Alice Coltrane Quotes

The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I'd never visited before.

Listen to the inner light; it will guide you. Listen to inner peace; it will feed you. Listen to inner love; it will transform you, it will divinise you, it will immortalise you.

It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence.

When all life is seen as divine, everyone grows wings.

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The soul... may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity - which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices - what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds.

Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.

To be awake is to be fully present, no noise, just you and God. Most of us only have seconds of full consciousness. To live in a state of Samadhi - that's what we're here for.

I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.

The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.

Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone. You can only escape within, and that's what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.

I am Walter, a body, but more important than the body is my spirit.

When the mind loses its density, you become translucent, like the flower. Spirit - the formless - shines through you into the world.

I'm actually very spiritual.

When we meditate, we are really trying to go beyond the mind. What I have found is that if I can get totally and completely into the moment, then the mind disappears. And as the mind disappears, that's when God appears.

The universe is wired with the electricity of God, & each of us is a lamp. It doesn't matter the size or shape of the lamp; it only matters that the lamp is plugged in. With every prayer, every thought of forgiveness, every meditation, every act of love, we plug in. The more of us who plug in, to more the darkness of the world will be cast from our midst. Today, let's all increase love's wattage!

Meditation isn't just something we do to make ourselves more peaceful and to take some of the stress out of our lives. We do it because it's the only direct experience we can have of knowing God. Because God is that which is indivisible. Everything else in the universe, in the physical world, is divisible. Up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, male and female, and so on. But that which is indivisible in our physical experience is called silence. And when you get into silence, you're coming to know the indivisibleness of your life - and that's conscious contact.

Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.

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 want to breathe in the Spiritual.

When the yogi starts to meditate, he must leave behind all sensory thoughts and all longings for possessions by quieting the waves of feeling (chitta), and the mental restlessness that arises therefrom, through the application of techniques that reinstate the controlling power of the untrammeled superconsciousness of the soul.

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.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.