When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.” ~ Adyashanti
#43
“Whatever you think you are, that’s not it.” ~ Adyashanti
#44
“When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what’s left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.” ~ Adyashanti
#45
“You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti Quotes
#46
“Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.” ~ Adyashanti
#47
“Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you.” ~ Adyashanti
#48
“Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.” ~ Adyashanti
#49
“By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you’ve got a very convincing – though divided – self.” ~ Adyashanti
#50
“Of course, there are those churches today that are inspired by the real living presence of Christ, but as a whole, Christianity needs new life breathed into it. It needs to be challenged to awaken from the old structures that confine spirit, so that the perennial spirit of awakening can flourish once again.” ~ Adyashanti
We hope you are inspired by Adyashanti quotes as much as we are!