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Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

Sogyal Rinpoche

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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Control Home Leaving Scattered
As you perfect meditation, thoughts become like the water in a deep, narrow gorge, then a great river slowly winding its way down to the sea; finally the mind becomes like a still and placid ocean, ruffled by only the occasional ripple or wave.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Become Gorge Meditate Narrow The Occasion
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
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
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Category Deluded Limits Nonesxisted
Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Dark Discipline Meditation Practice
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Action Consequences Real Spirituality
Let the sky outside awake a sky inside your mind.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Awake Mind Sky
…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Awareness Essence Nature
if 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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Character Important Mindstream
Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believe Jobs Spiritual
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Hands Knowing Water
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

General Information Intellectual Philospher Speech
The purpose of meditation is to awaken in us the sky-like nature of mind, and to introduce us to that which we really are, our unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Life Meditation Sky
What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Any Clue Happen Reality
This dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this, compassion is the only way. Love is the only way.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Compassion Dying Love
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
Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Climbing Helping Life Prioritise
And when you talk about realization, accomplishment for that matter enlightenment is that when you realize the fundamental essence of your mind.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Accomplishment Essence Mind
There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Dying Go Letting
Light must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhist Spiritual Yoga
Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life reveals just the opposite: that letting go is the real path to freedom.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believe Letting Go Real
We know, in Milarepa’s words: “This thing called ‘corpse’ we dread so much is living with us here and now.”
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Dread Know Meditation Words
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
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?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Being Consulting Karma Knowledge Negative
The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these 3 crucial points: Bring your mind home. Release. And relax!
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Home Meditation Practice
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhism Issues Real
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

Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

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Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

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