Inspirational Quotes

Part 1

The end of suffering is not found in the pursuit of freedom from suffering, but in realizing the divided nature of desire that imagines and identifies with a pain-free time or a place to come, only to imprison itself in a fear it may lose the heaven it has imagined.

Part 2

Pain is baked into any desire we're identified with before that condition crumbles.

Part 3

The moment we name something we imagine we need to be whole or happy... we give life to the name of something we will fear in the next moment. When it comes to being identified with any desire, we can't seek for what we want without finding what we don't want. This is why Christ said: "You can't serve two masters for you will love one and despise the other.”

Part 1

Most of us live an accidental life... where our actual condition is constantly covered up by the convenience of being able to regret whatever we look back on as the source of our pain. But let’s be clear. Our list of painful regrets is not due to a cruel world, bad timing, or unfortunate events that got the better of us; no, the fault lies elsewhere, much closer to home: not only are we blind to the legion of unconscious parts at large in the dark of us, but we are yet to see the other half of this same truth: these same parts never stop working to ensure that we never stop wrestling with the regrets they keep resurrecting within us. To what end, this painful plot?

That we never become conscious of the relationship between a life we regret, and our identification with a lower level of consciousness that ensures its continuation.

Part 2

It’s impossible to regret any unwanted moment in our past, let alone repeatedly incarnate its pain, without having agreed -- in one way or another -- to revisit the same sense of self whose experience we claim to regret, and yet we continue to relive.

Part 3

If regret is the act of a divided nature that keeps itself in place by regretting itself, then remorse is pain that nullifies this false sense of self. And that is why remorse is so rare -- and why it is so holy. It is written: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn for the sake of righteousness…”

Have you ever talked yourself into a dark place -- or watched someone else do it -- by identifying with a negative reaction that wouldn’t be there at all if it wasn’t being fueled by the fear of some pain as imagined coming?

Part 1

Given time, whatever degree of dependency we help to create in others will eventually prove itself a prison of our own making... For there is no form of psychological dependency that doesn't make a captive of whoever may be involved in that relationship... including the one who unknowingly initiated it.

Part 2

The Divine first intervenes in our unseen identification with useless suffering by the dawning of an interior Light that reveals a shocking truth: most of the familiar solutions we depend on to free us from our suffering... are secretly complicit in its continuation.

Part 3

Part of our unseen collusion with any co-dependent relationship is the strong sense of urgency we feel whenever something seems to threaten it. And, not coincidentally, identifying with that fear is perhaps our greatest weakness.

There is no flood, no raging waters to be crossed in a time to come. There is only the movement of life now. And when we neither halt nor strain in the face of what we are called to meet there, what we will discover there is that His will is the Way, and that it will carry us to that supreme realization... if we will only agree to see it is so.

Part 1

Revelation is not a product of time, rather (it is) the sudden appearance of an impersonal, timeless awareness within us. These “ah-ha” moments do not provide intellectual answers; rather they provide, by grace, a glimpse of a higher order of awareness whose peace is inseparable from the Divine intelligence it permeates.

Part 2

What we usually call a disturbance in the present moment does not actually belong to the present moment itself -- any more than an echo belongs to the voice that gives rise to it.

Part 3

The conditions required for humility are as countless as the stars, but only an act of grace can create the humility that reunites us with the Creator of their timeless radiance.

Negative reactions create chains. All chains are made by machines. To see that you are not a machine instantly releases you from becoming identified with any painful chain reaction.

Part 1

We do not become prisoners because we fail to escape some painful pattern. We become prisoners because we imagine there is a “someone” inside the pattern who must escape it. In truth, the sense of self that feels trapped is a creation of an unconscious nature struggling to escape the experience of itself. Once realized that the suffering inherent in this conflict is not yours... it no longer needs to be transcended; it’s released without effort because it simply has no one left to belong to.

Part 2

No conflict -- in and of itself -- produces a negative pattern. Any pattern of suffering is a dark creation of some pain remembered, replayed, rehearsed, and crystallized over time.

Poverty is best defined not by what we may possess or don't, but rather by what we have mistakenly come to value above all else, and then continue to suffer over, uselessly.

Awakening is the sudden, and often quite shocking realization that what we had once taken to be the whole of our life... isn’t, any more than you can see the whole of a starry night through a skylight.

Part 1

We are only as locked out of the Kingdom of Heaven as we are locked into our many mistaken ideas about it... beginning with the false belief that we already know the true nature of (its) freedom, including what's required of us if we ever hope to win it.

Part 2

Each time we turn our back and walk away from the pain of some unwanted moment, we close our eyes to the revelation of that Divine inevitability: a doorway that is always open to those willing to walk through it, and into the Light of Liberation that appears to reveal it.

Part 1

You can't escape any unwanted experience of yourself because that is the experience you don’t want! The Good news is this experience of yourself is not your true Self... but, for now, it is largely the only (sense of) self you’re given to know.

Part 2

The gateway to the Holy of Holies -- the tabernacle of the Divine -- is entered as the seeker awakens enough to see through and realize... there is no such time coming when he will be free as he’s imagined. The moment we stop reaching for what we're sure is missing in our life -- or running from what we fear to see about it -- we stand face-to-face with the silent truth that sets us free: what we are looking for is already within what the Divine has made us; nothing more, nothing less.

Part 3

As we are, at present, we listen to our thoughts. We look at what our reactions tell us that we must attend to; and our body is filled with a host of vacillating sensations produced by this divided mind as it tries to decide which of these thoughts and reactions will best serve its conditioned need. The end of this struggle with life... is seeing it, as it is, for the first time. And the advent of this higher order of seeing marks the awakening... of Being.