Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes on Mind (8 Quotes)

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.

More and more, I have come to realize how thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being ... in the absolute.... When the view is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are fleeting and transparent, and only relative.... You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them, but welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa.

The definition of mantra is 'that which protects the mind.' That which protects the mind from negativity, or that which protects you from your own mind, is called mantra.

While meditating I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind I don't question or doubt whether I am in the 'correct' state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being I simply am.

We are what we think. With our thoughts we make the world. All that we are will rise with our thoughts.

Devotion to the spiritual master becomes the purest, quickest, and simplest way to realize the nature of our mind and all things. As we progress in it, the process reveals itself as wonderfully interdependent We, from our side, try continually to generate devotion the devotion we arouse itself generates glimpses of the nature of mind, and these glimpses only enhance and deepen our devotion to the master who is inspiring us. So in the end devotion springs out of wisdom devotion and the living experience of the nature of mind becomes inseparable, and inspire one another.

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.

... 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.