Jean Klein Quotes

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.

When you become responsive to the solicitations of silence, you may be called to explore the invitation. This exploration is a kind of laboratory. You may sit and observe the coming and going of perceptions. You remain present to them but do not follow them. Following a thought is what maintains it. If you remain present without becoming an accomplice, agitation slows down through lack of fuel. In the absence of agitation you are taken by the resonance of stillness.

You are primal awareness. Life is only primal awareness. Between two thoughts or two perceptions you are. You know moments in your life when a thought completely disappears into silence, but still you are.

Ultimate Reality is itself multiplicity, diversity. It is a waste of energy to strive to explain the world and its origin, which only diverts us from the essential Experience.

The real quest begins when this not-knowing ceases to be an agnostic concept and becomes a living experience.

When timeless moments solicit you, accept the invitation. Go deep within it, until you find yourself in your absence.

If we turn away from the present,
or rather if the present is so often unable to hold our attention,
it is because we conceive of it as being a known and registered reality,
therefore devoid of interest, or as a disappointing one.
Just so long as we have not understood that true bliss is not in objects,
but in us, we continue to place our hope in the future and keep racing ahead.
We thus live in a state of imbalance, bent upon, and
striving endlessly towards the future.
What we must come to understand is that awareness in the present
is the only starting point and that
this starting point is at the same time the point of arrival.

Any love is a home-sickness, a longing for a lost paradise.

But when you live in beauty and look from beauty, everything points in different ways to your wholeness.

To identify yourself with your personality is more or less a reflex. You must see, when the reflex comes up, that it is a kind of feeling of insecurity; you are looking for a hold.

If the ego is in the slightest way separated from its source, it yearns to find it again. This search comes from the remembrance of unity and plenitude. As every experience emanates from the non-experience which is our real being, the me also bears the scent of its source. This remembering is awakened through those moments of desirelessness and in deep sleep.

You want me to talk about love, to give you a hold, something to feel, to admire or obtain. I will not give you a straw to grasp, and in this emptiness you will be taken by yourself. You are love so don't try to be a lover.

You are your own nearest environment, so begin with yourself.

Deep inquiry leads to contemplation, or prayer. Through dedicated contemplation we can attune to consciousness, the light which constitutes all phenomena. This light is our intrinsic nature. Our being is always shining. Our real nature is openness, listening, release, surrender without producing or will. Prayer or contemplation is welcoming free from projection and expectation. It is without demand and formulation. It invites the object to unfold in you and reveals your openness to you. Live with this opening, this vastness. Attune yourself to it. It is love. Ardent contemplation brings you to living meditation so ultimately they are one.

The root of all desires is the one desire: to come home, to be at peace.

Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment.

Nothing that can be known has existence in itself. It depends on a knower. The knower is consciousness.

We are completely unaware of our true nature because we identify ourselves with our body, our emotions and our thoughts, thus losing sight of our unchanging centre, which is pure consciousness. When we return to our true nature, our thoughts and perceptions no longer appear as modifications of a single substance, they come into being and subside like waves of the ocean.

The world exists only when we think about it; creation stories are for children. In reality the world is created every moment.

In listening and stillness there is nobody who is still, and this stillness doesn't refer to any object; it is absolutely objectless; it is our real nature.

Emotion integrates but emotivity isolates. So free yourself from affectivity. In this absence of emotivity, you may have the impression at first that you become indifferent. But very soon you'll see that there is really affection for your surroundings. Emotion, affection, is giving.

What any desire really aims at, is a state of non-desire. This non-desire is a state in which we demand absolutely nothing. Thus it is a state of extreme abundance, of fullness. This fullness is revealed as being bliss and peace. You now know that you are really seeking nothing else but fullness and absolute peace.