Thomas Merton Quotes

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

I believe spiritualism is above everything, and I would choose it over name, fame, and money because spiritualism gives you power, and I love power.

When every moment, you experience yourself as the source of creation, not as a piece of creation, then you are realized.

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

When you get to a higher level of consciousness, though, when you get into a spiritual approach to life, you are not trying to get someplace else...

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.

When we learn new behaviors and break through to higher levels of consciousness and love, we can fulfill the deeper spiritual hunger within.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

I've done a lot of meditation studying on my own, but I've also taken a couple of transcendence classes.

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 be conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey.

The mind is the world and the no-mind is freedom from the world. The mind is misery and no-mind is the end of misery and the beginning of ecstasy.

I have written and spoken my thoughts over many years. Now I'm on new ground and spirit. I want to bring these together. Things like karma yoga, bhakti yoga, conscious dying, conscious aging. Consciousness.

Spiritual Awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

How can one become enlightened? One can, because one is enlightened - one just has to recognize the fact.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Just one quality of the Buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing. This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality. Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are only a witness. As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. That is what is called ecstasy.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that it’s not where they’re gonna find their sense of completion. Like many of you, I was concerned about going out into the world and doing something bigger than myself, until someone smarter than myself made me realize that there is nothing bigger than myself. My soul is not contained within the limits of my body, my body is contained within the limitlessness of my soul.

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

When you are no more identified with your physicality, you become available to Grace.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

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.