When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn.
SOGYAL RINPOCHEif we do not change. This is why it is so absolutely important to use this lifetime to purify our mindstream, and so our basic being and character, while we can.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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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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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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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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…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .
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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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Normally we do not like to think about death. We would rather think about life. Why reflect on death?
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There is no general information about the nature of mind. It is hardly ever written about by writers or intellectuals; modern philosophers do not speak of it directly.
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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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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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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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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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We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
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In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life.
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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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There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am.
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The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these 3 crucial points: Bring your mind home. Release. And relax!
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We know, in Milarepa’s words: “This thing called ‘corpse’ we dread so much is living with us here and now.”
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At 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.
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It has never been liberated It has never been deluded It has never existed It has never been nonexistent It has no limits at all It does not fall into any kind of category
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Our problems, all come from nothing; they are all based on a misunderstanding that does not even exist.
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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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Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.
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Learning to live is learning to let go.
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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.
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And when you talk about realization, accomplishment for that matter enlightenment is that when you realize the fundamental essence of your mind.
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Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE