32 Quotes by Jed McKenna

Wake up first. Wake up, and then you can double back and perhaps be of some use to others if you still have the urge. Wake up first, with pure and unapologetic selfishness, or you’re just another shipwreck victim floundering in the ocean and all the compassion in the world is of absolutely no use to the other victims floundering around you.

The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it.

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.

Nothing false will survive. Nothing true will perish.

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.

Self-deceit is the hardest habit to break cuz it tells us we ain’t self-deceived.

Self is ego and ego resides exclusively in the dreamstate. If you want to break free of the dreamstate, you must break free of self, not stroke it to make it purr or groom it for some imagined brighter future.

Maybe the meaning of your life is what your life means to you now. It’s hard to understand that time doesn’t exist because we have such a clear experience of past, present and future, but we don’t really experience past and future, only present. Past and future are just ideas in the present. This means that there is only now, but what is now? We can’t say what now is because there is no not-now. It’s always now. There is only now.

Here’s the most directly I am able to say this: 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 is 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.