“This is the real and urgent reason why we must prepare now to meet death wisely, to transform our karmic future, and to avoid the tragedy of falling into delusion again and again and repeating the painful round of birth and death.”

And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.

Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion.

The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.

What should we “do” with the mind in meditation? Nothing. Just leave it, simply, as it is.

{While meditating} I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don’t question or doubt whether I am in the “correct” state or not.

Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth

Samsara is the mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections. Nirvana is the mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature.

Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.

True spirituality is to be aware that if we are interdependent with everything and everyone else, even our smallest, least significant thought, word and action have real consequences throughout the universe.

Quoting Dudjom Rinpoche on the buddha-nature: No words can describe it No example can point to it Samsara does not make it worse Nirvana does not make it better It has never been born It has never ceased.

Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew the water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.

…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .

At every moment in our lives we need compassion, but what more urgent moment could there be than when we are dying?

Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.

We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

There is no armor like perseverance.

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I’m always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

For the last six or seven years the circus has no longer been in fashion. That is a pity.

I believe love just happens once. You can be mistaken, you can think you are in love.

Everybody saying Guerrero, I’ll really turn your ass into a real ghost.