Let the sky outside awake a sky inside your mind.
SOGYAL RINPOCHEAt a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity, peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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. . . when the nature of mind is introduced by a master, it is just too simple for us to believe.
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…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .
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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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We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
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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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Even if we have accumulated a lot of negative karma, if we are able to make a real change of heart at the moment of death, it can decisively influence our future, and transform our karma, for the moment of death is an exceptionally powerful opportunity to purify karma.
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The most essential thing in life is to establish an unafraid, heartfelt communication with others.
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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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Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
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When the view is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are: fleeting and transparent, and only relative. . . . You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them, but welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa.
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What more wonderful and consoling gift could you give to dying people than the knowledge that they are being prayed for, and that you are taking on their suffering and purifying their negative karma through your practice for them?
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The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life.
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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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What should we “do” with the mind in meditation? Nothing. Just leave it, simply, as it is.
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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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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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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.
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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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The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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