Jed McKenna > Quotes

“Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.”
― Jed McKenna

“The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. In waking up.”
― Jed McKenna

“It is your show.

It is your universe.
There is no one else here, just you,
and nothing is being withheld from you.
You are completely on your own.
Everything is available for direct knowing.
No one else has anything you need.
No one else can lead you, pull you, push you or carry you.”
― Jed McKenna

“Wake up first. Wake up, and then you can double back and perhaps be of some use to others if you still have the urge. Wake up first, with pure and unapologetic selfishness, or you’re just another shipwreck victim floundering in the ocean and all the compassion in the world is of absolutely no use to the other victims floundering around you.”
― Jed McKenna

“I don’t have something you don’t; you believe something I don’t.”
― Jed McKenna

“The bottom line remains the same: you’re either awake or you’re not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles.”
― Jed McKenna

“Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.”
― Jed McKenna

“It’s ego – the false self – that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.”
― Jed McKenna

“Listen! Here’s all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know. That’s it. That’s the whole deal; a complete teaching of enlightenment, a complete practice. If you ever have any questions or problems—no matter what the question or problem is—the answer is always exactly the same: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know. In other words, go jump off a cliff. Don’t go near the cliff and contemplate jumping off. Don’t read a book about jumping off. Don’t study the art and science of jumping off. Don’t join a support group for jumping off. Don’t write poems about jumping off. Don’t kiss the ass of someone else who jumped off. Just jump.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“Enlightenment isn’t when you go there; it’s when there comes here.”
― Jed McKenna

“Before enlightenment I believed my ego was me, then enlightenment comes along and no more ego, only the underlying reality. Now it’s after enlightenment and this ego might be slightly uncomfortable or ill-fitting at times, but it’s all I’ve got. The idea that your ego is destroyed in the process of becoming enlightened is roughly correct, but it’s not complete. Before enlightenment, you’re a human being in the world, just like everyone you see. During enlightenment you realize the human being you thought you were is just a character in a play, and that the world you thought you were in is just a stage, so you go through a process of radical deconstruction of your character to see what’s left when it’s gone. The result isn’t enlightened-self or true-self, it’s no-self. When it’s all over it’s time to be a human being in the world again, and that means slipping back into costume and getting back on stage.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“Here’s the most directly I am able to say this: The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else—everything else—is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who is just going about their normal human existence undistracted by the larger questions, that rubbish and debris is everything that makes them who they are. But to someone who wants to get to the truth, who they are is what’s in the way.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“there is no such thing as a rational person. We are emotional creatures with some token capacity for reason.”
― Jed McKenna, Jed McKenna's Theory of Everything: The Enlightened Perspective

“All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can’t stop seeing it that way. It’s everywhere, everyone. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s not life. It can’t be. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not life.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“I don’t see it as my role to save or rescue anybody any more than regular people feel the need to rescue each other from sleeping and dreaming.”
― Jed McKenna

“To move forward, you must figure out exactly what is obstructing you. Whatever it is, it isn’t really there; it has no reality, no substance. It’s your own creation, a phantom lurking in the shadows of your mind, a shadow demon. Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers. They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard. Banish shadow with light and see for yourself that no obstruction exists, nor ever did. We create our demons and we feed them. To awaken we must slay them. That’s really the whole process: Slay one demon, take one step. Repeat.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“all belief systems are just the stories we create in order to deal with the void. Ego abhors a vacuum, so everybody’s scrambling to create the illusion of something where there’s nothing. Belief systems are simply the devices we use to explain away the unthinkable horror of no-self.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can’t do that while it’s still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent. By externalizing your thoughts, you can become your own guru; judging yourself, giving feedback, providing a more objective and elevated perspective.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth.”
― Jed McKenna

“We slip into the lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don’t live our lives by choice, but by default.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“There’s nothing left to contend against and nothing left that must be done, and there will never be anything that must be done ever again.”
― Jed McKenna

“Maybe you think death is the opposite of life, or that all this death-awareness stuff translates into the end of happiness and good times, but this is not the case. Death isn't morbid, fear is morbid. Death doesn't oppose life, fear opposes life. To close your eyes to death is to close them to life: what could be more morbid than that? From your perspective, death and suicide are horrific and unthinkable. From my perspective, they are empowering and lifeaffirming. and I would look at any person that doesn't have an open, honest relationship with these subjects as themselves nine parts dead.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Do you want to awaken? To stop being a false, artificial, self-benighted being? Then developing and sharpening this sense—the ability to detect fear and the source and emanations of fear—amounts to nothing more than disengaging your own autoimmune system; the subsystem of ego that keeps this poison from making you sick. Yes, to get it out you must let it in, breathe it deep, and allow yourself to become sickened by it. The way out is through, and there can be no rebirth without first a death.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“That's delusion. Exactly the same. This is the dream. The question is, who is doing the dreaming and how do we wake up? How do we get real? That's what all this enlightenment stuff boils down to. It's about waking up and seeing what's really true, and to do what we have to become progressively less asleep. We have to fight and scratch and claw our way to wakefulness. In the same sense, if you want to be more true, then the way to do that is by becoming less false, less full of shit. If you want to be less full of shit, the the way to do it is to go inside yourself with the spotlight of discrimination, find the shit, and illuminate it. Illumination destroys it. lies disappear when you really look at them because they never had real substance, they were only imagined. That's what you were doing just now-- bravely shining a light inward, digging deeper-- and that's cool. It's not easy and it's not fun, but that's the process. That's how the good stuff happens. That's how icebergs get melted back into the ocean.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?   Dr. Seuss”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare

“Nothing false will survive. Nothing true will perish.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

“The third thing about witnessing, the most important part and the thing that most people don't seem to understand. is that you have to take it further than just one step back. You have to keep going with it. Its not a passive thing. like you just sit back and observe. You don't just observe your character, you deconstruct it. You have to be aggressive about it. This is a way or simulating the enlightened perspective, which would be useful to anyone who wants to wake themselves up from the dreamstate instead of just in it.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare