The problem is that people don’t understand what enlightenment is. People see it as something other than who they are. They’re looking for some kind of perfection that’s almost dehumanized. The Buddha was very much a real person, a living person. Sometimes he did things that were not very enlightened, like not initially ordaining women. The perfection is to be found in the ability to keep working at it, and keep correcting yourself when you go astray. Keep returning to what it means to be human.

We have human qualities that are amazing. We have such things as integrity, and persistence, and dedication, and honor and love. There are also things like anger and delusion, separation and so on. These are also human qualities. Practice is about learning how to discern them. It doesn’t mean that an enlightened person never gets angry. What happens is that over a period of time anger becomes less self-centered. It’s more like the anger of a mother who has just yanked her child off a busy road. That kind of anger is for the benefit of the child. That’s why they say the other side of anger is wisdom.

- John Daido Loori

Even after many years of psychoanalysis, after teaching psychology, working as a therapist, after taking drugs for many years, being in India, being a yogi, having a guru, meditating for 18 or 19 years now – as far as I can see I haven’t gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one. The only thing that has changed is that while before these neuroses were huge monsters that possessed me, now they’re like little shmoos that I invite over for tea. I say, “Oh, sexual perversity! Haven’t seen you in weeks!” They’re sort of my style now. When your neuroses become your style, you’ve got it made. Everybody has a personality composed of neurotic patterns. I’ve given up thinking I’ve got to go through the eye of the needle and become psychologically sound. I’m always going to be a mess! At bottom, it’s uninteresting and unimportant. That’s part of the shift that occurs with spiritual practice. As things become less important, they become more available to change.

— Ram Dass

There is a very simple secret to being happy.
Just let go of your demand on this moment.

Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something
or remove something,
there is suffering.

Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of the conditioned mind.
The problem is that when there is a demand,
you completely miss what is now.

Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand,
and even for the demand for Love.
If you demand in some subtle way to be loved,
even if you get love, it is never enough.
In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself,
and you need to be loved again.

But as soon as you let go,
there is knowing in that instant
that there is love here already.

The mind is afraid to let go of its demand
because the mind thinks that if it lets go,
it is not going to get what it wants—-
as if demanding works.

This is not the way things work.
Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love,
and your heart becomes full.
Stop trying to be a better person,
and you are a better person.
Stop trying to forgive.
and forgiveness happens.
Stop and be still.

~Adyashanti

In our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts. We can take joy in that. I find that it’s essential during the day to actually note when I feel happiness or when something positive happens, and to begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

Pema Chodron

A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of 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 the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all others behind. Their suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.

On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear.

- Pema Chödrön

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

- Jeanette Winterson