Top 250 Adyashanti Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “If you want to know something, go elsewhere. If you want to un-know everything, then sit and listen.”

— Adyashanti

202. “We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.”

— Adyashanti

203. “We can only start to allow consciousness to wake up from its identification with thought and feeling, with body and mind and personality, by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning.”

— Adyashanti

204. “Feel this moment, see it with a willingness to experience it deeply, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. Emotionally and feelingly be fully present, right here, vulnerable, with your heart. Just be present. Don’t live from your conditioned mind, live from unconditional truth.”

— Adyashanti

205. “True inquiry is experiential.”

— Adyashanti

206. “Freedom is the realization that everything and everybody gets to be exactly as they are. Unless we’ve come to that point, unless we’ve seen that this is how reality sees things, then we’re actually withholding freedom from the world. We’re seeing it as a possession, and we’re only concerned with ourselves. How good I can feel? How free I can feel? True freedom is a gift to everything and everybody.”

— Adyashanti

207. “A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it.”

— Adyashanti

208. “The moment that you are willing to step outside of tomorrow, outside of needing more time, or having more time, everything becomes possible. And you may finally notice where the Buddha has always been.”

— Adyashanti

209. “Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.”

— Adyashanti

210. “As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that’s unreality. Life doesn’t need to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Life doesn’t need to know the “right” way to go because it’s going there anyway.”

— Adyashanti

211. “Doubt is always accompanied by a pervasive cynicism that unconsciously puts a negative spin on whatever it touches.”

— Adyashanti

212. “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

213. “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

214. “Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.”

— Adyashanti

215. “The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond – awake and present, here and now already.”

— Adyashanti

216. “At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.”

— Adyashanti

217. “The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned.”

— Adyashanti

218. “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

219. “We think there’s someplace other than here to get to – that’s what drives the whole pursuit. Only when the pursuit ceases, is it possible to recognize what comprises you: pure being, pure consciousness. This is actually the very substance of your own self and being.”

— Adyashanti

220. “Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control.”

— Adyashanti

221. “There is an invitation beyond the wall of knowledge, which is not to some regressive state before the mind can operate, but a transcendent state that’s beyond where the mind can go. That’s what spirituality is. It’s going where the mind cannot go.”

— Adyashanti

222. “The word parable comes from a Greek word meaning “comparison or analogy” and is essentially a very brief story that conveys a spiritual truth. A parable is a bit like a riddle: it has a meaning you can’t completely understand with the logical, conditioned mind. A parable is meant to present your mind with something that pushes you to go beyond your current level of understanding in order to comprehend it.”

— Adyashanti

223. “When we’re in our true being, the purpose of life is to feel that every moment is the purpose.”

— Adyashanti

224. “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

225. “Now is just what’s happening – minus everything you think.”

— Adyashanti

226. “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

227. “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

228. “By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you’ve got a very convincing – though divided – self.”

— Adyashanti

229. “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

230. “Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret.”

— Adyashanti

231. “If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body – in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.”

— Adyashanti

232. “Myth isn’t about factual or historical truth, but about a deeper truth. In ancient times, people saw myth in a very different light – as a vehicle that can transmit and carry a subtlety and richness of experience that simply cannot be conveyed by linear, conceptual forms of language.”

— Adyashanti

233. “Truth has no finality to it. It is not something to be held on to. Truth is discovered minute to minute or not at all.”

— Adyashanti

234. “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

235. “There’s no way to become happy. We simply need to stop doing the things that make us unhappy.”

— Adyashanti

236. “What we call ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is.”

— Adyashanti

237. “Live by truth or suffer. It’s that simple.”

— Adyashanti

238. “379True 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 lead only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial awareness.”

— Adyashanti

239. “It’s important to note, as well, that we do not become immune to misperception simply because we’ve had a glimpse of awakening. Certain fixations and conditionings will linger even after we perceive from the place of oneness. The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations – our hang-ups, you might say.”

— Adyashanti

240. “Have you ever noticed that you have never left here, except in your mind? When you remember the past, you are not actually in the past. Your remembering is happening here. When you think about the future, that future projection is completely here. And when you get to the future, it’s here. It’s no longer the future.”

— Adyashanti

241. “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

242. “Close the gap between what is and what you want it to be, between what is presenting itself and what you want to present itself. This gap of judgment is the separation you feel. You need to totally choose what is and lean into it with your whole being.”

— Adyashanti

243. “The freedom that’s discovered isn’t, “I have attained enlightenment.” The freedom is, “My God, there is nobody here to be enlightened. Therefore, there is nobody there to be unenlightened.” That’s the light. Only the concept “me” thinks it needs enlightenment, freedom, liberation, and emancipation. It thinks it needs to find God or get a Ferrari – it’s all the same thing when you get right down to it.”

— Adyashanti

244. “It’s important that meditation is not seen as something that only happens when you are seated in a quiet place. Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That’s the primary illusion – that there is something called “my spiritual life,” and something called “my daily life.” When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It’s all one seamless expression of spirit.”

— Adyashanti

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “You come into the natural state by letting go of control by letting go of effort and resting in a state of vividness. It’s very simple. It couldn’t be simpler. Sit down; let everything be as it already is.”

— Adyashanti