No Self Quotes

“These are the three stages of enlightenment, the three glimpses of satori.

1. The first stage enlightenment:
A Glimpse of the Whole

The first stage of enlightenment is short glimpse from faraway of the whole. It is a short glimpse of being.
The first stage of enlightenment is when, for the first time, for a single moment the mind is not functioning. The ordinary ego is still present at the first stage of enlightenment, but you experience for a short while that there is something beyond the ego.
There is a gap, a silence and emptiness, where there is not thought between you and existence.
You and existence meet and merge for a moment.
And for the first time the seed, the thirst and longing, for enlightenment, the meeting between you and existence, will grow in your heart.

2. The second stage of enlightenment:
Silence, Relaxation, Togetherness, Inner Being

The second stage of enlightenment is a new order, a harmony, from within, which comes from the inner being. It is the quality of freedom.
The inner chaos has disappeared and a new silence, relaxation and togetherness has arisen.
Your own wisdom from within has arisen.
A subtle ego is still present in the second stage of enlightenment.
The Hindus has three names for the ego:
1. Ahamkar, which is the ordinary ego.
2. Asmita, which is the quality of Am-ness, of no ego. It is a very silent ego, not aggreessive, but it is still a subtle ego.
3. Atma, the third word is Atma, when the Am-ness is also lost. This is what Buddha callas no-self, pure being.
In the second stage of enlightenment you become capable of being in the inner being, in the gap, in the meditative quality within, in the silence and emptiness.
For hours, for days, you can remain in the gap, in utter aloneness, in God.
Still you need effort to remain in the gap, and if you drop the effort, the gap will disappear.
Love, meditation and prayer becomes the way to increase the effort in the search for God.
Then the second stage becomes a more conscious effort. Now you know the way, you now the direction.

3. The third stage of enlightenment:
Ocean, Wholeness, No-self, Pure being

At the third stage of enlightenment, at the third step of Satori, our individual river flowing silently, suddenly reaches to the Ocean and becomes one with the Ocean.
At the third Satori, the ego is lost, and there is Atma, pure being. You are, but without any boundaries. The river has become the Ocean, the Whole.
It has become a vast emptiness, just like the pure sky.
The third stage of enlightenment happens when you have become capable of finding the inner being, the meditative quality within, the gap, the inner silence and emptiness, so that it becomes a natural quality.
You can find the gap whenever you want.
This is what tantra callas Mahamudra, the great orgasm, what Buddha calls Nirvana, what Lao Tzu calls Tao and what Jesus calls the kingdom of God.
You have found the door to God.
You have come home.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten

“Mindfulness means being present to whatever is happening here and now - when mindfulness is strong, there is no room left in the mind for wanting something else. With less liking and disliking of what arises, there is less pushing and pulling on the world, less defining of the threshold between self and other, resulting in a reduced construction of self. As the influence of self diminishes, suffering diminishes in proportion.”
― Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism

“The fundamental principal when traversing a spiritual path is that we do not have a mind. The mind has created the sense of you and me from the way it perceives reality. The truth is, the mind holds us within it. We are not the possessor of a mind and the mind is not something happening to us as if we were outside looking in. We are a part of the mental processing of the mind. The thoughts of the mind and the sense of 'I' are not two separate events. We exist only because the mind thinks us into creation.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“Both the wanting and the wanter are thoughts.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The emotions we feel, and the desires and thoughts we have, are as ours as the sounds we hear.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If you love another person, you have to become a no-self, a nothing. When you love, you have to become a nobody. When you are a nobody, love happens. If you remain somebody, love never happens.
One becomes afraid of love, because love opens the inner emptiness.
Love is not an effort. If love is an effort, it is not love.
It is the same case with the ultimate experience, it happens when you do not make an effort. Then you can simply float with the river to the Ocean.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten

“There is a plurality to our being: We are one heart with many parts. We are one psyche holding
many minds and many psychologies. This opens doors, and they are doors that urgently need
opening... while we are not responsible for the conditioning that’s brought us where
we are now, we are indeed accountable for what we do with it.”
― Ralph De La Rosa

“Anyone who engages in Buddhist meditation is subscribing to the bizarre doctrine that they do not actually exist, that they have no soul, that they are not a Self. They are agreeing with the extraordinary proposition that Nature - inexplicably - deals in creating pointless illusions.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Like a problem, time is nothing but a shadow of thought.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A problem is a shadow of the illusion of a self.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Of a mind, a person is not a possessor, but a product.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Perhaps the reason we can't find the self in the brain is because it isn't there.”
― Chris Niebauer, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism

“Before I wonder why I am here, maybe I should find out who this "I" is who is asking the question. Before I ask "What is God," maybe I should ask who I am, this "I" who is seeking God. Who am I, who is actually living this life? Who is right here, right now? Who is on the spiritual path? Who is it that is meditating? Who am I really?”
― Adyashanti, True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness

“Sermon of the Mounts

Matthew 5

AND SEEING THE MULTITUDES, HE WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAINS, AND WHEN HE WAS SET, HIS DISCIPLES CAME UNTO HIM.

The multitudes, the masses, the crowd, is the lowest state of consciousness. It is a deep ignorance and sleep.

If you want to relate and communicate with the masses, you have to come down to their level.

That is why whenever you go into the masses, the crowd, you start to feel suffocated.

This suffocation is physical and psychological, beacuse you relate to people, who functions from a very low state of consciousness.

They pull you down and you become physically and psychologically tired and drained.

That is why a need for meditation and aloneness arises.

There is a practice in the life of Jesus that he noves into the crowds of people, but after a few months he goes to the mountains. He goes away from the crowd, to be with God.

When you are alone, you are with God.

To relate to the masses brings you down to their level of consciousness, but only in the presence of God, you can fly.

With the crowd, you can not fly, you become crippled, and the masses will not tolerate if you do not live according to them, according to their level of consciousness.

To be able to work with the masses, to be able to help them, you have to relate to them according to their level fo consciousness - and this is tiring and draining.

Both Jesus and Buddha moved to the mounatins, to a lonely place, just to be themselves, and to be with God to regain their vitality to be able to come back to the masses where people are thristy.

The montain is where Jesus do not need to think about the masses, where he can forget the mind and the body.

In that moment of aloneness and meditation, one simply is.

This is the inner being, the source of life.

And when you are full again, you can share again.

AND WHEN HE WAS SET, HIS DISCIPLES CAME UNTO HIM.

To talk to the masses and to talk to disciples is two very different things.

To talk to the crowd is to talk to people, who are indifferent.

The crowd is resisting, defensive and argumentative.

To talk to disciples means to talk to people, who have a basic thirst. It means that they are not defensive, they are open to listen to the heart of truth.

AND HE OPENED HIS MOUTH, AND TAUGHT THEM, SAYING.

Jesus escaped into the mountains from the crowd, but he did not escape from the disciples.

He was available to the disciples.

In his aloneness, Jesus is with God. And through Jesus, the disciples can feel God.

The closer the disciple come to Jesus, the more they will see that Jesus is a silence and emptiness through which God can sing.

And the more the disciple himself will become an emptiness, he will also be able to help other people.

AND HE OPENED HIS MOUTH, AND TAUGHT THEM, SAYING. BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

This is the most fundamental statement of Jesus.

With this statement, Jesus has said everything.

The "poor in spirit" is exactly what Buddha means with the term Shunyatta - "emptiness", no-self, nothingness.

It is when the ego disappears, and you are a nobody, a silence.

If you are a nobody, if you are nothing, you are God.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten

“Of all the nouns we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than "myself". It consists of a collage of still images - name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships - which are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves. It's not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled together and transient as everything else. [With] the practice of meditation, ... we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flashcards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the card and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.”
― Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism

“There is a lot of work ahead of us, as we endeavor to rescue the planet from ourselves, and we are likely to be at this work for a very long time. Perhaps we could come at it from the wisdom of the non-self perspective, rather than the passions of the "world is mine" point of view.”
― Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism

“When you first suspect that your girlfriend or boyfriend does not love you, you feel nervous and anxious. When you find out that he or she really does not love you, you feel sick and nauseated. Dismantling beliefs about what we are and how we function is not threatening at the level of the body, but it is profoundly threatening to our feeling and conception of what we are and our relations with others. Nervousness arises when we begin to suspect or anticipate that things are not as we had thought. Nausea is a reaction to the realization that we have been emotionally attached to a fiction, the fiction of an autonomous volitional self.
Later you will feel ighter and clearer and emotionally alive. What you once resisted you now accept, often with a tinge of sadness because a cherished illusion has been shattered. Intellectual understanding does not have the same effects. While you may have a feeling of confidence in your comprehension, the emotional vitality is not present.
The intention of formal meditation practice is to develop sufficient attention to see into the operation of patterns and take them apart, but this is only half of the practice. The other half is to exercise attention in your daily life so that your actions arise from presence rather than from reactive patterns.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“I feel like a single-celled bacterium that has taken up permanent residence in the welcoming darkness of my intestinal track—content to do my part in the ongoing work of digestion even though I know nothing of “food” or “nourishment” or the impossibly larger multicelled biped that believes itself to be 'David.”
― David Rynick, This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

“The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea. not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting.”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton on Prayer

“Sự thật là khi nào chúng ta tin có một cái ngã, rồi đem cái ngã này so sánh với cái ngã kia thì ta mới có mặc cảm, hoặc tự ti, hoặc tự tôn, hoặc bằng người. Nếu thấy được vô ngã thì ta thoát hết tất cả bệnh. Trong đạo Bụt, cách trị liệu mặc cảm là thoát được ý niệm về ngã (I am). Cái “ngã” là cái rất nguy hiểm.

Sáng nay, trong khi ngồi thiền chúng ta thực tập: Thở vào, tôi thấy sự có mặt của tất cả tổ tiên của tôi trong từng tế bào cơ thể tôi. Thở ra, tôi thấy các tổ tiên của tôi trong từng tế bào của tôi đang mỉm cười với tôi. Thực tập như vậy để thấy mình không phải là cái ngã riêng, mình chẳng qua là sự tiếp nối của tổ tiên thôi. Mình là tổ tiên của mình. Đó là một trong những cách thực tập, một phương pháp gọi là quán tưởng (visualiser), quán chiếu (le regard profond) để thấy rõ ràng ta là cái gì? Ta là một hợp thể. Ta được làm bằng tổ tiên, dòng họ, đất nước, văn hóa, cơm gạo, giáo dục. Ngoài những cái đó làm gì có cái ta riêng biệt? Mình chính là tổ tiên mình, mình chính là dân tộc mình, mình chính là nền giáo dục, nền kinh tế của đất nước mình.

Cũng giống như ngón út, nó không phải là một thực tại cách biệt với những ngón khác. Nó với ngón đeo nhẫn cũng là một, nó với ngón giữa cũng là một. Nó không có sự có mặt riêng biệt. Quán chiếu về vô ngã là phương pháp trị bệnh sâu sắc nhất, hợp lý nhất. Khi chúng ta có cái thấy về vô ngã rồi thì cái chết, cái sống, cái còn, cái mất, không có động gì tới ta được và ta không còn lo sợ nữa.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Con Sư Tử Vàng Của Thầy Pháp Tạng

“The first love of oneself has to rise in your own heart. If the love has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody either. One has to love one's body and one has
to love ones soul. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent and meditative, than the person who does not love himself. If you love yourself you will be nourishing yourself. When you love yourself you will discover that others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. To love yourself is of immense spiritual value. 
The person who loves himself will find that there is no self in him. Love always melts the self. Whenever you love, the self disappears. Ego and love cannot exist together. The less a person is loving himself, the more egoistic a person is. The more you love yourself, the
more you will find that the self disappears. For moments, you will find that the self is not there and only love is there. ”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, The Call of the Heart 

“Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren't who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.”
― Adyashanti, True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness

“Only the person who is empty of self is happy; he has no jealousy, no hatred, no anger, because there is no self to compare.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Answers from the Heart Publisher: Parallax Press

“The sutra pictures Vimalakirti living his bodhisattva vow, that is, caring as much about the well-being of others as he does about his own. He lives selflessly, as though he has or is "no isolated self," because his sense of identity now encompasses his relations with others. The self/other dichotomy has been transformed in the paramita of morality. The boundaries that once defined his identity in opposition to others have been enlarged to include others. That is a significant dimension of what it means to live selflessly. Although Buddhist texts routinely refer to this as an experience of "no-self," it could just as easily be described as an expansion of the self, an enlargement empowered by a profound reverence for the whole of life.”
― Dale S. Wright, Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra

“I sometimes think, in fact, that one of the most precious skills a human being can learn is this way of looking at things as 'not me, not mine'. The joy, freedom, and understanding it can open are profound indeed.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising