Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes

Even if they don't know that you are practicing for them, you are helping them and in turn they are helping you. They are actively helping you to develop your compassion, and so to purify and heal yourself. For me, all dying people are teachers, giving to all those who help them a chance to transform themselves through developing their compassion.

how hollow and futile life can be when it's founded on a false belief in continuity and permanence.

There is no armor like perseverance.

Tibetan thangka paintings and derive strength from their beauty.

We and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence ...

I often think of the words of the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava: "Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?" What more chilling commentary on the modern world could there be than most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life?

Whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that's what we will be like at the moment of death,

We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.

...learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.

Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? 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.

There is only one way of attaining liberation and of obtaining the omniscience of enlightenment: following an authentic spiritual master.

Meditation is not something that you can "do"; it is something that has to happen spontaneously, only when the practice has been perfected. However,

In meditation take care not to impose anything on the mind, or to tax it. When you meditate there should be no effort to control, and no attempt to be peaceful. Don't be overly solemn or feel that you are taking part in some special ritual; let go even of the idea that you are meditating. Let your body remain as it is, your breath as you find it, and remain in your natural condition of unchanging pure awareness.

At the beginning of meditation training thoughts will arrive one on top of another, uninterrupted, like a steep mountain waterfall. Gradually, 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.

Sit, then, as if you were a mountain, with all the unshakeable, steadfast majesty of a mountain. A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that try to bother it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar

Our buddha nature is as good as any buddha's buddha nature.

Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit card ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

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.

Sometimes I think the greatest achievement of modern culture its its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.

Samsara is the mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections. Nirvana is the mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature.

The absolute truth cannot be realized within the domain of the ordinary mind, and the path beyond the ordinary mind is the path of the heart.

Let's try an experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents
the object at which you are grasping. Hold it tightly
clutched in your fist and extend your arm, with the palm of
your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your
grip, you will lose what you are clinging onto. That's why
you hold on.
But there's another possibility: You can let go and yet keep
REFLECTION AND CHANGE 35
hold of it. With your arm still outstretched, turn your hand
over so that it faces the sky. Release your hand and the coin
still rests on your open palm. You let go. And the coin is still
yours, even with all this space around it.
So there is a way in which we can accept impermanence
and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping.
Let us now think of what frequently happens in relationships.
So often it is only when people suddenly feel they are
losing their partner that they realize that they love them. Then
they cling on even tighter. But the more they grasp, the more
the other person escapes them, and the more fragile their relationship
becomes.
So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue
it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow.
Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something
that will ensure our happiness. We ask ourselves: How
can we possibly enjoy anything if we cannot own it? How
ofte

The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these 3 crucial points: Bring your mind home. Release. And relax!

Light must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.

There are so many ways of making the approach to meditation as joyful as possible. You can find the music that most exalts you and use it to open your heart and mind. You can collect pieces of poetry, or quotations of lines of teachings that over the years have moved you, and keep them always at hand to elevate your spirit.

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.

The nature of everything is illusory and ephemeral, Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness, Like they who lick the honey from a razor's edge. How pitiful they who cling strongly to concrete reality: Turn your attention within, my heart friends.5

This world can seem marvellously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

And when you talk about realization, accomplishment for that matter enlightenment is that when you realize the fundamental essence of your mind.

Anyone looking honestly at life will see that we live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity.

At the moment of death, there are two things that count: whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are in at that very moment. 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.

Whatever you do, don't shut off your pain. Accept your pain and remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, don't shut off your pain because it is in fact trying to hand you a precious gift -- the chance of discovery through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow. And don't we know and only far too well, that protection from pain doesn't work. And when we try and defend ourselves from suffering, we only suffer more and don't learn what we can from experience.

There would be no chance to get to know death at all ... if it happened only once.

More important than finding the teacher is finding and following the truth of the teaching ...

Tomorrow or the next life - which comes first, we never know.

Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion.

Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.

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. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.

That goodness is what survives death, a fundamental goodness that is in each and every one of us. The whole of our life is a teaching of how to uncover that strong goodness, and a training toward realizing it.

A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion. More

Looking at the world today, we might easily forget that the main purpose of our life - you could call it the heart of being human - is to be happy. All of us share the same wish, and the same right, to seek happiness and avoid suffering. Even following a spiritual path, or the religious life, is a quest for happiness.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

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.

So one moment you have lost something precious, and then, in the very next moment, you find your mind is resting in a deep state of peace.

We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego's self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.

The Dalai Lama has warned: 'Too many people have the Dharma only on their lips. Instead of using the Dharma to destroy their own negative thoughts, they regard the Dharma as a possession and themselves as the owner.

