Hindu 2.0
There is much more to a human being than just body and mind. The spirit plays an important part in shaping the life of each individual. Here are 250 powerful spiritual quotes from great spiritual masters, past and present, to inspire and stoke the fire of spirituality within.
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Spiritual quotes about yoga and meditation
From Sadhguru
(Note: Yoga is much more than the physical practices of Kundalini Yoga or Hatha Yoga. Hope these quotes clarify!)
Meditation means to go beyond the limitations of body and mind.
It is the pain of ignorance which makes one into a seeker.
Meditation is not an act, it is a quality. Meditation is not something that you do – it is something that you become.
Meditation is a way of moving into the unlimited dimension of who you are – it is the ultimate freedom.
Any method to heighten the presence of that which is the source of creation within you, is yoga.
The very purpose of life is to reach the highest possible flowering.
Meditation is the nourishment for flowering.
Mind is madness. Only when you go beyond the mind, there will be meditation.
When you exist here only as a body and a mind, suffering is inevitable.
Meditation means to go beyond the limitations of your body and mind.
There is no need to make spirituality a part of education. If you make education non-imposing and non-suppressive, people are naturally spiritual.
Meditation is that dimension of science which focuses on creating the right kind of interior, so that you can live a peaceful and joyous life.
Meditation is an opportunity to move into a dimension where there is no such thing as stress within you.
Meditation is the only way to freedom from stress as it is a dimension beyond the mind. All the stress and struggle are of the mind.
If you know how to keep yourself pleasant within, irrespective of what is happening around you, Ultimate Liberation cannot be denied to you.
Yoga is the journey from just eating and sleeping to becoming an ecstatic being. This is the aspiration of life itself.
Meditation means to know life beyond the sphere of the physical; to know and experience life not just at the surface but at the source.
If you cultivate your body, your mind, your emotions, and your energies to a certain level of maturity, meditation will blossom.
If only there is a sufficient number of people whose experience of life goes beyond body and mind, this world will be a very different place.
Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.
Yoga means union, that in your experience, everything has become one.
The essence of spirituality is, to be constantly aware of the oneness of all; at the same time to celebrate the uniqueness of the individual.
If you dissolve your personality, your presence becomes very powerful – this is the essence of spiritual sadhana.
Yoga essentially means finding the keys to the nature of the existence.
If you become so intensely curious that without knowing you cannot live, that is called seeking.
Spiritual sadhana is not about making you into something other than what you are, but to erase the false faces that you have created for yourself is not something that you do; it is something that you become.
Spiritual process is not for the dead or the dying; it is for the living who want to become fully alive in all dimensions of life.
When meditation makes you realize that you have so many limitations of your own and they are all created by you, the longing to break them will come.
The very way you breathe, sit, stand, eat, walk, work – everything can become yoga. You can use any process of life to transcend your limitations.
In spirituality, when we say growth, we are talking about becoming smaller; not just smaller – non-existent.
The most fundamental and the most important aspect of the spiritual process can in no way be stopped by anybody – except yourself.
Meditation means ultimate freedom within you.
The first step towards knowing is to see that you do not know.
To create something and not to be attached to what you have created is a spiritual process.
If you want to find out the purpose of life, you need to look beyond the limitations of body and mind.
Meditation means to awaken new dimensions within you.
Spirituality is a boundless ability to respond and experience.
Meditation does not mean you have to grin every moment of your life, but to learn to let your bones smile.
What we refer to as yoga is just a technology to make your energies function by choice, not by compulsion.
When you are truly meditative, there is no time and space for you. Time and space is just a creation of the mind .
If you can break the illusion that you are separate and begin to experience the oneness of the existence, that is yoga.
The methods and technologies of how to experience that which is beyond the physical is what is known as the science of yoga is a longing. Only when your longing is cranked up to peak intensity, knowing becomes a possibility.
Now, you believe you are a material person dabbling with . But essentially, you are a spiritual being dabbling with the material world means you have started seeing life with utmost clarity. There are no more illusions about it. You see everything just the way it is.
There is no need to make spirituality a part of education. If you make education non-imposing, non-suppressive, people are naturally spiritual.
Once you touch a dimension which is boundless, the idea of time and space disappears. What is here is there; what is there is here.
The science and technology of how this life functions and what we can do with it, is what we refer to as yoga.
Spiritual process is not about chanting a mantra or closing your eyes, spiritual process is essentially about enhancing your perception.
Being spiritual is a far more intelligent way to exist. It means being in tune with the intelligence of the Creator.
A spiritual process is not a divorce from life. It is an irrevocable love affair with life.
Yoga is a way to produce a chemistry of blissfulness. Once you are blissful by your own nature, you can deal with outside situations effortlessly.
The spiritual process is always individual. You may sit in a group, but only the individual can evolve, only the individual can liberate himself.
Seek what you know as the highest. It does not matter whether it is going to happen or not – living with a vision itself is a very elevating process.
To be spiritual means to be an emperor within yourself. This is the only way to be.
Yoga is not just about living better. It is about exploring the very source of life.
If you are truly a seeker of truth, truth cannot hide from you. It is in the lap of truth that you have happened.
Being a seeker means no matter what the Vedas said, what Krishna or Shiva said, you have to know the truth in your own experience.
Being spiritual does not mean being dead serious. If you allow life to happen within you exuberantly, unbridled, you will touch the spirit.
Spiritual quotes about life and truth
From Sadhguru
Only when man is willing to change himself, there can be a true revolution.
Your personality is something that you created. Once you are aware of that, you could create it whichever way you want.
When you are no more identified with your physicality, you become available to Grace.
Any teaching will not transform you as long as you are deeply attached to your body. Yoga is towards reducing this attachment.
Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is brutal. The brutality of ignorance is such that it will make you dead while alive.
The moment you ascribe who you are right now to what happened yesterday, you have written off your life.
Ignoring the source of creation and trying to conduct your life yourself is a terribly egoistic and ignorant attitude towards life.
We neither need a political revolution nor a religious revolution. What we need is an inner transformation in human beings.
If we do not work for individual transformation, talking about world peace is just entertainment.
Essentially, yoga means dissolving your identity.
If you see there is no meaning to anything that you are doing, your ego collapses; so you are trying to find all kinds of fake meanings.
On the spiritual path, the first thing is to experientially ascertain where your are right now. You can only start the journey from where you are.
Transformation means nothing of the old should remain; something absolutely new should happen.
Your ability to love, to reach out, and to experience life is limitless. The limitation is only of the body and mind.
Detachment does not mean non-involvement. You can be deeply involved but not entangled.
Until you allow yourself to blossom into a state of boundlessness, you should not be content, you must burn with discontent.
You do not have to pursue something intensely; you as a being should become very intense.
If you walk through life with ease and without any sense of entanglement, that is maturity.
There is only one calamity: ignorance. And there is only one solution: enlightenment.
We are eating, using up, and possessing more than we should. That is why a large portion of the human population is hungry.
When you do something just because it is needed, you involve yourself totally without it meaning anything to you, then action becomes liberating.
As long as you are a part of the physical process of the existence, there is nothing that does not change.
Your body and your mind can be receptacles to perceive the whole cosmos – if only you do not identify yourself with them.
Believing that what you do not know cannot exist is the crown of ignorance.
Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools.
Knowledge can only be limited. Ignorance is boundless. In recognizing our ignorance, we will touch that which is boundless.
Self-transformation is not just about changing yourself. It means shifting yourself to a completely new dimension of experience and perception.
If you did not have any personality, you would have a tremendous presence. The more rigid your personality, the more constipated your whole being.
Only when you stop identifying yourself with things that are not you, the possibility of knowing the nature of your existence arises.
Do not try to be special. If you are simply ordinary, more ordinary than others, you will become extraordinary.
Spiritual quotes about clarity and perception
From Sadhguru
Confidence without clarity is always a disaster.
Only in unawareness you are mortal. In awareness you are immortal.
Without raising human consciousness, whatever we do in the world will only lead to more and more suffering.
Trying to change social, national, or global realities without working on human consciousness means there is no serious intention.
Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival instincts. It does not take you towards liberation.
If you think one thing is sacred but you cannot stand the other, if you love the Creator but hate the creation, that is vulgarity.
What is most needed right now is evolving human consciousness. Without that, science, technology, development, everything will go waste.
Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.
Once you have access to the source of creation within you, your health and wellbeing will naturally be taken care of.
The source of creation is within you. You can be just a piece of flesh, or you can be the Creator himself – this is the choice and potential you have.
When every moment, you experience yourself as the source of creation, not as a piece of creation, then you are realized.
Intelligence essentially means that your intellect is sharp enough to see life the way it is.
Intelligence is of paramount importance to live life sensibly, because without intelligence, there is no clarity. And Clarity is intelligence everyone is capable of.
All beliefs will crash somewhere. Only reality will sustain itself.
