Jed McKenna Quotes

#1. We slip into the lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don't live our lives by choice, but by default.

Jed McKenna

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

Jed McKenna

#3. 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.

Jed McKenna

#4. How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon? Dr. Seuss

Jed McKenna

#5. Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.

Jed McKenna

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

Jed McKenna

#7. All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.

Jed McKenna

#8. Enlightenment isn't when you go there; it's when there comes here.

Jed McKenna

#9. 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.

Jed McKenna

#10. 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.

Jed McKenna

#11. 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.

Jed McKenna

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

Jed McKenna

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

Jed McKenna

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

Jed McKenna

#15. Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can't stop seeing it that way. It's everywhere, everyone. It doesn't make any sense. That's not life. It can't be. I don't know what it is, but it's not life.

Jed McKenna

#16. 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.

Jed McKenna

#17. The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it's just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn't in the character, it's in the underlying truth.

Jed McKenna