25 Adyashanti Quotes for Inner Peace & Reflection
Published March 22, 2023
Like the ancient Jedi masters, these Adyashanti quotes encourage us to let go of our attachments and live in the moment.
Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher and author known for his meditation, enlightenment, and spiritual awakening teachings.
Adyashanti (born in California in 1962 as Steven Gray) spent much of his early life studying:
What are the benefits of reading Adyashanti quotes
In his early 20s, he had a profound spiritual experience that led him to devote his life to spiritual practice and teaching.
He then changed his name to Adyashanti, which means “primordial peace.”
Tell us your favorite Adyashanti quote in the comments section below!
Reading Adyashanti quotes can help you dive deeper into your spiritual awakening and discover your authentic self.
His teachings emphasize the direct experience of enlightenment or awakening rather than an intellectual understanding of spiritual knowledge.
He encourages his students to let go of their conditioned beliefs and be open to the mystery of life as it unfolds in the present moment.
He preaches the message that realizing one’s true nature cannot be achieved through structured effort but is a natural process that unfolds when one is ready.
Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology.
He says, “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine.”
Adyashanti has written several books on spirituality and meditation, including:
- The End of Your World
- True Meditation
- Falling into Grace
- The Most Important Thing
- Sacred Inquiry
- The Direct Way
He also leads retreats and workshops worldwide and founded a spiritual community dedicated to supporting individuals on the path of awakening called Open Gate Sangha.
Overall, Adyashanti’s teachings emphasize the importance of direct experience, present-moment awareness, and the surrender of the ego in pursuing spiritual awakening.
Adyashanti quotes on enlightenment
As a seeker and studier of enlightenment from age 19, Adyshanti knows a thing or two about it.
Here are some great Adyashanti quotes on enlightenment.
1. “Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not.” — Adyashanti
2. “Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense.” — Adyashanti
3. “Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.” — Adyashanti
4. “I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.” — Adyashanti
5. “If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being.” — Adyashanti
Adyashanti quotes on love
These Adyashanti quotes on love are wise and thought-provoking.
6. “When someone tells you, ‘I love you,’ and then you feel, ‘Oh, I must be worthy after all,’ that’s an illusion. That’s not true.” — Adyashanti
7. “Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.” — Adyashanti
8. “If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again.” — Adyashanti
9. “As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.” — Adyashanti
10. “Until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.” — Adyashanti
Best Adyashanti quotes
Although he has many great sayings, here are the best Adyashanti quotes.
11. “Whatever the image of yourself, it’s a mask, and it’s hiding emptiness.” — Adyashanti
12. “The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.” — Adyashanti
13. “You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.” — Adyashanti
14. “Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.” — Adyashanti
15. “Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.” — Adyashanti
Adyashanti quotes about God
Enjoy these profound Adyashanti quotes on God.
16. “Look God in the eyes and finally for once in your life lose.” — Adyashanti
17. “The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that insecurity, and all wisdom will be yours.” — Adyashanti
18. “There is more truth and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all the shrines, scriptures and stories created to honor an idea of God.” — Adyashanti
19. “For God is in a mood to plunder your riches and fling you nakedly into such breathtaking poverty that all that will be left of you will be a tendency to shine.” — Adyashanti
20. “Almost everybody is looking for intimacy—a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union.” — Adyashanti
Adyashanti quotes about happiness
These Adyashanti quotes on happiness will teach you how to have more of it in your life.
21. “There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on this moment.” — Adyashanti
22. “Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy.” — Adyashanti
23. “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.” — Adyashanti
24. “There’s no way to become happy. We simply need to stop doing the things that make us unhappy.” — Adyashanti
25. “When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy.” — Adyashanti
When the student becomes the teacher
The profound spiritual experience Adyashanti had, which led him to devote his life to enlightenment, happened at 25.
He was meditating one day when he had what he describes as “an incredible onrush of energy.”
He views this experience as his first awakening, followed by another one where an inner voice tells him to “keep going.”
When he was 31, Adyashanti had another profound awakening where he experienced the realization of his true nature.
A few months after this third awakening, his own guru Arvis Joen Justi asked him to teach.
He founded Open Gate Sangha In 2000 as a nonprofit organization to make his teaching available to anyone who yearns for peace and freedom.
Open Gate Sangha has put forth over 100 DVDs and 800 audio recordings and broadcast over 130 free live internet audio and video programs to devoted followers on the path to enlightenment.
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