In tension you cannot perceive; in laxity you cannot perceive. Only if you are intense and relaxed, you perceive everything just the way it is.
If you have no agenda of your own, life will work according to its agenda. Your personal agenda is taking you further and further away from that.
Your ideas need not have anything to do with reality. Making conclusions is a sure way of not enhancing our perception.
If you look at creation the way it is, it is explosively beautiful.
Conclusion means death. Confusion means possibility.
The purpose of existence is to exist. It is too fantastic to have a meaning.
When the very source of creation is within you, all the solutions are within you. The problems are just created by you.
If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven .
It is possible for every human being to be blissful, if you are willing to pay a little attention to how this human mechanism functions.
Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival – it does not take you towards liberation.
Confusion is better than stupid conclusions. In confusion, there is still a possibility. In stupid conclusion, there is no possibility.
Making conclusions about life is a sure way to deny yourself the possibility of a human being transforming himself into the Divine.
Everything in this cosmos is happening wonderfully well. But just one nasty little thought coming up in your head is enough to make it a bad day.
Generally, people who are not self-realized are full of themselves. One who is self-realized sees that the whole world is full of one.
If you strive to make yourself in such a way that nobody can help loving you, life will blossom, everything will yield.
You cannot be receptive when you are too full of yourself. The less you are, the more you receive. The more you are, the less you receive.
Being on the spiritual path means you want to be a success in an existential sphere, not just on a social level.
The whole creation is so tenderly balanced – this manifests the mastery of the Creator.
You have the choice to be here as a speck of creation or as the very source of creation. Not exploring such a phenomenal possibility is a crime.
The hand of the Creator is actively involved in every atom, every plant, every creature, and yourself, in every cell in your body.
Your energy and your awareness are directly connected. If your energies are intense, your awareness naturally grows and sharpens.
Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections.
If you think you are big, you will become small. If you are willing to become an absolute nothing, you will become larger than creation and Creator.
You are a piece of creation. If you go against any other piece of creation, you are unknowingly going against yourself.
Creation is not your doing, but the way you are, the way you experience life, the situations you attract, are one hundred percent your doing.
Consciousness is not a bunch of thoughts or a certain level of understanding. Consciousness is a dimension that is beyond our physicality.
Life has come from a very beautiful source. If you remain in touch with that source, everything about you will be beautiful.
Spiritual quotes about devotion and divinity
From Sadhguru
If you want the Divine to become alive within you, first of all you as a human being have to become absolutely alive.
Destiny is the result of all your actions and the impressions that you have taken in.
A devotee has no agenda of his own. For him, the object of devotion is everything.
Devotion is about you. Maybe you use another object as inspiration, but you change your quality; you walk more joyfully, gently upon this planet.
Bhakti yoga is a way of transforming your emotion from negativity to utmost pleasantness.
Devotion is not about a God. Devotion is about you making your emotions so sweet that your life experience becomes beautiful.
What you call intelligence and what you refer to as the Creator are not different. The Creator is pure intelligence, intelligence beyond logic.
Devotion means your involvement with life is no more conditional.
The Divine is constantly waiting at your doorstep to move in if only you allow the necessary space.
In this culture, God is not the highest entity; mukti or liberation is the highest goal. We are willing to use God as a stepping stone, if needed.
It is not because there is God that devotion has come; because there is devotion, there is God.
Devotion means a profusion of life.
Devotion means who you are should merge with what you are doing. Otherwise, whatever your activity may be, it will not be of any great significance.
Devotion is a place where you do not exist; life just flows through you as a certain sweetness and beauty.
If thinking minds, questioning minds, doubting minds, are talking about faith, their whole life will become fake.
Devotion is not a concept, not a certain kind of ideology, not a certain kind of act, it is the agent of dissolution.
Only when you are absolutely devoted to what you do, can you produce something significant in the world.
There is a region beyond reason. Unless you get there, you will not know the sweetness of love, nor the Divine.
Devotion is not drama. Devotion is a way of living. Devotion is the way you walk, the way you breathe, and the way your heart beats.
If you pay sufficient attention, everything in life is magnificent, everything is a doorway to the Divine.
Devotion means your limited entity has been dissolved; a much larger possibility has become a living reality for you.
Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two .
Destiny is what every human being creates for oneself. Fate is when you fail to create your own destiny.
Devotion as an act is vulgar. Devotion as a way of life is wonderful. If you are a great devotee, it is ugly. If you are devout, it is beautiful.
Devotion is a tool to dissolve yourself into nothingness and become the very hand of the Divine.
Devotion is the spark that can fire up your chemistry and energy to such a level that it creates an explosion of ecstasy within you.
For the Divine to function through you, it is important to make every breath, every pulsation in the body, and your very existence an offering.
The roots of the Divine are entrenched in this body. If you nurture the roots, how can you avoid the flowering?
Spiritual quotes about humanity and morality
From Sadhguru
Inward is not a direction. Inward is a dimension.
One who is constantly resting within himself is capable of endless activity.
Only if you are joyful, you can be free from the fruit of action.
If you live your life burning for the highest possibility, in that burning itself, there is liberation.
If you shift from compulsiveness to consciousness, being joyful will not be an effort.
The most beautiful moments in life are moments when you are expressing your joy, not when you are seeking it.
You can give joyfully only when you have found something so valuable within yourself that everything else does not mean so much to you anymore.
The very life within you is longing to be joyful because joyfulness is the nature of the source of creation.
One who explores and knows all aspects of his life, is called self-realized.
If you do not choose to become a steady source of blissfulness for yourself and everything around you, you will remain an immature life.
Blissfulness does not compel you to behave in any particular way. Out of bliss, I can laugh or cry; I can sit quietly or be active in the world.
The most enduring sort of power is realizing the power within.
Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.
You will know the joy of action only when you are blissful by your own nature.
A materialistic person is ruthless with other people but kind to himself. A spiritual person is ruthless with himself but kind to everybody else.
The best thing that you can do to this world is to be joyous. Being joyful, is the greatest offering you can make to the world.
Life happens from within. How aware you are of it, decides the quality of your body, your mind, and your experience of life.
Comfort will never come to one who does not touch the stillness within himself.
A guru is not a crutch, he is a bridge.
The only reason why you are unhappy is because you are trying to be happy.
If you just live totally, you will dissolve lots of karma. Living totally means that you experience anything that comes fully and intensely.
Whether it is suffering or joy, going through experiences in life is not so much of a karma. Depriving yourself of any experience is the big karma.
If you want to create a beautiful world, people in positions of responsibility and power should know a certain sense of joyfulness and peacefulness.
Karma is your survival and your bondage. And if you handle it right, it can also be your liberation.
Do not try to fix whatever comes in your life. Fix yourself in such a way that whatever comes, you will be fine.
52 Spiritual Quotes from J Krishnamurthi
Truth is a pathless land.
As we are — the world is.
What brings understanding is love. When your heart is full, then you will listen to the teacher, to the beggar, to the laughter of children, to the rainbow, and to the sorrow of man.
Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.
A man who is really earnest must begin with himself, he must be passively aware of all his thoughts, feelings and actions.
It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself, and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.
Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself.
The society in which we live is the result of our psychological state.
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.
To learn about oneself, a living thing, you have to watch, learn anew each minute.
Truth does not belong to an individual.
The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life — perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter. Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. That is all life is … Matter and energy are interrelated.
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.
Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both.
The craving to become causes fears; to be, to achieve, and so to depend engenders fear.
If people who say they love their children meant it, would there be war? And would there be division of nationalities – would there be these separations?
Training the intellect does not result in intelligence. Intelligence comes into being when one acts in perfect harmony, both intellectually and emotionally.
Real freedom is not something to be acquired, it is the outcome of intelligence.
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free.
The demand to be safe in a relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear.
Love may be the ultimate solution to all man’s difficulties, problems and travails.
When you do not name a group of people, you are compelled to look at each individual face and not treat them all as the mass.
You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don’t live it.
Most of us waste our energy through chattering – endlessly chattering, gossiping, criticising, backbiting.
You may be ignorant of all the books in the world, and I hope you are, of all the latest theories, but that is not ignorance.
If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.
Truth is something which you must see immediately, and to see something clearly you must give your heart, mind and whole being.
Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself
In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.
When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.
All paths do not lead to truth. There is no path to truth, it must come to you.
There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.
Truth has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thought, in the fullness of love.
It is truth that frees, not your effort to be free
Meditation is the movement of love. It isn’t the love of the one or of the many. It is like water that anyone can drink out of any jar
If you set out to meditate, it will not be meditation. If you set out to be good, goodness will never flower.
Freedom is now or never.
Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation. Intelligence is the seeing of what is.
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.
Freedom comes with self-knowledge, when the mind goes above and beyond the hindrances it has created for itself.
To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery.
Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be.
To change the world, we must begin with ourselves.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand.
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