Quotes by "Robert A.F. Thurman"
I enjoy experiencing a taste of the feeling that I am infinite. But you have to risk going into a sphere where you can‘t quite remember exactly who you are. You have to negate it anytime you feel the „I“ emerging as a fixed, independent, absolute thing, and then negate it again. It‘s not that nonexistence is your final goal, but that you want to rid yourself of your habitual sense that you exist in a static way. This practice has its thrilling moments of revelation, its unsettling moments of doubt, its quiet moments of mindfulness – all of which add up to a continuous, ever-deepening, evolving flow of liberation. Your infinite life thus becomes grounded in the greatest virtue of all – wisdom. Your wisdom deepens constantly as you gain a deeper and deeper understanding of your own selflessness and your resulting interconnectedness with all other beings. You engage other people with generosity, sensitive and empathic justice, and invincible tolerance, forbearance, and forgiveness. With practice, you gradually erase the division between meditation and action until you are filled with endless joy and bliss. Your newfound freedom energizes your actions in daily life, and you become an inexhaustible source of the infinite life force. Your embrace of beings who feel lost and frightened and abandoned does not ruffle the surface of the great ocean of your happy, loving presence, as you unleash waves of dynamic effort to help them. (p. 72)
Religious people, West and East, have always tended to feel that there is a mysterious power of life in everything. In most forms of religions, the appearance of darkness and pain and death is overcome by the glorious light of goodness you have tasted in the wisdom meditation that discovers the open space-like freedom concentration. What Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus call „God“, or sometimes „Godhead“, is a force of reality much like the infinite ocean-body of living joy that the great enlightened meditators experience. When a believer asserts unshakable faith in the face of the worst experience or apparent reality, she or he is reaching for connection to the deepest awareness of infinite living energy. Enlightened people do not see this boundlessness as something other than themselves. They experience themselves as one with all gods and all other beings, and they consider us all capable of becoming fully aware of our own freedom and happiness. Faith in such a possibility is a good place to begin this journey to liberation; it encourages us to set forth. But we all can move beyond faith to direct experience and full knowledge of our true state. (p. 75)
