Anthony de Mello Quotes

Spiritual Awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

And what I was feeling was the wonder Of being more than me, of being more Than mere here and now allowed I had become a shining star, a burning nova Exploded with love Flying through an endlessly Expanding universe Away from the me that was Toward a me that is beyond Understanding.

Where you find the attraction for lust and wealth considerably diminished, to whatever creed he may belong, know that his inner spirit is awakening.

The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now To where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world.

I have come not to teach but to awaken.

Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.

Unless you become alert and aware in life, unless you change the quality of your living, you will not die consciously. And only a conscious death can bring you to a conscious birth; and then a far more conscious life opens its doors.

Man ordinarily is a robot. He lives apparently awake, but not really. He walks, he talks, he acts, but it is all as if in sleep - not conscious of what he is doing, not conscious of what he is saying, not conscious of all that surrounds him. He moves surrounded in a dark cloud of unawareness. According to Gautama the Buddha, this is the original sin: to live unconsciously, to act out of unconsciousness. In fact, the word 'sin' comes from a root which means forgetfulness. Sin simply means that we are not conscious, aware, alert, that we don't have any inner light to guide us.

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

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.

Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.

The real master is only a presence. He has no intentions of being a master. His presence is his teaching. His love is his message. Every gesture of his hand is pointing to the moon. And this whole thing is not being done, it is a happening. The master is not a doer. He has learned the greatest secret of life: let-go. The master has drowned his ego and the idea of separation from existence itself.

Like the ocean is your god-self; It remains for ever undefiled. And like the ether it lifts but the winged. Even like the sun is your god-self; It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being. Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

Spiritually, it's always there. It gets better and better all the time. One of these days I'll just finally release all that out.

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...

Surrender means seeing that "I am not separate" - just SEEING that "I am not separate." Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake.

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

raised' consciousness means lifelong bumping up against a continually receding ceiling. I mean, who ever 'graduates'?

That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.