In Spiritual Life There Is No Room for Compromise - Jack Kornfield

Subscribe to Articles

Get Articles by RSS

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

“Is Enlightenment easy or difficult?”
“It is as easy and as difficult as seeing what is right before your eyes.”
“How can seeing what is right before one’s eyes be difficult?”
To that the Master responded with the following anecdote:
A girl greeted her boyfriend. “Notice anything different about me?”
“New dress?”
“No.”
“New shoes?”
“No. Something else.”
“I give up.”
“I’m wearing a gas mask.”

—Anthony de Mello

All of our thoughts are conditioned. We all are thinking exactly along the lines we are conditioned to think. Programmed like a computer. Anybody who thinks they are actually choosing of their own free will the line of thinking that they have is completely deluded by their thinking.

—Adyashanti

Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you’re not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn’t someplace else; it’s the naturally occurring human state. It doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s who we all are. Spiritual practices also set up many pictures of what this state looks like. For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn’t in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it’s there too in the vastness of who we are.

—Suzanne Segal

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.

—Jack Kornfield