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Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer “yes” to both of these, then you really understand impermanence.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Our problems, all come from nothing; they are all based on a misunderstanding that does not even exist.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Misunderstanding Our Problem
Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddha Voice Writing
How we live now can cost us our entire future.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Cost Entire Future Live Now
What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Any Clue Happen Reality
We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believing Beyond Ordinary Senses
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Cover Death Eyes Jhour Postpone Uncertain
All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Extraordinary Hope Light Meditation Often Real
At every moment in our lives we need compassion, but what more urgent moment could there be than when we are dying?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Compassion Death Karma
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Nature Reality Show Subtlest Sunlight Working
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believe Buddhist Home
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Real Repeating Spiritual Tragedy Wisely
This life is the only time and place we can prepare in, and we can only truly prepare through spiritual practice: This is the inescapable message of the natural bardo of this life.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Compassion Inescapable Moment Natural Urgent
Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Devotion Discipline Essential Mind
There is no armor like perseverance.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Armor Create Perseverance
Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhism Forever Struggle
And to think that all this springs from a civilization that claims to adore life, but actually starves it of any real meaning; that endlessly speaks of making people “happy”, but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Happy Joy Meaning Source Strives

Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer “yes” to both of these, then you really understand impermanence.

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Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer “yes” to both of these, then you really understand impermanence.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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