Jed McKenna Quotes

Bob is talking about alternative people. Alternative beliefs and outlooks, alternative business and politics, alternative lifestyles and healthcare. alternative foods and fabrics, alternative child-rearing and schooling, alternative fuels and energies - alternative everything, basically, but not very alternative. These are alternatives within the established paradigm. not alternatives to it: a subherd running in parallel to the main body. Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multivarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via the removal, avoidance and denial of unhappiness.

It is your show.
It is your universe.
There is no one else here, just you,
and nothing is being withheld from you.
You are completely on your own.
Everything is available for direct knowing.
No one else has anything you need.
No one else can lead you, pull you, push you or carry you.

The third thing about witnessing, the most important part and the thing that most people don't seem to understand. is that you have to take it further than just one step back. You have to keep going with it. Its not a passive thing. like you just sit back and observe. You don't just observe your character, you deconstruct it. You have to be aggressive about it. This is a way or simulating the enlightened perspective, which would be useful to anyone who wants to wake themselves up from the dreamstate instead of just in it.

It's ego – the false self – that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.

The bottom line remains the same: you're either awake or you're not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles.

The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. In waking up.

The belief that something is wrong is the fire under the ass of humanity, is how I explain it to Sarah.

Maybe you think death is the opposite of life, or that all this death-awareness stuff translates into the end of happiness and good times, but this is not the case. Death isn't morbid, fear is morbid. Death doesn't oppose life, fear opposes life. To close your eyes to death is to close them to life: what could be more morbid than that? From your perspective, death and suicide are horrific and unthinkable. From my perspective, they are empowering and lifeaffirming. and I would look at any person that doesn't have an open, honest relationship with these subjects as themselves nine parts dead.

I don't see it as my role to save or rescue anybody any more than regular people feel the need to rescue each other from sleeping and dreaming.

I don't have something you don't; you believe something I don't.

There's nothing left to contend against and nothing left that must be done, and there will never be anything that must be done ever again.

if I were a gambling addict, then a large portion of my life energy - my time, my thoughts and emotions - would be spent either gambling or fighting my urge to gamble. But for our purposes. feeding my addiction and fighting it are really the same thing. Whether my gambling demon is beating me or I'm beating it doesn't matter. all that matters is that I'm sitting in my prison cell fully engaged in processes that will never move me one inch closer to liberation. That's what demons do. They're like Maya's army of winged monkeys. They always fight a delaying action that expends our resources and prevents us from making forward progress. That's their objective, to occupy us. not to defeat us.

Suffering just means you're having a bad dream. Happiness means you're having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice - meditation. for instance - is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Think for yourself. That's the golden rule. Think for yourself.
Make it your mantra. Tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids.

Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls. Walt Whitman

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.

Both In and Out of the Game Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Walt Whitman

There is no such thing as a rational person. We are emotional creatures with some token capacity for reason.

When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion.

The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else – EVERYTHING else – is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who's just going about their normal human existence undistracted by the larger questions, that rubbish and debris is everything that makes them who they are. But to someone who wants to get to the truth, who they are is what's in the way.
All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of that hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about the breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole.

Listen! Here's all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know. That's it. That's the whole deal; a complete teaching of enlightenment, a complete practice. If you ever have any questions or problems - no matter what the question or problem is - the answer is always exactly the same: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know. In other words, go jump off a cliff. Don't go near the cliff and contemplate jumping off. Don't read a book about jumping off. Don't study the art and science of jumping off. Don't join a support group for jumping off. Don't write poems about jumping off. Don't kiss the ass of someone else who jumped off. Just jump.

If you don't want to sleep your life away like most people do. you have to train yourself to wakefulness. Vigilance is the key. You should be shifting from character to actor many times every hour, in all types of situations, so that it happens smoothly and easily and doesn't detract from your performance." Maggie takes notes and asks for clarification now and then. I wait and proceed when she's ready. "Second." I say. "it trains you to disidentify from the character you're playing. There's a you behind the character you project out into the world, and you can't make any progress as long as you identify with your stage persona. You're an actor playing a character on a stage. That's what the Bhagavad-GIta is all about.