To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless.
SOGYAL RINPOCHELight must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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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.
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The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
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The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence of grasping.
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Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth
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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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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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Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.
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There would be no chance to get to know death at all …if it happened only once.
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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.
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What should we “do” with the mind in meditation? Nothing. Just leave it, simply, as it is.
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When no such thing occurs, they feel extremely disappointed. But the real miracle of meditation is more ordinary and much more useful. . . .
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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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Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat,
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Our bodies can suddenly break down and go out of order, just like our cars. We can be quite well one day, then fall sick and die the next.
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At the beginning of meditation training thoughts will arrive one on top of another, uninterrupted, like a steep mountain waterfall. Gradually.
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Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties.
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Just because we go through a difficult situation, it doesn’t mean that the future is predetermined. The future is very much in our hands, in our actions.
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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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Even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation will not leave the meditator.
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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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For most of us, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Our problems, all come from nothing; they are all based on a misunderstanding that does not even exist.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE