Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
More Quotes from Sogyal Rinpoche:
It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called 'egolessness.'Sogyal Rinpoche
Our buddha nature, then, has an active aspect, which is our 'inner teacher.' From the very moment we became obscured, this inner teacher has been working tirelessly for us, tirelessly trying to bring us back to the radiance and spaciousness of our true being. When we have prayed and aspired and hungered for the truth for a long time, for many, many lives, and when our karma has become sufficiently purified, a kind of miracle takes place. And this miracle, if we can understand and use it, can lead to the end of ignorance forever The inner teacher, who has been with us always, manifests in the form of the 'outer teacher,' whom, almost as if by magic, we actually encounter. He or she is nothing less than the human face of the absolute, the crystallization of the wisdom of all the buddhas, and the embodiment of their compassion directed always toward you. For me, my masters have been the embodiment of living truth, undeniable signs that enlightenment is possible in a body, in this life, in this world, even here and even now, the supreme inspirations in my practice, in my work, in my life, and in my journey toward liberation.
Sogyal Rinpoche
... we and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence....
Sogyal Rinpoche
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.
Sogyal Rinpoche
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.' When you live in the wisdom home, you'll no longer find a barrier between 'I' and 'you,' 'this' and 'that,' 'inside' and 'outside' you'll have come, finally, to your true home, the state of non-duality.
Sogyal Rinpoche
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of 'I' and 'mine,' self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. The ego's greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Death & Dying Quotes, Life QuotesBased on Keywords: immediacy
I think I've finally proven something to people who were cynical about me. Because they were cruel.
Nancy Sinatra
If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life, and there's going to be a life after tennis that's a lot longer than your tennis life.
Chris Evert
Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.
Jane Mayer