This is a collection of the best quotes on breaking your brain chains and freeing your mind from psychological prison.
Post Contents:
50+ Deep Quotes to Free Your Mind from Psychological Prison
The first step:
“The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.” — Sri Aurobindo
“If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.” — George Gurdjieff
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.” — Ram Dass
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” — Rosa Luxemburg
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” — Attributed to Plato
“The prison door of self is never closed, but very few wish to walk through it. The chains that confine us in Plato’s cave are not locked, but very few are aware of their captive status … Those who have slipped their chains may be more effectively confined yet, thinking themselves free merely because their cell is larger and others are less free. Thinking themselves free, they don’t seek freedom. They are content in their captivity.” — Jed McKenna
“‘You are so proud of your intelligence,’ said the master. ‘You are like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.'” — Anthony de Mello
“In some very important senses, a prisoner can be more free than a prison guard when you take into account our internal dimension.” — Raoul Martinez
“The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?” — Viktor Frankl
“It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act … The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative … The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.” — Aldous Huxley
Unconscious, conditioning, certainty, belief, language:
“Do you see now how you are in a prison created by the beliefs and traditions of your society and culture and by the ideas, prejudices, attachments and fears of your past experiences? … Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way. There is no way out, because you do not even have a suspicion that your perception is distorted, your thinking is wrong, and your beliefs are false.” — Anthony de Mello
“Your society is not going to be happy to hear this, because you become terrifying when you open your eyes and understand this. How do you control a person like this? He doesn’t need you; he’s not threatened by your criticism; he doesn’t care what you think of him or what you say about him. He’s cut all those strings; he’s not a puppet any longer. It’s terrifying. ‘So we’ve got to get rid of him. He tells the truth; he has become fearless; he has stopped being human.’ Human! Behold! A human being at last! He broke out of his slavery, broke out of their prison.” — Anthony de Mello
“Unconscious people – and many remain unconscious, trapped in their egos throughout their lives – will quickly tell you who they are: their name, their occupation, their personal history, the shape or state of their body, and whatever else they identify with. Others may appear to be more evolved because they think of themselves as an immortal soul or living spirit. But do they really know themselves, or have they just added some spiritual sounding concepts to the content of their mind? Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.” — Eckhart Tolle
“We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we overcome it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj
“What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it.” — Anthony de Mello
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Attributed to Carl Jung
“Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.” — Marcus Aurelius
“Blind certainty is a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.” — David Foster Wallace
“As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Belief is a shelter, a prison for a curious mind.” — Debasish Mridha
“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.” — Simone Weil
“A sane, balanced, and fruitful human life is a dance between the two dimensions that make up reality: form and space. Most people are so identified with the dimension of form, with sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotion, that the vital hidden half is missing from their lives. Their identification with form keeps them trapped in ego … Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?” — Eckhart Tolle
“I just need to get in touch with reality. I need to break out of this prison of mine, this programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; I need to break out into reality. Reality is lovely; it is an absolute delight. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all. We’re too distracted with this attachment … The only way to change is by changing your understanding. But what does it mean to understand? How do we go about it? Consider how we’re enslaved by various attachments; we’re striving to rearrange the world so that we can keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them … Freedom lies not in external circumstances; freedom resides in the heart. When you have attained wisdom, who can enslave you?” — Anthony de Mello
“You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free. It’s that simple. Because you’re scared, you have locked yourself within your house and pulled down all the shades. Now it’s dark and you want to feel the sunlight, but you can’t. It’s impossible. If you close and protect yourself, you are locking this scared, insecure person within your heart. You will never be free that way.” — Michael Singer
“When you truly awake spiritually, you realize you are caged. You wake up and realize that you can hardly move in there … Going beyond means going beyond the borders of the cage. There should be no cage. The soul is infinite. It is free to expand everywhere. It is free to experience all of life. This can only happen when you are willing to face reality without mental boundaries. If you still have barriers, and you know what they are because you hit them every day, you must be willing to go beyond them. Otherwise you remain within your cage. And remember, decorating your cage with beautiful experiences, fond memories, and great dreams is not the same as going beyond. A cage by any other name is still a cage. You must be willing to go beyond.” — Michael Singer
“Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet. What pollution is on the outer level is negativity on the inner. It is everywhere, not just in places where people don’t have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.” — Eckhart Tolle
“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.” — Eckhart Tolle
“They say that the highest good is freedom. And if freedom is goodness, then how can a free person be unhappy? If you see a person who is not happy you should know that he is not a free man; he is a slave of something. In order to be completely free, you should be ready to give to God all those things which you have received from him. You should be ready to unite your will with that of God.” — Epictetus (via Leo Tolstoy)
“In the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing. All they can do is give you formulas. And as soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the mind of someone else. If you take those formulas you will be imprisoned.” — Anthony de Mello
Going deeper:
“Most of us never question the origin of our suffering, so busy are we escaping the discomfort of it through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships. If we do question it, we usually attribute it to the absence of the object or experience that we seek or the presence of the situation we are attempting to avoid and, as a result, never fully trace it back to its original cause.” — Rupert Spira
“The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one’s apparent bondage in each moment.” — Sam Harris
“Right in the midst of your daily life, by untethering yourself from the bondage of your psyche, you actually have the ability to steal freedom for your soul. This freedom is so great it has been given a special name—liberation.” —Michael Singer
“How liberating it is not to depend emotionally on anything. If you could get one second’s experience of that, you’d be breaking through your prison and getting a glimpse of the sky. Someday, maybe, you will even fly.” — Anthony de Mello
“Inquiring into the nature of one’s self that is in bondage, and realising one’s true nature is liberation … One believes that there is bondage and therefore seeks liberation. But the fact is that there is no bondage but only liberation. Why call it by a name and seek it? … All that is necessary is to get rid of the false notion that we are bound. When we achieve that, there will be no desire or thought of any sort. So long as one desires liberation, one is in bondage.” — Ramana Maharshi
“When there is nothing to identify with anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. You realize your essential identity as formless, as an all-pervasive Presence, of Being prior to all forms, all identifications. You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That’s the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not in I am this or I am that, but I Am.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The word ‘I’ is no more the experience of ‘I’ than the word ‘red’ is tinted red. Notoriously, words become substitutes for their meaning … Talking and reading and writing about Who I am, without seeing Who I am, is a well-worn escape route from Who I am.” — Douglas Harding
“The strong illusion we have, especially in Western societies, of personal agency ties in with this notion that your life is about you and my life is about me. We are this personal agent; in some sense, separate from nature. We are mental and the rest of nature is not mental, so we are sort of aliens in here. The world is of a completely different nature than we are from the inside, and so we are separate and individual. So, for our little lives as this tiny little speck of dust walking around this little rock to have meaning, this personal agent has at the very least to be able to make choices and set its destiny in some way. Otherwise, it’s just an automatic play of predetermined moves. That’s what jails us. It’s this need for that kind of illusory freedom that confines us because it prevents us from seeing the horizon, from taking notice of what is really going on.” — Bernardo Kastrup
“What I’m leading you to is the following: awareness of reality around you. Awareness means to watch, to observe what is going on within you and around you. ‘Going on’ is pretty accurate: Trees, grass, flowers, animals, rock, all of reality is moving. One observes it, one watches it. How essential it is for the human being not just to observe himself or herself, but to watch all of reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Do you want to break out of your prison? Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will we see? This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and concepts. This is a spiritual exercise—connected with spirituality—connected with breaking out of your cage, out of the imprisonment of the concepts and words.” — Anthony de Mello
“Many of the greatest minds in history have gotten caught in this trap of wanting to be God and at the same time to retain their separate identity. They are caught because they still have energy attached to the desire for ego power. And to be God is obviously the ultimate power trip … You come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure . . . except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap . . . the desire to know it all and still be you, ‘the knower.’ This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can’t know it all. The goal is non-dualistic—as long as there is a ‘knower’ and ‘known’ you are in dualism.” — Ram Dass
“The mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity – the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.” — Eckhart Tolle
“When you are detached, you gain a higher vantage point from which to view the events in your life instead of being trapped inside them. You become like an astronaut who sees the planet Earth surrounded by the vastness of space and realizes a paradoxical truth: The earth is precious and at the same time insignificant. The recognition that This, too will pass brings detachment and with detachment another dimension comes into your life: inner space. Through detachment, as well as non-judgment and inner nonresistance, you gain access to that dimension … Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed form its imprisonment in form.” — Eckhart Tolle
“So long as the sense of doership is retained there is the desire … The sense of doership is the bondage and not the actions themselves … The feeling ‘I work’ is the hindrance. Ask yourself ‘Who works?’ Remember who you are. Then the work will not bind you, it will go on automatically. Make no effort either to work or to renounce; it is your effort which is the bondage.” — Ramana Maharshi
How to break out of psychological prison (from Anthony de Mello):
1. “First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates. Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.”
2. “Second, contemplate the walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, your habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgment and condemnation. Look at them and they will crumble.”
3. “Third, spend some time observing the things and people around you. Look, but really look, as if for the very first time, at the face of a friend, a leaf, a tree, a bird in flight, the behavior and mannerisms of the people around you. Really see them and hopefully you will see them afresh as they are in themselves without the dulling, stupefying effect of your ideas and habits.”
4. “The fourth and most important step: Sit down quietly and observe how your mind functions. There is a steady flow of thoughts and feelings and reactions there. Watch the whole of it for long stretches of time the way you watch a river or a movie. You will soon find it so much more absorbing than any river or movie. And so much more life-giving and liberating. After all can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions? The unaware life, it is said, is not worth living. It cannot even be called life; it is a mechanical, robot existence; a sleep, an unconsciousness, a death; and yet this is what people call human life!”
“So watch, observe, question, explore and your mind will come alive and shed its fat and become keen and alert and active. Your prison walls will come tumbling down till not one stone of the Temple will be left upon another, and you will be blessed with the unimpeded vision of things as they are, the direct experience of Reality.”
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