Who Is My Self? Quotes

“When the eye sees, it simply registers color and shape. All the rest takes place in the mind.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Wisdom comes only from the understood experience and from nothing else.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Not to learn from our experiences is a tremendous waste of time. Life is an adult-education school.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“There is no one creator, but there is the realm of creation.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“At the beginning of each meditation, we ask ourselves: “Am I having thoughts of ill-will? Doubt? Restlessness and worry? Am I feeling lazy and sleepy? Is my mind filled with desires?” If so, we try to drop these obstacles, using the antidotes of loving-kindness and of calming the mind, remembering that there is nothing to gain and everything to get rid of.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The missing link can only come through the practice of loving-kindness toward ourselves, in spite of everything we know about ourselves. Only then, in fact, will we be able to love others, without criticism or judgment.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Contentment with our life as it is brings a feeling of great lightness, for we lose the burden of continually craving for situations and people to be different. Things are as they are. Refusing to accept this creates dukkha and brings pain. It is like pushing against a sealed door. We push and we push until our hands hurt, but we cannot open it. If we are wise, we accept that this is simply how it is. The door is sealed, and it is perfectly all right that it is so.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“If we want real happiness, the only way it can arise is by letting go of the one who is unhappy. It is not a question of trying to hold on to the one who is happy. Rather, when the unhappy one is relinquished, nothing else remains except the happiness of tranquility and pure awareness.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“We will discover that everything we are carrying around in our minds is nothing but extraneous matter. It has been put there by our desires, rejections, reactions, thoughts, plans, hopes, ideas, and viewpoints.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Restlessness and worry are always connected to desire, and when we recognize this and let go of the desire, the heart is purified and the mind is calmed.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“In meditation, we have to give ourselves totally, with no holding back. Whatever meditation subject we have chosen, we must become immersed in it;”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“What we are looking for lies within us, and if we gave our time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The path the Buddha taught and is explaining to Po˛˛hap›da in this sutta has to be followed step by step. First comes morality, then guarding the sense-doors, mindfulness and clear comprehension, contentment, letting go of the hindrances, and — only after these — the first meditative absorption.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“If we sit down with the idea, “Oh dear, another meditation session, I suppose I must stick it out,” we will never be able to do it. There must be a feeling of strength and uplift in the mind. Meditation will enhance both, but we have to bring them with us in the first place.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“In another sutta, he speaks about the prerequisites for the practice of meditation. The first is to know our own dukkha, to recognize where it comes from, and how it operates within our own lives. The second is to gain confidence in the teaching, to realize that we can actually take this path. The third is to experience joy at the opportunity we have been given. Only when all three are present will meditation bear fruit.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Everything that comes to us through our senses comes from the world, but the inner experience that comes to us through meditation is not dependent on worldly matters. Once we are able to experience the joy of full concentration, we will find that this in itself is an automatic antidote to desire.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Nothing that is to be had in the world, anywhere, under any circumstances, is capable of bringing fulfillment”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The Buddha has no intention of answering the question about higher states of consciousness yet. He first advocates practicing moral conduct as a foundation for spiritual development.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When we bring the past to mind, it is then the present. When we bring the future to mind, that also becomes the present. So what we are doing is not only putting boundaries around three separate selves, but we are also putting boundaries around time and splitting it into three parts as well.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Each insight should be nurtured and reinforced by bringing it up again and again and anchoring it in the mind. Then we will have access to it and be able to use it at all times.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“It is not that we kill or annihilate something that actually exists; rather, we get rid of a deluded mind-state.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“There is no future, there is no past. Everything is now, and we are completely transparent; we have no solidity. We only look as if we had.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“It is well worth our while to check out need against greed, and see where that takes us.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“To be in the present is actually to be in eternity.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The goal of the Buddha’s teaching is Nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa). Literally translated, that means “not burning,” or in other words, the loss of all passions.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“when the words we speak or write come from inner experience and are heartfelt, they are always imbued with “trembling for the welfare of beings.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“on the higher levels of the spiritual path, celibacy is considered a most important aspect of the training.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“He first advocates practicing moral conduct as a foundation for spiritual development.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The teaching of the Buddha is called the Dhamma. He did not teach Buddhism, any more than Jesus taught Christianity. The one wanted to reform Judaism, the other to reform Brahmanism. Neither succeeded, but each unwittingly started a new religion. The movements they started were reforms of ancient religions which, because the spirit had left them and only the letter still was observed, had deteriorated into rites and rituals, and social norms. Today we come across this very same problem everywhere.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The teaching of the Buddha is called the Dhamma. He did not teach Buddhism, any more than Jesus taught Christianity.”
― Ayya Khema, Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation