#iri

Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment. ↗

— Adyashanti

#experience

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#alone #appearing #artist #everybody #him

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long? ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#day #heroes #high-spirited #how #lived

I am admiring of my fellow peers, black filmmakers and black actors and actresses. ↗

— Cuba Gooding, Jr.

#am #black #fellow #filmmakers #i

Far from making me feel different and special, my [spiritual] experiences made me feel the same, ordinary, and interconnected. If I felt more spiritual, everyone else felt more spiritual as well. (276) ↗

— Julia Cameron

#spiritual-experience #spirituality #unity #experience

I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God. ↗

— G. Willow Wilson

#religion #spirituality #experience

Man has two great spiritual needs. One is for forgiveness. The other is for goodness. ↗

— Billy Graham

#goodness #great #man #needs #other

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and re-experience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart. ↗

— Buckminster Fuller

#discerning #discovery #empiricism #experience #experiment

Shame on the body for breaking down while the spirit perseveres. ↗

— John Dryden

#breaking #down #perseveres #shame #spirit

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration. ↗

— Anna Katharine Green

#apparent #artists #awakened #beauty #because