Real Quotes From Hypothetical Gurus

Jul 10, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

“Being a guru is weird, man. I mean, how many different ways can you say ‘Hey you ever notice how everything just kinda is? Well, it just kinda is!’ But the words come anyway. Somehow they keep on coming.”

~ Hank “Bonesaw” Lucille

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“The most worthwhile spiritual teachings don’t actually teach you any new knowledge. Rather, they direct your attention to aspects of your own experience that you’d previously overlooked or hadn’t paid much attention to. They get you questioning your unquestioned assumptions about very fundamental components of your experience like your sense of self, your means of perception, and the workings of your own mind. The most skillful teachers therefore don’t require you to trust them or take anything they say on faith, because you can immediately examine everything they’re pointing your attention toward for yourself in your own experience.”

~ Margaret Tetherwood

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“Authentic spirituality is scarcely even recognizable as spirituality. It doesn’t give you new beliefs — it strips your old beliefs away. It doesn’t uplift you from the muck and mess of this world — it plunges you headfirst right into it. It doesn’t help you become a better person — it dispels the illusion that there was ever a person to begin with.”

~ Margaret Tetherwood

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“Beauty is just the experience of having truly seen something. If you’re not seeing beauty somewhere, you’re not really seeing what you’re looking at. Everything has beauty. The failure to recognize it lies always with the beholder.”

~ Quincy Harrington-Cho

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“Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they give you but for the hallucinations they take away.”

~ Alice Cave

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“I’ve killed off so many Hanks along this crazy path. Angry Hank. Hank the victim. Hank the cage fighter. Tough guy Hank, and then spiritual guy Hank after him. One of the last ones to leave was Cool Hank, but he had to go, because, man, you really do not get to be cool on this path. You really, really don’t. Being radically truthful on every level leaves you raw and undisguised, right out in the open, in all your dorky awkwardness. If you really let old lady Truth have her way with you, you’ll never get to feel cool again. How could anyone be cool with their fuckin’ ribcage splayed open to the whole entire world?”

~ Hank “Bonesaw” Lucille

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“Love — the real kind — is simply having a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to something. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything about your partner, then you may say that you fully love your partner. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything about your own body and mind and all their expressions, then you may say that you fully love yourself. If you have a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything that arises in your experience of the world, then you may say that you are fully living in unconditional love.

“And really, what else is there? Why be in argument with anything that already is? You can work toward positive changes in our world while holding a deep and intimate ‘yes’ to everything that already is here and now. If you start an argument with the present moment, you’ve already lost the debate anyway. Unconditional love is just being real about reality, and then doing what comes naturally.”

~ Louisiana Fetterman

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“The human organism seemingly creates the ego out of a desire to feel in control of life, but the joke of it all is that the ego has never really existed, and that life is never, ever under control. There has never at any time been an actual self anywhere who could exert any kind of control over any of this; it’s just an imaginary construct that gets imbued with the power of belief out of the organism’s concern for safety and security, and then all your personal dramas and conflicts and anxieties and fears arose out of the contracted energy of that belief. But the whole thing was based on a complete fiction! That’s why awakening is so often immediately followed by laughter: because that whole mess never even happened. It was all an imaginary clown show for ghosts who never bought tickets.

“Other animals don’t have this problem. Because they don’t have the capacity for abstract thought, when those organisms experience frightening events in their lives they aren’t able to kind of pop their attention out of their bodies and enter a mental fantasy world starring an imaginary ‘me’ character to help them feel as though things are more manageable and controlled. So instead they just shake the fear out of their bodies and move on.

“The human organism can learn to do this too, but its immense capacity for abstract thought tends to get in the way. All that newly evolved brain matter has in many ways made humans quite stupid.”

~ “Andromeda”, as channeled by Cynthia M Scott

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“Time is a mirage.
Life is impersonal energy masquerading as personal experiences.
Reality is made of unknowing.
I am nothing but a welcome mat
for anything that could possibly be.”

~ Alice Cave

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“Enlightenment will cost you everything, but after you’ve paid the toll you realize that the big pile of cash you’d been protecting your entire life was just a bunch of worthless Monopoly board game money that whole time.”

~ Omshanti Ramananda Kowalski

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