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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.”

Sogyal Rinpoche

The future is very much in our hands–in our actions.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Action Actions Hands Our
The act of meditation is being spacious.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Act Meditation Spacious
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
The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Giving Journey Meditation
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
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
Normally we do not like to think about death. We would rather think about life. Why reflect on death?
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Mirror Thinking
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
Even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation will not leave the meditator.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Leave May Meditation
We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Believing Beyond Ordinary Senses
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
The other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to – you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Attendedm Rarely Other Uncovered
A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Emotion Liberate Miracle Real
Light must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Buddhist Spiritual Yoga
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 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
To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Mean Spiritual Warrior
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
The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence of grasping.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Lying Peace Real
Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Firsts Next Tomorrow
If all we know of mind is the aspect of mind that dissolves when we die, we will be left with no idea of what continues, no knowledge of the new dimension of the deeper reality of the nature of mind.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Death Mother Running
…we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence. . . .
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Awareness Essence Nature
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Gratitude Intelligent Real
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
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
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth
SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Devotion Real Unbroken
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

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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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.”

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes