Vic Shayne > Quotes

“We have been psychologically and biologically conditioned to accept this life of constant struggle. This is borne of ignorance that the one who struggles and suffers is only a construct, a belief that there is an individual self apart from consciousness.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“When the mind is completely still, then all movement ceases. Beneath the substrate of consciousness is that which the sages of Vedanta call the Absolute. While the Absolute cannot be described, it is only known by negation. Remove everything from the equation, and there it is, right here all along.”
― Vic Shayne, 13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

“The two-sided coin of pain and pleasure keeps the 'I' in force. Most suffering is caused in this unending and troubling cycle, because desire becomes the overriding goal of the self. It wants things, and if it is denied them it becomes angry, frustrated, depressed, violent, sad, anxious, jealous, envious, miserable, boisterous, agitated, divisive, sorrowful, and troublesome. In other words, it is in a conflict that is self-induced and ultimately self- sabotaging.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“Silence has been widely recognized by poets, philosophers, sages, and mystics as the source of all that is, the starting point of the infinite and unknown that collapses into awareness until each of us can so readily say, 'I am.”
― Vic Shayne, The Self is a Belief: The idea that causes suffering

“There is a broader way to look at consciousness, beyond the parameters of modern medicine and neuroscience. Consciousness can be known as an all-encompassing life force or energy, yet this still does not even scratch the surface of possibilities. Consciousness is the field out of which arises the orchestrator, the orchestrated, and the orchestrating. It is therefore the entirety of the undivided backdrop out of which phenomena appear to happen, where all forms and expressions exist in potentiality, as well as the apparent act of creation and destruction.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“If the self remains at the center of meditation, it can be argued that the meditator begins with an immediate problem: he has separated himself from the meditation.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“Here we are, centuries down the pike in our cultural and scientific evolution, and we are still trying to figure out where the nothingness meets the something-ness. The problem is that, though science can now look into the subatomic world, it still cannot see deeply enough to uncover the depths of the human experience.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“The self is a story of who you are. The biological body has no ability to make up any stories, and consciousness has no need to do so. The practical mind merely goes about its business of making practical decisions and thinking without unnecessary emotions. But the self has been forged by millions of years of ideas, experiences, culture, history, biology, evolution, teachers, nature, education, religion, and all manner of influences.”
― Vic Shayne, The Self is a Belief: The idea that causes suffering

“In consciousness, all realities exist only because the mind is in movement. When the mind becomes completely still, then the reality made possible by the senses, memories, ideas, fears, hopes, and dreams comes to an end. And so does conflict..”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“The enlightened sages speak of surrender to the guru. This is not to be taken literally as surrender to some personage embodied in a teacher. Instead it means to surrender the belief that you are an individual so that you may embrace what you are as consciousness”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“Because science has given modern society the things of comfort, solutions to important issues (sanitation, electricity, transportation, food production, entertainment, etc.), we have become conditioned to depend upon it for answers to everything. And because of this conditioning, we have come to rely upon science to also provide answers for that which is beyond its capacity to provide.”
― Vic Shayne, The Self is a Belief: The idea that causes suffering

“...there is nothing that is truly objective, because all is consciousness, which is an undivided whole. As such, what is termed subjective and objective — the seer and the seen — are fictitious fragments of the whole. Both the seer and the seen are actually perceived aspects of a single consciousness.”
― Vic Shayne, The Self is a Belief: The idea that causes suffering

“All that I know is that I am.

I can know that the self is not me, because I can inquire into it, deconstruct it until it seems to dissolve, or just leave it alone, and yet I still exist. The body is not me, because it appears, changes, and eventually ceases to exist. Consciousness, too, is heir to movement and impermanence, and I am not solely that either. What remains when all else is removed is the silence that is a still, infinite, boundless, permanent, un-cancellable nothingness from which all springs.
And this Absoluteness never changes. 

I can only say that I am this.”
― Vic Shayne, 13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

“Pleasure is commonly confused for happiness, but the greatest differentiation seems to be one of transience — pleasure comes and goes, but happiness is a stable state of being.”
― Vic Shayne, Stressing Out Over Happiness: — exploring the effects of stress, meditation and happiness

“A wave on top of the ocean is still the ocean; it is still made of the same substance. Although it seems to be differentiated, it is still the ocean. It cannot move or change course from the entirety of the ocean, nor can it reorder the ocean so that it can do something that the rest of the water is not doing.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“The subjective experience is an incalculable, immeasurable personal experience of what it is like to be alive, to exist. It is the feeling of knowing that one exists, no matter how unexplainable or unprovable. This continues to be a thorn in the side of scientists, because science demands proof for everything, yet even the most skeptical scientist knows that he has the subjective experience of knowing what it is like to say, 'I am.”
― Vic Shayne, The Self is a Belief: The idea that causes suffering

“Consciousness says 'I am,' but it is the self that says 'I am this or that.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

“The mind and brain enable us to be aware of the thoughts and actions that seem to arise and fall, but they do not create consciousness. They are effects of consciousness. All that comes and goes does so within this soup of consciousness.”
― Vic Shayne, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience