16 dances with a beam of light,
20 Om Muni Muni Maha Muni Yea Swaha
22 Gun dro nga tang yul nge nga
23 Gewa ju jik dza nyon druk
24 Nye nyon nyi shu shen gyur shi
25 Sem chung nga jik di dak o.
27 religious letter games...
48 om a ra ba tsa na di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di di
50 Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Lotus Jewel)
52 The paths are many, the truth is one
54 Mickey Mouse has no wife, no horse, no mustache
56 where you are is where you were when you are where you will be.
59 don't let them immanentize your personal eschaton
61 nga tsho gyis rang gi gyo bar sems can song ba'i dgos.
62 (we should be self-motivating sentient beings.)
66 Acts without impediment
69 Yet he does not know himself
70 To be "kind," to be "gentle"
72 When an archer is shooting for nothing
74 If he shoots for a brass buckle
75 He is already nervous.
76 If he shoots for a prize of gold
79 He is out of his mind!
81 His skill has not changed. But the prize
82 Divides him. He cares.
83 He thinks more of winning
88 By giving, resources; by ethics, bliss
90 One may lead a horse to water, but cannot make him think.
94 neither i nor you nor anything exists truly
95 i, you and everything each have our own existence
96 the view between the two extremes is the middle way
99 Mickey Mouse and Mickey Rooney have something in common.
101 Natural language is hard.
102 -- (a prominent natural language scholar; do you know who? i don't.)
104 not this not this not this, what is it?
110 sangs rgyas kyi tshad mas ma nges ba'i phyir.
111 (the subject "horns of a rabbit" does not exist because it is not an object
112 validly cognized by a buddha.)
115 what you don't see is what you get when you don't look. -- fred t. hamster
117 this bell's knelling is never quelled,
118 while service is rendered,
119 tin staccato splattered over cupric strands,
120 spraying crazed meaning to distant lands.
124 To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others.
127 It is hard to think of what one is doing when one is doing it.
130 No program is so finished that a few bug fixes won't destroy it.
133 Words obscure meaning. -- fred t. hamster
135 There's a Ribong in my Attic, There's a Ribong in my Chair.
136 There's a Ribong in my Dipstick, There's a Ribong in my Hair.
137 In fact, there's a Ribong everywhere.
140 In the context of a spreadsheet system, the user must ensure that the
141 sheet is thoroughly spread onto the bed.
144 nechung: unable to open fortunes.dat file. (just kidding)
146 are you only using half your brain?
147 if you can only think in terms of logical conclusions, rational assumptions,
148 and common sense -or-
149 if you can only think in terms of intuitive jumps, esthetic motivations,
150 and the fluid nature of reality,
151 then you probably are stuck on one side of your head. try moving into
155 time has eight eyes and three elbows...
156 and millions of clocks.
159 i refuse to ignore what i cannot perceive. -- fred t. hamster
161 if you can't change your mind,
162 are you sure you've still got one?
164 The only people who deserve to be called "Americans" are called "Indians".
167 you are contemplative and analytical by nature
172 -- Merlin in Excalibur
174 Charlottesville, Virginia: gravity well for the soul.
176 if one is always ambiguous enough, he is never wrong.
177 but he never says anything either.
180 Protect Children, Feed Bunnies, Heal Sickness, Understand Reality
183 Improve the environment and the government;
184 feed politicians toxic waste.
186 alright, so it was a slow night.
187 alright, so it was a slow knight.
188 all night, what a slow knight.
189 there's slightly white snow tonight.
190 tight flights light from the height of night.
194 sasquatch in my breakfast cereal. -- fred t. hamster
196 "what i say is unimportant." -- david w andrews
197 "i'll keep that in mind." -- chris koeritz
199 "are Israelis Catholic?" -- christine kelly
203 -- seen in April 1991 High Times
207 -- co-authored by dave and chris
209 we grow old as soon as we cease to love and trust.
210 -- Madame De Choiseul
212 marijuana is a natural mollifier.
214 I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the
215 monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
220 -- Christian N. Bovee
222 Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist,
223 but the ability to start over.
224 -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
226 One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.
229 The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra.
232 The first casualty when war comes is truth. -- Hiram Johnson, 1917
234 Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the
235 love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity
237 -- Samuel Johnson, from The Idler, 1758
239 Luck sometimes visits a fool, but never sits down with him.
242 How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were? -- Satchel Page
244 Yeah, you got a point there man. Just let
245 your hair grow and nobody'll ever find out.
248 Eloquence is vehement simplicity. -- Richard Cecil
250 Two of my correspondents labeled me 'self-righteous', by which
251 they seem to have meant that they think they are righter
255 Every thought I have imprisoned in expression I must free by my deeds.
258 the other is a measure of the self. -- fred hamster
260 it is not who we are that defines us, but what we do.
261 the actions we take are the real indication of where our minds
262 and bodies are at, an expression of our being.
263 when one does not act, one cannot harm,
264 but by not acting when action could help another,
267 if what you are doing right now isn't broadening your mind
268 or elevating your spirit through total awareness of the essence,
269 then find that broadness! that elevation!
270 if an activity doesn't wake you up and tickle you,
271 then tickle yourself. that load which cannot be unburdened
274 the only people i don't like are those who don't want me to like them...
275 and i try to like them when they're not paying attention.
278 to george h. w. bush (on the occasion of our last meeting):
279 "you're a suit where a person should be."
281 The numbah uh bits in a compyooter word should NOT bee ayut, nor
282 sixuhteeen, nor thirty tooo, mah frayends. For vayrilee, it should
283 bee fifty! Theeuss would gayruntee that the sanctitty of our
284 great nayshun would be forevah preeserved! Theyuh would be just
285 one bit for each an every good stayett in this heyuh fahnnn nasyshun,
286 the YOOnited Stayetts of AhhMayReekah!
288 Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
289 -- Lord Acton, Letter, 5 April 1887
291 No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
292 for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
293 -- Henry B. Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
295 One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
296 -- Henry B. Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
298 It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
299 -- Alfred Adler, 1939
301 Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.
302 -- Roy Adzak, quoted in "Contemporary Artists", 1977
304 A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. -- Aesop
306 Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything. -- Aesop
308 We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. -- Aesop
310 The paper burns, but the words fly away. -- Ben Joseph Akiba
312 Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc.
313 And never lie down with a woman who's got more trouble than you.
314 -- Nelson Algren, "What Every Young Man Should Know"
316 Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats,
317 then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
320 Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night.
323 I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
324 I want to achieve it through not dying.
327 The lion and the calf shall lie down together
328 but the calf won't get much sleep.
331 If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a
332 large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
333 -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
335 The difference between sex and death is that with death
336 you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.
337 -- Woody Allen, quoted in "New York Tribune", 1975
339 It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people.
340 The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed
341 to enjoy the waking hours much more.
342 -- Woody Allen, "Side Effects" 1981
344 Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
345 -- Muhammad Ali, in "Time", 1978
347 Doing easily what others find difficult is talent;
348 doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
349 -- Henri-Frederic Amiel, "Journal", 1883
351 In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the
352 sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.
353 -- Idi Amin Dada, 1976
355 God has been replaced, as he has all over the West,
356 with respectability and air conditioning.
357 -- Imamu Amiri Baraka, "Home", 1966
359 Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity
360 of opportunity to be otherwise.
361 -- Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", 1969
363 Death is life's answer to the question 'Why?' -- Anonymous
365 God is not dead. He is alive and working on a less ambitious project.
368 In March July, October, May,
369 The Ides are on the fifteenth day,
370 The Nones the seventh: all other months besides
371 Have two days less for Nones and Ides.
374 Never argue with a fool--people might not know the difference. -- Anonymous
376 Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three. -- Anonymous
378 The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion,
379 the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
382 Vote early and vote often. -- Anonymous, on US election banners, 1850's
384 You're never alone with schizophrenia. -- Anonymous
386 Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause
387 for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
390 Women like silent men. They think they're listening. -- Marcel Archard
392 We make war that we may live in peace. -- Aristotle
394 What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. -- Aristotle
396 Wit is cultured insolence. -- Aristotle
398 That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. -- Neil Armstrong
400 What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.
401 -- Raymond Aron, "The Opium of the Intellectuals", 1957
403 We are still speaking the same language,
404 but neither of us is hearing the other.
405 -- Hafez Assad, on Syrian relations with Egypt, in "Time", 3 April 1989
407 If Gary Hart had seen Fatal Attraction two years ago,
408 he'd probably be President.
409 -- Bruce Babbitt, 1988 Presidential Campaign
411 Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. -- Francis Bacon, 1624
413 Rebellions of the belly are the worst. -- Francis Bacon
415 It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
416 -- Walter Bagehot, "Biographical Studies", 1863
418 Be careful what you set your heart upon--for it will surely be yours.
419 -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name" 1961
421 Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart;
422 for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
423 -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name" 1961
425 The future is like heaven--everyone exalts it,
426 but no one wants to go there now.
427 -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name", 1961
429 It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason
430 that it is more difficult to be witty every day
431 than to say pretty things from time to time.
432 -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829
434 Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster
435 that devours everything: familiarity.
436 -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829
438 The duration of passion is proportionate
439 with the original resistance of the woman.
440 -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829
442 It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
445 Television is the first truly democratic culture--the first culture
446 available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want.
447 The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
448 -- Clive Barnes, in "New York Times", 1969
450 What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
451 -- Simone de Beauvoir, "La Femme rompue", 1967
453 Now comes the mystery.
454 -- Henry Ward Beecher, last words, 8 March 1887
456 Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done,
457 they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
460 The most important things to do in this world are to get something
461 to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.
462 -- Brendan Behan, in "Weekend", 1968
464 Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
465 -- Hector Berlioz, "Almanach des lettres francaises"
467 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
470 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. -- Psalms 111:10
472 Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
475 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
476 fools despise wisdom and instruction.
479 The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
482 No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate one and love the other,
483 or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches.
486 And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life's span?
489 Greater love hath no man than this,
490 that a man lay down his life for his friends.
493 Spring beckons! All things to the call respond;
494 the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
495 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
497 Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
498 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
500 Belladonna, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison.
501 A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
502 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
504 Bore, n: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
505 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
507 Conservative, n: a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as
508 distinguished from a Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
509 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
511 Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
512 not as they ought to be.
513 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
515 Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community
516 consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves,
518 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
520 Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
521 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
523 Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
524 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
526 Yankee, n: In Europe, an American.
527 In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander.
528 In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMYANK.)
529 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
531 The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
532 -- Josh Billings, "The Kicker"
534 People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
537 Universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery.
540 The first sign of a nervous breakdown is when you start
541 thinking your work is terribly important.
544 An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes
545 which can be made, in a narrow field.
548 The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
549 opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
552 If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -- Derek Bok, 1978
554 The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
555 -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
557 Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed.
558 If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.'
559 They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'
562 Censorship, like charity, should begin at home,
563 but unlike charity, it should end there.
566 No good deed goes unpunished. -- Clare Boothe Luce
568 When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.
571 Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. -- Victor Borge
573 Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand,
574 but we must build as if the sand were stone.
575 -- Jorge Luis Borges, 1972
577 We never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
578 -- Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges On Writing", 1974
580 It is possible to store the mind with a million facts
581 and still be entirely uneducated.
582 -- Alec Bourne, "A Doctor's Creed"
584 Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue
585 to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant
586 may prove to be our executioner.
587 -- General Omar Bradley
589 Grub first, then ethics. -- Bertolt Brecht
591 I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
592 -- Ashleigh Brilliant
594 Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.
595 -- Ashleigh Brilliant
597 To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first,
598 and call whatever you hit the target.
599 -- Ashleigh Brilliant
601 No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
602 -- Jacob Bronowski, in "Encounter", 1971
604 Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
605 -- Sam Brown, in "Washington Post", 1977
607 Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.
608 -- Matthew Browne, "Lilliput Levee"
610 As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically
611 reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.
612 -- Anita Bryant, 1977
614 Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
615 -- William F. Buckley
617 Before you kill something make sure you have something better
618 to replace it with; something better than political opportunist
619 slamming hate horsesh*t in the public park.
620 -- Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man", 1969
622 We love your adherence to democratic principles.
623 -- George HW Bush speaking to Ferdinand Marcos, June 1981
625 The final lesson of Viet Nam is that no great nation
626 can long afford to be sundered by a memory.
627 -- George HW Bush, 1989 Inaugural Address
629 The caribou love [the Alaska oil pipeline].
630 They run up against it, and they have babies.
631 -- George HW Bush, 1988 and again "New York Times", 3 April 1989
633 It would be inappropriate for the President of the United States
634 to try to fine-tune for the people of Hungary how they ought to eat -
635 how the cow ought to eat the cabbage, as we say in the United States.
636 -- George HW Bush, quoted in "Philadelphia Inquirer", 13 July 1989
638 An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
639 -- Nicholas Murray Butler
641 Friendship is like money, easier made than kept. -- Samuel Butler
643 The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
644 -- Samuel Butler, "The Fair Haven", 1873
646 Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense
647 to know how to lie well.
648 -- Samuel Butler, "Notebooks" 1912
650 Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven.
651 Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
652 -- Samuel Butler, "Notebooks" 1912
654 One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague.
655 -- Robert Burton, 1651
657 For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
658 -- Lord Byron, "Don Juan", 1818
660 The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds;
661 and the pessimist fears this is true.
662 -- James B. Cabell, "The Silver Stallion" 1926
664 Men willingly believe what they wish. -- Julius Caesar
666 What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story.
667 And the greatest good is little enough:
668 for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
669 -- Pedro Calderon de la Barca, "Life is a Dream"
671 It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies.
672 -- Arthur Calwell, 1968
674 An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
677 Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
678 -- Albert Camus, "The Rebel", 1951
680 When I sell liquor, its called bootlegging; when my patrons serve
681 it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.
684 You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun
685 than you can with a kind word alone.
688 Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work.
689 -- Al Capp, in "Esquire", 1970
691 It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely
692 proportional to the amount of clothing people wore.
695 "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be,
696 and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"
697 -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
699 Because of the greatness of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability
701 -- Jimmy Carter, 31 December 1977
703 Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie!" till you can find a rock.
706 As long as people will accept crap,
707 it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
708 -- Dick Cavett, in "Playboy", 1971
710 Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away.
711 -- Luis Cernuda, "Las Ruinas"
713 A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
714 -- Miguel de Cervantes
716 I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women,
717 French to men, and German to my horse.
718 -- Charles V, King of France
720 In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
723 He who asks is a fool for five minutes,
724 but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
727 The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
730 I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
731 or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
734 I like a man who grins when he fights. -- Winston Churchill
736 I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.
737 Pigs treat us as equals.
740 It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
743 Man will occasionally stumble over the truth,
744 but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
747 Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.
750 The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;
751 the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
754 Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
755 -- Winston Churchill, Speech, January 1952
757 Preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger.
758 -- Tom Clancy, "The Hunt for Red October", 1984
760 Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?
763 It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God,
767 Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
770 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
771 -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962
773 You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
774 -- Eldridge Cleaver, 1968
776 The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
777 -- Eldridge Cleaver, "Soul on Ice", 1968
779 America is the only nation in history which miraculously
780 has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without
781 the usual interval of civilization.
782 -- Georges Clemenceau, 1 December 1945
784 War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
785 -- Georges Clemenceau
787 When you have nothing to say, say nothing. -- Charles Caleb Colton
789 I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
792 If we don't know life, how can we know death? -- Confucius
794 Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
797 Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. -- Confucius
799 What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. -- Confucius
801 When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them;
802 when we see persons of a contrary character,
803 we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
806 Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
807 -- Cyril Connolly, "The Unquiet Grave" 1945
809 Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime,
810 but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
811 -- Cyril Connolly, "The Unquiet Grave" 1945
813 Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite.
814 Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime
815 as to which is the main river.
816 -- Cyril Connolly, "The Unquiet Grave" 1945
818 Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones
819 who will be writing about you.
820 -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983
822 Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
823 -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983
825 The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
826 -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983
828 You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
829 -- Joseph Conrad, "Lord Jim", 1900
831 The horror! The horror!
832 -- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness", 1902
834 I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and
835 invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people.
836 -- Calvin Coolidge, Speech, 21 September 1928
838 Don't talk unless you can improve the silence. -- Laurence Coughlin
840 A man feared that he might find an assassin;
841 Another that he might find a victim.
842 One was more wise than the other.
843 -- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895
845 I stood upon a high place, and saw, below, many devils,
846 running, leaping, and carousing in sin.
847 One looked up, grinning, and said, "Comrade! Brother!"
848 -- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895
850 I walked in a desert.
852 "Ah, God, take me from this place!"
853 A voice said, "It is no desert."
854 I cried, "Well, but---
855 "The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon."
856 A voice said, "It is no desert."
857 -- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895
859 I was in the darkness;
860 I could not see my words
861 Nor the wishes of my heart.
862 Then suddenly there was a great light---
863 "Let me into the darkness again."
864 -- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895
866 A man said to the universe, "Sir, I exist." "However," replied the universe,
867 "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
868 -- Stephan Crane, "War is Kind", 1899
870 There is growing evidence that smoking has pharamacological ...
871 effects that are of real value to smokers.
872 -- Joseph F. Cullman III (Pres. of Phillip Morris)
873 Annual Report to Stockholders, 1962
875 There are no atheists in the foxholes.
876 -- William Thomas Cummings, 1942
878 Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days.
879 An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to
880 make it meaningful: a meaningful friend, or a meaningful day.
881 -- the 14th Dalai Lama, interview in "TIME", 11 April 1988
883 The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time
884 of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.
887 The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents,
888 and the second half by our children.
891 There is no such thing as justice--in or out of court.
892 -- Clarence Darrow, Interview, April 1936
894 When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President;
895 I'm beginning to believe it.
898 The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is,
899 in fact, a return to the idealised past.
900 -- Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960
902 There is no such thing as a nonracial society
903 in a multiracial country.
904 -- F. W. de Klerk, President of South Africa,
905 quoted in _Time_, 11 September 1989
907 There are a million ways to lose a work day,
908 but not even a single way to get one back.
909 -- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, _Peopleware_, 1987
911 People are always talking about tradition, but they forget we have
912 a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that
913 there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity.
914 -- Hugo Demartini, in "Contemporary Artists", 1977
916 Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly
917 and safely insane every night of our lives.
918 -- William Dement, in "Newsweek", 1959
920 We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them
921 to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
924 I never deny, I never contradict. I sometimes forget.
927 There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
930 Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.
931 -- Benjamin Disraeli, "Coningsby" 1844
933 The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones
934 from one graveyard to another.
935 -- J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England", 1945
937 Love built on beauty, soon as beauty dies.
938 -- John Donne, "Elegy II, The Anagram"
940 Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself,
941 but talent instantly recognizes genius.
942 -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Valley of Fear", 1914
944 One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do
945 and always a clever thing to say.
946 -- Will Durant, in "Reader's Digest", 1972
948 Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
949 -- Will Durant, in "National Enquirer", 1980
951 A man's got to know his limitations.
952 -- Clint Eastwood in "Magnum Force", 1973
954 History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely
955 once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
958 Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
959 -- Thomas Alva Edison, "Life", 1932
961 There is no substitute for hard work.
962 -- Thomas Alva Edison, "Life", 1932
964 To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.
965 -- Paul Ehrlich, in "The Farmers Almanac, 1978"
967 Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
970 Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present,
971 but an equation is something for eternity.
974 Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it
975 is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us
976 any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He
980 God may be subtle. But He is not malicious.
983 I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war
984 fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people
985 of the earth will be killed.
988 I never think of the future--it comes soon enough.
991 The important thing is not to stop questioning.
994 The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has
995 merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
998 The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
1001 You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his
1002 tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand
1003 this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signls here, they
1004 receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
1007 Before God we are all equally wise--and equally foolish.
1008 -- Albert Einstein, "Cosmic Religion"
1010 The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
1011 -- Albert Einstein, "Life", 1950
1013 Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and
1014 the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
1015 -- Albert Einstein, "Ideas and Opinions", 1954
1017 A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
1018 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1020 I think that people want peace so much that one of these days
1021 government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
1022 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1024 In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains.
1025 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1027 We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
1028 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1030 What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight -
1031 it's the size of the fight in the dog.
1032 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958
1034 This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
1035 -- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men", 1925
1037 The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines
1038 what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
1039 -- Havelock Ellis, "Little Essays of Love and Virtue", 1922
1041 The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
1042 -- Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923
1044 The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago...
1045 had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
1046 -- Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923
1048 What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.
1049 -- Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923
1051 Always do what you are afraid to do. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
1053 Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
1054 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
1056 What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters
1057 compared to what lies within us.
1058 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
1060 When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
1061 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
1063 To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
1064 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journal", 20 December 1822
1066 A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
1067 Before him, I may think aloud.
1068 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essays", 1841
1070 I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
1071 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essays", 1841
1073 To be great is to be misunderstood.
1074 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essays", 1841
1076 I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
1077 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journal", May 1849
1079 Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
1080 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Conduct of Life", 1860
1082 Hitch your wagon to a star.
1083 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Conduct of Life", 1860
1085 A wise man first determines what is within his control;
1086 all else is then irrelevant.
1089 We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
1092 War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
1093 -- Desiderius Erasmus
1095 A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
1098 A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way
1099 that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.
1100 -- Ludwig Erhard, in "The Observer", 1958
1102 There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman
1103 is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
1106 Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do
1107 with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
1110 Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
1113 The best of seers is he who guesses well.
1116 The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth.
1117 -- Harold Evans, "Pictures on a Page", 1978
1119 Passions are fashions.
1122 When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before.
1123 You see more in you than there was before.
1124 -- Clifton Fadiman, "Any Number Can Play", 1957
1126 The only accident [at Three Mile Island] is that this thing leaked out.
1127 You could have avoided this whole thing by not saying anything.
1128 -- Craig Faust (control-room operator at TMI), 1979,
1129 quoted from "Loose Talk"
1131 If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks
1132 and transporting goods on our backs.
1135 A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
1136 -- James Feibleman, "Understanding Philosophy", 1973
1138 The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.
1139 -- Fanny Fern, "Willis Parton"
1141 Computer: a million morons working at the speed of light.
1144 The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -
1145 and you are the easiest person to fool.
1146 -- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
1148 Anybody who hates children and dogs can't be all bad. -- W. C. Fields
1150 I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. -- W. C. Fields
1152 It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper. -- Errol Flynn
1154 Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
1157 The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
1158 to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
1161 I am responsible only to God and history.
1164 I still believe that people are really good at heart.
1165 I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation
1166 consisting of confusion, misery and death.
1169 Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
1170 -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac
1172 In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
1173 -- Benjamin Franklin, 1789
1175 Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
1178 Clothe an idea in words and it loses its freedom of movement.
1181 The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride.
1182 Everything else they do is crap--and they know it.
1183 -- Fred Friendly, 1980
1185 The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
1188 A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather
1189 and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
1192 A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday
1193 but never remembers her age.
1196 A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
1199 A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
1202 The world is full of willing people;
1203 some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
1206 The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
1207 But I have promises to keep,
1208 And miles to go before I sleep,
1209 And miles to go before I sleep.
1210 -- Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", 1923
1212 We compound our suffering by victimising each other.
1213 -- Athol Fugard, in "The Observer", 1971
1215 The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
1216 -- R. Buckminster Fuller
1218 The most important thing about Spaceship Earth -
1219 an instruction book didn't come with it.
1220 -- R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in "Contemporary Architects", 1980
1222 It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree.
1223 It's what you do with your life that counts.
1224 -- Millard Fuller, in "Time", 16 January 1989
1226 Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is
1227 almost as silly as getting married just because you do.
1230 If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
1231 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
1233 Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
1234 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
1236 Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing
1237 between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
1238 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
1240 The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises
1241 in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral
1242 justification for selfishness.
1243 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
1245 In economics, the majority is always wrong.
1246 -- John Kenneth Galbraith, in "Saturday Evening Post", 1968
1248 One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
1249 -- John Kenneth Galbraith, in "Time", 1961
1251 I could prove God statistically. -- George Gallup
1253 He who awaits much can expect little.
1254 -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
1255 "El Coronel no Tiene quien le Escriba"
1257 Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo
1258 habria tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo.
1259 (If God hadn't rested on Sunday,
1260 He would have had time to finish the world.)
1261 -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
1262 "Los Funerales de Mam Grande", 1974
1264 No creo en Dios, pero le tengo miedo.
1265 (I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.)
1266 -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "El Amor en los Tiempos de Calera", 1985
1268 The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.
1269 -- Charles de Gaulle, 1967
1271 A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs. -- German Proverb
1273 If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
1276 I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant,
1277 and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
1280 Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
1283 In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over
1284 and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
1287 The secret of success is sincerity.
1288 Once you can fake that you've got it made.
1291 Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.
1294 All things are only transitory. -- Goethe
1296 We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions,
1297 nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.
1298 -- Mikhail Gorbachev, UN address, 7 December 1988
1300 The truest wild beasts live in the most populous places.
1301 -- Baltasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" 1647
1303 Thirty days hath November,
1304 April, June, and September,
1305 February hath twenty-eight alone,
1306 And all the rest have thirty-one.
1307 -- Richard Grafton, 1562
1309 I think when a person has been found guilty of rape
1310 he should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick.
1311 -- Billy Graham, 1974
1313 The illusion that times that were are better than those that are,
1314 has probably pervaded all ages.
1315 -- Horace Greeley, "The American Conflict", 1864-1866
1317 If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
1318 -- Motto of the Green Berets
1320 Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
1321 -- Graham Greene, 1981
1323 Figures won't lie, but liars will figure.
1324 -- Charles H. Grosvenor
1326 It's round the world I've traveled; it's round the world I've roamed;
1327 but I've yet to see an outlaw drive a family from its home.
1328 -- Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"
1330 Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
1331 -- Alex Hamilton, "The Listener", 1978
1333 The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
1334 -- R. W. Hamming, "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers", 1973
1336 War will cease when men refuse to fight.
1339 Licker talks mighty loud w'en it gets loose fum de jug.
1340 -- Joel C. Harris, "Uncle Remus: Plantation Proverbs"
1342 Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has
1343 just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
1346 In times like these, it is helpful to remember
1347 that there have always been times like these.
1350 The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability.
1351 -- John W. Hazard, "Changing Times" 1957
1353 Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater. -- William Hazlitt
1355 Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained
1356 with the greatest violence.
1359 Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity,
1360 and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
1361 -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
1363 Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
1364 But beautiful women don't need to know about men.
1365 It's the men who have to know about beautiful women.
1366 -- Katherine Hepburn
1368 Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived
1369 and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
1370 -- Ernest Hemingway, quoted in "Sunday Times", 1966
1372 Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased
1373 at the price of chains and slavery?
1376 All is flux, nothing stays still. -- Heraclitus
1378 Nothing endures but change. -- Heraclitus
1380 Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end.
1381 It all depends upon where the observer is standing.
1384 I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that
1385 brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass
1386 over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner
1387 eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
1389 -- Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965
1391 Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks. -- Herodotus
1393 If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of
1394 fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.
1397 There's nothing in the middle of the road
1398 but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
1399 -- Jim Hightower, in "Time", 3 April 1989
1401 To do nothing is also a good remedy. -- Hippocrates
1403 Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
1404 -- Alfred Hitchcock, in "The Observer", 1960
1406 In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is
1407 and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
1408 -- Alfred Hitchcock, 1966
1410 The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
1413 What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
1416 Never tolerate the establishment of two continental powers in Europe.
1417 -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", 1933
1419 Strength lies not in defense but in attack.
1420 -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", 1933
1422 Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.
1423 -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", 1933
1425 The great masses of the people... will more easily
1426 fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
1427 -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", 1933
1429 You can discover what your enemy fears most
1430 by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
1431 -- Eric Hoffer, in "The Faber Book of Aphorisms", 1964
1433 The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. -- Abbie Hoffman
1435 Justice is incidental to law and order. -- J. Edgar Hoover
1437 Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!
1438 (Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!)
1441 Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
1442 (It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.)
1445 He has half the deed done who has made a beginning. -- Horace
1447 Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. -- Horace
1449 Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
1452 Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. -- Kin Hubbard
1454 When a fellow says it ain't the money but
1455 the principle of the thing, it's the money.
1458 Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
1459 -- Kin Hubbard, "Abe Martin's Broadcast", 1930
1461 Habit is the nursery of errors. -- Victor Hugo
1463 We believe that to err is human. To blame it on someone else is politics.
1464 -- Hubert H. Humphrey
1466 The right to be heard does not automatically
1467 include the right to be taken seriously.
1468 -- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1965
1470 A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far. -- Fannie Hurst
1472 The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from
1473 ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference,
1474 and undernourishment.
