Lama Marut > Quotes

“Worrying about tomorrow doesn’t change tomorrow. But it does change today—and not for the better.”
― Lama Marut, A Spiritual Renegade's Guide to the Good Life

“Actually we cannot attain enlightenment until we give up the notion of me personally attaining it. As long as the enlightenment drama has a central character known as me, who has certain attributes, there is no hope of attaining enlightenment, because it’s nobody’s project.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“Being nobody is not being nothing. It is an absence (no-body) and not a presence (some-body), but it is the emptiness that makes the plenitude possible. It is the hole in the middle that makes a donut what it is; it is the empty glass that can hold whatever is poured into it; it is the undifferentiated ocean from which all particular waves arise, last for a while, and then return to their source.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“And because who I am is merely a conceptualization on the basis of constantly evolving mental and physical parts, I can learn to re-conceptualize myself so as to become a happier me, no matter what role “I” am playing.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“We’re nobody apart from thinking that we’re somebody. And when we stop thinking we’re somebody, we’re really left with nobody.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“If you pursue happiness for itself, it will have no meaning. Happiness comes uninvited; and the moment you are conscious that you are happy, you are no longer happy. . . . Being self-consciously happy, or pursuing happiness, is the very ending of happiness. There is happiness only when the self and its demands are put aside.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“The spiritual quest is ultimately not the freedom of the individual; it is the freedom from the individual. And one of the main reasons we are not free is that the “somebody self” resists its own dethronement as the sole monarch ruling the Kingdom of Me.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“Even in ordinary life you feel the futility of words. And if you don’t feel the futility of words, that shows that you have not been alive at all; that shows that you have lived very superficially. . . . When for the first time something starts happening which is beyond words, then life has happened to you, life has knocked on your door.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody

“I may not be the “me” I ordinarily think I am. But I am also no other than the “me” that I think I am. That’s all the self there is when it comes to the particular, individual “me”—the “somebody self” is a self-conception.”
― Lama Marut, Be Nobody