I Am Quotes

“It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“The root of all desires is the one desire: to come home, to be at peace. There may be a moment in life when our compensatory activities, the accumulation of money, learning and objects, leaves us feeling deeply apathetic. This can motivate us towards the search for our real nature beyond appearances. We may find ourselves asking, 'Why am I here? What is life? Who am I?' Sooner or later any intelligent person asks these questions. What you are looking for is what you already are, not what you will become. What you already are is the answer and the source of the question. In this lies its power of transformation. It is a present actual fact. Looking to become something is completely conceptual, merely an idea. The seeker will discover that he is what he seeks and that what he seeks is the source of the inquiry.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“But when you live in beauty and look from beauty, everything points in different ways to your wholeness.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“When we live in memory we cut ourselves off from the universe, we live in isolation. This is the root of all suffering.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“The moments of satisfaction you experience are not in a subject/‌object relationship where you can say “I am free, I am happy.” These moments without thought, dream or representation are our true nature, fullness, which cannot be projected. It is an experience encountered where there is neither somebody experiencing nor a thing experienced. Only this reality is spiritual. All other states, “highs,” whether brought about by techniques, experiences or drugs, even the so often exalted samadhi, are phenomena‌—‌and carry with them traces of objectivity. In other words, as what you are is not a state, it is a waste of time and energy chasing more and more experiences in the hope of coming closer to the non-experience.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“When timeless moments solicit you, accept the invitation. Go deep within it, until you find yourself in your absence.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“Be knowingly silent as often as you can and you will no longer be a prey to the desire to be this or that. You will discover in the everyday events of life the deep meaning behind the fulfilment of the whole, for the ego is totally absent.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“Welcoming, openness, is the nature of life.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“Real acting is never personal.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“When you act you are one with the action, it is only afterwards that the ego appropriates the act from which it was absent, and says “I have done this.” At the moment of acting there is only acting, without an actor.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“once energy is no longer projected in strategy and end-gaining it returns to a state of equilibrium where everything remains peaceful and points towards silent awareness, within which all thoughts and perceptions come and go.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“But because we have mistaken our real self for this imposter we feel an insecurity, a doubt, a lack, a sensation of isolation. The “me” can only live in relation to objects so we spend all our energy trying to fulfill the insatiable insecurity of this me. We live in anxiety, fear and desire trying at one and the same time to be as individualistic as possible and to overcome this separateness. The “me” which appears occasionally is taken as a continuum. Actually it is only a crystallization of data and experience held together by memory. Being fractional, its viewpoint is fractional functioning through like and dislike. Its contact with its surroundings is based on this arbitrary choosing. Living in this way is miserable. The loneliness of such an existence may be temporarily camouflaged by compensatory activity but sooner or later, as we said, our real nature will make itself felt and our questioning will become more urgent.”
― Jean Klein, I Am