A Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson
When you're enlightened, you don't have to reference other people, because you yourself are enlightened. And that's a better Earth. People can make more informed decisions politically, culturally, personally.
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Very few people become enlightened in any given lifetime. On the planet earth their might be a dozen who are fully enlightened and several thousand who live in enlightened states of mind.
Celibacy doesn't make you enlightened, otherwise every nun or priest in Buddhism or Christianity would be enlightened. People who don't date and can't get any action would be enlightened.
In this whole world, there are actually very few people who study meditation with an enlightened master. This is because there are not very many enlightened masters on the entire earth.
Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.
I know that the blacks, take them half enlightened and ignorant, are more humane and merciful than the most enlightened and refined European that can be found in all the earth.
The difference between you, if you consider yourself not enlightened, and an enlightened master is not that the enlightened master has more knowledge. University professors have knowledge, and many enlightened masters have very little knowledge. Jesus probably had less knowledge than any university professor alive today in terms of raw information. Even a relatively uneducated person has more information than Jesus or Buddha ever had about things, such as political things and so on.
No one on this earth attains enlightenment anymore without an enlightened master as a guide, unless that person was enlightened in many previous incarnations.
People have this kind of concept that they can't change but I feel like change is possible. So who you choose to be is who you are and who you will be. I think that you can be enlightened in many different ways and if you choose to be enlightened and are someone who seeks out those things then you can be that and you will be that. If you want to be enlightened you will be enlightened. If you want to be an asshole you will be an asshole. But the greater scope of this statement is if you look at the history of humans, really, nothing has changed.
There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.
How can one become enlightened? One can, because one is enlightened - one just has to recognize the fact.
When you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment.
Bodhisattva is enlightened in the Buddhist philosophy, religion, tradition. He's enlightened. It's fine - I don't really fight it - but many people use the term 'zen' and terms like 'nirvana,' 'enlightenment' in an almost superficial way. It's not that complicated.
I came to California in 1970 and so many people were asking if I was a Buddhist or knew Zen theory, asking if I was enlightened already or not. So I said, "Yes, I am enlightened," and then I studied quickly to catch up.
The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture.
Christians make enlightened decisions, for they talk with God.
The world we live in pictures a pie with only so many pieces, and if other people have more you have less, and you have to compete with other people in order to try to get ahead. You have to sell yourself at every available opportunity. The shift, the enlightened shift, has to do with a movement from competition to collaboration, from sales to service, from ambition to inspiration, and to a belief in scarcity to a belief in abundance as an eternal spiritual quality.
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