There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.

The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.

Misery does not exist in reality but only in mere imagination.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

Since form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then instead of a hand grasping at nothing, it is better to grasp at someone's nose because this is closer to reality.

Happiness is self-generated. It depends on one's attitude of mind. The basis of happiness is the simple fact that the deepest reality of our own nature is ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new joy.

Reason is the illusion of reality.

The essence of the teaching is that you are the ultimate reality, and if you would know yourself as that, then all your problems would be solved. You’ll be able to overcome all the sufferings of life … There is no greater adventure in human life, no greater challenge in human life, no greater purpose or goal in human life, than to know this and to realize it in our life.

Vedanta is a vast, vast literature. It’s an ancient tradition, 5000 years back to the Upanishads. And, yet you can describe Advaita Vedanta in one sentence: Tat Tvam Asi (That Thou Art) … ‘That’ meaning that which is worshipped as God, the reality behind this universe. ‘Thou’ meaning you the individual. You and that are the same thing … We investigate these two polarities … The analysis into who am I or what am I, and an analysis into what is God. Then you come to a synthesis: seeing that what is the reality beyond God and beyond individual.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

[Speaking of marriage and family] In this entire world there is not a more perfect, more complete image of God, Unity and Community. There is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to that divine mystery.

In reality there are no others, and -helping yourself you help everybody else.

Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

The experience of life is very bitter. It is sweet only in imagination. In its reality it is very bitter. He escaped from the palace and the women and the riches and the luxury and everything.

The final Reality is silence.

One clings to life although there is nothing to be called life; another clings to death although there is nothing to be called death. In reality, there is nothing to be born; consequently, there is nothing to perish.

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. . . The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.

Buddha was speaking about reality. Reality may be one, in its deepest essence, but Buddha also stated that all propositions about reality are only contingent. Reality is devoid of any intrinsic identity that can be captured by any one single proposition - that is what Buddha meant by "voidness." Therefore, Buddhism strongly discourages blind faith and fanaticism.

Whatever you are doing, if there is contentment and a feeling that this whole existence is nothing but the manifestation of godliness, that we are traveling on holy earth, that whomever you are meeting, you are meeting God - there is no other way; only faces are different, but the inner reality is the same - all your tensions will disappear. And the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty.

The secret of enlightenment: When you are enlightened—when you know the absolute, Turiya—it’s not as an object. No, no. You are that. That’s what you realize. You are not a person who realizes the absolute. If you’re a person who says, ‘I know the absolute’ then you do not know. One who knows that it cannot be known as an object, truly knows. You are not a person who lives eternally; you are that eternal existence itself. You are not a person who knows that ultimate reality; you are that knowledge itself. You are not a person who enjoys various kinds of blissful experiences; you are that bliss itself … You are not somebody who has become free; you are freedom itself.