' Self realization '...

Self realization does not mean changing, coercing, and manipulating the mind and body to look a certain way.

It does not mean the absence of human nature including the spectrum of thought and emotion. Rather, it is the end of the obsession with the human condition and the experiences it offers.

Pain happens as well as pleasure.

When the mind is no longer caught in desiring certain experiences and expending all its energy in preserving and rejecting them, it naturally becomes still. It is in this stillness that one is made ripe for the flowering of awakening.


-Atreya Thomas