For most of us, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality.
SOGYAL RINPOCHELiving with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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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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There is no armor like perseverance.
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The most essential thing in life is to establish an unafraid, heartfelt communication with others.
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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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Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever.
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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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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.
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Light must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.
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The act of meditation is being spacious.
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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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Just as if you put your finger into water, it will get wet, and if you put it into fire, it will burn, so if you invest your mind in the wisdom mind of the Buddhas, it will transform into their wisdom nature.
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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.
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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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The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life.
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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 future is very much in our hands–in our actions.
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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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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
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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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As we progress in it, the process reveals itself as wonderfully interdependent: We, from our side, try continually to generate devotion.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE