Miles Neale Quotes

“Enlightenment is possible – for everyone. However, I don‘t think we will all awaken spontaneously in the way contemporary spiritual teachers Krishnamurti or Eckhart Tolle did. Most of us will never experience a voice from on high, a flash of life-altering insight, stigmata, or a transcendent miracle. Anything is possible, but the odds are not in our favor. What these teachers experienced is like winning the lottery. Yet, from the Buddhist perspective, most of us have already won the lottery: against all probability, we have been born as human beings with intact senses and a bit of interest in pursuing something spiritual. This is even more remarkable when we consider the obstacles and temptations of our materialistic culture, in which spirit is thrown out with the bathwater of religious dogma, God is proclaimed dead, consciousness is reduced to epiphenomena of the brain, and life‘s purpose is made a hedonic scramble on a treadmill to nowhere. What is far more likely than sudden enlightenment is gradual awakening. Following a systematic educational process like a college curriculum, gradual awakening builds on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. This gradual process of awakening doesn‘t offer an escape hatch to another realm of reality or disavow our human wounds, limits, and foibles in this realm; rather it embraces and transforms them, because the only way out is through.”
― Miles Neale, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human