Jack Kornfield Quotes

The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.

Most people tell themselves these excuses - I've always been this way, this is my nature, I can't help it - that are just memes. They're belief systems that keep you from being able to become all that you are intended to become. They're impediments to reaching God-realization, or Tao-centeredness. People lose track of their purpose, because they are so back there - living in their past. Byron Katie speaks about this: Who would you be without your story? Carlos Castaneda used to say if you don't have a story, you don't have to live up to it. So get rid of your story.

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.

The authentic self is the best part of a human being. It's the part of you that already cares, that is already passionate about evolution. When your authentic self miraculously awakens and becomes stronger than your ego, then you will truly begin to make a difference in this world. You will literally enter into a partnership with the creative principle.

The disappearance of your person is not your disappearance, remember; on the contrary, it is your appearance. As your person disappears, your personality falls away; your individuality, your individual arises. To have a personality is hypocrisy. To be an individual is your birthright.

Transcending mind-made limitations doesn't mean you stop being yourself. On the contrary, you become more yourself than ever before.

Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou abidest ever--what thou art.

If you don't feel fabulous, you have deviated from the path of who-you-really-are.

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.

Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.

Become such as you are, having learned what that is.

I'm no buddhist, but this is fu**ing enlightmentment

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn't make any difference to who you truly are.

The only service you can do for anyone is to remind them of their true nature.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.

Life is finding yourself. It is a spirit development.

Discard yourself and thereby regain yourself. Spread the trap of humility and ensnare love.

You awaken your True spirit by way of the broken heart: ragged, vulnerable, fierce and finally compassionate. Chris trod this rough way and shows honestly how it can be done.

Not only are we going to shift in our own lives - away from always trying to identify ourselves on the basis of what we have, what we do, and who we are better than, and so on - but shift into more reaching out, more service, more kindness, more living the virtues that Lao Tzu spoke about twenty-five hundred years ago.

Before you can do something, you must first be something.

Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquitte, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.

According to the law that governs the universe,all sufferings are your labor of love to unveil your real self.