50+ Adyashanti Quotes on Self, Awakening, & More

This page lists some of the all-time best Adyashanti quotes. Enjoy!

Page Contents:

Suffering & Separation Quotes
Ego & Self Quotes
Awakening & Awareness Quotes
Paradox & Willing Quotes
Enlightenment Quotes

50+ Adyashanti Quotes on Self, Paradox, Awakening, & More

Adyashanti Quotes on Suffering & Separation

“I was 7 or 8 and very confused about adults and why they acted the way they did. It just seemed sort of odd. And, one day, I just had the insight, ‘I get it, they’re crazy. They believe what they think … They believe their mind.’” — Adyashanti

“Even though spirituality is so often associated with escaping human suffering, that’s not what it’s really about at all—it’s a byproduct of being conscious that you don’t suffer as much.” — Adyashanti

“Crisis is often the catalyst for change.” — Adyashanti

“The main force of separation is fear … Fear is an incredible driving force for humanity.” — Adyashanti

“A lot of people experience that separateness, and they find that it’s inherently unsatisfactory—not only for oneself, but very unsatisfactory and unhealthy for the world.” — Adyashanti

“Our own divided state of consciousness is what’s destroying everything.” — Adyashanti

“Instead of being a destroyer of the world, now we’re a savior of the world. But, if we’re a savior of the world that’s motivated by fear then we’re actually in the same consciousness. That’s just heads and tails on a coin.” — Adyashanti

“Any spirituality that’s separated from this existence is a fantasy.” — Adyashanti

“The irony is we have to come to true existence through the doorway of our own separate nonexistence.” — Adyashanti

Adyashanti Quotes on Ego & Self

“The experience of separation, although it’s illusory, seems to be a natural stage in the development of consciousness—just like adolescence is a natural stage of development. You don’t look back and go, ‘Why was I ever an infant? That was silly, I should have just skipped over that stage.’ I even see this sort of ‘ego development’ and with it comes a sense of separation … It all starts to create the sense of self. I see that sense of separate self as ultimately illusory but actually quite natural stage of development.” — Adyashanti

“I like to call the ego a ‘psychological self’ because it’s a self that’s created through our mind and the way that our body and our emotions interact with the thoughts, and the beliefs, and the images that we have—and all these ideas, images, thoughts, memory, both conscious and unconscious, move in such a way that it creates this sense of a separate self.” — Adyashanti

“(The psychological self) is the unconscious orienting principle to everything—down to the the energy that motivates us, the meaning that we derive in our life, the purpose that we experience as either fulfilling or failing to fulfill. It’s a profound orienting principle. As you start to see through it enough, all of a sudden that which you oriented around—and you only know how much you oriented around it when it’s no longer really there to orient around—you see it was much more than it appeared.” — Adyashanti

“The psychological self isn’t who we are … That’s the good news—that who we are is already transcendent of the psychological self.” — Adyashanti

“A lot of spirituality is often trying to dismantle our attachment to that psychological self.” — Adyashanti

“Moving beyond the separate self is a death of an identity.” — Adyashanti

“Most human beings really don’t know who they are … The question of what you really are is, in one sense, the fundamental spiritual question … The question isn’t meant so you can find a new answer, a new better version of you … It’s to disassemble the version that you have made up.” — Adyashanti

Adyashanti Quotes on Awakening & Awareness

“What’s spirituality really about for you? Why is this quest happening for you? When I ask people that, 90% of them don’t know … 90% of what we call ‘spirituality’ actually serves the dream state rather than serves waking up from the dream state. 10% of spirituality might belong to something beyond the dream state—which means spirituality belongs to life, to the wholeness of existence. Spirituality, and life, and everything else—it’s the same thing. It’s not separate from anything.” — Adyashanti

“I see all spiritual teachings as strategies for awakening. Otherwise, we think that they are statements of truth or that the teaching itself contains the reality—which it really can’t, it’s all a pointer.” — Adyashanti

“To qualify as a spiritual awakening, it has to involve some some type of revelation which has the effect of shifting your identity—your your sense of what you are—from a sort of mind-based or ego-based identification to an identity that’s more based in our fundamental nature—something that’s certainly transcendent of the mind and the ordinary identifications we have … It’s very life-transforming because then you’re looking at life from an awareness point-of-view rather than a egoic or a mind-based point-of-view.” — Adyashanti

“One of the themes is going beyond the identifications with different levels or dimensions of the experience of separation and self. That’s the journey of realization, of awakening.” — Adyashanti

“To have a shift in our identity is so important because it shifts everything … When your identity shifts, you realize everything shifts along with it—your entire worldview shifts, your thought and view on everything shifts.” — Adyashanti

“Awakening is a fundamental shift in the way we perceive and feel about ourself—what and who we take ourselves to be.” — Adyashanti

“It takes whatever time it takes. Our lives are tailor-made for our own awakening.” — Adyashanti

“Awakening has to do with our true identity … It’s all about moving your base point of identity.” — Adyashanti

“My very idea that I am the director of my own life—I have control over it, and it’s going to go where I want—you wake up and realize that is not going to work for you anymore.” — Adyashanti

“When you actually see it, it can really be quite terrifying, quite shocking. ‘My god, the person I thought I was isn’t here.’” — Adyashanti

“In any moment of spiritual clarity, what we know is that what we really are is what we really are. We always were that, so it can’t actually go away. It can’t really be lost, therefore it can’t be grasped.” — Adyashanti

“I could see that which I had been chasing was this that was chasing it … I knew that what I had been chasing was what I am … I knew that I wasn’t separate from what I was seeking anymore.” — Adyashanti

“Often one of the first fundamental realizations that one will have is the perception and the sense of being awareness rather than being someone or something that is utilizing awareness or generating awareness—the perception that the awareness is actually much more what you are.” — Adyashanti

“Can anybody find a watcher to awareness? Can anybody find a witness that is separate from what it’s witnessing? Awareness isn’t really being the watcher and isn’t really being the witness.” — Adyashanti

“One of life’s movements is to become self-aware—to know itself, to be aware of itself.” — Adyashanti

“What is it that’s looking through my eyes?” — Adyashanti

Adyashanti Quotes on Paradox & Willing

“The will is one of the primary things that starts to disappear—the experience of will, of wanting to make this happen. The will is what drives most of the experience of the psychological self, and part of what will happen with any deep realization is the will will start to be diminished because the self that it is based on and flowing from and giving life to is seen through. You start to have a different operating system that you’re working from. The will is one of those things that’s hard to understand clearly until it’s no longer really there. You know it when it’s absent, strangely, much more than you know what it is when it’s present.” — Adyashanti

“Spiritual autonomy is an embracing of a paradox: that the absolute one and the one of your very human existence are, at the deepest level of being, the same … If you experience it as your own nature, if it’s authentic realization, you realize it’s the true nature of everybody else … That’s the beauty of truth. At this deep level of being, we’re touching upon the deepest subjective experience of being that all beings share in common.” — Adyashanti

“We have a deep instinct to realize deep unity or the one, and at the same time that we are the one, every part of creation is uniquely itself … The absolute, the ground of being that we all share in common, is essential, but also every way that absolute nature manifests is totally unique unto itself … Non-separation and profound autonomous individuality experienced at the same moment … It’s an embracing of this paradox of the realization of being and the completeness of that, and the endless capacity to become through your humanness what you’ve experienced deep within your being, to express the completeness that you realize.” — Adyashanti

“We’re very unique, and we’re very different, and there’s a beautiful, individualized manifestation of the one—but the whole substance of that is all one.” — Adyashanti

“Truth is not paradoxical in experience, but it’s paradoxical as soon as I even think about it to myself, much less describe it.” — Adyashanti

“Until everything is possible, we’re not even actually inquiring into what’s true.” — Adyashanti

“It’s infinitely and exponentially more powerful when our consciousness is what we’re for than what we’re against.” — Adyashanti

Adyashanti Quotes on Enlightenment

“How is it that I unenlighten myself? How is it that right now this mind is unenlightening me?” — Adyashanti

“This pull towards finding out what this enlightenment thing is, it’s not something that I can take or leave. It’s not something in my control. It’s something that kind of grabbed me, and it has hold.” — Adyashanti

“Something about enlightenment has to do with reality, and reality has something to do with seeing things as they actually are—of not being trapped in your mind, not being lost but actually having a real intimate connection with the real.” — Adyashanti

“Enlightenment is being able to simultaneously experience unity and individuality without experiencing any conflict.” — Adyashanti

“The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes. Things line up in ways you could never imagine.” — Adyashanti

“If there’s a defining characteristic, the unknowability is the defining characteristic.” — Adyashanti

“The experience of oneness—really feeling it, really realizing it—is the absence of fear.” — Adyashanti

“Love is indiscriminate. Love loves what is. Everything. Nothing is left out.” — Adyashanti

“Love always arises from that sense of unity of what we really truly actually are—from the experience of unity rather than the idea of unity.” — Adyashanti

“Life takes care of itself.” — Adyashanti

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