1475 -- Robert Hutchins, "Great Books" 1954
1477 Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. -- Aldous Huxley
1479 The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet
1480 is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is
1482 -- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited", 1956
1484 Experience is not what happens to you.
1485 It is what you do with what happens to you.
1486 -- Aldous Huxley, in "Reader's Digest", 1956
1488 Technological progress has merely provided us with more
1489 efficient means for going backwards.
1490 -- Aldous Huxley, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", 1956
1492 A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
1493 -- Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People", 1882
1495 The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
1496 -- Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People", 1882
1498 There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.
1501 Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.
1502 -- Robert G. Ingersoll
1504 To think contrary to one's era is heroism.
1505 But to speak against it is madness.
1508 The will to win is worthless if you don't get paid for it. -- Reggie Jackson
1510 It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
1511 -- Clive James, in "The Observer", 1976
1513 A great many people think they are thinking
1514 when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
1517 The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
1520 El amor es un camino que de repente aparece y de tanto caminarlo se te pierde.
1521 -- Victor Jara, "El Amor es un Camino"
1523 In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty.
1526 I think [a black]... could scarcely be found capable of
1527 tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.
1528 -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia", 1787
1530 It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless,
1531 of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
1534 To seek permission is to seek denial. -- Steve Jobs
1536 Men are like wine--some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
1537 -- Pope John XXIII, 1978
1539 I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.
1540 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1542 If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River,
1543 the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
1544 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1546 No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist
1547 or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.
1548 -- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960
1550 Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
1551 -- Samuel Johnson, 7 April 1775
1553 The heart has its prisons that intelligence cannot unlock.
1554 -- Marcel Jouhandeau, "De la grandeur"
1556 Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?
1559 An ounce of emotion is equal to a ton of facts. -- John Junor
1561 In the fight between you and the world, back the world. -- Franz Kafka
1563 There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring:
1564 impatience and laziness.
1567 The more things change, the more they remain the same.
1568 -- Alphonse Karr, "Les Guepes", January 1849
1570 You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one.
1573 Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
1574 -- John Keats, Correspondence, 1819
1576 College isn't the place to go for ideas. -- Hellen Keller
1578 We have met the enemy and he is us. -- Walt Kelly in "POGO"
1580 If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
1581 -- Florynce Kennedy, 1976
1583 Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
1586 Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
1589 We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind
1590 in the history of the world--or to make it the last.
1593 And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you;
1594 ask what you can do for your country.
1595 -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961
1597 If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,
1598 it cannot save the few who are rich.
1599 -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961
1601 Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
1602 will make violent revolution inevitable.
1603 -- John F. Kennedy, 12 March 1962
1605 Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
1606 -- Robert F. Kennedy
1608 Some men see things as they are and say why?
1609 I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?'
1610 -- Robert F. Kennedy, quoted in "Esquire", 1969
1612 Without feeling there's no reason to live.
1613 -- Andre Kertesz, photographer, 1894-1985
1615 In the long run we are all dead.
1616 -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory", 1936
1618 In a fight you don't stop to choose your cudgels. -- Nikita Khruschev
1620 Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build
1621 bridge even when there are no rivers.
1624 Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
1625 -- Soren Kierkegaard, "Life"
1627 Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
1628 -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
1630 It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me,
1631 but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
1632 -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
1634 Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the
1635 the philanthropist to over-look the circumstances of
1636 economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
1637 -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963
1639 The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort,
1640 but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
1641 -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963
1643 He travels the fastest who travels alone.
1646 Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
1649 The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
1652 Television--a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.
1655 Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
1658 Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
1661 People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather
1662 have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.
1663 -- Robert Keith Leavitt
1665 It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it.
1666 -- Robert E. Lee, December 1862
1668 To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
1669 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1975
1671 When smashing monuments, save the pedestals--they always come in handy.
1674 It is true that liberty is precious--so precious that it must be rationed.
1677 The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
1678 -- Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques", 1955
1680 Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive,
1681 but what they conceal is vital.
1684 Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you.
1685 Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
1686 -- Bernard Levin, in "Daily Mail", 1964
1688 A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor's throat
1689 without having his neighbor notice it.
1692 He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help. -- Abraham Lincoln
1694 Nearly all men can stand adversity,
1695 but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
1698 Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
1701 The ballot is stronger than the bullet. -- Abraham Lincoln
1703 Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong
1704 impulse to see it tried on him personally.
1707 You can fool all the people some of the time,
1708 and some of the people all the time,
1709 but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
1712 Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee,
1713 and just as hard to sleep after.
1714 -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1716 Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
1719 I have always thought the actions of men the best
1720 interpreters of their thoughts.
1723 Winning is not everything. It's the only thing.
1724 -- Vince Lombardi, 1965
1726 The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.
1727 -- Cesare Lombroso, "The Man of Genius"
1729 Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
1732 In war there is no substitute for victory.
1733 -- General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, 19 April 1951
1735 There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity.
1736 -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1955
1738 Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada m s;
1739 caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
1740 -- Antonio Machado, "Proverbios y cantares, VI"
1742 It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.
1743 -- Niccolo Machiavelli
1745 All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death
1746 than the animals that know nothing.
1747 -- Maurice Maeterlinck
1749 The atom bomb is a paper tiger...
1750 Terrible to look at but not so strong as it seems.
1753 Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
1754 -- Mao Zedong, "Quotations from Chairman Mao", 1966
1756 Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
1757 -- Mao Zedong, "Quotations from Chairman Mao", 1966
1759 An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
1760 -- Donald R. Perry Marquis, "archy and mehitabel", 1927
1762 Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
1765 From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
1768 Religion... is the opium of the masses.
1769 -- Karl Marx, "Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right", 1844
1771 Unrecognized faults lead to wasted efforts
1772 -- Joanot Martorell, "Tirant lo Blanc", 1490
1774 Impropriety is the soul of wit.
1777 Love is only the dirty trick played on us
1778 to achieve continuation of the species.
1779 -- W. Somerset Maugham, "A Writer's Notebook" 1949
1781 I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.
1782 -- William H. Mauldin, "Up Front" 1944
1784 Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.
1787 The people here [in Nicaragua] are amazingly friendly, when you
1788 figure we're here to overthrow their government.
1789 -- Richard Melton, US Ambassador to Nicaragua
1791 A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence
1792 and yet keep both ears to the ground.
1795 Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
1798 No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
1801 Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
1804 The American public knows what it wants,
1805 and deserves to get it good and hard.
1808 There's always an easy solution to every human problem -
1809 neat, plausible, and wrong.
1812 Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
1813 -- H. L. Mencken, "A Book of Prefaces", 1917
1815 Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life,
1816 there is actually no truth to be discovered;
1817 there is only error to be exposed.
1818 -- H. L. Mencken, "Prejudices, Third Series", 1922
1820 The older I grow the more I distrust
1821 the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
1822 -- H. L. Mencken, "Prejudices, Third Series", 1922
1824 Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
1825 -- H. L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy", 1949
1827 Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
1828 but most stupid people are conservatives.
1831 He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
1834 A good listener is not only popular everywhere,
1835 but after a while he gets to know something.
1838 Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something.
1841 I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
1844 Some of the greatest love affairs I've known
1845 have involved one actor, unassisted.
1848 When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism;
1849 but when you take it from many writers, it's research.
1852 I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.
1855 Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in,
1856 and those inside equally desperate to get out.
1857 -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
1859 The value of life lies not in the length of days,
1860 but in the use we make of them...
1861 Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not
1862 on your tale of years, but on your will.
1863 -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1580
1865 Obstacles are those frightful things you see
1866 when you take your eyes off the goal.
1869 Only the sinner has the right to preach.
1870 -- Christopher Morley
1872 There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way.
1873 -- Christopher Morley
1875 You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
1876 -- John Morley, "Rousseau", 1876
1878 Any party which takes credit for the rain
1879 must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the draught.
1882 If the nation's economists were laid end to end,
1883 they would point in all directions.
1886 As a student I learned from wonderful teachers
1887 and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.
1888 -- Bill Moyers, interviews on "Fresh Air", 1991
1890 Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
1893 Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
1896 The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well off,
1897 have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the
1898 greatest misery without almost noticing them.
1901 Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death
1902 should not be an even greater one.
1903 -- Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in "Time", 1981
1905 The speed of exit of a civil servant is directly proportional
1906 to the quality of his service.
1907 -- Ralph Nader, "The Spoiled System"
1909 Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
1910 -- V. S. Naipul, interview in "Time", 10 July 1989
1912 If you wish to be a success in the world,
1913 promise everything, deliver nothing.
1916 In politics stupidity is not a handicap.
1919 Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.
1922 A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
1923 -- Napoleon, "Maxims" 1804-1815
1925 History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
1926 -- Napoleon, "Maxims" 1804-1815
1928 Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
1929 -- Napolean, quoted in "The Book of Insults", 1978
1931 Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.
1934 Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
1935 -- George Jean Nathan
1937 Nobody believes the official spokesman ...
1938 but everybody trusts an unidentified source.
1941 Lack of will power has caused more failure than
1942 lack of intelligence or ability.
1943 -- Flower A. Newhouse
1945 Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
1948 If I have seen far, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
1951 O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed,
1952 courage to change what should be changed,
1953 and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
1954 -- Reinhold Niebuhr, sermon, 1934
1956 Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
1959 They [Nazis] came first for the Communists,
1960 and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
1961 Then they came for the Jews,
1962 and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
1963 Then they came for the Catholics,
1964 and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
1965 Then they came for me,
1966 and by that time there was no one left to speak up.
1967 -- Martin Niemueller
1969 In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
1970 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
1972 One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
1973 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
1975 What does not destroy me, makes me strong.
1976 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
1978 Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
1979 -- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil", 1885-1886
1981 A ship is always referred to as "she"
1982 because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.
1983 -- Chester Nimitz, Speech, 13 February 1940
1985 I have nothing to hide.
1988 I would have made a good pope.
1991 Voters quickly forget what a man says.
1994 Your President is no crook!
1997 Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth -
1998 to see it like it is, and tell it like it is -
1999 to find the truth, to speak the truth, and live the truth.
2000 -- Richard Nixon, accepting the Presidential Nomination, 1968
2002 When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
2003 -- Richard Nixon, in interview with David Frost, 19 May 1977
2005 Laws were made to be broken.
2006 -- Christopher North
2008 Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view.
2009 -- Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Return of the Jedi"
2011 There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
2012 -- Kenneth H. Olson, President of DEC,
2013 Convention of the World Future Society, 1977
2015 The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds,
2016 and the pessimist knows it.
2017 -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" 1951
2019 Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
2022 Liberal--a power worshipper without power.
2025 On the whole human beings want to be good,
2026 but not too good and not quite all the time.
2027 -- George Orwell, collected essays
2029 All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
2030 -- George Orwell, "Animal Farm" 1945
2032 Big Brother Is Watching You
2033 -- George Orwell, "1984", 1948
2035 Who controls the past controls the future.
2036 Who controls the present controls the past.
2037 -- George Orwell, "1984", 1948
2039 At 50 everyone has the face he deserves.
2040 -- George Orwell, "Journals", 1949
2042 Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives,
2043 but on balance life is suffering and only the very young
2044 or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
2045 -- George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant", 1950
2047 It is convenient that there be gods,
2048 and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are.
2049 -- Ovid, "Ars Amatoria"
2051 To be loved, be lovable.
2052 -- Ovid, "Ars Amatoria"
2054 The chief product of an automated society
2055 is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
2058 It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as
2059 to fill the time available for its completion.
2060 -- C. Northcote Parkinson, in "The Economist", 1955
2062 The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
2065 If all men knew what others say of them,
2066 there would not be four friends in the world.
2067 -- Blaise Pascal, 1656
2069 Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
2070 -- Blaise Pascal, "Pensees", 1670
2072 Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor
2073 of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will
2074 rob him of all if he gives too much.
2075 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2077 God forgives us... Who am I not to forgive?
2078 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2080 I have one great fear in my heart, that one day
2081 when they [the whites of South Africa] have turned to loving,
2082 they will find we [the blacks] are turned to hating.
2083 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2085 Then what is it worth, this mining industry? And why should it
2086 be kept alive, if it is only our poverty that keeps it alive? ...
2087 Is it we that must be kept poor so that others may stay rich?
2088 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2090 What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?
2091 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2093 Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? ...
2094 Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand.
2095 But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle,
2096 is beyond all human wisdom.
2097 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2099 Yet [white] men [of South Africa] were afraid,
2100 with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart,
2101 a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, ...
2102 They were afraid because they were so few.
2103 And fear could not be cast out, but by love.
2104 -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
2106 To give up the task of reforming society is to
2107 give up one's responsibility as a free man.
2110 Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often
2111 discover what they lack.
2114 Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do
2115 and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
2116 -- George S. Patton, "War As I Knew It", 1947
2118 Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained
2119 control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
2122 Public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
2123 -- Boies Penrose, 1931
2125 An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow
2126 why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
2127 -- Laurence J. Peter
2129 Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
2132 Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear
2133 but forgetting where you heard it.
2136 In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
2137 -- Laurence Peter, "The Peter Principle" 1969
2139 Democracy is a process by which the people are free
2140 to choose the man who will get the blame.
2141 -- Laurence Peter, "Peter's Quotations", 1977
2143 Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear
2144 but forgetting where you heard it.
2145 -- Laurence Peter, "Peter's Quotations", 1977
2147 A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well.
2148 -- Gaius Petronius, "Satyricon"
2150 Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
2151 -- Wendell Phillips, Speech, 7 November 1860
2153 Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.
2156 The measure of man is what he does with power.
2159 If everybody's behavior can be explained by simple stupidity and greed,
2160 there's no point in assuming a conspiracy.
2163 I don't need a friend who changes when I change
2164 and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.
2167 Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
2170 Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.
2173 Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.
2176 If you do not raise your eyes you will think you are the highest point.
2177 -- Antonio Porchia, "Voces", 1968
2179 One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
2180 -- Antonio Porchia, "Voces", 1968
2182 They talk most who have the least to say.
2185 A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
2188 A good workman is known by his tools.
2191 Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret,
2192 especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
2195 Maxim 914: Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
2198 Maxim 1070: I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
2201 Practice is the best of all instructors.
2204 If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.
2205 -- J. Danforth Quayle
2207 There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.
2208 In other words, a good offense wins.
2209 -- J. Danforth Quayle, on "Star Wars",
2210 quoted in "Time", 19 September 1988
2212 Happy campers you have been, happy campers you are,
2213 and happy campers you will always be.
2214 -- J. Danforth Quayle, on arrival in American Samoa,
2215 quoted in "Time", 8 May 1989
2217 I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and
2218 the only regret I have was that I didn't study
2219 Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.
2220 -- J. Danforth Quayle, quoted in "Time", 8 May 1989
2222 What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind.
2224 -- J. Danforth Quayle, addressing the United Negro
2225 College Fund, quoted in "Time", 26 June 1989
2227 Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as the Earth]...
2228 We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water.
2229 If there is water, there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
2230 -- J. Danforth Quayle, interviewed on Cable Network
2231 News, 11 August 1989
2233 Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
2234 -- Raymond Queneau, "A Model History"
2236 I have been staying in Moscow for only 24 hours,
2237 but already I feel almost at home.
2238 -- Hashemi Rafsanjani, in "New York Times",
2241 A nuclear power plant is infinitely safer than eating,
2242 because 300 people choke to death on food every year.
2243 -- Dixy Lee Ray, 1977, quoted from "Loose Talk"
2245 Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
2248 Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible
2249 for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen.
2252 If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.
2255 Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards,
2256 if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
2259 Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
2262 Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite
2263 at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
2264 -- Ronald Reagan, "Saturday Evening Post" 1965
2266 I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964
2267 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.
2268 -- Ronald Reagan, 20 October 1965
2270 I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
2271 -- Ronald Reagan, 1968
2273 All the wastes in a year from a nuclear power plant
2274 can be stored under a desk.
2275 -- Ronald Reagan, quoted in "Burlington Free Press", 15 February 1980
2277 History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20% of the
2278 people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government....
2279 When it reaches 25%, there comes an increase in lawlessness.
2280 -- Ronald Reagan, quoted in "Time", 14 April 1980
2282 Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released
2283 by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough
2284 emissions standards for man-made sources.
2285 -- Ronald Reagan, quoted in "Sierra", 10 September 1980
2287 I have just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever;
2288 we begin bombing in 5 minutes.
2289 -- Ronald Reagan, weekly radio address, 11 August 1984
2291 Facts are stupid things.
2292 -- Ronald Reagan, 1988 Republican Convention
2294 The scientists split the atom; now the atom is splitting us.
2295 -- Quentin Reynolds, in "Quote & Unquote", 1970
2297 The streets are safe in Philadelphia,
2298 it's only the people who make them unsafe.
2301 We need excellence in public education and if the teachers can't do it,
2302 we'll send in a couple of policemen.
2303 -- Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia Bulletin, Oct 19, 1973
2305 One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability
2306 to distinguish our needs from our greeds.
2307 -- Don Robinson, quoted in "Reader's Digest", 1963
2309 If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind,
2310 give it more thought.
2313 We always love those who admire us,
2314 but we do not always love those whom we admire.
2315 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
2317 Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
2318 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
2320 Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches
2321 beyond their own understanding.
2322 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665
2324 Old people like to give good advice,
2325 as solace for no longer being able to provide bad examples.
2326 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665
2328 Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done
2329 as the fear of the consequences.
2330 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665
2332 The reason that lovers never weary each other
2333 is because they are always talking about themselves.
2334 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665
2336 Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are
2337 for finishing it.... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing
2338 would fall flat in a week.
2341 Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
2344 Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
2347 There is nothing as stupid as an educated man
2348 if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
2351 There's no trick to being a humorist when you have
2352 the whole government working for you.
2355 This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session
2356 as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
2359 We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb
2360 and clap as they go by.
2363 Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.
2364 -- Will Rogers, "The Illiterate Digest", 1924
2366 I never met a man I didn't like.
2367 -- Will Rogers, speech, June 1930
2369 Half our life is spent trying to find something to do
2370 with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
2371 -- Will Rogers, "The Autobiography of Will Rogers", 1949
2373 The world is an enormous injustice.
2376 We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away. The center
2377 of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week,
2378 but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
2381 No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
2382 -- Eleanor Roosevelt, "This is My Story", 1937
2384 The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those
2385 who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.
2386 -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
2388 It is common sense to take a method and try it.
2389 If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.
2390 But above all, try something.
2391 -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech, 22 May 1932
2393 The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
2394 -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1st Inaugural Address, 1933
2396 A technique is a trick that works.
2399 One half of the children born die before their eighth year.
2400 This is nature's law; why try to contradict it?
2401 -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education", 1762
2403 People who know little are usually great talkers,
2404 while men who know much say little.
2405 -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education", 1762
2407 Never trust anyone over thirty. -- Jerry Rubin, 1966
2409 The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
2410 so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
2413 Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -
2414 more than ruin, more even than death.
2415 -- Bertrand Russell, "Selected Papers"
2417 You can outdistance that which is running after you,
2418 but not what is running inside you.
2421 A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.
2424 Women and elephants never forget an injury.
2425 -- Saki, "Reginald", 1904
2427 A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
2428 -- Saki, "The Square Egg", 1924
2430 Neither soldiers nor money can defend a king
2431 but only friends won by good deeds, merit, and honesty.
2432 -- Sallust, "De bello Iugurthino"
2434 Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves,
2435 spits on its hands and goes to work.
2436 -- Carl Sandburg, in "New York Times", 1959
2438 In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes
2439 when you awake in the morning.
2440 -- Carl Sandburg, in "New York Post", 1960
2442 A man's feet should be planted in his country,
2443 but his eyes should survey the world.
2446 Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
2449 Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
2452 When the rich make war it's the poor that die.
2453 -- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Le Diable et le bon Dieu", 1951
2455 Tolerance means excusing the mistakes others make.
2456 Tact means not noticing them.
2457 -- Arthur Schnitzler
2459 Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision
2460 for the limits of the world.
2461 -- Arthur Schopenhauer, "Studies in Pessimism"
2463 There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
2464 -- Charles M. Schulz
2466 Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
2467 -- C. P. Scott, c.1900
2469 They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist---
2470 -- General John B. Sedgwick, last words, 1864
2472 They that govern the most make the least noise.
2473 -- John Seldon, 1689
2475 People will swim through sh*t if you put a few bob in it.
2478 It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
2479 -- Seneca, "Epistles"
2481 There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
2482 -- Seneca, "On Tranquility of the Mind"
2484 Every reign must submit to a greater reign. -- Seneca, "Thyestes"
2486 Singing makes all the sad people happy because it is the voice of happiness.
2489 A government that robs Peter to pay Paul
2490 can always depend upon the support of Paul.
2491 -- George Bernard Shaw
2493 Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
2494 -- George Bernard Shaw
2496 If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
2497 -- George Bernard Shaw
2499 It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
2500 -- George Bernard Shaw
2502 Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior
2503 to all others because you were born in it.
2504 -- George Bernard Shaw
2506 Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
2507 -- George Bernard Shaw
2509 We've already established what you are, ma'am.
2510 Now we're just haggling over the price.
2511 -- George Bernard Shaw
2513 Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
2514 -- George Bernard Shaw, "The Rejected Statement"
2516 He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
2517 -- George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman", 1903
2519 Lack of money is the root of all evil.
2520 -- George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman", 1903
2522 Liars ought to have good memories.
2525 All reformers, however strict their social conscience,
2526 live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
2527 -- Logan Pearsall Smith
2529 I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
2532 I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
2535 The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
2538 If God had meant there to be more than 2 factors of production,
2539 He would have made it easier for us to draw three-dimensional diagrams.
2542 Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
2545 Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
2548 If you want a thing well done, do it yourself.
2549 -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
2551 A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
2554 The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
2557 Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
2558 -- Joseph Stalin, Speech, 19 April 1923
2560 Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
2561 -- Joseph Stalin, 1935
2563 Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?
2566 Time is the only critic without ambition.
2567 -- John Steinbeck, "Writers at Work', 1977
2569 There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a
2570 vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
2573 A hungry man is not a free man.
2576 In America, any boy may become president and I suppose
2577 that's just one of the risks he takes.
2580 Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact
2581 that sometimes he has to eat them.
2584 The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.
2585 -- Adlai Stevenson, 9 September 1952
2587 The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
2588 -- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Virginibus Puerisque", 1881
2590 Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness.
2591 Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success.
2592 -- Sting (Gordon Summer), 1980
2594 If God, as some now say, is dead, He no doubt died of trying
2595 to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.
2596 -- I. F. Stone, 1967
2598 Ninety per cent of everything is crap.
2599 -- Theodore Sturgeon
2601 There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.
2604 Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and
2605 thinking what no one else has thought.
2606 -- Albert Szent-Gyorgi
2608 And you may ask yourself "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
2609 And you may say to yourself "MY GOD! WHAT HAVE I DONE?"
2610 -- The Talking Heads
2612 The nice thing about standards is that there are
2613 so many of them to choose from.
2614 -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
2616 A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, will tell you.
2617 -- Bert Taylor, "The So-Called Human Race", 1922
2619 The hunger for love is much more difficult
2620 to remove than the hunger for bread.
2621 -- Mother Teresa, quoted in "Time", 4 December 1989
2623 El infierno es el lugar donde no se ama.
2624 (Hell is the place where love is not found.)
2627 If you want anything said, ask a man.
2628 If you want anything done, ask a woman.
2629 -- Margaret Thatcher
2631 You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.
2632 -- Margaret Thatcher, 1976
2634 Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
2635 the true place for a just man is also a prison.
2636 -- Henry David Thoreau
2638 That government is best which governs least.
2639 -- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" 1849
2641 The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
2642 -- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
2644 If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
2645 perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
2646 -- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
2648 The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
2649 -- Henry David Thoreau, "Journal", 26 September 1859
2651 I think that maybe if women and children
2652 were in charge we would get somewhere.
2655 It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
2658 You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
2659 -- James Thurber, "The Thurber Carnival", 1945
2661 The Law of Raspberry Jam--The wider any culture is spread,
2662 the thinner it gets.
2663 -- Alvin Toffler, "The Culture Consumers", 1964
2665 The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
2668 The function of genius is not to give new answers,
2669 but to pose new questions--which time and mediocrity can solve.
2670 -- Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Men and Events"
2672 The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained
2673 by recourse to every form of violence.
2674 -- Leon Trotsky, "Terrorism and Communism", 1924
2676 If you can't convince them, confuse them.
2679 If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
2682 It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
2685 Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
2686 -- Harry S. Truman, "Memoirs, Vol. II", 1955
2688 A President cannot always be popular.
2689 -- Harry S. Truman, "Memoirs, Vol. II", 1955
2691 It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job;
2692 it's a depression when you lose yours.
2693 -- Harry S. Truman, 1958
2695 Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
2696 -- Harry S. Truman, 1959
2698 The more laws and order are made prominent,
2699 the more thieves and robbers there will be.
2702 Words divide us, action unites us.
2703 -- Slogan of the Tupamaros
2705 If I had any humility I would be perfect.
2708 Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to.
2711 The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
2714 The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
2717 When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand
2718 to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished
2719 at how much he had learned in seven years.
2722 Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority,
2723 it is time to reform.
2726 Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
2727 it's time to pause and reflect.
2730 Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear.
2731 -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson", 1894
2733 Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy
2734 you must have somebody to divide it with.
2735 -- Mark Twain, "Following the Equator", 1897
2737 Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
2738 -- Mark Twain, Correspondence, 1908
2740 Good politics are often inextricably intertwined.
2741 -- Morris Udall, "Too Funny to Be President", 1988
2743 Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender,
2744 for tomorrow we may have to eat them.
2745 -- Morris Udall, quoted in "Sierra", May/June 1989
2747 To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
2748 -- Miguel de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life", 1913
2750 Nada muere, todo baja del rio del tiempo al mar de la eternidad y alli queda.
2751 -- Miguel de Unamuno, "Ver con los Ojos y Otros Relatos Novelescos"
2753 No es acaso todo esto un sueno de Dios o de quien sea,
2754 que se desvanecera en cuanto El despierte,
2755 y por eso le rezamos y elevamos a El canticos a himnos,
2756 para adormecerle, para cunar su sueno?
2757 -- Miguel de Unamuno, "Niebla", 1914
2759 Nadie tiene mas imaginacion que la realidad.
2760 -- Miguel de Unamuno, "El Espejo de la Muerte", 1941
2762 The Vice Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate.
2763 Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.
2766 Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
2767 (And perhaps at some later date it will be pleasant to remember these things.)
2770 Time is flying never to return.
2773 It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
2776 There's a lot to be said for being noveau riche,
2777 and the Reagans mean to say it all.
2778 -- Gore Vidal, in "The Observer", 1981
2780 A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire
2782 If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. -- Voltaire
2784 Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft...
2785 and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor.
2786 -- Wernher von Braun
2788 We are what we pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
2790 One's company, two's a crowd and three's a party.
2791 -- Andy Warhol, in "Exposures", 1979
2793 The sports page records people's accomplishments;
2794 The front page nothing but their failures.
2795 -- Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren
2797 My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us
2798 to occupy the land until Jesus returns.
2799 -- James Watt, in "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981
2801 If you worry about your customers,
2802 you won't have to worry about money.
2803 -- Les Welch, in "Bicycle USA", March/April 1990
2805 I passionately hate the idea of being with it,
2806 I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
2807 -- Orson Welles, 1966
2809 I never loved another person the way I loved myself. -- Mae West
2811 Too much of a good thing is wonderful. -- Mae West
2813 When choosing between two evils, I always like to take
2814 the one I've never tried before.
2815 -- Mae West, in "Klondike Annie" 1936
2817 Do I contradict myself?
2818 Very well then I contradict myself,
2819 (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
2820 -- Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass", 1855
2822 There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
2825 No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
2828 There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
2829 and that is not being talked about.
2832 A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
2833 -- Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Grey", 1891
2835 Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them;
2836 sometimes they forgive them.
2837 -- Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Grey", 1891
2839 There is no sin except stupidity.
2840 -- Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist", 1891
2842 We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
2843 -- Oscar Wilde, "Lady Windermere's Fan", 1892
2845 Relations are simply a tedious pack of people,
2846 who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live,
2847 nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
2848 -- Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest", 1895
2850 Hindsight is always 20:20.
2853 Voters do not decide issues. They decide *who* will decide issues.
2854 -- George F. Will, in "Newsweek", 1976
2856 Anyone can hate. It costs to love.
2859 Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
2860 -- Gary Wills, in "New York Times", 1975
2862 Not-really-trying is just as much effort as trying-really-hard.
2863 The only difference... is that not-really-trying receives no reward.
2864 -- A. N. Wilson, "Incline Our Hearts", 1989
2866 If you think nobody cares if you're alive,
2867 try missing a couple of car payments.
2870 You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't
2871 put a few nickels in the machine.
2872 -- Flip Wilson, 1971
2874 Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.
2875 -- Jonathan Winters in "The Twilight Zone"
2877 The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
2878 -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
2880 Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses
2881 possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting
2882 the figure of man at twice its natural size.
2883 -- Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own", 1929
2885 TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
2886 -- Frank Lloyd Wright
2888 I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.
2891 Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
2892 -- William Butler Yeats
2894 He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
2895 -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1968
2897 It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!
2900 Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
2903 One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you
2904 only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
2905 -- Frank Zappa, 1979
2907 Progress might be a circle, rather than a straight line.
2908 -- Eberhard Zeidler, in "Contemporary Architects", 1980
2910 Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a
2911 mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and
2912 wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, "Okay, as
2913 long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch,
2914 you know." He started telling his story, about the treasure
2915 and his life and all, and I thought "This story isn't too long".
2916 But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, "Uh-oh, this
2917 story is getting long." But then the story was over, and I said
2918 to myself: "You know, that story wasn't too long after all".
2919 I forgot what the story was about, but there was a good movie
2920 on the plane. It was a little long though.
2921 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2923 I believe in making the world safe for our children,
2924 but not for our children's children, because i don't
2925 believe children should be having sex.
2926 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2928 In weightlifting, I don't think that sudden uncontrolled urination should
2929 automatically disqualify you.
2930 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2932 Blow ye winds, like the trumpet blows, but without that noise.
2933 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2935 When the age of the Vikings came to a close, they must have sensed it.
2936 Probably, they gathered together one evening, slapped each other on the
2937 back and said, "Hey, good job".
2938 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2940 I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing
2941 a fresh load of tadpoles to that old board of his. Then he'd spin it round
2942 and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell
2943 out, "Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!" We all thought he was crazy. But
2944 then, we had some growing up to do.
2945 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2947 If I ever opened a trampoline store, I don't think I'd call it Trampo-Land,
2948 because you might think it was a store for tramps, which is not the
2949 impression we are trying to convey with our store. On the other hand, we
2950 would not prohibit tramps from browsing, or testing the trampolines, unless
2951 a tramp's gyrations seemed to be getting out of control.
2952 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2954 I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula
2955 _and_ Superman away.
2956 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2958 Too bad you can't just grab a tree by the very tiptop and bend it clear to
2959 the ground and then let her fly, because I bet you'd be amazed at all the
2960 stuff that comes flying out.
2961 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2963 I remember that fateful day when Coach took me aside. I knew
2965 "You don't have to tell me," I said. "I am off the team, aren't I?"
2966 "Well," said the coach, "You never were really _on_ the team. You
2967 made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels, and your helmet
2968 is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and then either steal the
2969 ball and make us chase you to get it back, or you try to tackle people at
2970 inappropriate times."
2971 It was all true what he was saying. And yet, I thought, something is
2972 brewing inside the head of the coach. He sees something inside of me,
2973 some kind of raw talent that he can mold. But that's when I felt the
2975 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2977 When I heard that trees grow a new "ring" for each year they live, I thought,
2978 we humans are kind of like that; we grow a new layer of skin each year; and
2979 after many years we are thick and unwieldy from all our skin layers.
2980 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2982 If you're in a boxing match, try not to let the other guy's glove touch your
2983 lips, because you don't know where that glove has been.
2984 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2986 It's too bad that whole families have been torn apart by something as
2987 simple as wild dogs.
2988 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2990 Marta says the interesting thing about fly fishing is that it's two lives
2991 connected by a thin strand. Come on, Marta. Grow up.
2992 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2994 The old pool shooter had many a game in his life. But now it was time to
2995 hang up the cue. When he did, all the other cues came crashing to the floor.
2996 "Sorry," he said with a smile.
2997 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
2999 If I ever do a book on the Amazon, I hope I am able to bring a certain
3000 lightheartedness to the subject, in a way that tells the reader we are going
3001 to have fun with this thing.
3002 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3004 Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had
3005 accomplished was a brillant piece of stratagy. First, he punched me, then
3006 he kicked me, then he punched me again.
3007 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3009 The sound of fresh rain run-off splashing from the roof reminded me of the
3010 sound of urine splashing into a filthy Texaco latrine.
3011 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3013 I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very
3014 large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then, after you
3015 camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?
3016 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3018 I scrambled to the top of the precipice where Nick was waiting. "That was
3019 fun," I said. "You bet it was", said Nick. "Lets climb higher." "No," I
3020 said, "I think we should be heading back now." "We have time," Nick
3021 insisted. I said we didn't, and Nick said we did. We argued back and forth
3022 like that for about 20 minutes, then finally decided to head back. I didn't
3023 say it was an interesting story.
3024 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3026 Some folks say it was a miracle. Saint Francis suddenly appeared and knocked
3027 the pitch clean over the fence. But I think it was just a lucky swing.
3028 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3030 Too bad there's not such a thing as a _golden_ skunk, because you'd probably
3031 be _proud_ to be sprayed by one.
3032 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3034 To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same
3035 time unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I
3036 can't remember, all rolled into one big "thing". This is truth, to me.
3037 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3039 I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to
3040 be an eclipse and tell the cave men, "If I have come to destroy you, may the
3041 sun be blotted out from the sky". Just then the eclipse would start, and
3042 they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about
3043 the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh.
3044 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3046 I think in one of my previous lives I was a mighty king, because I like
3047 people that do what I say.
3048 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3050 Today I accidentally stepped on a snail on the sidewalk in front of our
3051 house. And I thought, I too am like that snail. I build a defensive wall
3052 around myself, a "shell" if you will. But my shell isn't made out of a hard,
3053 protective substance. Mine is made out of tinfoil and paper bags.
3054 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3056 A man doesn't automatically get my respect. He has to get down in the dirt
3058 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3060 If you're ever stuck in some thick undergrowth, in your underwear, don't
3061 stop and start thinking of what other words have "under" in them, because
3062 that's probably the first sign of jungle madness.
3063 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3065 Sometimes the beauty of the world is so overwhelming, I just want to throw
3066 back my head and gargle. Just gargle and gargle, and I don't care who hears
3067 me, because I am beautiful.
3068 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3070 Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an
3071 astronaut on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into
3072 Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!!, you just
3073 slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and
3074 say he's not Dracula, but you just say, "Think again, bat man."
3075 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3077 I wish scientists would come up with a way to make a dogs a lot bigger, but
3078 with a smaller head. That way, they'd still be good as watchdogs, but they
3079 wouldn't eat so much.
3080 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3082 I bet for an Indian, shooting an old fat pioneer woman in the back with an
3083 arrow, and she fires her shotgun into the ground as she falls over, is like
3084 the top thing you can do.
3085 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3087 I think a good movie would be about a guy who's a brain scientist but he gets
3088 hit on the head and it damages the part of the brain that makes you want
3090 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3092 I wouldn't be surprised if someday some fishermen caught a big shark and cut
3093 it open, and there inside was a whole person. Then they cut the person open,
3094 and in him is a little baby shark. And in the baby shark there isn't a
3095 person, because it would be too small. But there's a little doll or
3096 something, like a Johnny Combat little toy guy--something like that.
3097 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3099 It makes me mad when I go to all the trouble of having Marta cook up about
3100 a hundred drumsticks, then the guy at Marineland says, "You can't throw
3101 chicken to the dolphins. They eat fish." Sure they eat fish, if that is all
3102 you give them. Man, wise up.
3103 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3105 If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at how much
3106 glow-in-the-dark stuff we have, and how we take so much of it for granted.
3107 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3109 It's not good to let any kid near a container that has a skull and
3110 crossbones on it, because there might be a skeleton costume inside and the
3111 kid could put it on and really scare you.
3112 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3114 If you had a school for professional fireworks people, I don't think you
3115 could cover fuses in just one class. It's just too rich a subject.
3116 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3118 People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they
3119 forget the negative side, which is the preening.
3120 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3122 If I lived back in the Wild West days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my
3123 holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That way, if some smart-aleck cowboy
3124 said something like "Hey, look. He's carrying a soldering iron!" and started
3125 laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, "That's
3126 right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice." Then everybody
3127 would be real quiet and ashamed, because they made fun of the soldering iron
3128 of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink.
3129 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3131 When I think back on all the blessings I have been given in my life, I can't
3132 think of a single one, unless you count that rattlesnake that granted me
3134 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3136 I hope in the future Americans are thought of as a warlike, vicious people,
3137 because I bet a lot of high schools would pick "Americans" as their mascot.
3138 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3140 Sometimes I think the world has gone completely mad. And then I think, "Aw,
3141 who cares?" And then I think "Hey, what's for supper?"
3142 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3144 If you ever discover that what you're seeing is a play within a play, just
3145 slow down, take a deep breath, and hold on for the ride of your life.
3146 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3148 I can see why it would be prohibited to throw most things off the top of
3149 the Empire State Building, but what's wrong with little bits of cheese?
3150 They probably break down into their various gases before they even hit.
3151 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3153 If you're a circus clown, and you have a dog that you use in your act, I
3154 don't think it's a good idea to to dress the dog up like a clown, because
3155 people see that and they think, "Forgive me, but that's just too much".
3156 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3158 Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: straddle a big crack in the
3159 ground, and if it opens wider, go "Whoa! Whoa!" and flail your arms around,
3160 like you're going to fall in.
3161 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3163 If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people
3164 do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be suprised.
3165 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3167 It makes me mad when people say I turned and ran like a scared rabbit. Maybe
3168 it was like an angry rabbit, who was running to go fight in another fight,
3169 away from the first fight.
3170 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3172 I think a good way to get into a movie is to show up where they're making the
3173 movie, then stick a big cactus plant onto your buttocks and start yowling
3174 and running around. Everyone would think it was funny, and the head movie guy
3175 would say, "Hey, let's put him in the movie."
3176 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3178 Instead of having "answers" on a math test, they should just call them
3179 "impressions", and if you got a different "impression", so what, can't we
3181 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3183 If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope He likes
3184 enchiladas, because that's what He's getting!
3185 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3187 Probably to a shark, about the funniest thing there is a wounded seal,
3188 trying to swim to shore, because _where_does_he_think_he's_going_?!
3189 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3191 Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday
3192 be noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the
3193 greatest works of genius ever created by Man.
3194 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3196 Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine,
3197 which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.
3198 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3200 Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself:
3201 "Mankind." Basically, it's made up of two separate words--"mank" and "ind."
3202 What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
3203 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3205 I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they don't
3206 just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good
3208 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3210 It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at
3212 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3214 I guess we were all guilty, in a way. We all shot him, we all skinned him,
3215 and we all got a complimentary bumper sticker that said, "I helped skin
3217 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3219 I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is
3220 they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then,
3221 when somebody comes up, act like they just woke up and go, "What was
3223 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3225 The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
3226 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3228 Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite
3229 and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny
3230 plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like
3232 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3234 I'd rather be rich than stupid.
3235 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3237 If you were a poor Indian with no weapons, and a bunch of conquistadors
3238 came up to you and asked where the gold was, I don't think it would be a
3239 good idea to say, "I swallowed it. So sue me."
3240 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3242 If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger,
3243 screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave Man, I
3245 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3247 I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture,
3248 is the story of Popeye.
3249 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3251 When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they
3253 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3255 To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography,
3256 and the dancers hit each other.
3257 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3259 What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a
3260 solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.
3261 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3263 We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at
3264 them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.
3265 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3267 Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of
3268 striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.
3269 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3271 I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon was
3272 free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand, pretending
3273 he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.
3274 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3276 To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've
3277 wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to
3278 the circus, and a clown killed my dad.
3279 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3281 As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was
3282 very pleasurable-until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN
3284 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3286 Most people don't realize that large pieces of coral, which have been
3287 painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a
3288 child look like a deer.
3289 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3291 If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We
3292 might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
3293 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3295 Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head
3296 out when you're coming home his face might burn up.
3297 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3299 You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who makes
3300 people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.
3301 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3303 Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm
3304 myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell.
3305 When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on
3306 the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with
3307 a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no
3309 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3311 If you're a horse, and someone gets on you, and falls off, and then gets
3312 right back on you, I think you should buck him off right away.
3313 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3315 If you ever teach a yodeling class, probably the hardest thing is to keep
3316 the students from just trying to yodel right off. You see, we build to
3318 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3320 If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe
3321 you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey,
3323 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3325 I'd like to see a nude opera, because when they hit those high notes, I bet
3326 you can really see it in those genitals.
3327 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3329 Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's
3330 neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because
3332 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3334 He was a cowboy, mister, and he loved the land. He loved it so much he
3335 made a woman out of dirt and married her. But when he kissed her, she
3336 disintegrated. Later, at the funeral, when the preacher said, "Dust to
3337 dust," some people laughed, and the cowboy shot them. At his hanging, he
3338 told the others, "I'll be waiting for you in heaven--with a gun."
3339 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3341 The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I
3342 remember we'd all pile into the car-I forget what kind it was-and drive and
3343 drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there.
3344 The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we
3345 played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff,
3346 or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.
3347 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3349 If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is
3350 "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to
3351 tell him is "probably because of something you did."
3352 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3354 Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is
3355 not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's a shark riding on an
3356 elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see.
3357 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3359 As we were driving, we saw a sign that said "Watch for Rocks." Martha said
3360 it should read "Watch for Pretty Rocks." I told her she should write in
3361 her suggestion to the highway department, but she started saying it was a
3362 joke-- just to get out of writing a simple letter! And I thought I was lazy!
3363 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3365 One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my
3366 little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out
3367 warehouse. "Oh, no," I said, "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried,
3368 but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started
3369 to drive over to the the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.
3370 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3372 If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flipper, which one would you think
3373 liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong,
3374 though. It's Hambone.
3375 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3377 Laurie got offended because I used the word "puke."
3378 But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.
3379 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3381 We used to laugh at Grandpa when he'd head off and go fishing. But we
3382 wouldn't be laughing that evening when he'd come back with a whore he
3384 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3386 I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to
3387 town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.
3388 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3390 As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I
3391 thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and
3392 how I named him Flint.
3393 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3395 If you're a young Mafia gangster out on your first date, I bet it's real
3396 embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.
3397 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3399 Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first
3400 instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell
3401 on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.
3402 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3404 If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and your friends
3405 are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were
3407 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3409 When I was a kid, my favorite relative was Uncle Caveman. After school
3410 we'd all go play in his cave, and every once in a while he would eat one of
3411 us. It wasn't until later that I found out that Uncle Caveman was a bear.
3412 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3414 I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're
3415 sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur.
3416 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
3418 Another major social development of the time was the Temperance
3419 Movement, led by Carrie Nation, who headed an organization called
3420 Scary Looking Women with Hatchets. They would swoop down upon saloons
3421 and smash all the whiskey bottles, then go back to their headquarters,
3422 fire up reefers as big as Roman candles, and laugh until dawn. This
3423 resulted in so much social turmoil that in 1918 Congress decided to
3424 have a total prohibition on alcohol, which was approved early on a
3425 Saturday morning by a vote of 9-2, with 416 members unable to attend
3426 because of severe headaches. Thus began the nation's "Noble
3427 Experiment," which was eventually judged to be a noble failure and
3428 replaced by the current sensible and coherent alcohol policy of
3429 showing public-service TV announcements wherein professional sports
3430 figures urge people not to drink, interspersed with TV commercials
3431 wherein professional sports figures urge people to drink.
3432 -- from "Dave Barry Slept Here", 1989
3436 The Tao that can be known is not Tao.
3437 The substance of the World is only a name for Tao.
3438 Tao is all that exists and may exist;
3439 The World is only a map of what exists and may exist.
3441 One experiences without Self to sense the World;
3442 One experiences with Self to understand the World.
3443 The two experiences are the same within Tao;
3444 They are distinct only within the World.
3445 Neither experience conveys Tao
3446 Which is infinitely greater and subtler than the World.
3450 When Beauty is ascribed to the World
3451 Ugliness has been learned;
3452 When Good is ascribed to the World
3453 Evil has been learned.
3456 Alive and dead are abstracted from growth;
3457 Difficult and easy are abstracted from progress;
3458 Long and short are abstracted from contrast;
3459 High and low are abstracted from position;
3460 Song and speech are abstracted from harmony;
3461 After and before are abstracted from sequence.
3463 For this reason the sage controls without instruction,
3464 And teaches without words.
3465 He lets all things rise and fall,
3466 Nurtures, but does not interfere,
3467 Gives without demanding,
3470 3. Control without Action
3472 Not praising the worthy prevents cheating
3473 Not esteeming the rare prevents theft
3474 Not flaunting beauty prevents lust
3476 So the sage controls people by:
3477 Emptying their hearts,
3478 Filling their bellies,
3479 Weakening their ambitions,
3480 And strengthening their bodies.
3482 If people lack knowledge and desire
3483 The crafty among them can not act;
3484 If no action is taken
3485 Then all live in peace.
3487 4. Properties of Tao
3489 Tao is a depthless vessel;
3490 Used by the Self, it is not filled by the World;
3491 It cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled;
3492 Its depths are hidden, ubiquitous and eternal;
3493 I don't know where it came from,
3494 But it came before Nature.
3499 It treats all things impartially.
3500 The Sage is not kind,
3501 And treats all people impartially.
3503 Nature is like a bellows
3504 Empty, yet supplying all needs,
3505 The more it moves, the more it yields;
3506 The sage draws upon Tao in the same way
3507 And so can not be exhausted.
3511 Like a riverbed, the heart is never filled
3512 It is an ineffable female
3513 Whose entrance is the root of the World;
3514 Tao is ever present within it:
3515 Draw upon it and it will never fail.
3519 Nature is everlasting
3520 Because it does not have a Self.
3522 In the same way the sage
3523 Serves his Self last and finds it served first,
3524 Regards his body as accidental and finds it endures;
3525 Because his Self does not require service
3530 The best of man is like water,
3531 Which benefits all things, and does not contend with them,
3532 Which flows in places that others disdain,
3533 Where it holds fast to Tao.
3536 In dwelling holds fast to the land,
3537 In feeling holds fast to the heart,
3538 In dealing holds fast to men,
3539 In talking holds fast to truth,
3540 In governing holds fast to order,
3541 In crafting holds fast to competence,
3542 In acting holds fast to opportunity;
3543 So he does not contend, and is without blame.
3547 Stretch a bow to its limit and it is soon broken;
3548 Temper a blade to its sharpest and it is soon blunted;
3549 Amass the greatest treasure and it is soon stolen;
3550 Claim credit and honour and you will soon fall;
3551 Retire once your purpose is achieved--this is the best way.
3555 Embracing Tao, can you become embraced?
3556 Supple, breathing gently, can you become newborn?
3557 Clearing your vision, can you become clear?
3558 Nurturing your beloved, can you become impartial?
3559 Opening your heart, can you become female?
3560 Knowing the world, can you embrace Tao?
3562 Bearing and nurturing,
3563 Creating but not owning,
3564 Giving without demanding,
3565 Controlling without authority.
3568 11. Wealth and Worth
3570 Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
3571 Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
3572 Clay is moulded into a vessel;
3573 Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
3574 Walls are built around a hearth
3575 Because of the doors we may use the house.
3576 Thus wealth comes from what is,
3577 But worth from what is not.
3581 Too much color blinds the eye
3582 Too much tone deafens the ear
3583 Too much taste dulls the palate
3584 Too much play maddens the mind
3585 Too much desire tears the heart.
3587 The sage provides for the belly but not for the senses;
3588 He lets go of sensation and accepts substance.
3592 The mythic masters said: "Praise and blame cause anxiety;
3593 The objects of hope and fear are within your Self."
3595 "Praise and blame cause anxiety"
3596 For you must hope and fear to receive or to lose them.
3598 "The objects of hope and fear are within your Self"
3599 For, without Self, neither fortune nor disaster can befall.
3602 He who regards the World as the Self is able to control the World;
3603 He who loves the World as the Self is able to nurture the World.
3605 14. The Continuity of Tao
3607 Looked at but cannot be seen--it is beyond form;
3608 Listened to but cannot be heard--it is beyond sound;
3609 Grasped at but cannot be touched--it is beyond reach;
3610 Depthless things evade definition,
3611 And blend into a single mystery.
3613 In its rising there is no light,
3614 In its falling there is no darkness,
3615 A continuous thread beyond description,
3616 Lining what can not exist,
3620 Meet it, it has no face,
3621 Follow it, it has no back.
3623 Understand the past, but attend the present;
3624 In this way you know the continuity of Tao,
3625 Which is its essence.
3627 15. The Mythic Masters
3629 The Mythic Masters of Tao had understanding
3630 So profound they can not be understood.
3632 Because they cannot be understood
3633 I can only describe their appearance:
3634 Cautious, like one crossing thin ice,
3635 Hesitant, like one who fears danger,
3636 Modest, like one who is a guest,
3637 Smooth, like melting ice,
3638 Genuine, like unshaped wood,
3639 Empty, like a riverbed,
3640 Opaque, like muddy water.
3642 He who can lie still while the mud settles,
3643 And remain still until the water flows
3644 Does not seek fulfillment
3645 And may transcend Nature.
3647 16. Transcending Nature
3649 Empty the Self completely;
3650 Embrace perfect peace.
3651 The World will rise and move;
3652 Watch it return to rest.
3653 All the flourishing things
3654 Will return to their source.
3656 This return is peaceful;
3657 It is the way of Nature,
3658 An eternal decay and renewal.
3659 Understanding this brings enlightenment,
3660 Ignorance of this brings misery.
3662 Who understands Nature's way becomes all-cherishing;
3663 Being all-cherishing he becomes impartial;
3664 Being impartial he becomes magnanimous;
3665 Being magnanimous he becomes part of Nature;
3666 Being part of Nature he becomes one with Tao;
3667 Being one with Tao he becomes immortal:
3668 Though his body will decay, Tao will not.
3672 The best rulers are scarcely known by their subjects;
3673 The next best are loved and praised;
3674 The next are feared;
3676 They have no faith in their subjects,
3677 So their subjects become unfaithful to them.
3679 When the best kings achieve their purpose
3680 Their subjects claim the achievement as their own.
3684 When Tao is forgotten
3685 Duty and justice arise;
3686 Then wisdom and sagacity are born
3687 Along with hypocrisy.
3689 When family relationships dissolve
3690 Then respect and devotion arise;
3691 When a nation falls to chaos
3692 Then loyalty and patriotism are born.
3696 If we could discard wisdom and sagacity
3697 Then people would profit a hundredfold;
3698 If we could discard duty and justice
3699 Then loving relationships would form;
3700 If we could discard artifice and profit
3701 Then corruption and theft would disappear -
3702 Yet such remedies treat only symptoms
3703 And so are inadequate.
3705 People need personal remedies:
3706 Reveal your naked Self,
3707 Embrace your original nature,
3708 Bind your self-interest,
3709 Control your desire.
3713 I know nothing and nothing troubles me.
3714 I see no difference between yes and no.
3715 I see no difference between good and evil.
3716 I do not fear what the people fear in the night.
3718 The people are merry as if at a tremendous party
3719 Or playing in the park at springtime;
3720 But I am tranquil and wandering,
3721 Like a newborn before it learns to smile,
3722 Lonely, with no true home.
3724 The people have enough and to spare,
3726 And my heart is foolish,
3729 The people are bright and certain,
3730 Where I am dim and confused;
3731 The people are clever and wise,
3732 Where I am dull and ignorant,
3733 Aimless as a wave drifting over the sea,
3734 Attached to nothing.
3736 The people are busy with purpose,
3737 Where I am impractical and uncouth.
3738 I am apart from all other people
3739 Yet I am sustained by Nature, their mother.
3741 21. Expressions of Tao
3743 Love is expressed by following Tao.
3745 Tao is evasive and intangible
3746 But expresses all form and substance;
3747 Tao is dark and subtle
3748 But expresses Nature;
3749 Nature is unchanging,
3750 But expresses sensation.
3752 Since before knowledge
3753 Tao has expressed these things.
3755 By faith in my senses.
3757 22. Contention and Contentment
3759 Accept and you become whole,
3760 Bend and you straighten,
3762 Decay and you renew,
3763 Want and you acquire,
3764 Fulfill and you become confused.
3766 The sage embraces the one
3767 As the World embraces Tao;
3768 He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
3769 Does not justify himself, so is famed,
3770 Does not boast, so is credited,
3771 Does not glory, so excels,
3772 Does not contend, and so no one contends against him.
3774 The mythic masters said, "Accept and you become whole",
3775 Once whole, the World is your home.
3779 Nature says only a few words:
3780 High wind does not last long,
3781 Nor does heavy rain.
3782 If Nature's words do not last
3783 Why should those of man?
3785 To follow Tao, become Tao; Tao will embrace you.
3786 To give love, become love; love will embrace you.
3787 To lose Tao, become lost; loss will embrace you.
3788 You must trust in order to be trusted.
3792 If you stand on tiptoe you can not stand steady;
3793 If you stride too long you can not stride well;
3794 If you display yourself you can not be clearly seen;
3795 If you justify yourself you can not be respected;
3796 If you promote yourself you can not be believed;
3797 If you pride yourself you can not excel.
3798 These behaviours are dregs and tumors,
3799 Disgusting things avoided by love.
3801 25. Four Infinities.
3803 Before the World exists
3807 Ubiquitous and ever moving,
3808 The mother of the World.
3809 I can not know its name, so I call it Tao;
3810 I can not know its limit, so I call it infinite.
3812 Being infinite, it flows away forever
3813 Flowing away forever, it will return to the Self.
3815 For the Self follows the way of the World
3816 The World follows the way of Nature
3817 And Nature follows the way of Tao.
3821 Therefore Nature is infinite,
3822 Therefore the World is infinite,
3823 Therefore the Self is infinite.
3824 There are four infinities,
3825 And the Self is one of them.
3827 26. Gravity and Calm
3829 Gravity is the root of Lightness,
3830 Calm, the master of Haste
3832 The commander of a great fleet should not act lightly or hastily.
3833 Acting lightly, he loses touch with the World,
3834 Acting hastily, he loses control of the Self.
3836 The sage will travel all day without losing his vehicles.
3837 Surrounded by desirable things,
3838 He remains calm and unattached.
3842 A good traveller leaves no trail to be followed
3843 A good speaker leaves no questions to be asked
3844 A good accountant leaves no workings to be checked
3845 A good container leaves no lock to be opened
3846 A good fastener leaves no knots to be unravelled
3848 So the sage nurtures all men
3849 And abandons no one.
3850 He accepts everything
3851 And rejects nothing.
3852 He attends to the smallest details.
3854 So the strong must guide the weak,
3855 For the weak are raw material to the strong.
3856 If the guide is not respected
3857 Or the material is not nurtured
3858 Confusion will result, no matter how clever one is.
3859 This is the essence of subtlety.
3861 28. Being the Female
3863 Knowing the male, being the female,
3864 Being the course through which flows the World,
3865 One possesses unfailing Love
3866 And exists again as a newborn.
3868 Knowing the light, being the dark,
3870 One becomes unerring Love
3873 Knowing honour, being humble,
3874 Being the valley of the World,
3876 And one becomes as unshaped wood.
3878 When wood is shaped it becomes tools.
3879 Used by the sage, tools become powerful;
3880 A good carpenter wastes little.
3884 Those who wish to change the World
3885 According with their desire
3888 The World is shaped by Tao;
3889 It cannot be shaped by the Self.
3890 If one tries to shape it, one damages it;
3891 If one tries to possess it, one loses it.
3894 Sometimes things will flourish,
3895 And sometimes they will not.
3896 Sometimes life is hard
3897 And sometimes it is easy.
3898 Sometimes people are strong
3899 And sometimes they are weak.
3900 Sometimes you get where you are going
3901 And sometimes you fall by the way.
3903 The sage is never extreme, extravagant, or complacent.
3907 Powerful men are well advised not to use violence,
3908 For violence has a habit of returning;
3909 Thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes,
3910 And lean years follow a great war.
3912 A general is well advised
3913 To achieve nothing more than his orders,
3914 No matter how strong his army;
3915 To carry out his orders
3916 But not glory, boast or be proud;
3917 To do what is dictated by necessity,
3918 But not by bloodlust;
3919 For even the fiercest force will weaken with time,
3920 And then its violence will return, and kill it.
3922 31. Tools of Violence
3924 Soldiers are tools of violence, feared by all;
3925 The sage will not employ them.
3926 His purpose is creation;
3927 Their purpose is destruction.
3929 Weapons are tools of violence, not of the wise man;
3930 He uses them when there is no choice
3931 For he values peace and tact,
3932 And does not delight in conquest.
3934 For who delights in conquest
3935 Delights in the slaughter of men;
3936 Who delights in the slaughter of men
3937 Cannot control them.
3939 Slaughters should be mourned
3940 And conquest should be celebrated with a funeral.
3944 Tao has no true definition.
3945 Like unshaped wood, it has no use;
3946 If a ruler understands this
3947 His whole country flourishes and obeys
3948 In harmony with his Self,
3949 Just as sweet rain falls
3950 Needing no instruction
3951 To slake the thirst of all.
3953 When Tao is shaped by use,
3954 The shape gains a name in the World;
3955 One should not keep too many names
3956 Lest their shapes stop up the Self;
3957 Instead let Tao flow through the Self into the World
3958 As water courses down a riverbed into the sea.
3962 He who understands the World is learned;
3963 He who understands the Self is enlightened.
3964 He who conquers the World has strength;
3965 He who conquers the Self has love.
3966 He who is contented has riches;
3967 He who is determined has purpose.
3968 He who maintains his home will long endure
3969 He who maintains his influence will live long after death.
3971 34. Tao Favours Nothing
3973 Infinite Tao flows everywhere, creating and destroying,
3974 Implementing all the World, attending to the tiniest details,
3975 Claiming nothing in return.
3977 It nurtures all things,
3978 Though it does not control them;
3980 So it seems inconsequential.
3982 It is the substance of all things;
3983 Though it does not control them;
3985 So it seems all-important.
3987 Because it favours no finite thing,
3992 Tao lacks art and flavour;
3993 It can neither be seen nor heard,
3994 Yet its application cannot be exhausted.
3996 So, if you offer music and food
3997 Strangers may stop with you;
3998 But if you accord with the shape of Tao
3999 The people of the World will keep you
4000 In safety, health, community, and peace.
4004 To reduce someone's influence, first cause it to expand;
4005 To reduce someone's force, first cause it to increase;
4006 To overthrow someone, first cause them to be exalted;
4007 To take something from someone, first give it to them.
4009 This is the subtlety by which the weak overcome the strong,
4010 For fish should not leave their depths;
4011 And soldiers should not leave their camouflage.
4013 37. Quieting the Heart
4015 Tao does not act, yet leaves nothing undone.
4016 If the Self understands this
4017 All things of the World will naturally flourish;
4018 Flourishing, they will be restrained by Nature.
4020 Nature does not possess desire;
4021 Without desire, the heart becomes quiet,
4022 And so the whole World may be made tranquil.
4026 The kind act without self-interest;
4027 The just act to serve self-interest;
4028 The religious act to reproduce self-interest.
4030 When Tao is lost, there is love;
4031 When love is lost, there is kindness;
4032 When kindness is lost, there is justice;
4033 And when justice is lost, there is religion.
4035 Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
4036 Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
4037 So religions enthrall generation after generation.
4039 Religion is the dissolution of love and trust,
4040 The beginning of confusion.
4041 Belief is a colourful hope or fear,
4042 The origin of folly.
4044 The sage goes by knowledge, not by hope;
4045 He dwells in the fruit, not the flower;
4046 He accepts the former, and rejects the latter.
4050 In mythic times things were whole:
4051 All the sky was clear,
4052 All the earth was stable,
4053 All the mountains were strong,
4054 All the riverbeds were full,
4055 All of nature was alive,
4056 All the rulers were supported.
4058 For without clarity the sky tears;
4059 Without stability the earth cracks;
4060 Without strength the mountain collapses;
4061 Without water the riverbed stagnates;
4062 Without life nature dies back;
4063 And without support rulers fall.
4065 So the ruler depends upon his subjects,
4066 The noble depend upon the humble;
4067 Rulers call themselves orphaned, lonely or disabled,
4068 To win the people's sympathy,
4069 For wholeness gains no support.
4071 So there is weakness in power,
4072 And power in weakness;
4073 Rather than tinkle like jade,
4074 One should clatter like stones.
4076 40. Application of Tao
4078 The motion of Tao is to return;
4079 The use of Tao is to accept;
4080 All things are made of Tao,
4081 And Tao is made of nothing.
4085 When the strong learn Tao, they practice it diligently;
4086 When the average learn Tao, they practice it sometimes;
4087 When the weak learn Tao, they laugh out loud;
4088 Those who do not laugh do not learn at all.
4090 Therefore is it said:
4091 Who understands Tao seems foolish;
4092 Who progresses in Tao seems to fail;
4093 Who follows Tao seems to wander.
4095 For the greatest force appears vulnerable;
4096 The brightest truth appears coloured;
4097 The richest character appears incomplete;
4098 The strongest heart appears meek;
4099 The most beautiful nature appears fickle;
4101 For the square, perfected, has no corner;
4102 Art, perfected, has no meaning;
4103 Sex, perfected, has no climax;
4104 Form, perfected, has no shape.
4106 So Tao can not be sensed or known:
4107 It transmits sensation and transcends knowledge.
4112 Love bears restraint;
4113 Restraint bears acceptance;
4114 Acceptance bears the World;
4115 All things begin with love and end with restraint,
4116 But it is acceptance that brings harmony.
4118 As others teach, I teach:
4119 "Those without harmony end with violence";
4122 43. Overcoming the Impossible
4124 The soft overcomes the hard;
4125 The formless penetrates the impenetrable;
4126 Therefore I value taking no action.
4128 Teaching without words,
4129 Work without action,
4130 Are understood by no one.
4134 Fame or Self: which is dearer?
4135 Self or wealth: which is more valuable?
4136 Profit or loss: which is more torturous?
4138 Great love incurs great expense,
4139 And great wealth incurs great theft,
4140 But great contentment incurs no loss.
4143 He who knows when to stop
4144 Does not continue into danger,
4145 And may long endure.
4149 Great perfection seems imperfect,
4151 Great abundance seems empty,
4154 Great truth seems contradictory;
4155 Great cleverness seems stupid;
4156 Great eloquence seems awkward.
4158 Action overcomes contentment,
4159 But stillness overcomes desire;
4160 Therefore calm and quiet control the World.
4164 When the World is not in accord with Tao,
4165 Horses bear soldiers through the countryside;
4166 When the World is in accord with Tao,
4167 Horses bear horse-manure through the countryside.
4169 There is no greater curse than desire;
4170 There is no greater misery than discontent;
4171 There is no greater ailment than greed;
4172 He who is content to be content shall always be content.
4174 47. Knowledge and Experience
4176 Without taking a step outdoors
4177 You know the whole World.
4178 Without taking a look out the window
4179 You see the colour of the sky.
4181 The more you experience,
4183 The sage wanders without knowing,
4184 Looks without seeing,
4185 Accomplishes without acting.
4189 The follower of knowledge acquires as much as he can every day;
4190 The follower of Tao loses as much as he can every day.
4192 By attrition he reaches a state of inaction
4193 Wherein he does nothing, but leaves nothing undone.
4195 To conquer the world, do nothing;
4196 If you must do something,
4197 The world remains beyond conquest.
4199 49. The Worlds of Others
4201 The sage does not distinguish between Self and World;
4202 Therefore the needs of people in the World are as his own.
4204 He is good to those who are good;
4205 He is also good to those who are not good;
4206 For love is goodness.
4207 He trusts those who are trustworthy;
4208 He also trusts those who are not trustworthy;
4211 He is in harmony with the World;
4212 Therefore he nurtures the Worlds of others
4213 As a mother does her children.
4217 Death enters life as man enters woman.
4220 Thirty years of growth;
4221 Thirty years of decay;
4222 Thirty years inbetween;
4223 So death and life reproduce themselves.
4225 He who would prolong his life
4226 Will not meet tigers or rhinoceri in the wilds,
4227 Nor soldiers in battle
4228 So the rhinoceros sees no place in him for its horn,
4229 The tiger no place for its claw,
4230 The soldier no place for a weapon;
4231 So death finds no place to enter his life.
4238 Circumstance completes us.
4240 We worship Tao and honour love;
4241 For worship of Tao and honour of love
4242 Are performed just by being alive.
4245 Love nurtures, develops, cares for,
4246 Shelters, comforts and makes a home for us.
4248 Making without controlling,
4249 Giving without demanding,
4250 Guiding without interfering,
4251 Helping without profiting,
4256 The origins of the World are its mother;
4257 Know the mother, and you understand the child;
4258 Know the child, and you embrace the mother,
4259 Who will not perish when you die.
4261 Reserve your judgments and words
4262 And you maintain your influence;
4263 Draw conclusions and speak your mind
4264 And your cause is lost.
4266 As seeing detail is clarity,
4267 So maintaining tact is strength;
4268 Keep your eyes and mind open
4269 So that you may not regret your actions;
4274 With but a small understanding
4275 One may follow Tao like a main road,
4276 Fearing only to leave it;
4277 Following a main road is easy,
4278 But being sidetracked is also easy.
4280 For when palaces are kept up
4281 Fields are left to weeds
4282 And granaries empty.
4284 Wearing fine clothes,
4285 Bearing sharp swords,
4286 Glutting with food and drink,
4287 Hoarding wealth and possessions -
4288 These are the ways of theft
4289 And deviations from Tao.
4293 Love does not think of love
4294 For this reason is it strong;
4296 Yet leaves nothing undone.
4297 Desire is intent upon love
4298 For this reason is it weak;
4300 Yet gets nothing done.
4302 Nurture love in the Self, and love will be genuine;
4303 Nurture love in the family, and love will be abundant;
4304 Nurture love in the community, and love will multiply;
4305 Nurture love in the culture, and love will flourish;
4306 Nurture love in the World, and love will be ubiquitous.
4309 Judge a person by their love;
4310 Judge a family by its love;
4311 Judge a community by its love;
4312 Judge a culture by its love;
4313 Judge the World by its love.
4314 How can I know the love of the World?
4319 Who is filled with love is like a newborn.
4320 Wasps will not sting him;
4321 Tigers will not eat him;
4322 Hawks will not tear out his eyes.
4324 His bones are soft, yet his sinews are supple,
4325 So his grip is strong;
4326 He has no wife, yet his manhood is healthy,
4327 So his vigour is unspoiled;
4328 He sings all day yet his voice remains sweet
4329 So his harmony is perfect.
4331 To approach Nature is to know harmony;
4332 To achieve Nature is to be enlightened;
4333 But to surpass Nature invites calamity
4334 For emotion will burst the lungs
4335 And exhaustion will age the heart:
4336 The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
4340 He who knows does not speak;
4341 He who speaks does not know.
4343 Reserve your judgments and words;
4344 Dull your wit and simplify your purpose;
4345 Be humble as earth and a part of Nature.
4348 Friendship and enmity,
4350 Honour and disgrace,
4351 Will not affect you.
4352 The impartial Self is of most benefit to the World.
4356 A nation is best governed by innocence;
4357 A war is best waged by treachery;
4358 The World is best controlled by inaction;
4362 The more property and taxes there are,
4363 The more poverty prevails;
4364 The more guns and knives there are,
4365 The more chaos prevails;
4366 The more arts and sciences there are,
4367 The more deceit prevails;
4368 The more rules and regulations there are,
4369 The more theft prevails.
4371 Therefore the sage says:
4372 I take no action, and the people become civilized;
4373 I wage no war, and the people become just;
4374 I transact no business, and the people become wealthy;
4375 I have no desire, and the people become innocent.
4379 When government is lazy and blunt
4380 The people are kind and honest;
4381 When government is efficient and severe
4382 The people are discontented and deceitful.
4384 Misery may yield happiness;
4385 Happiness may conceal misery.
4386 Who can say which will be for the best?
4387 Nothing is straightforward.
4388 Honesty is ever corrupted;
4389 Kindness is ever seduced;
4390 Men have been like this for a long time.
4392 So the sage is firm but not cutting,
4393 Pointed but not piercing,
4394 Straight but not inflexible,
4395 Brilliant but not blinding.
4399 Manage a great nation
4400 As you would cook a delicate fish.
4402 When directing men to a purpose
4403 The sage is restrained;
4404 Restraint allows time to prepare and strengthen,
4405 To build loving relationships;
4406 With sufficient strength and love all resistance is overcome;
4407 When all resistance is overcome his purpose is achieved.
4409 Who can achieve his purpose is able to direct men
4410 And his influence upon them long endures.
4411 Deeply rooted and firmly established,
4412 His vision lives on even after death.
4416 Because the sage follows Tao his emotions do no hurt;
4417 It is not that they lose their power;
4418 But that they do not hurt others;
4419 Because they do not hurt others,
4420 He does not hurt others:
4421 Because his emotions do no hurt,
4422 His relations with people are loving.
4424 61. International Relations
4426 A nation acts as a hierarchy, a meeting place, and a female.
4427 A female seduces a male by being cool,
4428 Being cool is a means of submission.
4430 If a large country submits to a small country
4431 It will seduce the small country;
4432 If a small country submits to a large country
4433 It will seduce the large country;
4434 The large will submit in order to control
4435 And the small will submit in order to prosper.
4438 It is in the interests of a large country to give shelter,
4439 And in the interests of a small country to give service;
4440 If both would achieve their purposes,
4445 Tao is the source of all things,
4446 The treasure of the saint,
4447 And the refuge of the sinner.
4449 Fine words win honour
4450 And fine acts win respect,
4451 But if a man sins, do not abandon him;
4452 And if a man wins power, do not bribe him;
4453 Just be still and present accordance with Tao.
4455 Why do saints treasure Tao?
4456 Because it is easily found by seeking,
4457 And absolves every sin.
4458 It is the most valuable gift.
4460 63. Confront Difficulty
4463 Attend to do-nothing;
4464 Taste the flavorless,
4467 Return love for hate.
4469 Deal with difficulty while it is yet easy;
4470 Deal with the great while it is yet small;
4472 The difficult develops naturally from the easy
4473 And the great from the small;
4474 So the sage, by dealing with the small
4477 He who finds it easy to promise finds it hard to deliver;
4478 He who takes things lightly makes things hard;
4479 The sage confronts difficulty, and so has none.
4481 64. Care at Beginning and End
4483 What lies still is easy to grasp;
4484 What is far off is easy to plan for;
4485 What is cold is easy to shatter;
4486 What is small is easy to disperse.
4489 A tree broader than a man can embrace is born of a tiny shoot;
4490 A dam taller than a river can overflow is born of a clod of earth;
4491 A journey of a thousand miles begins at the spot under one's feet.
4493 Therefore deal with things before they happen;
4494 Create order before there is confusion.
4496 Yet he who acts, spoils;
4497 He who grasps, loses.
4498 People often fail on the verge of success.
4499 Take care at the end as at the beginning,
4500 So that you may avoid failure.
4502 The sage desires no desire,
4505 But gives the people what they can not find
4506 And helps all things accord with Nature
4507 Without interfering.
4509 65. Understanding History
4511 The mythic masters of Tao did not want to make people wise,
4512 But to keep them ignorant;
4513 For it is difficult to govern people who know too much.
4515 To govern a nation by imparting knowledge to its people
4516 Destroys the nation.
4517 To govern a nation by decreasing the knowledge of its people
4520 Understanding these two paths is understanding history;
4521 Understanding history gives clarity of vision
4522 By which one may see through deceit.
4524 66. Lead by Following
4526 How does the river carve out the valley?
4527 By flowing beneath it.
4528 Thereby the river is master of the valley.
4530 In order to master people
4531 One must speak as their servant;
4532 So when the sage is elevated to power
4533 People do not feel oppressed.
4535 In order to lead people
4536 One must follow them;
4537 So when the sage restrains people
4538 They do not feel hindered.
4540 Thus the popularity of the sage does not fail,
4541 He does not seem superior, so no one wishes to usurp him.
4545 It may seem that my teaching means nothing;
4546 It describes the infinite, so of course it means nothing;
4547 If it meant something it would long since have been refuted.
4549 Yet I have three treasures, which I follow and commend to you:
4551 By which one finds courage.
4552 The second is restraint.
4553 By which one finds strength.
4554 The third is not contending.
4555 By which one finds influence.
4557 Those who are fearless, but without love,
4558 Strong, but without restraint,
4559 Or influential, yet contentious,
4562 Only love conquers all and is defeated by none.
4563 It is Nature's finest tool and sharpest weapon.
4567 A good soldier does not use violence;
4568 A good fighter does not use anger;
4569 A good conqueror does not use attack;
4570 A good ruler does not use authority;
4571 So not contending is the best way to use men.
4575 There is a saying among soldiers:
4576 It is easier to lose a yard than take an inch.
4578 In this way one may deploy troops without marshalling them,
4579 Reveal weapons without exposing them,
4580 Assault the foe without charging them,
4581 And apply force without aggression.
4583 Conversely there is no disaster like underestimating your enemy;
4584 For false confidence will lose you your most valued assets.
4585 When two equally matched forces meet
4586 The general who conserves life will win.
4590 My words are easy to understand
4591 And my actions are easy to perform
4592 Yet no man can understand or perform them.
4594 My words have logic; my actions have meaning;
4595 Yet these cannot be known and I cannot be known.
4597 We are each unique; no man understands another.
4598 Though the sage wears coarse clothes, his heart is jade.
4602 Who knows what he knows is healthy;
4603 Who ignores what he ignores is sick;
4604 Who grows sick of sickness recovers;
4605 The sage is never sick, but always sick of sickness.
4609 When people do not fear, they are easily conquered.
4611 Praise their goods and children
4612 And they will not dislike yours.
4613 Know your superiority,
4614 But do not tell it to them;
4616 But do not let them know;
4617 Reject what is yours
4618 And accept what is theirs.
4622 Who is brave and bold may die;
4623 Who is brave and subtle may live.
4624 Which course best serves one's purpose?
4625 Fate favours some and destroys others.
4626 The sage does not know why.
4628 Fate does not contend, yet all things are conquered by it;
4629 It does not ask, yet all things answer to it;
4630 It does not call, yet all things come to it;
4631 It does not plan, yet all things are determined by it.
4633 Fate's hands are vast, its fingers spread wide,
4634 Yet none slip through its grasp.
4638 People do not fear death, so do not threaten them with death.
4640 If people feared death, and you executed all who did not love you
4641 There would be no people left but you and the executioner.
4642 You would then need to kill him.
4643 You would then need to chop off your own hand.
4647 If rulers take too much grain
4648 People rapidly starve;
4649 If rulers take too much freedom
4650 People easily rebel;
4651 If rulers take too much happiness.
4654 By not interfering the sage improves the people's lives.
4658 Man is born soft and tender,
4659 But dies hard and stiff.
4660 Plants and animals, in life, are supple and juicy;
4661 In death, brittle and dry.
4662 So hardness and stiffness are attributes of death,
4663 And softness and tenderness attributes of life.
4665 Just as a sapless tree splits and decays
4666 A strong but inflexible force will meet defeat;
4667 So the hard and mighty lie beneath our feet
4668 While the tender and weak toss in the breeze above.
4672 Is the movement of Nature not unlike drawing a bow?
4673 What is higher descends and what is lower ascends;
4674 What is longer shortens and what is shorter lengthens;
4675 Nature's way decreases those who have more than they need
4676 So to increase those who need more than they have.
4678 It is not so with Man.
4679 Man decreases those who need more than they have
4680 So to increase those who have more than they need.
4682 The sage works regardless of personal reward or recognition;
4683 To benefit the World is to benefit the Self.
4685 78. Accept Responsibility
4687 Nothing in the World is as yielding as water;
4688 Nor can anything better overcome the hardened.
4690 Just as the yielding overcomes the hardened,
4691 The weak may overcome the strong;
4695 "Who accepts responsibility for his people rules the country;
4696 Who accepts responsibility for the World rules the World"
4697 Yet his words are not understood.
4701 When conflict is reconciled, some hatred remains;
4702 How can this be put right?
4704 The sage accepts less than is due
4705 And does not blame or punish;
4706 Love seeks agreement
4707 Where justice seeks payment.
4709 The mythic masters said: "Nature is impartial;
4710 Therefore it serves those who serve all."
4714 Imagine that there is a small country with few people;
4715 Who have a hundred times more than they need;
4716 Who love life and do not wander far;
4717 Who own ships but do no foreign trade;
4718 Who own weapons but do not threaten war;
4719 Who are literate but keep no histories;
4720 Who cook well, dress beautifully, dwell safely
4721 And delight in their own culture,
4722 But live within cock crow of their neighbours.
4724 People in such a place would never leave.
4728 Truth is not rhetorical;
4729 Therefore rhetoric is not true;
4730 Lovers do not contend;
4731 Therefore competitors do not love;
4732 The enlightened keep no knowledge;
4733 Therefore the learned are not enlightened.
4735 The sage does not aim to increase himself;
4736 But the more he does for others the more he is satisfied;
4737 And the more he gives the more he gets.
4739 The best way is to benefit all and harm none;
4740 So the sage achieves his purpose without contention.
4742 Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they're open.
4743 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar, aka Lord Dewar
4767 /\/\ (. ).) `_'_', ( )
4770 / \ ~====' /_____/` D)
4772 .__|~-/^\-~|_/_ |^^^^^^^|| |
4775 _- ,`_'_' .~\ \|__ __|-____ / )
4776 < -(. ).) > \ ( .\ (. ) \(_/ )
4777 ~- _) \_- ooo @ (_) @ \(_//.
4778 / /_C (-.____) /((O)/ \ ._/\~_.
4779 / |_\ / / /\\\\`-----'' _|>o< |__
4780 | \ooooO ( \ \\ \\___/ \ `_'_', /
4781 \ \__-| \ `)\\-^\\ ^--. /_(.(.)- _\
4782 \ \ ) |-`--.`--=\-\ /-//_ ' ( c D\
4783 \_\_) |-___/ / \ V /.~ \/\\\ (@)___/ ~|
4784 / | / | |. /`\\_/\/ / /
4785 / | ( C`-'` / | \/ (/ /
4786 /_________- \ `C__-~ | / (/ /
4787 | | | \__________| \ (/
4794 #################### ##
4795 #################### ##
4816 <=============**==============>
4825 [Reuters 8/16/92] SHANGHAI--A 24-year-old bus passenger, Dong Huibo, died
4826 in the street, after tangling with one of the city's dreaded woman bus
4827 conductors. His nightmare began inside the bus when the ticketpuncher
4828 snarled an insult about the shape of his backside. She swore at him,
4829 slapped his face and broke his glasses, made a grab for his testicles, then
4830 stood back and aimed a vicious kick at his private parts. As he scrambled
4831 out of a window, the driver--also a woman--slammed her foot on the
4832 accelerator pedal and sent him flying. (From: Di Bi Cao)
4834 -----------------------------------------
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4857 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@|
4858 -----------------------------------------
4875 Ronald Wilson Reagan can be rearranged into Insane Anglo Warlord
4876 and George Herbert Walker Bush into Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog, and of
4877 course H. Ross Perot can be rearranged into Sport Horse and Short Poser.
4879 HSIN-HSIN-MING (AFFIRMING FAITH IN MIND)
4881 wong@rkna50.riken.go.jp (Wong Weng Fai) posted a version of this,
4882 and I thought I would send another, longer version. This is from
4883 (if my memory serves) Roshi Kapleau's "Zen--Dawn in the West",
4884 so I assume it is his translation.
4886 The Great Way is not difficult
4887 For those who do not pick and choose.
4889 When preferences are cast aside
4890 The Way stands clear and undisguised.
4892 But even slight distinctions made
4893 Set Heaven and Earth far apart.
4895 If you would clearly see the truth,
4896 Discard opinions pro and con.
4898 To founder in like and dislike
4899 Is nothing but the mind's disease.
4901 And not to see the Way's deep truth
4902 Disturbs the Mind's essential peace.
4904 The Way is perfect like vast space,
4905 Where there's no lack and no excess.
4907 Our choice to choose and to reject
4908 Prevents our seeing this simple truth.
4910 Both striving for the outer world
4911 As well as for the inner void
4912 Condemns us to entangled lives.
4914 Just calmly see that all is One
4915 And by themselves false views will go.
4917 Attempts to stop activity
4918 Only fill you with activity.
4920 Remaining in duality
4921 You'll never know of unity.
4923 And not to know this unity
4924 Lets conflict lead you far astray.
4926 When you assert that things are real,
4927 You miss their true reality.
4928 But to assert that things are void
4929 Also misses reality.
4931 The more you talk and think on this,
4932 The further from the truth you'll be.
4934 Cut off all useless thoughts and words
4935 And there's nowhere you cannot go.
4936 Returning to the root itself,
4937 You'll find the meaning of all things.
4939 If you pursue appearances,
4940 You overlook the primal source.
4942 Awakening is to go beyond
4943 Both emptiness as well as form.
4945 All changes in this empty world
4946 Seem real because of ignorance.
4948 Do not go searching for the truth,
4949 Just let those fond opinions go.
4951 Abide not in duality;
4952 Refrain from all pursuit of it.
4954 If there's a trace of right and wrong,
4955 True Mind is lost, confused, distraught.
4957 From One-Mind comes duality,
4958 But cling not even to this one.
4960 When this One-Mind rests undisturbed,
4961 Then nothing in the world offends.
4963 And when nothing can give offense,
4964 Then all obstructions cease to be.
4966 If all thought-objects disappear,
4967 The thinking subject drops away.
4969 For things are things because of mind,
4970 As mind is mind because of things.
4972 These two are merely relative,
4973 And both at source are emptiness.
4975 In emptiness these are not two,
4976 Yet in each are contained all forms.
4978 Once coarse and fine are seen no more,
4979 Then how can there be taking sides?
4981 The Great Way is without limit,
4982 Beyond the easy and the hard.
4984 But those who hold to narrow views
4985 Are fearful and irresolute;
4986 Their frantic haste just slows them down.
4988 If you're attached to anything,
4989 You surely will go far astray.
4991 Just let go now of clinging mind,
4992 And all things are just as they are.
4993 In essence nothing goes or stays.
4995 See into the true self of things,
4996 And you're in step with the Great Way,
4997 Thus walking freely and undisturbed.
4999 But live in bondage to your thoughts,
5000 And you will be confused, unclear.
5002 This heavy burden weighs you down-
5003 O why keep judging good and bad?
5005 If you would walk the highest way,
5006 Do not reject the sense domain.
5008 For as it is, whole and complete,
5009 This sense world is enlightenment.
5011 The wise do not strive after goals,
5012 But fools themselves in bondage put.
5014 The One Way knows no differences;
5015 The foolish cling to this and that.
5016 To seek Great Mind with thinking mind
5017 Is certainly a grave mistake.
5019 From small mind comes rest and unrest,
5020 But mind awakened transcends both.
5022 Delusion spawns dualities-
5023 These dreams are naught but flowers of air-
5024 Why work so hard at grasping them?
5026 Both gain and loss, and right and wrong-
5027 Once and for all get rid of them.
5029 When you are no longer asleep,
5030 All dreams will vanish by themselves.
5032 If mind does not discriminate,
5033 All things are as they are, as one.
5035 To go to this mysterious source
5036 Frees us from all entanglements.
5038 When all is seen with "equal mind",
5039 To our self-nature we return.
5041 This single mind goes right beyond
5042 All reasons and comparisons.
5044 Stop movement and there's no movement,
5045 Stop rest and no-rest comes instead.
5047 When rest and no-rest cease to be,
5048 Then even Oneness disappears.
5049 This ultimate Finality's
5050 Beyond all laws; can't be described.
5052 With single mind one with the Way,
5053 All ego-centered strivings cease.
5055 Doubts and confusion disappear,
5056 And so true faith pervades our life.
5058 There is no thing that clings to us,
5059 And nothing that is left behind.
5061 All's self-revealing, void and clear,
5062 Without exerting power of mind.
5064 Thought cannot reach this state of truth;
5065 Here feelings are of no avail.
5067 In this true world of emptiness,
5068 Both self and other are no more.
5070 To enter this true empty world,
5071 Immediately affirm "Not-Two".
5073 In this "Not-Two" all is the same,
5074 With nothing separate or outside.
5076 The wise in all times and places
5077 Awaken to this primal truth.
5079 The Way's beyond all space, all time;
5080 One instant is ten thousand years.
5082 Not only here, not only there,
5083 Truth's right before your very eyes.
5085 Distinctions such as large and small
5086 Have relevance for you no more.
5088 The largest is the smallest too;
5089 Here limitations have no place.
5091 What is is not, what is not is;
5092 If this is not yet clear to you,
5093 You're still far from the inner truth.
5095 One thing is all, all things are one.
5096 Know this and all's whole and complete.
5098 When faith and mind are not separate,
5099 And not separate are mind and faith,
5100 This is beyond all words, all thought.
5107 You don't understand because you are a technocrat, an engineer.
5108 You work with your hands.
5109 I however am a visionary. I work with my mouth.
5112 So we'll go to the top of the toppest blue space,
5113 The Official Katroo Birthday Sounding-Off Place!
5114 Come on! Open your mouth and sound off at the sky!
5115 Shout loud at the top of your voice,
5119 And I may not know why
5120 But I know that I like it.
5121 _Three cheers_! I AM I!"
5122 -- Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
5131 Human conduct is ever unreliable
5132 until man is anchored in the Divine,
5133 Everything in future will improve
5134 if you are making a spiritual effort now.
5135 -- Swami Sri Yukteswar
5137 A strange weed this be
5138 what's restoreth my vitality.
5141 Q: Is an opinion true or false?
5142 A: Depends on whether it's mine or yours....
5145 Would anyone ever admit that an opinion was wrong?
5146 Wouldn't most people change the opinion instead,
5147 having then a new, well-considered, and more correct opinion?
5150 Through the dark of future past,
5151 The magician longs to see.
5152 One chants out between two worlds,
5153 "Fire, walk with me!"
5155 It's really very simple... I found wearing women's clothes... relaxed me.
5158 the first differentiation between reality as conceived and reality as it IS
5159 consists of an analogy: conceptions of reality (all ideas entertained by a
5160 knower) are maps, while reality is the territory being mapped.
5161 whether or not two individuals can be said to live in the same territory
5162 is unclear, because their conceptions may be different enough that their maps
5163 of reality are very different. it is also unclear whether there can be said
5164 to be two individuals at all--if the self and other are one, then all
5165 distinctions between selves ultimately disappear in the final analysis.
5168 This message partially funded by the Apathy Partnership of Earth (APE).
5170 Styrofoam never dies for as long as you live.
5171 -- Deputy Andy Brennan, Twin Peaks
5180 A dog howling at the moon,
5181 not because he's a dog,
5182 but because he wants to.
5185 I want to share something with you, the three
5186 little sentences that will get you through life:
5188 #2. Ooh, good idea boss!
5189 #3. It was like that when I got here...
5190 -- Homer Simpson to Bart
5192 you wouldn't know the truth if it bit off your nose, stuck a gasoline
5193 nozzle into the gaping wound, filled you up with high octane, and
5196 In a world where children blow up children,
5197 everyone's a threat.
5198 -- psycho cop, on Star Trek: The Next Generation
5202 environments based in chaotic realms inevitably concern themselves less with
5203 conservation of mass or energy, ignore laws regarding increasing entropy,
5204 cease to be rational or defined. chaotic ones within orderly realms still
5205 recall this power and warp the space where they stand.
5211 | \\_/_/ /__|O||O|__ \
5212 / |_ | "I do solemnly swear by the sacred |/_ \_/\_/ _\ |
5213 | ||\_ ~| bedpan to fix the patient, and | | (____) | ||
5214 | ||| \/ ease his wretched suffering, even \/\___/\__/ //
5215 | |||_ until all hope is lost." (_/ ||
5221 / ||||__ (____(____)
5224 When they came for the Fourth Amendment I didn't say anything
5225 because I had nothing to hide.
5226 When they came for the Second Amendment I didn't say anything
5227 because I didn't own a gun.
5228 When they came for the Fifth and Sixth Amendments I didn't say anything
5229 because I had committed no crimes.
5230 When they came for the First Amendment I couldn't say anything.
5232 (taken from the Urine Nation News, spring/summer 1993, number 12, page 1)
5235 something may be great,
5236 but the bother of not doing it
5237 while continuing to think about it
5241 Then we sat on the sand for some time and observed,
5242 how the oceans that covered the world were perturbed,
5243 by the tides from the orbiting moon overhead,
5244 "How relaxing the sound of the waves is," you said.
5245 I began to expound upon tidal effects,
5246 when you asked me to stop, looking somewhat perplexed,
5247 so I did not explain why the sunset turns red,
5248 and we watched the occurrence in silence instead.
5252 Felis catus, Your visual, olfactory,
5253 is your taxonomic nomenclature, and auditory senses,
5254 an endothermic quadruped, contribute to your hunting skills,
5255 carnivorous by nature? and natural defenses.
5257 I find myself intrigued A tail is quite essential
5258 by your subvocal oscillations, for your acrobatic talents,
5259 a singular development you would not be so agile,
5260 of cat communications, if you lacked its counterbalance,
5261 that obviates your basic and when not being utilized,
5262 hedonistic predilection, to aid in locomotion,
5263 for a rhythmic stroking of your fur it often serves to illustrate,
5264 to demonstrate affection. the state of your emotion.
5266 Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display,
5267 connote a fairly well developed cognitive array,
5268 and though you are not sentient, Spot,
5269 and do not comprehend, I nonetheless consider you
5270 a true and valued friend.
5274 There is no secret to excel in playing the shakuhachi.
5275 Blow not intensely, but from your heart.
5276 Although technique is secondary, it helps to express your true self.
5277 If we are natural, we make fine sound.
5278 If we have an open mind, our sound will be mellow.
5279 If we have right attitudes toward life,
5280 our music will be acceptable to everyone.
5281 Take care of your sound as you would care for yourself.
5284 You can't save money by spending it. Beware claims to the contrary.
5287 If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.
5288 This is true because the mind is the governing aspect of human life.
5289 If the river flows clearly and cleanly through the proper channel,
5290 all will be well along its banks.
5292 The Integral Way depends on decreasing, not increasing:
5293 To correct your mind, rely on not-doing.
5294 Decrease thinking and clinging to complications;
5295 keep your mind detached and whole.
5296 Eliminate mental muddiness and obscurity;
5297 keep your mind crystal clear.
5298 Avoid daydreaming and allow your pure original insight to emerge.
5299 Quiet your emotions and abide in serenity.
5300 Don't go crazy with the worship of idols, images, and ideas;
5301 this is like putting a new head on top of the head you already have.
5303 Remember: if you can cease all restless activity,
5304 your integral nature will appear.
5305 -- Hua Hu Ching -- 45
5307 Dualistic thinking is a sickness.
5308 Religion is a distortion.
5309 Materialism is cruel.
5310 Blind spirituality is unreal.
5312 Chanting is no more holy than listening to the
5313 murmur of a stream, counting prayer beads no more
5314 sacred than simply breathing, religious robes no
5315 more spiritual than work clothes.
5317 If you wish to attain oneness with the Tao, don't get
5318 caught up in spiritual superficialities.
5319 Instead, live a quiet and simple life, free of ideas and
5321 Find contentment in the practice of undiscriminating
5322 virtue, the only true power.
5323 Giving to others selflessly and anonymously, radiating
5324 light throughout the world and illuminating your
5325 own darkness, your virtue becomes a sanctuary for
5326 yourself and all beings.
5328 This is what is meant by embodying the Tao.
5330 -- Hua Hu Ching -- 47
5332 ________________ _______________
5337 | ___\ \| | / / \____________ \ \
5342 | | __ | | (o-) _ | |
5343 | __\ (_o) | / \ | |
5344 | | | Heh Heh Heh / ) ) | |
5345 \ || \ / Huh Huh Huh / ) / | |
5346 | |__ \ / \ |___ - | |
5347 | | (*___\ / \ *' | |
5348 | | _ | / \ |____ | |
5349 | | //_______| ####\ | |
5350 | / |_|_|_|___/\ ------ |_/
5352 | _----_______/ \_____ |
5354 |_____/ \__________|
5356 "Beavis and Butthead are catching up in the poles."
5357 "Yeah, our poles are rising."
5359 The chief cause of problems is solutions. -- Eric Severeid
5361 [CND, 12/15/93] A women trafficking gang, consisting of 69 members, was
5362 rounded up by the Inner Mongolia police, the Inner Mongolian Daily said.
5363 The gang, operating in several nearby provinces, enticed a total of 200
5364 unemployed women to make the journey to Inner Mongolia with the promise
5365 of good jobs and shelter. The women, ranging from 15 to 41, then were sold
5366 as wives or servants to local peasants who had difficulties in finding
5370 A genuine ASCII stereogram!
5371 Here's an ASCII single image random dot stereogram for your enjoyment. To
5372 get the 3d effect, you need to diverge (unfocus) your eyes such that two
5373 adjacent letters in the same row come together. To help you focus, try to
5374 make the two capital O's at the top look like three. Once you've done that,
5375 the rest of the image should jump out of the screen at you!
5377 n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
5378 f f f f f f f f f f f f f f
5379 e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e
5380 a a a a a a a a a a a a a a
5381 a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a
5382 r r r r r r r r r r r r r r
5383 r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r
5385 Try moving your head back from the screen and moving it about a bit
5386 once you have focused on the image to increase the stereo effect even
5390 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5391 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5392 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5393 . . . . . . . . . . .
5409 . . . . . . . . . . .
5410 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5411 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5412 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5414 The following a 3-d Maze (3x4) consisting of the following objects:
5415 circle, square, asterisk, hour-glass, triangle, and a square with two lines
5416 in it. The rules are as follows: You can 'warp' from one part of the maze to
5417 another by matching similar objects. Each 'warp' counts as one move. You
5418 can also travel along the lines, if there is a line. This also counts as one
5419 move. (I got the idea of this from a GAMES magazine I read a LONG time ago)
5420 Try to go from "START" to "END" in the least amount of moves. I would give
5421 out a prize to somebody, if I could think of one(that doesn't cost anything,
5422 of course!). (Take this as a first maze...I didn't plan it out, and it's not
5423 very difficult.) I would suggest that people that have worked with
5424 stereograms EXTENSIVELY try this, as it is hard to move your eyes around and
5425 still keep focused on the 3-D image. E-mail me the number of moves it took
5426 you and the path you followed (e.g. 6 Sqauare -warp- Asterisk Circle...etc.),
5427 I'll post the list of people that reply to it within the next week and got
5428 the lowest number of moves. Good luck!!
5430 [qL|[NYcUCdH>,(&[qL|[NYcUCdH>,(&[qL|[NYcUCdH>,(&[qL|[NYcUCdH>,(&[qL|[NYcUCdH>,(
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5432 rwA#nbud>*Dj+X<TrwA#nbud>*Dj+X<TrwA#nbud>*Dj+X<TrwA#nbud>*Dj+X<TrwA#nbud>*Dj+X<
5433 $*-Xj+V&%Ui\START*-Xj+V&%UiSTART;*-Xj+V&%UiSTART;*-Xj+V&%UiSTART;*-Xj+V&%Uieg%(
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5435 WL(-W->WTPh:UQ:oWL(-W->WT:UQ:oWL(-eBW->WT:UQ:oW-YoeBW->WT:UQ:oW-YBW|H->WT:UQ:oW
5436 cTV:wpR6GN\ne![|cTV:wpR6Gn<e![|cT:YQwpR6Gn<e![T4YH\QwpR6Gn<e!4YH\QQpR6GHln<e!4Y
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5438 H6hhYb"6^EwE*rEoH6hhYb"6^Ea*rEoH6h]Yb"6^Ea*ro<Hh"]bD$"6^Ea*ro<H]DbD$6zP^Ea*ro<H
5439 zp@.Gx,Tu(Q!.hKbzp@.Gx,Tu!t.hKbzp.8?Gx,Tu!tKbbzp.8?xcy,Tu!tKbp.8?Xxy,TuB&!tKbp.
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5441 1<Q)K|.BH?n:K-gc1<Q)K|.BH?n:K-gc1<Q)K|.BH?n:K-gc1<Q)K|.BH?n:K-gc1Q)5K|.BH?n:K-g
5442 lR,gO$66yAP&W<?>lR,gO$66yAP&W<?>lR,gO$66yAP&W<?>lR,gO$66yAP&W<?>l,gMO$66yAP&W<?
5443 u1JC&-_WLwf7JiGFu1JC&-_WLwf7JiGFu1JC&-_WLwf7JiGFu1JC&-_WLwf7JiGFuJCN&-_WLwf7JiG
5444 *Ogb{pQJw6e{v*'D*Ogb{pQJw6e{v*'D*Ogb{pQJw6e{v*'D*Ogb{pQJw6e{v*'D*gbw{pQJw6e{v*'
5445 b*cB2RFU5R+{3myvb*cB2RFU5R+{3myvb*cB2RFU5R+{3myvb*cB2RFU5R+{3myvbcBi2RFU5R+{3my
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5448 wn(odb-='HALW=^Wwn(odb-='LW:=^Ww(o?db-='LW=^W/(o?fb-=1T'LW=^Wop?fb-=1')OLW=^Wop
5449 S<>"\$f";MP\$4?hS<>"\$f";\$S4?hS>"!\$f";\$4?hh>"!q$f"F*;\$4?h"v!q$f"*;]j\$4?h"v
5450 =/twTn#S9ikXS%`y=/twTn#S9iS%[`y/t2nwTn#S9i[`y't2n/Tn#\\S9i[`y2Yn/Tn#\S?I9i[`y2Y
5451 d1|,!mJqjd8x^=!Bd1|,!mJqjd8x!Bd1=1|,!mJqjd!Bd1=1|,!mJV^qjd!Bd1|,!mJV^qIGjd!Bd1|
5452 Sy<6*yAW|!l;tZ]nSy<6*yAW|!l;t]n'Sy<6*yAW|!l;t]nSy+<6*yAW|!l;t]nSy<6X*yAW|!l;t]n
5453 &)v;_!*qY*L)-IQd&)v;_!*qY*L)-Qd5&)v;_!*qY*L)-Qd&)Bv;_!*qY*L)-Qd&)v;6_!*qY*L)-Qd
5454 t?K!lfksx)kzAp2Wt?K!lfksx)kzA2W:t?K!lfksx)kzA2Wt?%K!lfksx)kzA2Wt?K!Llfksx)kzA2W
5455 UAsuytGXa{(cnug]UAsuytGXa{(cng](UAsuytGXa{(cng]UAzsuytGXa{(cng]UAsuXytGXa{(cng]
5456 |Is@[A-F0)KmcN>o|Is@[A-F0)Kmc>o#|Is@[A-F0)Kmc>o|Ins@[A-F0)Kmc>o|Is@>[A-F0)Kmc>o
5457 NHnuKxzh"2zQ=hq+NHnuKxzh"2zQ=hNmhHnuKxzh"2zQ=hNHn85uKxzh"2zQNHn85uKxzh".I2zQNHn
5458 vj5-juY;&H>b[w"mvj5-juY;&H>b[mBjX!5-juY;&H>mBjXc!-juYY:;&H>mXc!;juYJ:;&.fH>mXc!
5459 zE"A{TfCX?9H9e;:zE"A{TfCX?9H;8:z"mA{TfCX?9H;8z="mATRwfCX?9H;="m{TRwbCX?zt9H;="m
5460 OI5{{UQa5D.Vo/rVOI5{{UQa5D./@rOoI{D{UQa5D./@rotI{DU.ZQa5D./@tI{pU.ZNa5D85./@tI{
5461 VvmyUF3wGZ.Vd-0.VvmyUF3wGZd1-0.VvmUKqF3wGZd0.VvKmKqF3?kwGZd0vKmxqF3okwGU!Zd0vKm
5462 Yo{BgD`f\`$JRtu'Yo{BgD`f\JRtu'Yo{BgDis`f\JRtu'YBg3#Dis`f\JRtYBg3#Dis`f\ygJRtYBg
5463 80[vV7`fchW6A#'x80[vV7`fchW6A'x-80[vV7`fchW6A'x80r[vV7`fchW6A'x80r[vV7`fchW6A'x
5464 O"<a1OA^o=:]aa=(O"<a1OA^o=:]a=([O"<a1OA^o=:]a=(O"Z<a1OA^o=:]a=(O"Z<a1OA^o=:]a=(
5465 V+{S>As"N5\Ul_^TV+{S>As"N5\Ul^TkV+{S>As"N5\Ul^TV+;{S>As"N5\Ul^TV+;{S>As"N5\Ul^T
5466 /U!sJ3m%/qr?4m!I/U!sJ3m%/qr?4!IB/U!sJ3m%/qr?4!I/Uw!sJ3m%/qr?4!I/Uw!sJ3m%/qr?4!I
5467 yh6Sd(VC3g&>\H<.yh6Sd(VC3g&>\<.Vyh6Sd(VC3g&>\<.yhs6Sd(VC3g&>\<.yhs6Sd(VC3g&>\<.
5468 ;*<*[r!OIx.k(ZB^;*<*[r!OIk(ZB^;*<*[rkw!OIk(ZB^<*[i^rkw!OIk(Z<*[i^rkw!OI]Fk(Z<*[
5469 9xGH.E=u,tZXVx!<9xGH.E=u,tZx!<9xGH;W.E=u,tZx9x'GHW.TzE=u,tZx9xHW.TzE=.|u,tZx9xH
5470 \Hu"\@V#8"mLukmM\Hu"\@V#8"mLuM\Hs;u"\@V#8"mM\PHs;u\@DV#8"mM\PHs;\@DECV#8"mM\PHs
5471 +TnXOmPMQKTVwlSV+TnXOmPMQKTVwV+TJInXOmPMQKTV+@TJInOmmPMQKTV+@TJIOmmizPMQKTV+@TJ
5472 JaXq{$*|_pP|-`[wJaXq{$*|_pP`[wJaXqS*{$*|_pP`Ja,Xq*{K3$*|_pP`Jaq*{K3$*g.|_pP`Jaq
5473 A7_qF(|hvg5>t;!nA7_qF(|hv>t;!nA7_qF(f"|hv>t;!n_qFIf(f"|hv>t;_qFIf(f"|hvY*>t;_qF
5474 Clzp3ggIZF7:E.cqClzp3ggIZF7:E.cqClzp3ggIZF7:E.cqClzp3ggIZF7:E.cqClzp3ggIZF7:E.c
5475 UENDu6z[k<anY>&JUENDu6z[k<anY>&JUENDu6z[k<anY>&JUENDu6z[k<anY>&JEND>u6z[k<anY>&
5476 h-Q!-z98>A%65jWBh-Q!-z98>A%65jWBh-Q!-z98>A%65jWBh-Q!-z98>A%65jWBh-Q!-z98>A%65jW
5477 #7ch;MFM9k0{T2."#7ch;MFM9k0{T2."#7ch;MFM9k0{T2."#7ch;MFM9k0{T2."#7ch;MFM9k0{T2.
5478 IMfNj5t*M,K`xKz9IMfNj5t*M,K`xKz9IMfNj5t*M,K`xKz9IMfNj5t*M,K`xKz9IMfNj5t*M,K`xKz
5482 ## # # # # ## #### #
5483 ## # # # #### ######## # ##
5485 ### ## # ## # ### ### ## ##
5486 # #### ### # # # ## # # # # ###
5487 ## ############# # # # ## ###
5488 # # # # ## ### ## ###
5489 # # ## # ## ### # ###
5491 # #### # ## #### ###
5492 ##### # # ## # # # ##### #
5493 # # # # # # ## # ##### #
5497 # ## # # ## ##### ##
5498 ###### # # # # ### ###
5499 ## # # # # ###### ##
5500 ## # ##### # ##### ### ## ##
5501 # ## ## ## # ## ## # ### ####
5502 ### #### # # #### # # ########
5503 ##### # ## ### # ### #
5504 #### ## # ### #### ##
5509 # # # ##################
5511 ### # # ## #### ## ##
5514 ## # ## # ## ## #####
5515 # ### ## # ## #### ## # ###
5516 ## ##### # ######### # ####
5538 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5539 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"" ""$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5540 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5541 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" " " o "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5542 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ " o "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5543 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ o o "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5544 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o " o"$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5545 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" " $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5546 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" " o " " "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5547 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o " "o o $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5548 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ o" " o o $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5549 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ "$$ " o " " $$ "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5550 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$ o o " o " $$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5551 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o$$ o o o $$$ "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5552 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o $$$ " o o " " $$$ " "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5553 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o$$$$ " o $$$$ "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5554 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ " $$$$ " oo$$$$$$$oooo $$$$" " $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5555 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" " $$$$$o """ o o"""o$$$$" " ""$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5556 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ " ooooo$$$$$$$$oo o o oo$$$$$$$ooooo o o $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5557 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$o $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5558 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ o$$$"" " $ ""$$$$$$$$" ""$$$$$$$$"" " """"$$o" "$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5559 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$oo$" " $o $"$$$$oo " o$$$$" o$o " ""$oo"$$$$$$$$$$$$
5560 $$$$$$$$$$$$$ o" " o " $$" o "" o o " o o$o " o "" "$$$$$$$$$$$
5561 $$$$$$$$$$$$" $ " " $$ "$$$$$$$$ $$ o o o $ ""$$$$$$$$$$
5562 $$$$$$$$$$$" o o o o o$$ "$$$$$$ o $$ o o o $$$$$$$$$
5563 $$$$$$$$$$ o $ " $$oo "$$$$$$" oo$$ $ $$$$$$$$
5564 $$$$$$$$$ " o " "$ $$$$$$ "$" " " " o $$$$$$$
5565 $$$$$$$$ " " " " o "o$$$$$$o" o " o $$$$$$
5566 $$$$$$$" " o " o $$$$$$$$$o " o o " " o $$$$$
5567 $$$$$"o " o o o " "$$$$" ""$$$oo o " " $$$$
5568 $$$$"o o " $ o " oo$$$$"o o"$$$$oo o " o "$$
5569 $$$$ " $ o oo$o$$"$" o o """$$$oooo "" o " o $$
5570 $$$$$ " " o " o o o o o o o " " " o$$$
5571 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5572 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5578 ___\ \ \ /\___/___ \
5580 ____/ /_______/ \ / _\/_____
5582 __/ / \ \ / / / / _\__
5583 / / / \_______\/ / / / / /\
5584 /_/___/___________________/ /_______/ /___/ \
5585 \ \ \ ___________ \ \ \ \ \ /
5586 \_\ \ / /\ \ \ \ \___\/
5588 \__/ / \ \ \_______\/
5599 "$mmmmm m$" mmmmmmm$"
5601 mmmmmmm$$$$$$$$$"mmmm
5602 mmm$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ m$$$$m " m "
5603 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$"$$$
5604 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm $$$$$$$$$$
5605 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$""" m
5606 "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$ " "
5607 """""""$$$$$$$$$$$m """"
5608 mmmmmmmm" m$ "$mmmmm
5609 $$"""""" "$ """"""$$
5617 _ _ _ _ _ _ _---| | _---| \ ` ' /
5618 ]-I-I-I-I-[ ---| | ---| |. |
5619 \ ` '_/ | / \ | | /^\|
5620 [*] __| ^ / ^ \ ^ | |*||
5621 |__ ,| / \ / `\ / \ | ===|
5622 ___| ___ ,|__ / /=_=_=_=\ \ |, _|
5623 I_I__I_I__I_I (====(_________)___|_|____|____
5624 \-\--|-|--/-/ | I [ ]__I I_I__|____I_I_|
5625 |[] '| | [] |`__ . [ \-\--|-|--/-/
5626 |. | |' |___|_____I___|___I___|---------|
5627 / \| [] .|_|-|_|-|-|_|-|_|-|_|-| [] [] |
5628 <===> | .|-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-| | / \
5629 ] []|` [] ||.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.||- <===>
5630 ] []| ` | |/////////\\\\\\\\\\.||__. | |[] [
5631 <===> ' ||||| | | | ||||.|| [] <===>
5632 \T/ | |-- ||||| | O | O | ||||.|| . |' \T/
5633 | . _||||| | | | ||||.|| | | |
5634 ../|' v . | .|||||/____|____\|||| /|. . | . ./
5635 .|//\............/...........\........../../\\\
5643 ___---___---_________________________________
5644 =============================================
5646 |-------------------------------------------
5647 |-___-----___-----___-----___-----___-----__
5648 / _ \===/ _ \ / _ \===/ _ \ / _ \===/ _
5649 ( (.\ oOo /.) ) ( (.\ oOo /.) ) ( (.\ oOo /.
5650 \__/=====\__/ \__/=====\__/ \__/=====\_
5651 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5652 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5653 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5654 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5655 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5656 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5657 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5658 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5659 ||||||| ||||||| |||||||
5660 (oOoOo) (oOoOo) (oOoOo)
5661 J%%%%%L J%%%%%L J%%%%%L
5662 ZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZ
5663 ==========================================
5664 __|_________________________________________
5667 ____----------- _____
5668 \~~~~~~~~~~/~_--~~~------~~~~~(__) \
5671 / ___ ~~--[""] | __/__|__-------'_
5672 > /~` \ |-. `\~~.~~~~~ _ ~ - _
5673 ~| ||\% | | ~ ._ ~ _ ~ ._
5674 `_//|_% \ | ~ . ~-_ /\
5675 `--__ | _-____ /\ ~-_ \/.
5676 ~--_ / ,/ -~-_ \ \/ _______---~/
5677 ~~-/._< \ \`~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ##--~/
5678 \ ) |`------##---~~~~-~ ) )
5714 oooo$$$$$$$$$$$$oooo
5715 oo$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$o
5716 oo$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$o o$ $$ o$
5717 o $ oo o$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$o $$ $$ $$o$
5718 oo $ $ "$ o$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$o $$$o$$o$
5719 "$$$$$$o$ o$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$o $$$$$$$$
5720 $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5721 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ """$$$
5722 "$$$""""$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ "$$$
5723 $$$ o$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ "$$$o
5724 o$$" $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$o
5725 $$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" "$$$$$$ooooo$$$$o
5726 o$$$oooo$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ o$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
5727 $$$$$$$$"$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$""""""""
5728 """" $$$$ "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" o$$$
5729 "$$$o """$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"$$" $$$
5730 $$$o "$$""$$$$$$"""" o$$$
5732 "$$$$o o$$$$$$o"$$$$o o$$$$
5733 "$$$$$oo ""$$$$o$$$$$o o$$$$""
5734 ""$$$$$oooo "$$$o$$$$$$$$$"""
5735 ""$$$$$$$oo $$$$$$$$$$
5749 \._____.-~\ . ~\. ./
5753 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
5757 ,agd888b,_ "Y8, ___`""Ybga,
5758 ,gdP""88888888baa,.""8b "888g,
5759 ,dP" ]888888888P' "Y `888Yb,
5760 ,dP" ,88888888P" db, "8P""Yb,
5761 ,8" ,888888888b, d8888a "8,
5762 ,8' d88888888888,88P"' a, `8,
5763 ,8' 88888888888888PP" "" `8,
5764 d' I88888888888P" `b
5770 `8, ,d8888888baaa ,8'
5771 `8, 888888888888' ,8'
5772 `8a "8888888888I a8'
5773 `Yba `Y8888888P' adP'
5775 `"Yba, d8888P" ,adP"' Normand Veilleux
5776 `"Y8baa, ,d888P,ad8P"' from
5777 ``""YYba8888P""'' Spaceship Earth
5780 =========================================================================
5781 ________________ _______________ _______________
5782 /_______________/\ /_______________\ /\______________\
5783 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ \ ||||||||||||||||| / ////////////////
5784 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/ ||||||||||||||||| / ////////////////
5785 \\\\\\_______/\ ||||||_______\ / //////_____\
5786 \\\\\\\\\\\\\ \ |||||||||||||| / /////////////
5787 \\\\\\\\\\\\\/____ |||||||||||||| / /////////////
5788 \\\\\___________/\ ||||| / ////
5789 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ \ ||||| / ////
5790 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/ ||||| \////
5792 =========================================================================
5794 88 d8'd8' 88 88 ad88888ba ,adba, ,d8
5795 88 d8'd8' 88 88 d8" 8 8 "8b 8I I8 ,d8"
5796 88 "" "" aa88aaa88aa Y8, 8 8 "fbdP' ,d8"
5797 88 ""88"""88"" `Y8a8a8a, ,d8"
5798 88 aa88aaa88aa `"8"8"8b, ,d8"
5799 "" ""88"""88"" 8 8 `8b ,d8" ,adba,
5800 aa 88 88 Y8a 8 8 a8P ,d8" 8I I8
5801 88 88 88 "Y88888P" 8" "fbdP'
5822 ** * ********* * ***
5823 ***** **********************
5824 ******** *************** ****
5825 ****** ***************** ** **
5826 ** ******************* *** ********
5827 ******************** *** *******
5828 ********************* *** ** ****
5829 ********* * *********************** *** ****
5830 ********** ************************ **** ** ***
5831 **** *********************** * ****
5832 ************** ****** * *** * **
5833 *********** ** **** * *** * ** ********** *
5834 ************* ***** ***** ** * ** ****** *
5835 * ************* **** ******* *** **
5836 ************** **************** *********** **
5837 ****** ******************************* **
5838 ********************************* **
5839 ******************************** ** **
5840 ******************************* ** *********
5841 **** *************************** *** *****
5842 ***** * *** ******************** **
5843 ***** * ***************** ** ******
5844 **** ********************* * *****
5845 ***** ****************** **
5846 **** **************** * *****
5847 * ***************** ** ******
5848 ** ************** ** **
5850 *** ************* **
5851 * *** *********************
5852 ****** ******* * *** ***
5854 ************ ********
5855 ********************** * **********
5856 ************************* ***********
5857 ************************** ***********
5858 ************************* ***********
5859 ************************ **********
5860 ********************* *********
5861 **************** ***
5871 \. \. "~" ./ /c-..,__
5872 ^r- .._ .- .-" `- . ~"--.
