The End of Your World Quotes

“We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“This one question -- "What do I know for certain?"-- is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-- things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It’s almost like catching onto a hidden secret—that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven. From the very beginning, there was only nirvana, as the Buddha would say. But we were misperceiving things. By believing the images in the mind, by contracting through fear, hesitation, and doubt, we misperceived where we were. We didn’t realize we were in heaven; we didn’t realize we were in the promised land. We didn’t realize that nirvana is right here, right now, exactly where we are.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“So with awakening, the stakes go up. The more awake we get, the higher the stakes get. I remember when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery for a while. The abbess there, a wonderful woman, talked about this process of awakening as climbing a ladder. With each step you go, you have less and less tendency to look down. You have less tendency to act in ways you know aren’t true or to speak in ways you know aren’t true or do things you know aren’t coming from truth. You start to realize that the consequences have become greater; the more awake we get, the greater the consequences are. Finally, the consequences of acting outside of truth become immense; the slightest action or behavior that’s not in accordance with the truth can be unbearable to us.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“Somewhere inside I always knew that everything was one—that I was eternal, unborn, undying, and uncreated. I understood that my essential nature was not limited by or confined to my personality structure or the body I seemed to be inhabiting. There had been a dissolving, in a somewhat radical way, of the world as I had known it and of the self I had known myself to be.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing. We are simply acting out of deep programming. But once we have seen the true nature of things-- once Spirit has opened its eyes within us-- we suddenly know what we're doing. There's a much more accurate sense of whether we're moving or speaking or even thinking from truth or not. When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it's much more painful than we we didn't know our actions were untrue. When we say something to someone that we know is untrue, it causes an inner division that is vastly more painful than when we said the same thing and thought it was true.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“What we call ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true—from ourselves to the world.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“True inquiry is experiential”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“Again, the only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“that smallest point of light was a thought, just floating out there. And the thought was: “I.” And when I turned and looked at the thought, all I had to do was become interested in it, in any way interested, and this little point of light would move closer and closer and closer. It was like moving close to a knothole in a fence—when you get your eye right up to it, you don’t see the fence anymore; you see what’s on the other side. So as this little point of “I” came closer, I started to perceive through this point called “me.” And I found that in that point called “me” was the whole world. The whole world was contained within that “I,” within that little point called “me.” There wasn’t really an I, but an emptiness that could go into and out of that point, in and out of it, and it’s like the whole world could flicker on and off, and on and off, and on and off.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“…you don't die; the illusion of a separate self dies. Still, it may feel like you are going to die. Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“True realization, true enlightenment, comes through a complete relinquishing of personal will - a complete letting go.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“All of a sudden there I was, standing there, holding my plate my of food at this wedding, and there was the realization that even though I don't see things the way most people around me see them, this is it. This is life, and it is absolutely wonderful, amazingly beautiful. The only thing left for me to do was to walk back into the world.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“What is required is the willingness to let life impact you; to let yourself see when life impacts you; to see if you go into any sort of separation about it, if you go into judgment, if you go into blame, if you go into “should” or “shouldn’t,” if you start to point the finger somewhere other than at yourself.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“One of the most common of these traps is a sense of meaninglessness. From our new view of reality, we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego’s desire to find meaning in life is actually a substitute for the perception of being life itself. The search for meaning in life is a surrogate for the knowledge that we are life. Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone disconnected from life will look for purpose.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“In awakening, what's revealed to us is that we are not a thing, nor a person, nor even an entity. What we are is that which manifests as all things, as all experiences, as all personalities. We are that which dreams the whole world into existence. Spiritual awakening reveals that that which is unspeakable is actually what we are.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“[...]in a true awakening, it is realized very clearly that even the awakening itself is not personal. It is universal Spirit or universal consciousness that wakes up to itself. Rather than the "me" waking up, what we are wakes up from the "me". What we are wakes up from the seeker. What we are wakes up from the seeking.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment