This is a curated selection of Adyashanti quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Adyashanti’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Separation Quotes
- Ego & Self Quotes
- Awakening & Awareness Quotes
- Paradox & Willing Quotes
- Enlightenment Quotes
25 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
“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
“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
“Any spirituality that’s separated from this existence is a fantasy.” — 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.’” — 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
“A lot of spirituality is often trying to dismantle our attachment to that psychological self.” — 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
“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
“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
“Awakening has to do with our true identity … It’s all about moving your base point of identity … 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 … 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
“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
“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
“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
Adyashanti Quotes on Paradox & Willing
“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
“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
Adyashanti Quotes on Enlightenment
“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
“Life takes care of itself.” — Adyashanti
You May Also Enjoy:
- Browse all Quote Posts
