Spiritual Warfare Quotes

“Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can’t stop seeing it that way. It’s everywhere, everyone. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s not life. It can’t be. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not life.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“We slip into the lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don’t live our lives by choice, but by default.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Maybe you think death is the opposite of life, or that all this death-awareness stuff translates into the end of happiness and good times, but this is not the case. Death isn't morbid, fear is morbid. Death doesn't oppose life, fear opposes life. To close your eyes to death is to close them to life: what could be more morbid than that? From your perspective, death and suicide are horrific and unthinkable. From my perspective, they are empowering and lifeaffirming. and I would look at any person that doesn't have an open, honest relationship with these subjects as themselves nine parts dead.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“The third thing about witnessing, the most important part and the thing that most people don't seem to understand. is that you have to take it further than just one step back. You have to keep going with it. Its not a passive thing. like you just sit back and observe. You don't just observe your character, you deconstruct it. You have to be aggressive about it. This is a way or simulating the enlightened perspective, which would be useful to anyone who wants to wake themselves up from the dreamstate instead of just in it.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?   Dr. Seuss”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“If you don't want to sleep your life away like most people do. you have to train yourself to wakefulness. Vigilance is the key. You should be shifting from character to actor many times every hour, in all types of situations, so that it happens smoothly and easily and doesn't detract from your performance." Maggie takes notes and asks for clarification now and then. I wait and proceed when she's ready. "Second." I say. "it trains you to disidentify from the character you're playing. There's a you behind the character you project out into the world, and you can't make any progress as long as you identify with your stage persona. You're an actor playing a character on a stage. That's what the Bhagavad-GIta is all about.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“ose if we did choose, but we don't. That's what it means to be unconscious: to be asleep within the dream. We slip into the lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don't live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don't live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don't know any better. and the reason we don't know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. never stood up. never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. the one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked: "What the hell is going on here?”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice—meditation. for instance—is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Bob is talking about alternative people. Alternative beliefs and outlooks, alternative business and politics, alternative lifestyles and healthcare. alternative foods and fabrics, alternative child-rearing and schooling, alternative fuels and energies—alternative everything, basically, but not very alternative. These are alternatives within the established paradigm. not alternatives to it: a subherd running in parallel to the main body. Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multivarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via the removal, avoidance and denial of unhappiness.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“if I were a gambling addict, then a large portion of my life energy—my time, my thoughts and emotions—would be spent either gambling or fighting my urge to gamble. But for our purposes. feeding my addiction and fighting it are really the same thing. Whether my gambling demon is beating me or I'm beating it doesn't matter. all that matters is that I'm sitting in my prison cell fully engaged in processes that will never move me one inch closer to liberation. That's what demons do. They're like Maya's army of winged monkeys. They always fight a delaying action that expends our resources and prevents us from making forward progress. That's their objective, to occupy us. not to defeat us.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“You don’t have to trust people not to betray you or break your heart or steal your purse; you just trust them to be who they are. Once you understand fear, get a little distance from it and see what it really is and how it operates in the world, then you can understand everything about people. In an eyes-closed being, everything flows from fear; good and bad, courage and cowardice, love and hate, all flow from the same well.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“A common example of Spiritual Dissonance would be; If God loves us, why does He allow so much suffering? The certainty of God’s love is the internal belief. The obviousness of human suffering is the external reality. Is God unable to end suffering? No, we must answer, because He can do whatever He wants. Therefore, He must allow or even cause suffering. But how can that be if He loves us? Something somewhere has to give or, preferably, we avoid asking the question in the first place.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“We think miracles happen and prayers are answered only when it’s something good; when it’s in line with our hopes and desires which, in Human Children, are always fear-based. We don’t acknowledge the same forces equally at work when the results are not in line with our hopes and desires. We’re very selective in our perceptions. Good luck, bad luck, it’s all the same; the ebb and flow of tides, it just gets interpreted differently.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Self-deceit is the hardest habit to break cuz it tells us we ain’t self-deceived.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“I know were all intelligent people, but intelligence is a curious thing in the dreamstate: can't live with it. can't live without it. It's like an icepick in a balloon store. We have to push it into a cork or things are gonna start poppin'. That's the real point of all spirituality and religion and philosophy: they are the safe corks into which we can bury the sharp points of our minds. This self-inflicted dulling of the wit is how we constantly cast our own sleep spell. No one else is doing it to us. There is no magic behind our delusion except the magic we conjure with our own emotional energy. If we stop weaving our enchantment. we start waking up. and that is the last thing we want to happen. even though it may be our stated intent. Whatever we might say, we don't want things to start
poppin”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Spiritual Dissonance is what occurs where our inner world meets our outer world; where what we think is true butts up against what appears to be true; where internal belief collides with external reality. It’s the discomfort that occurs where self and not-self come into contact.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Ultimately, everything you think you know is really just something you believe.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Scoop a jar of water out of the ocean and put a lid on it,” I tell them. “Study it in its segregated state. Where is the ocean in that jar? Where are the tides and the currents? Pour it back into the ocean and it returns to its integrated state. The temporary entity no longer exists.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“No belief is true, life has no meaning, nothing we do matters. All is vanity and a striving after wind. We’re going to die and it will be as if we never lived. Everything we think is true is false, all our beliefs are delusions and everything we know is a lie. There is no such thing as success, nothing we do can make any possible difference, no matter how fast we go or how far ahead we are, we are not going anywhere. The best and the brightest are in a dead-tie with the worst and the dimmest. These are the facts of life, simple, obvious, plain to behold, yet universally unrecognized and unacknowledged. This is what it means to see what’s not and not see what is, to be in denial, to be asleep within the dream, to reside in the womb of the unborn. We are madly, desperately, insanely afraid of the truth, and it is that fear that walls us off from our unbounded nature. It is the emotional energy of fear that erects and maintains the egoic shell.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Fear converts every inward thought and impulse right back outward. Maya turns everything to her purpose. That’s what you’re up against. It’s a deathmatch and there’s only one way to win and Brett found it. She stopped fighting. She surrendered. It’s ego that fights, that resists, that sucks all our energy. Brett dropped her armor and exposed her breastbone to her enemy, and in so doing, she destroyed the enemy. Maya is not outside of us. Ultimately, she’s just another internal demon. Routing our power against her or to her are the same thing, and when we stop, we stop empowering her and she ceases to exist.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“No one can push you, pull you, or go with you. All thoughts, ideas, feelings, concepts, and systems of knowledge and belief boil down to this one unequivocal distinction; sewer or sunshine, dungeon or daylight, ego or surrender, obstruction or flow, segregation or integration, vertical entrenchment or horizontal progress.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“For example,” I explain, “if I were a gambling addict, then a large portion of my life energy—my time, my thoughts and emotions—would be spent either gambling or fighting my urge to gamble. But for our purposes, feeding my addiction and fighting it are really the same thing. Whether my gambling demon is beating me or I’m beating it doesn’t matter, all that matters is that I’m sitting in my prison cell fully engaged in processes that will never move me one inch closer to liberation. That’s what demons do. They’re like Maya’s army of winged monkeys. They always fight a delaying action that expends our resources and prevents us from making forward progress. That’s their objective, to occupy us, not to defeat us.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Why is everyone seeking and no one finding? Because they’re not seeking truth or growth or change, they’re seeking peace of mind. The rest is just dressing.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“I want to stop not knowing who and what and where I am. I want to stop being confused and unclear. I want to stop pretending lies are true and that I understand things when I don’t. I want to stop playing make-believe and find out what’s real.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“People are dust-bunnies,” I finally respond, “little bundles of lint and cobwebs that collect in shadows and dark corners, held together and drawn together by fear. Once you see them clearly, trusting them becomes very easy. I trust everybody and I’m never disappointed. It can be the same for you.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Whenever I venture to take a look at what’s current and popular in New Age and spiritual thought, all I find is the same dumbed-down, watered-down, sickly-sweet slop. It’s as if everyone was dining from a common trough and the special of the day is just a matter of who regurgitated last. I try to tough it out, but the experience is ill-making, like radiation exposure, and only tolerable in small doses. When I get over my sour reaction, I remind myself that if I can’t stand the smell, I shouldn’t stick my head in the sewer.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“The truth is that no belief is true, and to say that any belief is true is to open the floodgates and say that all beliefs are true.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“If there is conflict between idea and actual, then the idea is in error.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“There is no disorder. Nothing is random or chaotic, only fully perceived or not.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare