Learning to live is learning to let go.
SOGYAL RINPOCHESo many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.
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…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .
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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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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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We start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.
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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.
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Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
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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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Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?
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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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This dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this, compassion is the only way. Love is the only way.
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At 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.
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When I came to the West, I realized there was much hunger for spiritual teachings, but no environment for spirituality.
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Again and again we need to appreciate the subtle workings of the teachings and the practice, and even when there is no extraordinary, dramatic change, to persevere with calm and patience.
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What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?
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The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them.
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If all we know of mind is the aspect of mind that dissolves when we die, we will be left with no idea of what continues, no knowledge of the new dimension of the deeper reality of the nature of mind.
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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.
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For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well; Meditation is the road to enlightenment.
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Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.
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So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
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We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in.
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The whole of our life is a teaching of how to uncover that strong goodness, and a training toward realizing it.
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We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
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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.
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Generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity. Meditation is the way to bring us back to ourselves, where we can really experience and taste our full being.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE