In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life.
SOGYAL RINPOCHEAt the moment of death, there are two things that count: whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are in at that very moment.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion.
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Yet is our deepest desire is truly to live and go on living, why do we blindly insist that death is the end? Why not at least try and explore the possibility that there may be a life after?
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Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.
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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.
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How we live now can cost us our entire future.
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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.
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A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that try to bother it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar
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Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
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Just as if you put your finger into water, it will get wet, and if you put it into fire, it will burn, so if you invest your mind in the wisdom mind of the Buddhas, it will transform into their wisdom nature.
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Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.
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It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called “egolessness.
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To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless.
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At every moment in our lives we need compassion, but what more urgent moment could there be than when we are dying?
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The other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to – you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide.
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As we progress in it, the process reveals itself as wonderfully interdependent: We, from our side, try continually to generate devotion.
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So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow.
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Modern society seems to be a celebration of all the things that lead away from the Truth, make Truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.
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All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle.
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When you realize the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don’t actually “become” a buddha, you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being.
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How important it is to be skillful and gentle with ourselves, without becoming disheartened or giving up, but trusting the spiritual path and knowing that it has its own laws and its own dynamics.
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The purpose of meditation is to awaken in us the sky-like nature of mind, and to introduce us to that which we really are, our unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death
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Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
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The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
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There is no armor like perseverance.
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And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge.
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Devotion {to the spiritual master} becomes the purest, quickest, and simplest way to realize the nature of our mind and all things.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE