Tom Robbins Quotes

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.

For many people, the first indication of a spiritual awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They become a witness to their thoughts, so to speak. They are not completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known before.

To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.

A brahmin once asked The Blessed One: "Are you a God?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "Are you a saint?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "Are you a magician?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "What are you then?" "I am awake."

Seek for illumination of self, and then the world, through the simple, humble, almighty, supreme virtue of love.

Enlightenment is not so much a hard-won achievement, much less a "creation," but instead is deep relaxation and recovery of our natural condition. You come to see the evolution of the soul, the soul's journey, as a realization of what has always been there in the first place.

Enlightenment is the only real antidote to the world's despair.

If we seek the Buddha outside the mind, the Buddha changes into a devil.

To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever

You should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.

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

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

Of those beings who live in ignorance, shut up and confined, as it were, in an egg, I have first broken the eggshell of ignorance and alone in the universe obtained the most exalted, universal Buddhahood.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.

I briefly flirted with some of the new age offerings available in the early '90s and found strength in Buddhism, but ultimately I was looking for something that was not tied to tradition.

Your nature is the Buddha.

Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.

One must realise his Self in order to open the store of unalloyed happiness.

One secures the gold of the spirit when he finds himself.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.