Sogyal Rinpoche famous quotes

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

#Yoga #Light #Darkness

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. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Believe #Home #Fighting

The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well; Meditation is the road to enlightenment.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Journey #Giving #Meditation

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

#Choices #Our Actions #Never Forget

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

#Attachment #Meditation #Aversion

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Death #Compassion #Dying

All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle. When no such thing occurs, they feel extremely disappointed. But the real miracle of meditation is more ordinary and much more useful. . . .
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Real #Light #People

Just as the ocean has waves or the sun has rays, so the minds's own radiance is its thoughts and emotions.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Ocean #Meditation #Mind

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Letting Go #Ideas #Effort

To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Spiritual #Mean #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

#Sky #Life And Death #Meditation

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

#Self #Meditation #Way

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Healing #Past #Compassion

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Spiritual #Fall #Loss

Just as if you put your finger into water, it will get wet, and if you put it into fire, it will burn, so if you invest your mind in the wisdom mind of the Buddhas, it will transform into their wisdom nature.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Wisdom #Fire #Water

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Ocean #Sea #Rivers

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

#Home #Practice #Meditation

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's what naturally peaceful awareness is.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Past #Hair #Meditation

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Real #Buddhism #Issues

Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Death #Dying #Done

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

#May #Habit

{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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Effort #Understanding #Doubt

Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Keys #Simplicity #Balance

The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Keys #Simplicity #Balance

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Struggle #Buddhism #Forever

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Spiritual #Giving Up #Teaching

Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Heart #Compassion #Spontaneous

Meditation is bringing the mind home.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Home #Meditation #Mind

Normally we do not like to think about death. We would rather think about life. Why reflect on death? When you start preparing for death you soon realize that you must look into your life now... and come to face the truth of your self. Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Thinking #Mirrors #Self

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

#Meditation #Realization #Body

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Dark #Confusion #Addiction

Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Priorities #Helping #Corny

Just because we go through a difficult situation, it doesn’t mean that the future is predetermined. The future is very much in our hands, in our actions.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Mean #Hands #Our Actions

The act of meditation is being spacious.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Meditation

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
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Strong #Dark #Wind

Learning to live is learning to let go.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Letting Go #Learning #Learn To Let Go

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Real #Spirituality #Action

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

#Teacher #Teaching #Important

The point is not how long you meditate; the point is whether the practice actually brings you to a certain state of mindfulness and presence, where you are a little open and able to connect with your heart essence. And five minutes of wakeful sitting practice is of far greater value than twenty minutes of dozing!
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Heart #Essence #Practice

The future is very much in our hands--in our actions.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Hands #Our Actions #Action

In this complex world, the best way to survive is to be genuine.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Inspirational Life #Way #World

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.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Death #Letting Go #Dying

We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that 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, 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

#Death #Character #Mind

Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion. 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; the majority of scientists deny it could possibly be there at all. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it in plays, and it's not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Real #Believe #Buddhism

The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this lifetime.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Yoga #Giving #Lifetime

If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche

#Water #Mind #Clear

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

#Letting Go #Real #Believe