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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

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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Answer Both Impermanence Pursuit Urgent
In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhist Death Mirrors
Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believe Jobs Spiritual
Devotion {to the spiritual master} becomes the purest, quickest, and simplest way to realize the nature of our mind and all things.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Life Nature Spiritual
As we progress in it, the process reveals itself as wonderfully interdependent: We, from our side, try continually to generate devotion.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Continually Devotion Generate Interdependent Process Progress
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Nature Reality Show Subtlest Sunlight Working
When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Encouragement Spiritual
Let the sky outside awake a sky inside your mind.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Awake Mind Sky
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
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Different Faces Mind Names
Learning to live is learning to let go.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Go Learn Learning Letting
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Giving Spiritual Teaching Up
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
When you realize the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don’t actually “become” a buddha, you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Confusion Nature Spiritual
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
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
Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhism Lying Real
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

Happy Joy Meaning Source Strives
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
Generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity. Meditation is the way to bring us back to ourselves, where we can really experience and taste our full being.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Meditation Self Spiritual
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Absolute Deathless Mind Nature
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Even Karma Purify
The future is very much in our hands–in our actions.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Action Actions Hands Our
For me, all dying people are teachers, giving to all those who help them a chance to transform themselves through developing their compassion.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Compassion People Teacher Themselves
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
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.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Dying Forever
What should we “do” with the mind in meditation? Nothing. Just leave it, simply, as it is.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Meditation Mind Spiritual

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.

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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.

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