The Way of Liberation Quotes

“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, The Way of Liberation

“The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation

“It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Absolute Truth is not a belief, not a religion, not a philosophy, not a momentary experience, and not a transient spiritual experience either. It is neither static nor in motion, neither good nor bad. It is other than all of that, more other than you can ever imagine. Truth cannot be touched by thought or imagined by the mind. It can only be found in the heart of universal being. To know thy self is the key. To bring forth your being is The Way.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“We are so busy and obsessed with our restless thinking about everything and everyone that we have mistaken our thinking about everything and everyone for everything and everyone. This tendency to take our thoughts to be real is what keeps the dream state intact and keeps us trapped within its domain of unconsciousness and strife. To many people the very idea that what is is more real than all of their beliefs and opinions about what is is hard to believe. But that’s how it is when you are caught up in a dream.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation

“Suffering occurs when you
believe in a thought that is at odds with
what is, what was, or what may be.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions!”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“WAKE UP OR PERISH The world’s problems are, by and large, human problems—the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well. In a manner of speaking, we have lost (or at the very least forgotten) our souls, and we try very, very hard not to notice, because we don’t want to see how asleep we are, how desolate our condition really is. So we blindly carry on, driven by forces we do not recognize or understand, or even acknowledge. We are no doubt at a very critical point in time. Our world hangs in the balance, and a precarious balance it is. Awakening to Reality is no longer a possibility; it is an imperative. We have sailed the ship of delusion about as far as she can carry us. We have run her ashore and now find ourselves shipwrecked on an increasingly desolate land. Our options have imploded. “Wake up or perish” is the spiritual call of our times. Did we ever need more motivation than this? And yet all is eternally well, and more well than can be imagined.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“We should come to know that there is more Reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about Reality.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Ultimate Reality is not a certain state of consciousness, no matter how wonderful or blissful. Reality is the ground of all being, unborn and undying eternity. It is as present in one experience or state of consciousness as in any other. Reality, or Truth, is that which is ultimately true in all states, at all times, in all locations.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Being is that which disturbs our insistence on remaining in the life-numbing realm of our secret desperation. It is the itch that cannot be scratched, the whisper that will not be denied. To be, to truly be, is not a given. Most of us live in a state where our being has long ago been exiled to the shadow realm of our silent anguish. At times being will break through the fabric of our unconsciousness to remind us that we are not living the life we could be living, the life that truly matters. At other times being will recede into the background silently waiting for our devoted attention. But make no mistake: being—your being—is the central issue of life. To remain unconscious of being is to be trapped within an ego-driven wasteland of conflict, strife, and fear that only seems customary because we have been brainwashed into a state of suspended disbelief where a shocking amount of hate, dishonesty, ignorance, and greed are viewed as normal and sane. But they are not sane, not even close to being sane. In fact, nothing could be less sane and unreal than what we human beings call reality.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Aspiration is not so much a matter of the mind as of the heart, in that it is a reflection of what you cherish, love, and value most. You do not need to be reminded of what you truly love, only of what you do not love. And what you actually love is most truly reflected in your actions, not in what you feel, think, or say.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“absolute honesty and a willingness to uncover and let go of any illusion that comes between you and the realization of Reality.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“what you actually love is most truly reflected in your actions, not in what you feel, think, or say.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“True Meditation is effortless stillness, abidance as primordial being.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“True Meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True Meditation is effortless stillness, abidance as primordial being. True Meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focusing on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning. In True Meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In True Meditation the emphasis is on being awareness—not on being aware of objects, but on resting as conscious being itself. In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience. As you gently relax into awareness, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition. As you effortlessly rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive habit of control, contraction, and identification. Awareness returns to its natural condition of conscious being, absolute unmanifest potential—the silent abyss beyond all knowing.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Such grace is never held in abeyance, never earned or deserved. It is not given to some and not to others. Grace is ever present; it is only our openness to it that comes and goes. In one sense, The Way of Liberation is a means of opening up to grace.”
― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment