Leo Hartong > Quotes

“conventions? The moment one becomes predictable, one cannot be free.*6”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: Who sets the example? Why should a liberated one necessarily follow conventions? The moment one becomes predictable, one cannot be free.*6”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The intellect is the wrong tool for relating to non-dualistic reality, in the same way that a bucket is the wrong tool for scooping up the summer wind, or that bars are unfit to confine the rain, or that a sealed coffin can’t hold sunlight.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“You will not find this ‘ghost in the machine’ that is supposed to be the thinker of your thoughts, the feeler of your feelings, and the doer of your deeds, except as a thought or a grammatical convention. You are that which is looking for this ‘I,’ and as long as the search continues, this will be overlooked.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“Climbing the signpost will not get you to your destination.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The Tao Te Ching starts by affirming that: ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.’ At this point, we might expect Lao Tsu to shut up and throw his brush and rice paper to the wind. Instead, he continues to expound for eighty-one chapters on the Tao of which one cannot speak. In my country, there is a proverb that may explain this. It says, ‘The mouth has no choice but to speak of that which fills the heart.’ Compare it to a man in love who cannot stop talking about his lady. His intention is not to convince his friends to go and court her; he simply is unable not to talk about her.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The concept of ‘me’ getting rid of my ego is as credible as a trap that has been set to catch itself.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“Enlightenment not only shows that your separate identity is an illusion, it reveals that sheer purposelessness is at the heart of this whole creation. This sounds absurd to the goal-and-future-oriented mind; yet I will tell you unequivocally that the whole point of this manifestation is nothing other than this manifestation”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“Why should a liberated one necessarily follow conventions? The moment one becomes predictable, one cannot be free.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The fear of dying is that which stops you from disembarking an airborne plane without a parachute or from organizing a picnic on a train track. The fear of death, on the other hand, is more abstract as the mind projects a future in which it no longer exists”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“As long as we realize that the symbols we use to describe our world are not that which they attempt to describe, there is no confusion. When we forget, however, that the map is not the territory, we get hypnotized into seeing the world as a complex and scrambled jigsaw puzzle, too big and complicated for us ever to completely put together. This way of thinking not only promotes the idea that we are separate from our environment, but it also encourages manipulation and exploitation of, instead of cooperation with, that environment.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“You may protest that the thought that led you to steal from your employer simply arose, and you are not responsible; but then neither is your employer responsible for the thought that led him to fire you and press charges.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Albert Einstein”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The seeker, who wants to get rid of his ego chases an ever-receding illusion. First, he splits himself in two – the ego and the one trying to get rid of it. As he realizes this split, he then occupies a third position. As soon as he notices this third ‘me’ that sees both the ego and the one wanting to get rid of it, there must be a fourth ‘me’ seeing the third me, and then a fifth seeing the fourth, and so on. An endless subdivision starts, which reminds me of a limerick Alan Watts used to illustrate this point. There was a young man who said:
‘Though it seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see, is the I that knows me,
When I know, that I know, that I know.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“The cosmic joke in the journey of the seeker is that the energy that fuels the seeking is precisely what is being sought. In Zen this is called ‘riding an ox in search of an ox.’ Wei Wu Wei compared it to looking for your spectacles, not realizing that they are on your nose and, were you not looking through them, you wouldn’t be able to see what you are looking for.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“When a fruit mixer breaks down, nothing happens to the electricity. That which animated the now broken machine is itself unbroken.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living

“No effort in the world can make you what you already and actually are.”
― Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living