Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment Quotes

“To move forward, you must figure out exactly what is obstructing you. Whatever it is, it isn’t really there; it has no reality, no substance. It’s your own creation, a phantom lurking in the shadows of your mind, a shadow demon. Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers. They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard. Banish shadow with light and see for yourself that no obstruction exists, nor ever did. We create our demons and we feed them. To awaken we must slay them. That’s really the whole process: Slay one demon, take one step. Repeat.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The really strange thing about being awake isn’t being awake; it’s the people that aren’t. They’re walking and talking in their dreamstates; some of them declaring their deep commitment to waking up while doing everything possible not to. Have you ever been around a sleepwalker who had their eyes open and was performing a task, even speaking? It’s pretty eerie. Now imagine the whole world is like that. It’s eerie and it’s lonely, but more than that, it’s dubious. It lacks credibility. It’s not believable. Even at the level of consensual reality, it’s hard to accept that these people are all really asleep. I’m able to interact to some degree with sleepwalkers, but they’re speaking from within a dreamstate world that I can’t see and only barely remember. They might say they want to wake up, but it quickly becomes apparent that they have some dreamworld notion of what awake means that might involve anything so long as it doesn’t disturb their slumber. Ego’s guard dog is ever-vigilant, and it bites. They say that sleepwalkers get violent if you try to wake them; a curiously apt parallel.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“There seems to be an attitude that opinion counts for something. Goethe said none are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they’re free. I think that applies here. People might say they’re spiritual or that they want to know the truth or whatever, but they mostly just want what anyone wants regarding the big questions; just enough to get by, just enough so they can go on about their lives, maybe make things a little better, puff themselves up a bit. That’s about all, really. When it comes to all this religion and spirituality stuff, the closer you look, the foggier it gets, and I think a lot of people are happy just to hang out in the fog.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The American dream of freedom and abundance is just a child’s rendering of true freedom and abundance, and serves only to convince people who haven’t gone anywhere that they’ve already arrived.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Karma and hell and suffering aren’t things in their own right but disturbances in this flimsy substance of false self. The problem isn’t in the disturbing things but in the thing disturbed. The thing disturbed is the false thing and if it weren’t there, there’d be nothing to be disturbed. Nothing to get pierced or burned or dried out. Nothing to be wounded or slain.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“How many years have I spent lighting incense and candles? Meditating? Chasing after gurus and teachers, reading all that crap, following every stupid new fad, reading every stupid new book? But now I see clearly, perfectly clearly, that all I was ever doing, all it was all about, was avoiding this. Avoiding me. I see it now, there’s only this. THIS! All I was doing was keeping myself distracted so I didn’t have to do this one thing. Life, the world, reality, all depend on not doing this. This is the one true blasphemy. This is the one true heresy.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls.   Walt Whitman”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Spiritual Autolysis—trying to write something true and keeping at it until you do—is the best possible way of identifying and eradicating our falseness because the process of writing minimizes the weaknesses and maximizes the strengths of the intellect. Nothing false can survive illumination by a steady and focused mind.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Who we think we are can be stripped away forever,” I make a poof gesture, “just like that. Right now, well fed, unthreatened, we have the luxury of pretending the Donners and the Nazis and the gang-bangers are someone else, but they’re not. They’re us; a veil’s breadth away. There are no good guys and bad guys. People are people, all the same; only the circumstances change.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Sag Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor, Mystic, New Bedford, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you’. There is nothing there inside you other than that.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? In landlessness alone resides highest truth.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Truth hath no confines.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“For this whole dualistic universe thing to work, it’s important that everyone doesn’t just go wandering off; that they stay on stage and play their role. Fear is the glue that holds the whole thing together and keeps everyone in character.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“If you think about the qualities you’d like to possess, the ideal qualities—unconditional love, loyalty, devotion, unwavering friendship, forgiveness, selflessness, sincerity, being fully present in the moment, happiness—qualities we uphold as the loftiest ideals to which we might aspire, they look very much like, you know, a good dog; dog consciousness. Of course,” I add, “by those same ideal standards, humans are far and away the least evolved beings on the planet.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“She doesn’t get to be a healer because the gods bestow powers upon her, but through the prolonged, rigorous, all-consuming struggle of her own self-healing.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The answer is to stop struggling, to go into the fear. Let her go. The cause of the unhappiness isn’t the situation, but the resistance. You’re making disease and decay and death evil, but they’re not evil, they just are. The clinging is the cause of the unhappiness. Release is the answer. Let her sink.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Depression is fear with hope removed. It arises as we discover that something we thought could be ours will never be ours. Unhappiness is when we worry about not having something, depression is when we realize we’ll never have it, and freedom is when we realize that nothing is ours and nothing can be ours, so that, in effect, nothing isn’t ours.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The point isn’t to make yourself feel that you’re a part of everything, but to stop for one minute insisting with every thought and feeling that you’re not.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The various forms of spirituality and religion are not the path to truth, but the antidote to it.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The last thing of a spiritual nature I recall reading was a magazine interview with an old Indian guy who said that if I recited a certain mantra for six months I’d get rich, if I stood on hot rocks for six months I‘d conquer my sexual desires, and if I lived on air alone for six months I’d get enlightened. I wondered if all three could be done simultaneously so I could be a rich enlightened eunuch in time for the holidays, but the article didn’t address that.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“You can have your cake and eat it too! This is the bestselling formula that had Govinda marching in place for fifteen years; the promise that one can soar majestically as an eagle without actually leaving the nest. Virtual reality, I guess. Virtual spirituality. Virtual life.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“All attachments to the dreamstate are made of energy. That energy is called emotion. All emotions, positive and negative, are attachments. Humans are emotion-based creatures and all emotions derive their energy from one core emotion; fear. Fear cannot be confronted or slain because it is fear of nothing, of no-self. The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered. You can spend your life hacking away at the million-headed hydra of attachment and never make any progress, or you can follow emotional energy back to its source, its lair, and see Leviathan, enemy of light, for what it really is: Your heart.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“To those who would argue, correctly, that the teachings of the East offer deeper, richer levels of subtlety and sophistication than the more youthful and boisterous Americans, I’d reply that waking up is a youthful, boisterous business and that those who seek ever deeper layers of understanding are merely fulfilling ego’s agenda of stagnation and self-preservation.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“One who has seen his true nature no longer regards life as being full of menace and misery as most people do. His previously mistaken sense of personal volition and responsibility has disappeared in such freedom and joy that life is now just an amusing spectacle like a game or a dream, in which he has no real part. Ramesh Balsekar”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“Now you, on the other hand, reading this book, might take a moment to consider how your thread weaves through this section of the tapestry. It’s our little conceit that we possess free will, so you might want to exert some now. You have either left your cell already or you’re sniffing around at the open door, so this might be a good time to stop and ask yourself what you want, and what you’re willing to give for it. Not all fires are started by conscious intent according to convenient schedules. Sometimes they just flare up where you didn’t even know it was getting warm, and then you learn two things fast; fire doesn’t negotiate and nothing doesn’t burn. What do you really want? If you’ve got the kids and the house and the cars and the career, or any sort of life you’re fond of, and you’re looking at the subjects discussed here as a way to spiritually enhance your existing lifestyle, then I should remind you that dreams are highly flammable things and suggest that you ask yourself, really ask yourself, why you’re reading books about setting your world on fire.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment