Peter Kingsley > Quotes

“Always remember your focus determines your reality.”
― Peter Kingsley

“Rationality is simply mysticism misunderstood.”
― Peter Kingsley, Reality

“[T]he song of the Sufis, once it starts, never ends.

There is a traditional saying that you should never waste your time trying to find real Sufis because they are the ones who will find you. And this turned out to be perfectly true.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“The rules are simple. Prepare in silence. Train in stillness. Strain as much as possible to become worthy of facing the impossible. Maybe you'll be unlucky, or lucky, enough to be chosen but the chances are you won't. It's much more likely someone else will be picked who is far simpler and purer than you, untrained, unprepared: the timeliest reminder of what matters most.

Intelligence, everything anyone would think of as intelligence, is entirely irrelevant. It's just a question of being empty enough to transmit the will of the gods.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift — and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.”
― Peter Kingsley, Reality

“Dreams become a reality when we put our mind into it.”
― Peter Kingsley, Reality

“All nature is waiting for us to become conscious because there's a particular quality of consciousness that only humans can provide. Nature needs that consciousness; cries out for it. And the process of deciphering Nature's need, then discovering how to respond to it, is what's called learning to become human.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“We have the strange idea in the West that civilizations just happen: that they come into existence as a hit and miss affair and that we bumble along, creating and inventing and making it better.

But this is not how things are done at all.

Civilizations never just happen. They are brought into existence quite consciously, with unbelievable compassion and determination, from another world. Then the job of people experienced in ecstasy is to prepare the soil for them; carefully sow and plant them; care for them; watch them grow.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World

“[G]radually, skillfully, [Parmenides] conjures up the image of us humans as stuck at this place where the road divides—unable to decide between the two paths, incapable even of seeing what the choice involves, just dithering in the space in between.”
― Peter Kingsley, Reality

“As the ancient Gnostics patiently explained almost two thousand years ago, there is no greater trap than to believe one has arrived at “the completion of all completions”—when in reality one hasn't even arrived yet at the very first mystery of existence behind which all the other mysteries after mysteries lie.

Then even liberation traps us in its net, thanks to the elegance and grace and speed with which we are caught by what we're sure has set us free.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“The precision of existence can never be known by the human mind. That's why the goal of every woman and man is to become human, but the purpose of being human is to leave everything human behind.
To discover this precision, one has to stop being a human and start being the mystery of life itself.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“In our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours—the sacred origin not just of religion but also of everything else, of science and technology, education and law, of medicine, logic, architecture, ordinary daily life, the cry of longing, the excruciating ache of the awakening love for wisdom.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World

“Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“Anyone who identifies with the body while alive will identify with it when it dies. And that's the end of their story. But whoever stays alive while the body dies instead of going unconscious realizes how much has been lost, knows at first hand what it means to be a human and sees the purpose of the body and understands how necessary it is.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“[E]ach culture is just like a tree whose essence and whole potential are already contained in the seed. Nothing during the course of a civilization is ever discovered, or invented, or created, which was not already present inside that seed.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World

“Tiene mérito: hemos conseguido crear la ilusión de que somos más sabios que las gentes de tiempos anteriores”
― Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

“We can either write history as a way of placing our own values and prejudice is at the center of every picture, or we can choose to allow for what sometimes is referred to as the “nomadic alternative”—a term politely coined by some recent researchers to celebrate their growing realization that nomadic people might have had some sound reasons for wanting to live their own life in their own way….”
― Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World