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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHEWe 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.
More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes
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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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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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Our problems, all come from nothing; they are all based on a misunderstanding that does not even exist.
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Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth
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Don’t you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly.
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Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.
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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.
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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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Again and again we need to appreciate the subtle workings of the teachings and the practice, and even when there is no extraordinary, dramatic change, to persevere with calm and patience.
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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.
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All my masters would give this as their advice, for this is the essence of what is needed as you come to die: “Be free of attachment and aversion. Keep your mind pure. And unite your mind with Buddha.”
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This is the real and urgent reason why we must prepare now to meet death wisely, to transform our karmic future, and to avoid the tragedy of falling into delusion again and again and repeating the painful round of birth and death.
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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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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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Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE