Richard Bach Quotes

I believe in past lives but I know nothing about mine and I don't want to know. I live in the present, taking one day at a time.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth... we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

But Buddy was an upper. He was happy. He loved music, and he was really happy. I don't know... I don't believe in reincarnation at all, but if all that stuff is true, then he might have been on his last time around.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.

My whole belief system is that our paths are drawn for us. I believe in reincarnation. I believe we're here to learn and grow. We choose how we come into this life based on what it is we have to learn. Some people have harder lessons than others.

By 1968, both The Beatles and The Beach Boys had plenty of fame - we were looking for something deeper. The Maharishi taught us how to go beyond thinking and action in order to grow from within.

The vision of the human being is confined today to the physical body. One regards this as a reality; one cannot raise oneself to what is spiritual. The souls who now look upon their own physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians.

All of us, at different times of life, are looking for answers. It happened to me a decade ago and led me to the path of wanting to know more. I read Osho, Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and Parmananda Yogi. I haven't found the ultimate answer. The journey is the answer.

If you believe, as I do believe, in reincarnation, they say that every time you come back, it's because you have to finish something. I've a funny feeling that my thing in this life is to have one relationship after another.

Say - i am the Atman in which my lower ego has become merged for ever. Be perfect in this idea; and then as long as the body endures, speak unto others this message of fearlessness: "Thou art That", "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached!"

Yoga is the journey from just eating and sleeping to becoming an ecstatic being. This is the aspiration of life itself.

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead. The Art of Peace is a celebration of the bonding of heaven, earth, and humankind. It is all that is true, good, and beautiful.

When life takes away the forms that you thought were the foundation of your life, what's left? The life that needs no foundation - that is the foundation. The formless. The essence.

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as an animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.

If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there is no peace in it.

To ignore one's spiritual self is unsettling, to say the least. That's a very profound outlook on it.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

Real music is not for wealth, not for honours or even the joys of the mind... but as a path for realisation and salvation.

Art is the path to being spiritual.

I have no doubt I was someone very interesting in a past life.

If we are born under a lucky star, it shows that we have earned the good fortune thereby Indicated, by forethought, kindness, and our other virtues expressed in previous lives, for we cannot have friends unless we are friendly ourselves.