Let the sky outside awake a sky inside your mind.

What the world needs more than anything are Bodhisattvas of peace, lawyers, politicians, teachers working tirelessly for the enlightenment of themselves and others.

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. We know, in Milarepa's words: "This thing called 'corpse' we dread so much is living with us here and now."

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.

What a beautiful and what a healing mystery it is that from
contemplating, continually and fearlessly, the truth of change
and impermanence, we come slowly to find ourselves face to
face, in gratitude and joy, with the truth of the changeless,
with the truth of the deathless, unending nature of mind!

Don't let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or "philosophical," but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen. 129-130

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity - but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

The masters say if you create an auspicious condition in your body and your environment then meditation and realization will automatically arise.

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. 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.

The act of meditation is being spacious.

When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Because the dying also are unable to help themselves, we should relieve them of discomfort and anxiety, and assist them, as far as we can, to die with composure.

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.

Our problems, all come from nothing; they are all based on a misunderstanding that does not even exist.

Do not make the mistake of imagining that the nature of
mind is exclusive to our mind only. It is in fact the nature of
everything. It can never be said too often that to realize the
nature of mind is to realize the nature of all things.

How many of us are swept away by what I have come to call an 'active laziness'?
It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.

The secret is not to "think" about thoughts, but to allow them to flow through the mind, while keeping your mind free of afterthoughts.

It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.

Each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground-the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge.

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. 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.

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. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

The nature of mind is just too close to be recognized. Just as we are unable to see our own face, mind finds it difficult to look into its own nature. 2.

Meditation is bringing the mind home.

When I came to the West, I realized there was much hunger for spiritual teachings, but no environment for spirituality.

We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead.

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. The diminishing of grasping in yourself is a sign that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous "wisdom of egolessness."

Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow.

The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points:
▪When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness?
Well, that is what Rigpa is!
▪Yet it doesn't stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn't it?
This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa.
▪However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the "chain of delusion," and is the root of samsara.
▪If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.
Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen.
…
Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other–and this is

For most of us, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality. As a result we clutch on to happiness and suffering as real, and in our unskillful and ignorant actions go on sowing the seeds of our next birth. Our actions keep us bound to the continuous cycle of worldly existence, to the endless round of birth and death. So everything is at risk in how we live now at this very moment: How we live now can cost us our entire future.

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.

People will die as they have lived, as themselves.

Self-grasping creates self-cherishing, which in turn creates an ingrained aversion to harm and suffering. However, harm and suffering have no objective existence, what gives them their existence and their power is only our aversion to them. When you understand this, you understand then that it is our aversion, in fact, that attracts to us every negativity and obstacle that can possibly happen to us, and fills our lives with nervous anxiety, expectation, and fear. Wear down that aversion by wearing down the self-grasping mind and its attachment to a nonexistent self, and you will wear down any hold on you that any obstacle or negativity can have.

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?

We must never forget that it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice.

Life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else.

182. "You must constantly nourish openness, breadth of vision, willingness, enthusiasm, and reverence, that will change the whole atmosphere of your mind." ~

When the nature of mind is introduced by a master, it is just too simple for us to believe. Our ordinary mind tells us this cannot be, there must be something more to it than this. It must surely be more "glorious", with light blazing in space around us, angels with flowing golden hair swooping down to meet us, and a deep Wizard of Oz voice announcing, "Now you have been introduced to the nature of your mind." There is no such drama.

Don't get too excited. In the end, it's neither good nor bad.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. MONTAIGNE

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.

What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing, to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform it; 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.

So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow. Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something that will ensure our happiness. [ ... ] Learning to live is learning to let go.

Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.

Train in compassion is to know that all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know that you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.

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. So it is vital for us all to familiarize ourselves with the nature of mind while we are still alive. Only then will we be prepared for the time when it reveals itself spontaneously and powerfully at the moment of death; be able to recognize it "as naturally," the teachings say, "as a child running into its mother's lap"; and by remaining in that state, finally be liberated.

Taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built everything.

When your amnesia over your identity begins to be cured, you will realize finally that dak dzin, grasping at self, is the root cause of all your suffering. You will understand at last how much harm it has done both to yourself and to others, and you will realize that both the noblest and the wisest thing to do is to cherish others instead of cherishing yourself. This will bring healing to your heart, healing to your mind, and healing to your spirit. It

I remember how people would often come to see my master Jamyang Khyentse simply to ask for his guidance for the moment of death. He was so loved and revered throughout Tibet, especially in the eastern province of Kham, that some would travel for months on end to meet him and get his blessing just once before they died. 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."