Carlos Castaneda Quotes

It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit.

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.

Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.

That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

That which comes and goes, rises and sets, is born and dies is the ego. That which always abides, never changes, and is devoid of qualities is the Self.

All things are accomplished by the meditative act of releasing illusions and simply becoming.

Being is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

Self-realization is the object of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures.

Books simply help you to see what is already within your self. That's what enlightenment is all about.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.

To one who reads the spirit of the Gita, it teaches the secret of nonviolence, the secret of realizing self through the physical body.

Meditation is neither of the body nor of the mind, but belongs to the third within you—your being.

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward.

God is your very being. So the first thing is, don't think about enlightenment as a goal.

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly.

Knowing the Self, God is known.

Is there a meditation that is not the ego trying to become? Is meditation conscious if every effort implies time?

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

Remove the Ego and Avidya (Ignorance) is gone. Look for it, the ego vanishes and the real Self alone remains.

One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke. Don't get attached to anything. This attachment takes you away from your real being; you become focused on the thing to which you are attached. Your awareness gets lost in things, in money, in people, in power. And there are a thousand and one things, the whole thick jungle around you, to be lost in. Remember, non-attachment is the secret of finding yourself, then awareness can turn inwards because you don't have anything outside to catch hold of. It is free, and in this freedom you can know your self-nature.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.