5876 ,.__.--._ _j \ ~ . ; |
5877 ( ~"-._~"^._\ ^. ^._ I . l
5878 "-._ ___ ~"-,_7 .Z-._ 7" Y ; \ _
5879 /" "~-(r r _/_--._~-/ / /,.--^-._ / Y
5880 "-._ '"~~~>-._~]>--^---./____,.^~ ^.^ !
5883 ~-._~~~---._,____..--- \
5890 / `-.____/ |||||||/`-.____________
5891 \-'_ \-' ||||||||| `-._
5892 -- `-. -/||||||||\ `` -`.
5893 |\ /||||||\ \_ | `\\
5894 | \ \_______...-//|||\|________...---'\ \ \\
5895 | \ \ || | \ ``-.__--. | \ | ``-.__--.
5896 | |\ \ / | |\ \ ``---'/ / | | ``---'
5897 _/ / _| ) __/_/ / _| ) __/ / _| |
5898 /,__/ /,__/ /,_/,__/_/,__/ /,__/ /,__/ tbk
5900 Aw mom, you act like I'm not even wearing a bungie cord! -- Calvin
5906 YES ============================= NO
5907 +-----------|| Does the Darn Thing work? ||-----------+
5908 | ============================= |
5910 +----------+ +---------+ +---------+
5911 | Don't | NO | Does | +-------+ YES | Did you |
5912 | mess | +---| anyone |<------| YOU |<---------| mess |
5913 | with it! | | | know? | | MORON | | with it |
5914 +----------+ | +---------+ +-------+ +---------+
5916 | +------+ +-----------+ |
5918 | | IT | +--------+ +-----------+
5919 | +------+ | YOU | YES | WILL THEY |
5920 | | +------->| POOR |<------------| CATCH YOU?|
5921 | | | |BASTARD!| +-----------+
5922 | | | |________| | NO
5925 | | | +---------------+ +-----------+
5926 | | | NO | CAN YOU BLAME | |DESTROY THE|
5927 | | +------| SOMEONE ELSE? | | EVIDENCE |
5928 | | +---------------+ +-----------+
5931 | | ============================ |
5932 | +---->|| N O ||<---------+
5933 +------------>|| P R O B L E M ||
5934 ============================
5942 ,ad8"" ,ad8"" 8"Y8a, "Y8a,
5943 ,ad8"" ,ad8"" 8 "Y8a, "Y8a,
5944 ,ad8"" ,ad8"" 8 "Y8a, "Y8a,
5945 ,gPPR8, ,ad8"" ,ad88a, "Y8a, "Y8a,
5946 dP' `Yb ,ad8"" ,ad8"" "Y8a, ,ad8"" ,ad8"8
5947 8) (8,ad8"" ,ad8"" Y888"" ,ad8"" 8
5948 Yb d8P" ,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,ad8"" 8
5949 "8ggg8" ,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,8
5950 ,gPPR8, ,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,ad8""
5951 dP' `Yb ,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,ad8""
5952 8) (8,ad8"" ,ad8"" ,ad8""
5953 Yb d8P" ,ad8"" ,ad8""
5954 "8ggg8" ,ad8"" ,ad8""
5961 .... NO! ... ... MNO! ...
5962 ..... MNO!! ...................... MNNOO! ...
5963 ..... MMNO! ......................... MNNOO!! .
5964 .... MNOONNOO! MMMMMMMMMMPPPOII! MNNO!!!! .
5965 ... !O! NNO! MMMMMMMMMMMMMPPPOOOII!! NO! ....
5966 ...... ! MMMMMMMMMMMMMPPPPOOOOIII! ! ...
5967 ........ MMMMMMMMMMMMPPPPPOOOOOOII!! .....
5968 ........ MMMMMOOOOOOPPPPPPPPOOOOMII! ...
5969 ....... MMMMM.. OPPMMP .,OMI! ....
5970 ...... MMMM:: o.,OPMP,.o ::I!! ...
5971 .... NNM:::.,,OOPM!P,.::::!! ....
5972 .. MMNNNNNOOOOPMO!!IIPPO!!O! .....
5973 ... MMMMMNNNNOO:!!:!!IPPPPOO! ....
5974 .. MMMMMNNOOMMNNIIIPPPOO!! ......
5975 ...... MMMONNMMNNNIIIOO!..........
5976 ....... MN MOMMMNNNIIIIIO! OO ..........
5977 ......... MNO! IiiiiiiiiiiiI OOOO ...........
5978 ...... NNN.MNO! . O!!!!!!!!!O . OONO NO! ........
5979 .... MNNNNNO! ...OOOOOOOOOOO . MMNNON!........
5980 ...... MNNNNO! .. PPPPPPPPP .. MMNON!........
5981 ...... OO! ................. ON! .......
5982 ................................
5986 --/- ___ / \/ / / / \
5996 // / / // / /\ /-_-/\//-__-
5997 / / // / \__// / / / //
5998 // / / // / // / // /
5999 /// // / / / // / //
6002 /// / / / // // / // //
6004 /// / // / / // / / / /
6036 /.../###/______________\ \###\
6037 /........................\ \###\
6038 /..........................\ \###\
6039 ----------------------------- \###/
6041 \_________________________________/
6044 ___. .. . _ .. . ___. .__ . . _ . . __ __ _ __ _ . .___
6045 | | ||\||- ||\| | | ||_)|\| | ||\| | ||_)| ||_) | || | |
6046 ` `-`` ``- `` ` ``` ` `-`` \` ` `-`` ` ``` `-`` \`-`| `-``-` `
6074 ;;;;: ==;; :==== :+++=;; ::;=i===+: :=;;=+: ,,,,:==+;
6075 =tt;;: i+; ++++ :ii=: :::i++= ==;;+: :::=;+; ,
6076 :; iIt=: ;t+; ii=;::;+;=+; +;=; ;i+i, ==;=+; :,;;;i : ,
6077 :: :tIi: +i+ =+::=;;,;;;+; +;=; :=i==+;,:,;=;;+= ::;=;++ : ;
6078 ,i; iIt: t+= :+=,,,,::: ;,+;=;;: ;:,,;==;+=;+= ::;;=i; : ;ii
6079 RYi +Yt: ++i :i;,::==;; ;:i;=;;: ======+=i=++ :;=tYY: : :tt
6080 VXY= =Yi; :t=+ it==+It;; ;:+:=;:: :,;;=:=+==+ :;tYVY :: =Iii
6081 tVYt ;Yt, i+= +t+;=iI,; ;:;:;;:= :i :=;+ :;i+tt : :Iti
6082 iYY: :Yi, :i+: :t+;++i:; ;,;,;;;= :t +=+ ;i+ii :: =Y+
6083 =YY= ;Vi I++ :++=;==;;; +,=,,,,+ ;i;::;it, :i+t=;;: +I+
6084 IX+ =V; +i+=;;==;::,:::,,t,+,,,,;;iiii+iIiX=:=+ii;:;: iI+
6085 iXi =VItYIi=+======;;::;;ii;:,,,,,;iittiYV+XXttiit+, Yt
6086 IVYXYYIYi+;;;;;;;;;;;;;+it+:::::::=====+IttIItiitMBttti
6087 +tVVVttti+;::;;======+YBBVVVVXRVti+++==+IXIiYi+iRWWi+i=
6088 +=ttYVIi= ....,,,,+iIRWWWWWWWMBBRYI+....... +YMBYX==++
6089 ==+t: .;;===::,,:,,;=iIIItIIt=:,,:::===iii=;.,iXY+i;i
6090 t;+.IIY+++iii++;===:==++++I,:;;:,:=iiVXIBVRt+;,.IXY;t
6091 ii+, =itIItY==+tt+=+++;=ti;=;+M+i=;;=;=i+=it+tVti+==;.itI= +=ii
6092 i:===iIttIii+,:,, ,,:+++;t=t;V++;=;=;:,, ,,:;+IYii+==;.+Y+Ii===:i
6093 ti iii=i;;,, ;i: =i ,;.i=t=I=;Ri=, ,; ,it: ,:.,==;;;i+=YYttt,
6094 iit :Y++IIIIi+;;,,,,,,:;:i+;I=i;=II=;:;;;;;;;;;+++tIt+ii;iII; iYi=
6095 t= iV+tYYYVYVt===;;;===ii+=ti+=+=iii+==+;=+=IYVXRitYYItYXtVt= :+=
6096 Yi XX+iYYYVYR+i+++===;tIti=i+ttit;;=+====+;=IRVRRXtIIYM+YYI+ ++=I
6097 tt==Y+iYYYVYRI+++++=+IIti+++tt+=iYI+;;==+=+ttMMMRBXiiYi=+YYIt=;;
6098 t+iY:;iYYYYXRYi+++++Yt+iIt=+iItVXYYtIXBXYYVRWWWBXIi++=+=X+ ;It
6099 ti;I iYYYIYYVVRI++++i+ti++=:,;;++IX+YWWWMBWWWXYYi+++=;t:;IItY
6100 tt:,+;YYYYYYYYX+++====:::;=:;;;::++iYRWWBYt+tt+==++==:=;:=+
6101 tYYYYIYYt++++=;=YYI+;,,BYBBYIi++iii+=+I+++++;=I
6102 +YYYYYYt+++==iYYII;ittitVBBXBI+++==+i++=+=;=:i
6103 +YYYIYt+++iBt=:,...:;;=++itXXI++==i++==;;ii:
6104 IYYYI=;+=iitI;,;.,=iitIiiI;++=+++===;=:I;
6105 YYYt==tittIi;+:::=+tItIBIt+=+i++==;+=;+
6106 iYYIIIttt+=;=::::::=++ti+++=i==;+i=:=
6107 tIYYIIIVi++;;:::=+;+IYt+=;;IVY+:,;
6108 ;,ttIYIY++ii;=;==Y+iVYt===YIi;;Ii
6109 ;=:,:=iI====;;;;:=;;+ii=+i+iIttIi
6110 :==+++,;=;::::::::=;=+t++==it+iti
6125 / / / /\ \ Pat \ \ \
6126 / / / / \ \ Taylor / \ \
6127 / / / / /\ \ \ / /\ \ \
6128 / / / / / /\ \ \ / / /\ \_\
6129 / / / / /_/ \ \_\ / / / \/_/
6130 / / / / \ \ / / / / / / __ __
6131 / / / / /\ \ \/ / / / / / /\_\ /\ \
6132 / / / / / /\ \/ / / / / / / / / \ \ \
6133 / / /_/ / / \ / / / / / / / /____\_\ \
6134 / / /__\/ / / / / / / / / / /__________\
6135 \/_______/ / / / / / / \/_____________/
6157 L;;PMMMbaa_ "d88ad8'
6159 ,V;;;;;;;;;;"Man,8b.
6160 gd;;;;;;;;;;;;;"Mb;Mb.
6161 gd;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;"Mb,
6162 d8b;;;;;;;;b;;;;;;;;;;;"b,
6163 7P"8ba;;;;;B;;;;;;;;;;;;"Na
6164 8" "8b;;a";;;;;;;;;;;;;lB.
6165 B "8b,d;;paaaaaaqaL;;;"B
6166 ,B P" """' ""Y8bmdMb
6183 '8 .adP""9a .d" d lb
6192 ,oood8888888888booo,
6223 $ oo 8' `""booooooob 8' ooo 8
6224 $ o$"$o ,P o 8 8 d8"""" 8 `8
6225 $' d$' d8 od do d8 d8 8 `8 8
6226 $' d$' dP 8' d8 d8' 8 8 `8 `b
6227 $' od$ dP ,8' d8' d8 8b 8 `"b 8b
6228 $' od' d"' od od 88 `8 "8 `8 `8,
6229 $ od' 8 8' `8 8b 8 8 "o `8,
6230 $oo"" 8b 8 `8o 8bo "8 8b 8b 8b
6231 " 8b 8' 8o $$$ "8 8 `b `"oo
6232 Yb `b `8"$$$" 8b 8b 8b $$o
6233 `8 `b 8o "b `$o$$$$"
6237 happiness is a state of mind
6238 more than anything else,
6239 but so is everything else.
6242 Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
6246 1) "Don't worry, I can handle it."
6247 2) "You and what army?"
6248 3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop."
6250 For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
6253 I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.
6254 -- Ashleigh Brilliant
6256 Pittsburgh Driver's Test
6258 The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but
6259 a steady left tail light. This means:
6261 (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call
6262 the problem to the driver's attention.
6263 (b) the driver is signaling a right turn.
6264 (c) the driver is signaling a left turn.
6265 (d) the driver is from out of town.
6268 (The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign
6269 countries to signal turns.)
6273 1. Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
6274 2. Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
6275 3. What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
6276 4. We won't need reservations.
6277 5. It's always sunny there this time of the year.
6278 6. Don't worry, it's not loaded.
6279 7. They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
6281 Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy,
6282 but it's very funny--Did you ever try buying them without money?
6285 Lactomangulation, n.:
6286 Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly
6287 that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
6288 -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
6290 If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
6293 Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.
6295 Every creature has within him the wild, uncontrollable urge to punt.
6297 The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
6298 human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of
6299 ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that
6300 we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
6301 have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
6302 dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and
6303 of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
6304 revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a
6308 "Krusty non-toxic Cologne
6309 'The smell of the big top'
6310 Warning: Use in a well ventilated area.
6311 May stain furniture.
6312 Prolonged use may cause chemical burns."
6315 a girlfriend is a bottle of wine,
6316 a wife is a wine bottle.
6318 The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
6319 Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts
6320 to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to
6321 be one of the facts that needs altering.
6322 -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"
6324 In the beginning was The Plan
6325 And then came The Assumptions
6326 And the Assumptions were without form
6327 And The Plan was completely without substance
6328 And the darkness was upon the face of the workers.
6329 And they spoke amongst themselves, saying
6330 "It is a crock of sh*t, and it stinketh."
6331 And the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,
6332 "It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odor thereof."
6333 And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them,
6334 "It is a container of excrement and it is very stong
6335 Such that none may abide by it."
6336 And the Managers went unto the Directors and sayeth,
6337 "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
6338 And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
6339 "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
6340 And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,
6341 "It promotes growth and is very powerful."
6342 And the Vice Presidents went unto the President and sayeth unto Him,
6343 "This new Plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency
6344 Of this Company, and these Areas in particular."
6345 And the President looked upon The Plan,
6346 And saw that it was good, and The Plan became Policy.
6347 This is how sh*t happens.
6349 be unafraid to think fully on a small matter. -- fred t. hamster
6351 The late Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma sect of the Tibetan Buddhist
6352 tradition, wrote one book on the evils of tobacco. He detailed a number of
6353 problems, both physical and spiritual, which would derive from the use of
6354 tobacco. Interestingly, he claims the origin of the plant to be a demoness
6355 who vowed to take rebirth as a plant to afflict humankind.
6358 be unafraid to walk across the water. -- fred t. hamster
6366 | | | | ______ ~~~~ _____
6367 | |__/ | / ___--\\ ~~~ __/_____\__
6368 | ___/ / \--\\ \\ \ ___ <__ x x __\
6369 | | / /\\ \\ )) \ ( " )
6370 | | -------(---->>(@)--(@)-------\----------< >-----------
6371 | | // | | //__________ / \ ____) (___ \\
6372 | | // __|_| ( --------- ) //// ______ /////\ \\
6373 // | ( \ ______ / <<<< <>-----<<<<< / \\
6374 // ( ) / / \` \__ \\
6375 //-------------------------------------------------------------\\
6377 Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels
6378 start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and
6379 then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas... with the
6380 music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
6381 -- H. S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
6383 dude, i have your tickets
6384 for the grateful briquettes
6385 on saturday the 20th.
6387 so get out your wallets
6388 i need the rental lease
6389 or be hit with mallets
6390 for my friend has no peace
6391 and i have no ballots.
6392 without which you get no tickets
6393 for my friend has no spigots
6394 disgorging money in hiccups
6395 in the land of honey and pickups.
6398 Some people imagine that only the person who physically carries out the
6399 killing is creating a negative karmic effect, and that the person who just
6400 gave the orders is not--or, if he is, then only a little. But you
6401 should know that the same karmic result comes to everyone involved,
6402 including even anyone who just felt pleased about it--and therefore how
6403 much more so the person who actually ordered that the killing be carried
6404 out. Each person gets the whole karmic result of killing one animal. It
6405 is not as if one act of killing could be divided up among many people.
6407 From the Nying-ma _kunzang lama'i shelung_ (The Words of My Perfect Teacher)
6408 written by Patrul Rinpoche (1808-1887), (Padmakara translation group,
6409 trans., New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994, 104.)
6411 did you hear about the professor that got some human lips grafted onto his
6412 anus? then when his students were kissing butt, they could get some response.
6413 and he can also now wear a hat on his ass and sit on his head, and no one
6414 knows the difference...
6417 Software undergoes alpha testing as a first step in getting user
6418 feedback. Alpha is Latin for "doesn't work."
6421 Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is
6422 Latin for "still doesn't work."
6425 Instrument of torture. The first computer was invented by Roger
6426 "Duffy" Billingsly, a British scientist. In a plot to overthrow Adolf
6427 Hitler, Duffy disguised himself as a German ally and offered his
6428 invention as a gift to the surly dictator. The plot worked. On April
6429 8, 1945, Adolf became so enraged at the "Incompatible File Format"
6430 error message that he shot himself. The war ended soon after Hitler's
6431 death, and Duffy began working for IBM.
6434 Central propulsion unit. The CPU is the computer's engine. It
6435 consists of a hard drive, an interface card and a tiny spinning wheel
6436 that's powered by a running rodent--a gerbil if the machine is a 286,
6437 a ferret if it's a 386 and a ferret on speed if it's a 486.
6440 Black hole. Default directory is where all files that you need
6444 Terse, baffling remark used by programmers to place blame on users for
6445 the program's shortcomings.
6448 A document that has been saved with an unidentifiable name. It helps
6449 to think of a file as something stored in a file cabinet--except when
6450 you try to remove the file, the cabinet gives you an electric shock
6451 and tells you the file format is unknown.
6454 Collective term for any computer-related object that can be kicked or
6458 The feature that assists in generating more questions. When the help
6459 feature is used correctly, users are able to navigate through a series
6460 of Help screens and end up where they started from without learning
6464 Information is input from the keyboard as intelligible data and output
6465 to the printer as unrecognizable junk.
6468 A programmer's feeble attempt at repentance.
6471 Of computer components, the most generous in terms of variety, and the
6472 skimpiest in terms of quantity.
6475 A joke in poor taste. A printer consists of three main parts: the
6476 case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.
6479 Computer avengers. Once members of that group of high school nerds
6480 who wore tape on their glasses, played Dungeons and Dragons, and
6481 memorized Star Trek episodes; now millionaires who create
6482 "user-friendly" software to get revenge on whoever gave them noogies.
6485 Object that raises the monitor to eye level. Also used to compensate
6486 for that short table leg.
6488 Scheduled Release Date:
6489 A carefully calculated date determined by estimating the actual
6490 shipping date and subtracting six months from it.
6493 Of or pertaining to any feature, device or concept that makes perfect
6494 sense to a programmer.
6497 Collective term for those who stare vacantly at a monitor. Users are
6498 divided into three types: novice, intermediate and expert.
6499 - Novice Users--People who are afraid that simply pressing a key
6500 might break their computer.
6501 - Intermediate Users--People who don't know how to fix their computer
6502 after they've just pressed a key that broke it.
6503 - Expert Users--People who break other people's computers.
6506 H8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@S
6507 FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/
6508 DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$
6509 UKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ
6510 JKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH//8JHJKH
6511 JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH
6512 &^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^J
6513 KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)(8&*:KL)
6514 +J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*&^jj\+J23*
6515 H8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@Si8!p(_;XLk/\c@S
6516 FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/
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6518 UKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ
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6520 JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH
6521 FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/?*&l|FD/
6522 DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$%#DJK%$
6523 UKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ+IO3GUKJ
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6525 JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH&HJKL|JKH
6526 &^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^JKjgzh~&^J
6528 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;itIRXItIt=:;iVRIIII:;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6529 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;:+ItXRYtIIi;IIRXiII+=;;:::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6530 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;::;==+ittYRViII+iiRRtIIiiti++=;;::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6531 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;::;=+iitIIiitIXViII+tYRtIII=iIYIti++=;::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
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6545 ;;;;;;;;;;:;;,;i+VBMX+tI+;+itIYt==ittVRWWWWIIIIItItti+++;;IIii+;,;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6546 ;;;;;;;;;;;;,,:tYYYYi=+itt+;=+iiIIIIYWWWWWWIIIII=itii+;:+Itii+:,;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
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6549 ;;;;;;;;;;,:,,,,,,:;iIIIIIIti+;;;+IWWWXWWWWWYIi+tIYtii+=;::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6550 ;;;;;;;;;;,,:::,,,::::=itiiiIII+itIWWWMWWWWWXI+tiii+=;:::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6551 ;;;;;;;;;;;:,,:,,:;;;;;:IYIIItiIItMWWWWWWWWWXI;=;;:::;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
6557 ___-==++""" . /. . . \ . """++==-___
6558 __-+"" __\ .. . . | .. . | . . . /__ ""+-__
6559 /\__+-"" `-----=====\_ <O> _/=====-----' ""-+__/\
6570 WHY GOD NEVER RECEIVED TENURE AT ANY UNIVERSITY
6572 1. He had only one major publication.
6573 2. It had no references.
6574 3. It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
6575 4. Some even doubt he wrote it himself.
6576 5. It may be true that he created the world,
6577 but what has he done since then?
6578 6. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
6579 7. The scientific community has had a hard time
6580 replicating his results.
6581 8. He never applied to the Ethics Board
6582 for permission to use human subjects.
6583 9. When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it up
6584 by drowning the subjects.
6585 10. When subjects didn't behave as predicted,
6586 he deleted them from the sample.
6587 11. He rarely came to class, just told students
6589 12. Some say he had his son teach the class.
6590 13. He expelled his first two students for learning.
6591 14. Although there were only ten requirements,
6592 most students failed his tests.
6593 15. His office hours were infrequent and usually
6594 held on a mountaintop.
6596 When we walk upon Mother Earth, we always plant our feet carefully
6597 because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up
6598 at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them.
6599 -- Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation
6602 the foot is forgotten...
6605 Talent, will, and genius are natural phenomena, like volcanoes,
6606 lakes, mountains, winds, stars, clouds.
6607 -- George Sand -- 1874
6609 Creeping Featurism is the desire to add every technologically possible
6610 feature to a product whether or not the market needs it or will pay
6612 -- Leu Platt, CEO Hewlett Packard
6614 everybody's equal, but nobody's the same. -- fred t. hamster
6616 Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.
6619 The successful mother sets her children free
6620 and becomes more free herself in the process.
6621 -- Robert J. Havinghurst
6623 No amount of energy will take the place of thought.
6624 A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.
6627 It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.
6630 It's strange the way the imagination, having exhausted one field,
6631 turns for rest and reinvigoration to another.
6634 Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
6637 People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.
6638 -- Dr. Wilhem Stekel
6640 Love is the greatest refreshment of life.
6643 An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it.
6646 I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent
6647 that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.
6650 You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
6653 The greater the difficulty
6654 the more glory in surmounting it.
6657 Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself--at the
6658 expense of the new demands of each new generation.
6659 -- John Haynes Holmes
6661 The only thing that is really difficult is to prove what one believes.
6664 There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for
6665 all one's life--reciprocity.
6668 Each time we make a decision, it is determined by the good or evil forces,
6669 respectively, which are dominant.
6672 We taste and feel and see the truth.
6673 We do not reason ourselves into it.
6676 You inside and the wind outside, tangled on the window blind, tell me why you
6677 treated me so unkind. Down where the sun don't shine I'm lonely and I call
6678 your name, no place to go ain't that a shame....
6681 The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough
6682 to believe the best is yet to come.
6685 "Observing formations of pigs flying south for the winter is several orders
6686 of magnitude more likely than having two competing C[++] compilers deal
6687 with more than eight lines of source code the same way."
6688 -- Steve Rimmer -- windows columnist
6690 If asses were rainbows, we'd all have a pot of gold.
6699 Good judgment is a result of experience.
6700 Experience is a result of poor judgment.
6703 in programming, insanity is not a handicap.
6712 you don't have to get mad every time you have the right to. -- fred t. hamster
6714 It's actually quite straightforward, but first you must be familiar
6715 with the 9 Palaces and 24 Directions.
6718 Every fairly intelligent person realizes that
6719 the price of respectability is a muffled soul
6720 bent on the trivial and mediocre.
6723 People will admit to anything on the Internet. -- fred t. hamster
6725 If all the beasts were gone, men would die
6726 from great loneliness of spirit,
6727 for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man.
6728 All things are connected.
6729 Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth.
6730 -- Chief Seathl (Seattle) of Suwamish tribe,
6731 State of Washington, 1855
6733 keep doing good, but don't be a do-gooder. -- fred t. hamster
6735 All systems of thought confine their thinkers within the accepted boundaries.
6736 To free the mind from this conceptual jail, step back from and outside of the
6737 system; detachment enables both sides of the system (that which is within
6738 and that which is not within) to be perceived and dealt with as an object
6742 That which exists requires no reaffirmation by the mind; it simply is.
6743 It is that which does not exist that needs constant renewing contact by
6744 the mind; else it would fade from its only sphere of influence, the internal
6745 stage upon which it dances and captures the imagination.
6748 Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, no matter how stupid.
6749 -- Frank Zappa (paraphrase unfortunately... know the exact quote?)
6753 i am the beaver who reincarnated as a carpenter.
6754 i am the squirrel who came back as jimmy carter.
6755 if there's anything more fun than programming (where i actually use my brain
6756 mainly and not my body), then i don't want to know what it is.
6757 algorithms are my bread.
6758 objects are my butter.
6759 state machines are my toaster.
6760 library hierarchies are my table.
6761 my house is composed of invisible data and my nation rides along cables.
6762 i really need a girlfriend.
6765 every religion constitutes a view of reality and a view of the world.
6766 each one might suit a particular person differently.
6767 for any religion to claim that it is the one true religion is ridiculous
6768 because it asserts that its one way of viewing reality is the only correct
6769 one. surely this is a bad case of religious egotism or selfishness.
6772 talking about dharma is like making a home movie. when you watch it later,
6773 you see it, you hear it, and yet it isn't really there and the vital
6774 experience of being there is missing. but when you are there... you know
6775 it and feel it in a way your brain can't accurately record for later
6779 Deja Fu: The feeling that somehow, somewhere, you've been kicked in the
6780 head like this before.
6782 A day without sunshine is like night.
6784 There is a CD out entitled "The Worst of Jefferson Airplane". If you buy
6785 this, take it home, play it, and enjoy it, should you take it back and
6788 College is a fountain of knowledge... and the students are there to drink.
6790 A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
6792 Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that's not true.
6793 I have the heart of a young boy--in a jar on my desk.
6794 -- Stephen King, 3/8/90
6796 He who dies with the most toys, is, nonetheless, still dead.
6798 Photons have mass? I didn't know they were catholic!
6800 If you had everything, where would you keep it?
6802 I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
6803 has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
6804 -- Supposedly an English Professor, Ohio University
6806 What was sliced bread the greatest thing since?
6808 When aiming for the common denominator, be prepared
6809 for the occasional division by zero.
6811 When you're swimmin' in the creek
6812 And an eel bites your cheek
6814 -- Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
6816 Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
6817 A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with
6818 brightly colored machine tools.
6820 "... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking
6821 zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
6824 Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3--not even for very large values of 2.
6826 Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
6828 There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD.
6829 We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
6831 If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet,
6832 what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?
6835 One night I walked home very late and fell asleep in somebody's satellite
6836 dish. My dreams were showing up on TV's all over the world.
6839 My dental hygienist is cute. Every time I visit, I eat a whole package of
6840 Oreo cookies while I'm in the waiting room. Sometimes she has to cancel
6841 the rest of the afternoon's appointments.
6844 Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've
6845 forgotten this before.
6848 Smoking cures weight problems... eventually.
6851 I have an inferiority complex. But it's not a very good one.
6854 I was in the supermarket the other day, and I met a lady in the aisle where
6855 they keep the generic brands. Her name was 'woman'.
6858 I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the
6862 I'd like to sing you a song now about my old girlfriend. It's
6863 called, 'They'll Find Her When the Leaves Blow Away 'Cause I'm
6864 Not Raking 'Til Spring.'
6867 When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, 'Did you sleep good?'
6868 I said, 'No, I made a few mistakes.'
6871 I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
6874 The other day, I was walking my dog around my building... on the ledge.
6877 Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.
6880 I spilled spot remover on my dog. He's gone now.
6883 Referring to a glass of water: I mixed this myself. Two parts H, one
6884 part O. I don't trust anybody!
6887 I went to the cinema, and the prices were: Adults $5.00, children $2.50.
6888 So I said, 'Give me two boys and a girl.'
6891 I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered
6892 French Toast during the Renaissance.
6895 There's a pizza place near where I live that sells only slices. In the back
6896 you can see a guy tossing a triangle in the air.
6899 I went to a general store. They wouldn't let me buy anything specifically.
6902 I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy
6903 was locking the front door. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you're open 24
6904 hours.' He said, 'Yes, but not in a row.'
6907 There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people
6908 were trapped on the escalators.
6911 I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas. I took it to the Gift Wrap
6912 Department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would
6913 know when to stop unwrapping.
6916 I was born by Cesarean section... But not so you'd notice. It's just that
6917 when I leave a house, I go out through the window.
6920 When I was little, my grandfather used to make me stand in a closet for five
6921 minutes without moving. He said it was elevator practice.
6924 I didn't get a toy train like the other kids. I got a toy subway instead.
6925 You couldn't see anything, but every now and then you'd hear this rumbling
6929 Last week the candle factory burned down. Everyone just stood around and
6930 sang 'Happy Birthday'.
6933 A wino asked me for change... I gave him my shirt.
6936 I bought this thing for my car. You put it on your car, it sends out this
6937 little noise, so when you drive through the woods, deer won't run in front
6938 of your car. I installed it backwards by accident... Driving down the
6939 street with a herd of deer chasing me.
6942 The ice cream truck in my neighborhood plays 'Helter Skelter'.
6945 The sky already fell. Now what?
6948 My girlfriend and I went on a picnic. I don't know how she did it, but she
6949 got poison ivy on the brain. When it itched, the only way she could scratch
6950 it was to think about sandpaper.
6953 Trees that grow in smoggy cities are needed to make carbon paper.
6956 What's another word for Thesaurus?
6959 When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms
6960 with me. I said, 'Well, what do you need?'
6963 Why doesn't the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie?
6966 You know how it is when you decide to lie and say the check is in the mail,
6967 and then you remember it really is?
6970 I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No
6971 brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
6974 My watch is three hours fast, and I can't fix it. So I'm going to move to
6978 When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
6981 One time I went to a museum where all the work on display had been done by
6982 children. They had all the paintings up on refrigerators.
6985 When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was
6986 an only child... Eventually.
6989 One day I got on the bus, and when I stepped in, I saw the most gorgeous
6990 blond Chinese girl. I sat beside her. I said, 'Hi', And she said, 'Hi',
6991 and then I said, 'Nice day, isn't it?' And she said, 'I saw my analyst
6992 today and he says I have a problem. So I asked, 'What's the problem?'
6993 She replied, 'I can't tell you. I don't even know you.' I said, 'Well,
6994 sometimes it's good to tell your problems to a perfect stranger on a bus.'
6995 So she said, 'Well, my analyst said I'm a nymphomaniac and I only like
6996 Jewish cowboys... By the way, my name is Denise.' I said, 'Hello, Denise.
6997 My name is Bucky Goldstein.'
7000 Today I was arrested for scalping low numbers at the deli. I sold a #3 for
7004 Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just
7005 whipped out a quarter?
7008 I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
7011 What happens if you put a slinky on an escalator?
7014 If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
7017 If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
7020 If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?
7023 In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over
7024 what I considered to be an odd number.
7027 Is "tired old cliche" one?
7030 My aunt gave me a walkie-talkie for my birthday. She says if I'm good,
7031 she'll give me the other one next year.
7034 At an October re-trial in Leeds, England, jurors took about an
7035 hour to acquit police officer Andrew Whitfield, 30, of stealing a
7036 calculator worth about $4. The cost of the trial, plus the original
7037 mistrial, plus keeping Whitfield on paid suspension for 14 months
7038 as required by law, was about $158,000.
7039 -- News of the Weird -- Compiled by Chuck Shepard
7041 Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world,
7042 I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not
7043 with those flies and death and stuff.
7047 If you could live forever, would you and why?
7049 I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because
7050 if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we
7051 cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
7052 -- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest
7054 Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions
7055 in the brain as marijuana... The researchers also discovered other
7056 similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are.
7057 -- Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, August 22
7059 I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
7060 -- David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he
7061 failed to pay his taxes.
7063 Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your
7065 -- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson
7066 for a federal anti-smoking campaign
7068 I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.
7069 -- Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward
7071 Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates
7073 -- Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C.
7075 Beginning in February 1976 your assistance benefits will be discontinued...
7077 it has been reported to our office that you expired on January 1, 1976.
7078 -- Letter from the Illinois Department of Public Aid
7080 The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history... This century's
7081 history... We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.
7082 -- Dan Quayle, then Indiana senator and Republican vice-presidential
7083 candidate during a news conference in which he was asked his opinion
7086 I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly
7088 -- Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explaining why
7089 we should export toxic wastes to Third World countries
7091 After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal,
7092 the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of
7093 David Steele to the post.
7094 -- Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools, Barrington, Rhode Island
7096 The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.
7097 -- Dizzy Dean explaining how he felt after being hit on the head
7098 by a ball in the 1934 World Series
7100 there are some who believe that intelligence can only be won at the cost of
7101 other's intelligence; that is, there is no way to be intelligent without being
7102 more intelligent than someone else. i hypothesize that talking to this kind
7103 of person is a very draining experience because all that they are interested
7104 in is proving how much smarter they are than you are.
7105 i believe that people who want to increase intelligence everywhere are easy
7106 to talk to; they want you to know what they know and vice-versa, not to prove
7107 that they are the most intelligent person in the room.
7110 You are 97% water; the other 3% keeps you from drowning.
7113 It got to the end of our show, so I was just wandering around. I had
7114 this maternity dress on and a white face and I was doing unattractive
7115 things, spitting on people, things like that.
7116 -- Iggy Pop, sept. 22, 1968, several minutes before he signed his first
7119 The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena, who strive
7120 valiantly; who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and speed
7121 themselves in a worthy cause; who at the best, know the triumph of high
7122 achievement; and who, at the worst, if they fail, fail while daring
7123 greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid
7124 souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
7125 -- Theodore Roosevelt
7127 I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian
7128 because I hate plants.
7131 My young brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get
7132 buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should
7133 have told him the truth--that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally,
7134 but I didn't want to upset him.
7135 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 10
7137 When I go to heaven, I want to see my grandpa again. But he better have
7138 lost the nose hair and the old-man smell.
7139 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 5
7141 I once heard the voice of God. It said "Vrrrrmmmm." Unless it was just
7143 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 11
7145 I don't know about you, but I enjoy watching paint dry. I imagine that
7146 the wet paint is a big freshwater lake that is the only source of water
7147 for some tiny cities by the lake. As the lake gets drier, the population
7148 gets more desperate, and sometimes there are water riots. Once there was
7149 a big fire and everyone died.
7150 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 13
7152 I like to go down to the dog pound and pretend that I've found my dog.
7153 Then I tell them to kill it anyway because I already gave away all of
7154 his stuff. Dog people sure don't have a sense of humor.
7155 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 14
7157 I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I
7158 don't have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants to wash clothes
7159 on the last day of their life?
7160 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7162 It sure would be nice if we got a day off for the president's birthday,
7163 like they do for the queen. Of course, then we would have a lot of people
7164 voting for a candidate born on July 3 or December 26, just for the long
7166 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 8
7168 As you make your way through this hectic world of ours, set aside a few
7169 minutes each day. At the end of the year, you'll have a couple of days
7171 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 7
7173 Democracy is a beautiful thing, except for that part about letting just
7175 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 10
7177 Home is where the house is.
7178 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 6
7180 Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher. That
7181 is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.
7182 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7184 It would be terrible if the Red Cross Bloodmobile got into an accident.
7185 No, wait. That would be good because if anyone needed it, the blood would be
7187 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 5
7189 Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the
7190 things I cannot, and a great big bag of money.
7191 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 13
7193 I bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.
7194 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 13
7196 For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then
7197 the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That's what
7198 happens to cheese when you leave it out.
7199 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 6
7201 Think of the biggest number you can. Now add five. Then, imagine if you
7202 had that many Twinkies. Wow, that's five more than the biggest number
7203 you could come up with!
7204 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 6
7206 The only stupid question is the one that is never asked, except maybe
7207 "Don't you think it is about time you audited my return?" or "Isn't it morally
7208 wrong to give me a warning when, in fact, I was speeding?"
7209 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7211 Once, I wept for I had no shoes. Then I came upon a man who had no feet.
7212 So I took his shoes. I mean, it's not like he really needed them, right?
7213 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7215 I often wonder how come John Tesh isn't as popular a singer as some
7216 people think he should be. Then, I remember it's because he sucks.
7217 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7219 If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world
7220 peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the
7222 -- Deep Thoughts Jr., Age 15
7224 Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
7226 Lobotomies for republicans? Why be redundant?
7228 The last time we mixed politics and religion,
7229 people got burned at the stake.
7233 Minimum wage for politicians.
7236 i dancing nude green
7238 (a haiku-style anagram for "inova engineering and production")
7241 If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
7243 A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
7245 Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.
7247 Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
7249 A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7251 He who hesitates is probably right.
7253 Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.
7255 The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.
7257 To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.
7259 Two wrongs are only the beginning.
7261 You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
7263 The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
7265 Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.
7267 The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
7269 A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
7271 Change is inevitable... except from vending machines.
7273 Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow.
7275 Half the people you know are above average.
7277 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
7279 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
7281 If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
7283 Oh, yeah, what are you gonna do? Release the dogs? Or
7284 the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when
7285 they bark, they shoot bees at you?
7288 Son, when you participate in sporting events, it's not
7289 whether you win or lose... it's how drunk you get.
7292 Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably.
7293 The lesson is, never try.
7296 It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but
7297 somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.
7300 Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What
7306 Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
7307 Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah.... right, Lisa. A wonderful...
7310 Marge: Do you want your son to be Chief Justice of the
7311 Supreme Court, or a sleazy male stripper?
7312 Homer: Can't he be both, like the late Earl Warren?
7313 Marge: Earl Warren was never a stripper!
7314 Homer: Oh, now who's being naive?
7316 Homer: But every time I learn something new, it pushes out
7317 something old! Remember that time I took a home
7318 wine-making course and forgot how to drive?
7319 Marge: That's because you were drunk!
7322 Oh, Lisa, you and your stories: Bart's a vampire, beer
7323 kills brain cells. Now let's go back to that...
7324 building...thingie... where our beds and TV... is.
7327 Operator! Give me the number for 911!
7330 Lenny: Hey, Homer? What do I tell the boss?
7331 Homer: Tell him I'm going to the back seat of my car with
7332 the woman I love, and I won't be back for ten minutes!
7334 Big brother representative: Now, Mr. Simpson, may I ask why
7336 Homer's brain: Don't say revenge. Don't say revenge.
7337 Homer: Ummm... revenge?
7338 Homer's brain: Okay, that's it. I'm outta here.
7339 (step step step step step...slam)
7341 Homer: Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like
7342 you, but let's get through this thing and then I can
7343 continue killing you with beer.
7344 Homer's Brain: It's a deal!
7346 Homer: But Marge! I was a political prisoner!
7347 Marge: How were you a political prisoner?
7348 Homer: I kicked a giant mouse in the butt! Do I have to
7351 Homer: Bart, a woman is like a beer. They look good, they
7352 smell good, and you'd step over your own mother just
7353 to get one! (chugs beer)
7355 Old man: Take this doll, but beware; it carries a terrible curse.
7356 Homer: Ooo, that's bad.
7357 Old man: But it comes with a free serving of frozen yogurt!
7359 Old man: The frozen yogurt is also cursed.
7361 Old man: But it comes with your choice of toppings!
7363 Old man: The toppings contain potassium benzoate...
7365 Old man: That's bad.
7366 Homer: Can I go now?
7368 Getting out of jury duty is easy. The trick is to say
7369 you're prejudiced against all races.
7372 Homer's brain: Use reverse psychology.
7373 Homer: Oh, that sounds too complicated.
7374 Homer's brain: Okay, don't use reverse psychology.
7375 Homer: Okay, I will!
7377 Homer: When I first heard that Marge was joining the police academy, I thought
7378 it would be fun and zany, like that movie--Spaceballs. But instead it was
7379 dark and disturbing. Like that movie--Police Academy.
7381 Marge: Homer, did you call the audience "Chicken"?
7382 Homer: No! I swear on this bible!
7383 Marge: That's not a bible. That's a book of carpet samples.
7384 Homer: Mmmm... fuzzy.
7386 Lisa: Dad, we did something very bad!
7387 Homer: Did you wreck the car?
7389 Homer: Did you raise the dead?
7391 Homer: But the car's okay?
7392 Bart & Lisa: Uh-huh.
7393 Homer: All right then.
7395 Mmmmm... reprocessed pig fat... -- Homer Simpson
7397 (praying): Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me. As
7398 an offering, I present these milk and cookies. If you
7399 wish me to eat them instead, please give me no sign
7400 whatsoever... thy will be done (munch munch munch).
7403 Homer: (On George HW Bush) I didn't vote for him!
7404 Marge: You didn't vote for anybody.
7405 Homer: I voted for Prell to go back to the old glass bottle.
7406 Then I became deeply cynical.
7408 What's the point of going out? We're just going to
7409 wind up back here anyway.
7412 I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer.
7415 All right, brain, I don't like you and you don't like me--so let's
7416 just do this and I'll get back to killing you with beer.
7419 You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline;
7420 it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear
7421 weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
7424 Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to
7425 keep your mouth shut.
7426 -- Ernest Hemmingway
7428 Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has
7430 -- Winston Churchill
7432 He was a wise man who invented beer.
7435 Time is never wasted when you're wasted all the time.
7436 -- Catherine Zandonella
7438 A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
7441 "Sir, if I were your wife, I would put poison in your coffee."
7442 -- Lady Nancy Astor speaking to Winston Churchill
7443 "Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it."
7444 -- Winston Churchill's reply
7446 If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs.
7449 Work is the curse of the drinking class.
7452 When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
7455 Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
7456 -- Benjamin Franklin
7458 If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it
7459 makes beer shoot out your nose.
7460 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
7462 Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is
7463 beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but
7464 the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
7467 The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.
7470 Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine.
7473 People who drink light "beer" don't like the taste of beer; they just
7475 -- Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI
7477 Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world.
7480 Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and
7481 oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital
7485 I drink to make other people interesting.
7486 -- George Jean Nathan
7488 They who drink beer will think beer.
7489 -- Washington Irving
7491 An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with
7493 -- For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
7495 You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
7498 I will not carve gods.
7499 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7501 I will not spank others.
7502 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7504 I will not aim for the head.
7505 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7507 I will not barf unless I'm sick.
7508 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7510 I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty.
7511 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7513 I saw nothing unusual in the teacher's lounge.
7514 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7516 I will not conduct my own fire drills.
7517 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7519 Funny noises are not funny.
7520 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7522 I will not snap bras.
7523 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7525 I will not fake seizures.
7526 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7528 This punishment is not boring and pointless.
7529 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7531 My name is not Dr. Death.
7532 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7534 I will not defame New Orleans.
7535 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7537 I will not prescribe medication.
7538 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7540 I will not bury the new kid.
7541 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7543 I will not teach others to fly.
7544 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7546 I will not bring sheep to class.
7547 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7549 A burp is not an answer.
7550 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7552 Teacher is not a leper.
7553 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7555 Coffee is not for kids.
7556 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7558 I will not eat things for money.
7559 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7561 I will not yell "She's Dead" at roll call.
7562 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7564 The principal's toupee is not a Frisbee.
7565 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7567 I will not call the principal "spud head".
7568 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7570 Goldfish don't bounce.
7571 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7573 Mud is not one of the 4 food groups.
7574 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7576 No one is interested in my underpants.
7577 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7579 I will not sell miracle cures.
7580 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7582 I will return the seeing-eye dog.
7583 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7585 I do not have diplomatic immunity.
7586 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7588 I will not charge admission to the bathroom.
7589 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7591 The cafeteria deep fryer is not a toy.
7592 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7594 All work and no play makes Bart a dull boy.
7595 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7597 I will not say "Springfield" just to get applause.
7598 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7600 I am not authorized to fire substitute teachers.
7601 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7603 My homework was not stolen by a one-armed man.
7604 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7606 I will not go near the kindergarten turtle.
7607 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7609 I am not deliciously saucy.
7610 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7612 Organ transplants are best left to professionals.
7613 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7615 The Pledge of Allegiance does not end with "Hail Satan".
7616 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7618 I will not celebrate meaningless milestones.
7619 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7621 There are plenty of businesses like show business.
7622 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7624 Five days is not too long to wait for a gun.
7625 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7627 I will not waste chalk.
7628 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7630 I will not skateboard in the halls.
7631 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7633 Underwear should be worn on the inside.
7634 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7636 I will never win an emmy.
7637 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7639 I will not torment the emotionally frail.
7640 -- Bart Simpson (at the blackboard)
7642 Bitter, unsuccessful middle aged loser wallowing in an unending sea of inert,
7643 drooping loneliness looking for 24 year old needy leech-like hanger-on to
7644 abuse with dull stories, tired sex and Herb Alpert albums.
7645 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7646 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7648 Me--trying to sleep on the bus station bench, pleading with you to give me a
7649 cigarette; you--choking on my odor, tripping over your purse trying to get
7650 away; at the last moment, our eyes meeting. Yours were blue.
7651 Can I have a dollar?
7652 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7653 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7655 Imp and angel. Disembodied head in jar, 24, seeks pixie goddess to fiddle with
7656 while Rome burns. You bring marshmallows. No. I make joke. You like laugh?
7657 I like comebacks and confessions. Send photo of someone else.
7658 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7659 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7661 I am spitting kitty. Ftt Fttttttt. I am angry bear. Grrrrr. I am large
7662 watermelon seed stuck in your nose. Zermmmmmmmmmm. I am small biting spider
7663 in your underwear. Yub yub yub. No mimes.
7664 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7665 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7667 Three toed mango peeler searching for wicked lesbian infielder. Like screaming
7668 and marking territory with urine? Let's make banana enchiladas together in my
7669 bathtub. You bring the salsa.
7670 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7671 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7673 Mongoloid spastic underwear model with extra limb (you guess where?) in search
7674 of bottlenosed dolphin and extra prickly cactus juice. Soup is good food.
7675 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7676 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7678 I like eating mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches in the rain, watching
7679 Barney Miller reruns, peeing on birds in the park and licking strangers on the
7680 subway; you eat beets raw, have climbed Kilimanjaro, and sweat freely and
7681 often. Must wear size five shoes.
7682 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7683 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7685 Timber! Falling downward is the lumber of my love. You grind your axe of
7686 passion into my endangered headlands. Don't make me into a bureau. I want
7687 to be lots and lots of toothpicks.
7688 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7689 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7691 Small lumpy squid monkey seeks healthy woman with no identifying scars, any
7692 age. Must have all limbs. Recommend appreciation of high-pitched, screeching
7693 noises. Must like being bored and lonely. Must not touch the squids, EVER.
7694 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7695 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7697 There is a little place in the jumbled sock drawer of my heart where you
7698 match up all the pairs, throw out the ones with holes in them, and buy me
7699 some of those neat dressy ones with the weird black and red geometrical
7701 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7702 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7704 Mmmm Pez! Rabid Wonder Woman fan looking for someone in satin tights,
7705 fighting for our rights and the old red, white 'n blue. You look like
7706 Linda Carter? Big plus. Know all words to theme song? Marry me.
7707 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7708 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7710 Sanctimonious mordacious raconteur seeking same for hijinks and hiballs.
7711 SJM 27 wants to look someone in the eye so don't be tall. Or, if you can't
7712 help it, enjoy laying down. Wanna swim upstream?
7713 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7714 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7716 Remember that summer you spent with your parents in Hawaii and how mad you
7717 were that they made you go? And how you were hopelessly bored until you saw
7718 the most gorgeous man you'd ever encountered strolling down the beach looking
7719 at you, skillfully removing your skimpy bikini with his piercing eyes? And
7720 how you spent the last month imagining him taking you in every possible way,
7721 masturbating feverishly day and night, wishing he would reappear, but he never
7722 did because you were 15 and he would have gone to jail? That was me, and
7724 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7725 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7727 Angry, simple-minded, balding, partially blind ex-circus flipper boy with a
7728 passion for covering lovers in sour cream and gravy seeks exotic, heavily
7729 tattooed piercing fanatic, preferably hairy, either sex, for whippings,
7730 bizarre sex and fashion consulting. No freaks.
7731 -- from "A Collection of Personal Ads From Alternative Newspapers,"
7732 by Skippy Williams and Zohre Crumpton, 1996, Simon and Schuster.
7734 A freshman at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho
7735 Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned
7736 we have become to the alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear
7737 of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign
7738 a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical
7739 "dihydrogen monoxide." And for plenty of good reasons, since
7741 1. it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting;
7742 2. it is a major component in acid rain;
7743 3. it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state;
7744 4. accidental inhalation can kill you;
7745 5. it contributes to erosion;
7746 6. it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes;
7747 7. it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients.
7749 He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical. Forty-three said
7750 yes, six were undecided, and only one knew that the chemical was water. The
7751 title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?".
7752 The conclusion is obvious.
7754 If you ever see me getting beaten by the police, put down the video camera
7756 -- Bobcat Goldthwait
7758 I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because
7759 it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive,
7760 but I have photographs of her.
7763 I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other
7764 one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they
7765 are always locking three.
7768 Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?
7771 Relationships are hard. It's like a full-time job, and we should treat it like
7772 one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you
7773 two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay and before they leave you,
7774 they should have to find you a temp.
7777 I don't know what's wrong with my television set. I was getting C-Span and
7778 the Home Shopping Network on the same station. I actually bought a
7782 I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language
7783 that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may may be. But I
7784 think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't
7785 afraid of vacuum cleaners.
7788 Did you ever walk in a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how
7789 dogs spend their lives.
7792 Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to
7793 listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating
7797 The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering
7798 from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they
7799 are okay, then it's you.
7802 Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image
7803 there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe
7804 laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body
7805 before you do the wash.
7808 USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people
7809 make up 75 percent of the population.
7812 A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket. 'You know
7813 a cow was murdered for that jacket?' she sneered. I replied in a psychotic
7814 tone, 'I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too.'
7817 I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
7820 The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Pretty
7821 impressive. Also pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife
7822 they have to fight with? Not much of a weapon there. Corkscrews. Bottle
7823 openers. "Come on, buddy, let's go. You get past me, the guy in back of me,
7824 he's got a spoon. Back off. I've got the toe clippers right here."
7827 Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my
7828 fishburger and I realize, Oh my God... I could be eating a slow learner.
7831 Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.
7834 Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
7835 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7837 Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.
7838 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7840 I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom
7841 and democracy--but that could change.
7842 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 5/22/89
7844 One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that
7845 one word is 'to be prepared'.
7846 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 12/6/89
7848 May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope to the world.
7849 -- The Quayles' 1989 Christmas card
7851 Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
7852 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7854 We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.
7855 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7857 I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the
7859 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7861 The future will be better tomorrow.
7862 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7864 We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world.
7865 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7867 People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a
7868 tremendous impact on history.
7869 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7871 I stand by all the misstatements that I've made.
7872 -- Vice President Dan Quayle to Sam Donaldson, 8/17/89
7874 We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm
7875 commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.
7876 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7878 I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.
7879 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7881 I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix.
7882 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7884 A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.
7885 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7887 When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and
7888 the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame
7889 for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings?
7890 The killers are to blame.
7891 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7893 Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.
7894 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 5/20/92 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
7896 Murphy Brown is doing better than I am. At least she knows she still has a job
7898 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/18/92
7900 We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.
7901 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 9/22/90
7903 For NASA, space is still a high priority.
7904 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 9/5/90
7906 Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.
7907 -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 9/18/90
7909 The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle
7910 may or may not make.
7911 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7913 We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the
7914 mistakes we may or may not have made.
7915 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7917 It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities
7918 in our air and water that are doing it.
7919 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7921 [It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.
7922 -- Vice President Dan Quayle
7924 Public speaking is very easy.
7925 -- Dan Quayle to reporters in 10/88
7927 We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice.
7930 The president has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
7931 -- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on "Larry King Live"
7933 The police are not here to create disorder.
7934 They're here to preserve disorder.
7935 -- Former Chicago mayor Daley
7936 during the infamous 1968 convention
7938 Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas.
7939 -- Former Australian cabinet minister Keppel Enderbery
7941 It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.
7942 -- Former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle
7944 The internet is a great way to get on the net.
7945 -- Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole
7947 It is bad luck to be superstitious.
7950 It's like an Alcatraz around my neck.
7951 -- Boston mayor Menino on the shortage of city parking spaces
7953 They're multipurpose. Not only do they put the clips on, but they take
7955 -- Pratt & Whitney spokesperson explaining why the company charged the
7956 Air Force nearly $1,000 for an ordinary pair of pliers
7958 We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
7959 -- Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks
7961 I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers.
7962 We are the president.
7963 -- Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents
7965 When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.
7966 -- Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge
7968 China is a big country, inhabited by many chinese.
7969 -- Former French President Charles de Gaulle
7971 That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and
7972 i'm just the one to do it.
7973 -- A congressional candidate in Texas
7975 Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
7976 -- Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
7978 Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
7979 -- General William Westmoreland, during the war in Viet Nam
7981 If you let that sort of thing go on, your bread and butter will be cut
7982 right out from under your feet.
7983 -- Former British foreign minister Ernest Bevin
7985 Almonds and peaches are members of the Rosaceae family (roses) and are
7986 both in the subfamily Amygdaloideae, which also includes plums, cherries
7989 The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
7991 Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
7993 Nutmeg is toxic and can cause fatal overdoses just from eating too much.
7995 Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real
7996 brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp).
7998 In Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie," mime Marcel Marceau is the only person who
7999 has a speaking role.
8001 Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make--$5 million going to actor's salaries.
8003 A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the
8004 production of Guinness beer.
8006 Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los
8007 Angeles de Porciúncula" or "The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of Angels,
8008 of Porziuncola", although its official name is simply "El Pueblo de
8009 la Reina de Los Angeles".
8011 A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
8013 An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
8015 Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
8017 Deborah Winger did the voice of E.T.
8019 In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed
8020 on an analog watch is 10:10.
8022 Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
8024 Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
8026 The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint--no two lions have the same
8027 pattern of whiskers.
8029 Bob Dylan's given name is Robert Allen Zimmerman.
8031 Research by the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in
8032 2003 demonstrated that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three
8033 months and can distinguish between different shapes, colours and sounds.
8035 The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
8037 It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog
8038 throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's
8039 mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's
8040 contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
8042 Bingo is the name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box.
8044 ABBA got their name by taking the first letter from each of their first
8045 names (Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, Anni-frid.)
8047 The Beatles song "Dear Prudence" was written about Mia Farrow's sister,
8048 Prudence, when she wouldn't come out and play with Mia and the Beatles
8049 at a religious retreat in India.
8051 The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
8053 The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator,
8054 Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence "Oz."
8056 Horses and rabbits cannot normally vomit, but have been observed in
8057 extreme cases appearing to vomit. For example, horses with severe colic
8058 can produce fermented stomach contents, and rabbits have been observed
8059 expelling stomach contents due to over-eating or health issues.
8061 Virgina Woolf liked to write standing up.
8062 Mark Twain often wrote while lying down.
8064 Testimonial from Col. George Harvey, Mark Twain's publisher:
8065 I think that perhaps the funniest thing about Mark Twain now is not
8066 his writing, but his bed. He lies in bed a good deal; he says he has
8067 formed the habit. His bed is the largest one I ever saw, and on it is
8068 the weirdest collection of objects you ever saw, enough to furnish a
8069 Harlem flat--books, writing materials, clothes, any and everything that
8070 could foregather in his vicinity.
8071 He looks quite happy rising out of the mass, and over all prowls a
8072 huge black cat of a very unhappy disposition. She snaps and snarls and
8073 claws and bites, and Mark Twain takes his turn with the rest; when she
8074 gets tired of tearing up manuscript she scratches him and he bears it
8075 with a patience wonderful to behold.
8076 -- interview subtitled "Mark Twain's Bed," Washington Post,
8077 March 26, 1905, p. F12
8079 Testimonial from Katy Leary, Mark Twain's servant:
8080 Mr. Clemens borrowed a kitten one time, called Bambino, from Clara, who
8081 had him in the sanitarium, and had trained him to wash his own face in the
8082 bowl every morning--which shows that he was a very smart little cat. He
8083 used to have this kitten up in his room at the Fifth Avenue house and he
8084 taught it to put out a light, too. He had a tiny little lamp to light his
8085 cigars with at the head of the bed, and after he got all fixed and didn't
8086 want the light any more, he taught that cat to put his paw on the light
8087 and put it out. Bambino would jump on the bed, look at Mr. Clemens to see
8088 if he was through with the light, and when Mr. Clemens would bow twice to
8089 him, he'd jump over on to that table quick, and put his little paw right
8090 on the lamp! Mr. Clemens was always showing him off; he did that for a lot
8091 of people that come there to call.
8092 One night he got kind of gay, when he heard some cats calling from the
8093 back fence, so he found a window open and he stole out. We looked high
8094 and low but couldn't find him. Mr. Clemens felt so bad that he advertised
8095 in all the papers for him. He offered a reward for anybody that would
8096 bring the cat back. My goodness! the people that came bringing cats to
8097 that house! A perfect stream! They all wanted to see Mr. Clemens, of
8099 Two or three nights after, Katherine heard a cat meowing across the
8100 street in General Sickles' back yard, and there was Bambino--large as
8101 life! So she brought him right home. Mr. Clemens was delighted and then
8102 he advertised that his cat was found! But the people kept coming just
8103 the same with all kinds of cats for him--anything to get a glimpse of
8105 -- A Lifetime with Mark Twain, by Mary Lawton
8107 If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to
8108 yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because
8109 for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.
8110 -- Rainer Maria Rilke
8112 Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of human existence.
8113 -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8115 If we concede that human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of
8119 What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself;
8120 when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it
8121 must go seeking, and where all its equipment will avail nothing. Seek? More
8122 than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist,
8123 to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into
8127 As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
8128 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
8130 I believe that everything depends on attention. I only see you if I pay
8131 attention. I only exist, in my own eyes, if I pay attention to myself.
8134 The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette.
8136 If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
8138 I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
8140 If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.
8142 Good girls get fat, bad girls get eaten.
8144 The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.
8146 A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.
8148 I need someone really bad... are you really bad?
8150 If, a two letter word for futility.
8152 Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
8154 To all you virgins, thanks for nothing.
8156 The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.
8158 My kid had sex with your honor student.
8160 Don't hit me. My lawyer's in jail.
8162 If something goes without saying, LET IT!
8164 If at first you do succeed, try not to look astonished.
8166 IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.
8168 Hard work has a future payoff, laziness pays off now.
8170 Life's a buffet... so eat me!
8172 Montana--At least our cows are sane!
8178 God must love stupid people, he made so many.
8180 I said "no" to drugs, but they just wouldn't listen.
8182 The gene pool could use a little chlorine.
8184 There's too much youth, how about a fountain of smart.
8186 Forget about World Peace... Visualize Using Your Turn Signal!
8188 Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.
8190 I know what you're thinking, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
8192 Don't drink and drive, you might hit a bump and spill your drink.
8194 Elvis is dead, and I'm not feeling too good myself.
8196 Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
8198 Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
8200 Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
8202 Always be nice to your children because they are
8203 the ones who will choose your rest home.
8206 I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles.
8208 Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.
8210 I'm not offended by all the dumb blond jokes because I know I'm not
8211 dumb... and I also know that I'm not blond.
8214 You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a
8215 smart woman with a dumb guy.
8218 I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home
8219 which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls
8220 every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that
8221 comes home late at night.
8224 I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.
8227 I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told
8228 me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that
8229 feels GOOD for 36 hours.
8232 I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.
8235 I think--therefore I'm single.
8238 Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
8241 Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as
8242 assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly
8243 promoted as a male schlemiel.
8246 I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on
8247 how to combine marriage and a career.
8250 Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they
8251 should live next door and just visit now and then.
8252 -- Katharine Hepburn
8254 God is my favorite fictional character.
8257 Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
8258 -- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
8260 I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
8261 -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
8263 I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the
8264 best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't
8266 -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
8268 But what... is it good for?
8269 -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,
8270 commenting on the microchip
8272 This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a
8273 means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
8274 -- Western Union internal memo, 1876
8276 The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for
8277 a message sent to nobody in particular?
8278 -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment
8279 in the radio in the 1920s
8281 The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than
8282 a 'C,' the idea must be feasible.
8283 -- A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's
8284 paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service
8285 (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
8287 Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
8288 -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927
8290 I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary
8292 -- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone
8295 A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say
8296 America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.
8297 -- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies
8299 We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
8300 -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
8302 If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
8303 literature was full of examples that said you can't do this.
8304 -- Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
8307 So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built
8308 with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll
8309 give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for
8310 you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they
8311 said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'
8312 -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P
8313 interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer
8315 Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and
8316 the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He
8317 seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
8318 -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary
8321 You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your
8322 muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to
8323 accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight
8325 -- Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by
8328 Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're
8330 -- Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill
8333 Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
8334 -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929
8336 Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
8337 -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy,
8338 Ecole Superieure de Guerre
8340 Everything that can be invented has been invented.
8341 -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899, arguing
8342 that the office should be closed
8344 Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
8345 -- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
8347 The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion
8348 of the wise and humane surgeon.
8349 -- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary
8350 to Queen Victoria 1873
8352 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
8353 -- Attributed to Bill Gates, 1981, but he asserts that he did not say this.
8355 Three things are certain:
8356 Death, taxes, and lost data.
8357 Guess which has occurred.
8360 Your life's work has been destroyed.
8361 Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
8364 I am the Blue Screen of Death.
8365 No one hears your screams.
8367 Seeing my great fault
8368 Through darkening blue windows
8371 The code was willing,
8372 It considered your request,
8373 But the chips were weak.
8376 Could be a fatal error.
8380 It might be very useful.
8383 Errors have occurred.
8384 We won't tell you where or why.
8387 Server's poor response
8388 Not quick enough for browser.
8389 Timed out, plum blossom.
8391 Chaos reigns within.
8392 Reflect, repent, and reboot.
8396 Only perfect spellers may
8399 This site has been moved.
8400 We'd tell you where, but then we'd
8404 scatt'ring petals to the wind:
8408 Close all that you have.
8409 You ask way too much.
8411 First snow, then silence.
8412 This thousand dollar screen dies
8415 With searching comes loss
8416 and the presence of absence:
8417 "My Novel" not found.
8419 The Tao that is seen
8420 Is not the true Tao, until
8421 You bring fresh toner.
8423 The Web site you seek
8424 cannot be located but
8425 endless others exist
8427 Stay the patient course
8428 Of little worth is your ire
8432 your expensive computer
8436 of carbon and silicon
8437 the software can't bridge
8440 Today it is not working
8441 Windows is like that
8444 Would be life without meaning
8447 You step in the stream,
8448 but the water has moved on.
8449 This page is not here.
8456 Hal, open the damn file, Hal
8457 open the, please Hal
8460 We wish to hold the whole sky,
8464 The document you're seeking
8465 Must now be retyped.
8467 The ten thousand things
8468 How long do any persist?
8469 Netscape, too, has gone.
8472 Or a rude error message,
8473 These words: "File not found."
8476 All shortcuts have disappeared.
8477 Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
8479 Indecision may or may not be my problem.
8482 If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
8483 This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
8486 If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He
8490 I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage.
8491 They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
8494 I would love to speak a foreign language but I can't.
8495 So I grew hair under my arms instead.
8498 The second day of a diet is always easier than the first.
8499 By the second day you're off it.
8502 Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
8505 If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's
8506 life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if
8507 there is a man on base.
8510 Somebody hits me, I'm going to hit him back. Even if it does look like he
8511 hasn't eaten in a while.
8512 -- Charles Barkley, after blatantly elbowing an Angolan basketball
8513 opponent in the Olympics.
8515 I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said,
8516 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough.
8520 The show business newspaper Daily Variety reported in December that John
8521 Kricfalusi, creator of TV's "The Ren & Stimpy Show," was threatening legal
8522 action against the producers of the Comedy Central show "South Park" for
8523 ripping off a cartoon character. According to Kricfalusi, his character
8524 "Nutty the Friendly Dump," an animated piece of excrement, must have been
8525 the basis for "South Park"'s "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo," a holiday-
8526 dressed, singing, dancing piece of excrement.
8528 If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is
8529 no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?
8531 If a deaf person swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap?
8533 If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is
8534 it considered a hostage situation?
8536 Is there another word for synonym?
8538 Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice?"
8540 When sign makers go on strike, is anything written on their signs?
8542 Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all?"
8544 Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food?
8546 What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
8548 If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?
8550 Would a fly without wings be called a walk?
8552 Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone
8555 If a stealth bomber crashes in a forest, will it make a sound?
8557 If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?
8559 Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
8561 Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
8563 If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to
8566 Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?
8568 How do they get the deer to cross at that yellow road sign?
8570 Why do they sterilize the needles for lethal injections?
8572 Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
8574 Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny?
8576 Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies.
8579 In dog years, I'm dead.
8582 Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in
8583 case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in
8588 I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees us peeing in his water bowl.
8591 Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend,
8592 and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
8595 To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
8598 A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times
8602 Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is
8603 how dogs spend their lives.
8606 Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac who stays up all night
8607 wondering if there really is a Dog?
8610 I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give
8614 I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts
8615 to bite people themselves.
8616 -- August Strindberg
8618 Ever consider what they [our pets] must think of us? I mean, here we come
8619 back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul--chicken, pork, half
8620 a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
8623 My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can.
8624 That's almost $7.00 in dog money.
8627 If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known
8628 will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
8631 You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
8634 Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are
8638 Women and cats will do as they please and men and dogs should relax and get
8640 -- Robert A. Heinlein
8642 In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have
8643 a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
8644 -- Dereke Bruce, Taipei, Taiwan
8646 When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
8649 Cat's Motto: No matter what you've done wrong, always try to
8650 make it look like the dog did it.
8653 Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy
8654 the wag of his tail... No one appreciates the very
8655 special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
8656 -- Christopher Morley
8658 A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
8661 Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.
8664 The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
8667 He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life,
8668 his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat
8669 of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.
8672 Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog
8676 I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
8679 If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
8682 Things that upset a terrier may pass virtually unnoticed by a Great Dane.
8685 I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt,
8686 and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
8689 There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
8692 One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
8693 No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
8696 (AP) Tokyo: Tokyo commuter Katsuo Katugoru caused havoc on a crowded tube
8697 train when his inflatable underpants unexpectedly went off. The rubber
8698 underwear was made by Katsuo himself, and designed to inflate to 30 times
8699 their original size in the event of a tidal wave.
8700 "I am terrified of water, and death by drowning is my greatest fear" said
8701 Katsuo, 48. "Unfortunately I set them off accidently while looking for a
8702 boiled sweet on a rush hour train. They were crushing everybody in the
8703 carriage until a passenger stabbed them with a pencil."
8705 Kindness cannot be taught by harshness--
8706 not by any amount of harshness.
8707 -- Raymond M. Smullyan / The Tao is Silent
8710 Full employment for lawyers
8714 Inflate your tires by all means, but then hide your bicycle pump where it
8716 -- attributed to a spokesman for the Nakhon Ratchasima hospital
8718 Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it
8719 holds the universe together....
8722 There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the
8723 Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
8724 by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which
8725 states that this has already happened.
8728 Only two things are infinite, the universe and
8729 human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
8732 Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for
8733 those people who can't remember where they leave things.
8736 In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that
8737 our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
8740 It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception,
8741 is composed of others.
8742 -- John Andrew Holmes
8744 Technology is a way of organizing the universe so
8745 that man doesn't have to experience it.
8748 The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
8749 -- Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
8751 I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough
8752 to find your way around Chinatown.
8755 In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people
8756 very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
8759 The crux... is that the vast majority of the
8760 mass of the universe seems to be missing.
8763 Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build
8764 bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce
8765 bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
8768 There is a coherent plan in the universe,
8769 though I don't know what it's a plan for.
8772 We are an impossibility in an impossible universe. -- Ray Bradbury
8774 My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
8775 -- Christopher Morley
8777 I'm worried that the universe will soon need replacing.
8778 It's not holding a charge.
8781 The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe
8782 is that it has never tried to contact us.
8783 -- Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
8785 As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using
8786 individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and
8787 employees will receive their cards in two weeks.
8788 -- pointy haired boss contest. (This was the winning quote from
8789 Fred Dales at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington)
8791 What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.
8792 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Lykes Lines Shipping)
8794 E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used
8795 only for company business.
8796 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)
8798 This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important
8800 -- pointy haired boss contest
8801 (Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)
8803 Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. No one will believe
8804 you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now,
8805 go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them.
8806 -- pointy haired boss contest
8807 (R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing / 3M Corp.)
8809 My Boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only needed
8810 corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she couldn't edit
8811 it. The disk I gave her was write-protected.
8812 -- pointy haired boss contest. (CIO of Dell Computers)
8814 Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say."
8815 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)
8817 "How About Friday?" My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for
8818 Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died so that I would have to miss
8819 work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her
8820 burial to Friday. He said, "That would be better for me."
8821 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Shipping executive, FTD Florists)
8823 "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is
8824 not going to discuss it with the employees."
8825 -- pointy haired boss contest
8826 (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)
8828 We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to inform
8829 you that a memo will be issued today regarding the subject mentioned above."
8830 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)
8832 One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project
8833 I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said "If
8834 I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"
8835 -- pointy haired boss contest
8836 (New business manager, Hallmark Greeting Cards)
8838 Speaking the Same Language: As director of communications I was asked to
8839 prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In
8840 the body of the memo one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach"
8841 used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the
8842 executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office and told that
8843 the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I
8844 asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" (pedophilia)?
8845 working in her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her
8846 demand that I be fired--and the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR
8847 manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his
8848 dictionary, and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me
8849 not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later a memo to the entire
8850 staff came out--directing us that no words which could not be found in the
8851 local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I
8852 resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo
8853 by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.
8854 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Taco Bell Corporation)
8856 This gem is the closing paragraph of a nationally-circulated memo from a large
8857 communications company: "(Company name) is endeavorily determined to promote
8858 constant attention on current procedures of transacting business focusing
8859 emphasis on innovative ways to better, if not supersede, the expectations of
8861 -- pointy haired boss contest. (Lucent Technologies)
8863 Marriage isn't a word, it's a sentence.
8864 -- unknown, seen on back of Charlottesville, VA cab
8866 Have you ever noticed... Anybody going slower than you is an idiot,
8867 and anyone going faster than you is a f*cking maniac?
8870 You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five
8871 miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where
8875 I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.
8878 I have a great diet. You're allowed to eat anything you want, but you
8879 must eat it with naked fat people.
8882 I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, "I'd like some fries."
8883 The girl at the counter said, "Would you like some fries with that?"
8886 The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be
8887 caught dead in otherwise.
8890 I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
8893 If it weren't for electricity we'd all be watching television by candlelight.
8896 Don't spend two dollars to dry clean a shirt. Donate it to the
8897 Salvation Army instead. They'll clean it and put it on a hanger.
8898 Next morning buy it back for seventy-five cents.
8901 Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a member of
8902 Congress... But I repeat myself.
8905 Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least
8906 they can find Kuwait.
8909 My mom said she learned how to swim. Someone took her out in the lake
8910 and threw her off the boat. That's how she learned how to swim. I
8911 said, "Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim."
8914 I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up
8918 What do people mean when they say the computer went down on me?
8921 Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when
8922 God talks to us we're schizophrenic?
8925 When you look at Prince Charles, don't you think that someone in the
8926 Royal family knew someone in the Royal family?
8929 Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to
8930 accept God's final word on where your lips end.
8933 [Modern economists are] "used to measuring the 'standard of living' by
8934 the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who
8935 consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist
8936 economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since
8937 consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to
8938 obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption...
8939 The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic
8940 creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption
8941 to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity."
8942 -- E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977), from "Small Is Beautiful:
8943 A Study of Economics As If People Mattered", 1973.
8945 As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world
8946 is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of
8947 a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called
8948 a net because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and
8949 each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes.
8950 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
8952 When debugging, suspect the more complicated code,
8953 but keep an eye on the simple code lest it get too cocky.
8956 I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
8959 As I let go of my feelings of guilt, I am in touch
8960 with my inner sociopath.
8962 I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring
8963 levels of suspicion and paranoia.
8965 I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones
8966 that are someone else's fault.
8968 I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself,
8969 unless I want to stay employed.
8971 In some cultures what I do would be considered normal.
8973 I honor my personality flaws for without them
8974 I would have no personality at all.
8976 Joan of Arc heard voices, too.
8978 I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those
8979 censorious, self-righteous people around me.
8981 I need not suffer in silence while I can still
8982 moan, whimper, and complain.
8984 As I learn the innermost secrets of people around me, they
8985 reward me in many ways to keep me quiet.
8987 When someone hurts me, I know that forgiveness is cheaper
8988 than a lawsuit, but not nearly as gratifying.
8990 The first step is to say nice things about myself.
8991 The second is to do nice things for myself, the third,
8992 to find someone to buy me nice things.
8994 As I learn to trust the universe,
8995 I no longer need to carry a gun.
8997 I am at one with my duality.
8999 Blessed are the flexible,
9000 for they can tie themselves into knots.
9002 Only a lack of imagination saves me from
9003 immobilizing myself with imaginary fears.
9005 I will strive to live each day as
9006 if it were my 50th birthday.
9008 I honor and express all facets of my being,
9009 regardless of state and local laws.
9011 Today I will gladly share my experience and advice, for there
9012 are no sweeter words than "I told you so."
9014 False hope is better than no hope at all.
9016 A good scapegoat is almost as good as a solution.
9018 Just for today, I will not sit in my living room all day in my
9019 underwear in the Hollywood Cafe. Instead, I will move my
9020 computer into the bedroom.
9022 Who can I blame for my problems?
9023 Just give me a minute.
9026 Why should I waste my time reliving the past when
9027 I can spend it worrying about the future?
9029 The complete lack of evidence is the surest
9030 sign that the conspiracy is working.
9032 I am learning that criticism is not nearly as
9033 effective as sabotage.
9035 Becoming aware of my character defects leads me
9036 naturally to the next step of blaming my parents.
9038 To have a successful relationship I must learn to
9039 make it look like I'm giving as much as I'm getting.
9041 I am willing to make the mistakes if someone else
9042 is willing to learn from them.
9044 Before I criticize a man, I walk a mile in
9045 his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he's
9046 a mile away and barefoot.
9048 Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
9050 Canadian = unarmed American with health care.
9052 Mohandas K. Gandhi's list of "Seven Blunders Of The World That Lead
9055 Science without humanity
9056 Pleasure without conscience
9057 Worship without sacrifice
9058 Knowledge without character
9059 Politics without principle
9060 Commerce without morality
9062 `Tis the longest Purse Conquers the longest Sword.
9065 A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise;
9066 he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he
9067 shall lie in the Ditch and die.
9070 He that has Truth on his Side, is a fool, as well
9071 as a Coward, if he is afraid to own it because of
9072 the Currency or Multitude of other Men's Opinions.
9075 Writers' earnings are the reward of industry and the prize of learning.
9078 Absolute necessity forces many a poor distressed
9079 person to do things which his very soul abhors.
9082 The rising greatness of the British nation
9083 is not owing to war and conquests,
9084 to enlarging its dominion by the sword,
9085 or subjecting the people of other countries to our power;
9086 but it is owing to trade.
9087 An estate is a pond, trade is a spring,
9088 conquest is a Thing attended with Difficulty, Hazard,
9089 Expense, and a Possibility of Miscarriage.
9092 24 hours in a day. 24 beers in a case. coincidence?
9095 When Human Folk at Table Eat,
9096 A Kitten must not mew for meat,
9097 Or Jump to grab it from the Dish
9098 (Unless it happens to be fish).
9101 When I am at peace with myself, and in good spirits--for
9102 instance, on a journey, in a carriage, or after a good meal,
9103 or while taking a walk, or at night when I can't sleep--then
9104 thoughts flow into me most easily and at their best. Where
9105 they come from and how -- that I cannot say; nor can I do
9107 -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
9109 It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has
9110 become easy to me. I assure you no one has given so much
9111 care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely
9112 a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently
9113 and diligently studied.
9114 -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
9116 If one has talent it pushes for utterance and torments
9117 one; it will out. And then one is out without questioning.
9118 And, look you, there is nothing in this thing of learning
9119 out of books. Here, here and here [the ear, the head, the
9120 heart] is your school. If everything is right there, then
9121 take your pen and down with it; afterwards ask the opinion
9122 of a man who knows his business.
9123 -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
9125 It is no just function of government to prohibit what is not wrong.
9128 If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
9129 than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not
9130 your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you.
9131 May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you
9132 were our countrymen.
9135 You may call, you may call,
9136 But the little black cats won't hear you,
9137 The little black cats are maddened,
9138 By the green light of the moon.
9139 -- Elizabeth Coatsworth
9141 on exception handling...
9142 the point is to create dependable systems. some languages are better than
9143 others for this. some languages provide no support for verification, although
9144 the semantics of most programming constructs are well established. exceptions
9145 predate much of the work done in formal verification of the last 30 years.
9146 many people have tried (with varying degrees of success) to fit exceptions into
9147 the grand scheme and make them verifiable. flaviu cristian has shown how
9148 exception handlers can be fitted with preconditions for their activation and
9149 postconditions for their completion.
9150 however, an attempt to postfit a system with hooks for verifiability will
9151 fail if the system is very large. and programming in this manner is simply a
9152 living hell. the programmer is not generally equipped to set up all of his
9153 handlers for this type of reasoning, even if he has a clear idea for when the
9154 handlers are to be invoked.
9155 what is needed is a general language structure that is capable of embodying
9156 the reasons and the services of the exception-like items in the system.
9159 why aren't programs published in better boxes?
9160 thicker cardboard, smaller profiles, thin like coffee table books,
9161 packaged with only essentials and fitting together well...
9162 you'd be proud to have a software library if the damn boxes weren't
9163 so flimsy and didn't take up so much room.
9165 Here's a thought... The government should only be allowed to test urine for
9166 drugs if they collect the pee in their own mouths.
9168 the drug war is a war on liberty that cannot possibly be won without the
9169 utter removal of all rights or at least the indefinite suspension thereof.
9170 urine testing is the best emblem of this horrible war; it makes the police
9171 look like a bunch of perverted urine sniffers. it is not cost effective
9172 for testing large numbers of people and it is insanely easy to fake if one
9173 wants to anyway. we need to stop the drug war and start the war on ignorance.
9174 this ignorance is an ignorance of the REAL scientifically determined results
9175 of using the drugs in question. studies show that marijuana, for example,
9176 DOES have therapeutic results and that it is almost completely HARMLESS.
9177 smoke inhalation is not harmless, but there are other ways to get stoned than
9178 by inhaling burning vapors. the root ignorance that MUST be warred upon is
9179 an ignorance of the fact that people should leave each other alone and not
9180 be such shrieking paranoid shrews about what their neighbors are doing.
9181 put down your goddamned binoculars, you nosy cretin, and get to the business
9182 of living your own life.
9184 drug prices are caused to soar by the organized crime elements
9185 that are behind the drug war (and behind the republican party).
9186 organized crime at the same time causes the war to look just as
9187 ridiculous as the carrie nation hatchet smashing of beer kegs so
9188 that people will buy more drugs and think that governmental
9189 authority is a crock. who benefitted from the intense CAMP
9190 activity in california? the mafia, because prices on marijuana
9191 soared. who got screwed by CAMP? the people, who made their
9192 honest living off of growing marijuana, which at the time was
9193 our nation's largest commodity. it's time to toss the republican
9194 crooks out of office on their asses. american patriots smoke pot:
9195 george washington, thomas jefferson, benjamin franklin, and thou,
9196 if you like. unamerican creeps are against marijuana and against
9197 the right of the america people to control their own destiny.
9198 i think it really is that simple.
9200 ode to a petty tyrant...
9201 what you don't seem to realize is that productivity is mood dependent.
9202 you seem to think that i need to be degraded repeatedly as some form of
9203 character builder, but what if someone came to this school as your student
9204 who had already been degraded enough in his life? what if every time you
9205 were cutting on them in some sly tricky sarcastic form you were in fact
9206 rubbing a sore spot and only inflaming their opinions as to your anus-nature?
9207 did you realize that one of your students comes back to the office
9208 and just swears and swears at the computer he's working at? this wasn't
9209 because the machine was bad, or his program was bad, or he was bad,
9210 but because he was mad at _you_.
9211 the solution, i think, is to respect people a whole lot more. we're
9212 not here for professors to deride us. this isn't some f*cking fraternity
9213 with you chumps as the chief hazing marshalls. we're here to learn and if
9214 our learning is colored with hues of condemnation and abuse, it diminishes
9215 you, it diminishes us, and it diminishes the whole search for truth and
9219 i don't believe the druidic and grecian universities had this
9220 same kind of "cut him up, slice and dice!" attitude that prevails
9221 at our fine american universities in this day and age. that
9222 attitude is surely a holdover from roman times, when the
9223 patriarchal society demanded discipline and obedience from all
9224 of its members, especially those with license to think. this
9225 approach is impractical these days (because it doesn't work
9226 very well), except at the higher levels in education, where
9227 it is still fervently practiced. root it out, toss it away;
9228 we don't need authoritarian learning, we need to follow the truth
9229 back to all its origins and forward to the myriad potential fruits.
9230 your rule book stopped being effective a long time ago.
9233 on artistic and technical integrity...
9234 in the beginning, i had a totally egotistical attitude that the rest of the
9235 world was screwed and i was right. this is actually somewhat correct, because
9236 one must have his own voice and thoughts, except for the fact that i was not
9237 _that_ correct and the world was not _that_ wrong. but at least what i chose
9238 to say and what i chose to be were right for me. over the past few years i
9239 have sought to learn the phd game, but i have been doing it by suppressing
9240 my own voice and allowing others to tell me what i should say. this is
9241 fundamentally f*cked, because now i have become dependent on them as my voice
9242 instead of relying on the tao to guide the research and for my own voice to
9243 speak what needs to be said. is it any wonder that i have devolved to this
9244 state of being unable to say anything on my own? after years of thinking for
9245 myself, i have allowed myself to become placed in a situation where i was
9246 dependent on someone else as my source of "the scoop". numerous problems
9247 result when others' biases are not what i want to express, yet they have
9248 potency to affect my presentation. the fact that when the bogus guru doesn't
9249 understand something, he usually tells you that you are the one who does not
9250 understand, is no help. he has no subtlety and yet seeks the original
9251 thoughts, leading him to warp other people's original thoughts into his own
9252 mental framework, often losing the original spark and leading the ideas astray
9253 into his own personal interests. i need to cut loose and start thinking on my
9254 own again. if the ideas in my research here have any merit at all, they have
9255 to be proven using my own metrics, not others' metrics. and this no longer
9256 seems possible in this stringently bulletheaded "hard science" department
9257 which instead only enforces conventional viewpoints and does not reach out
9258 into the unknown where the really interesting concepts live....
9261 niceness here is the ineffable.
9262 the only difference between you and the wolf is that you want to be nice,
9263 and fail. the wolf only wants to appear nice while remaining vile inside,
9264 and he succeeds. your demeanor to others is sometimes nice and sometimes
9265 not nice because of your failures in actually being the way you want to
9266 be. and the reason that you fail to be the way you want to be is that you
9267 lack the spiritual strength to keep it up. you can't synchronize your
9268 noble desires with your weak mind/body, and it is mainly because you reject
9269 spirituality itself that you fail in achieving spiritual strength.
9270 one cannot succeed in something one does not believe in except through
9271 dumb beginner's luck. and yet to fully believe in something is to be
9272 trapped in it, without the capacity to disbelieve and free oneself.
9273 you need a fluid belief that accepts what is true within the constraints
9274 of its validity. can this flow be strong enough to become who and what
9278 eek on the candidate from louis cypher... i notice with some lack of
9279 surprise that "ollie north" can be rearranged into the nice phrase
9280 "o, rot in hell". i think this needs to be made more public. perhaps
9281 we should publish an epigram regarding this particular correspondence
9282 between reality and republicanism.
9284 1. Commit to your business.
9285 2. Share your profits with all your associates.
9286 3. Motivate your partners.
9287 4. Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners.
9288 5. Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
9289 6. Celebrate your success.
9290 7. Listen to everyone in your company.
9291 8. Exceed your customers' expectations.
9292 9. Control your expenses better than your competition.
9294 -- "Sam's Rules For Building A Business", from "Made In
9295 America: My Story", by Sam Walton.
9297 Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously.
9298 Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show
9299 enthusiasm--always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a
9300 silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don't do a hula
9301 on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt. All of
9302 this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really
9303 fools the competition. "Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart
9307 If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the
9308 impersonators would be dead.
9311 In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line
9312 up quietly in a single file line from smallest to
9313 tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?
9314 -- Warren Hutcherson
9316 Every time a baseball player grabs his crotch, it makes
9317 him spit. That's why you should never date a baseball player.
9320 Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they
9321 always say the same thing: 'This looks much better on.'
9331 The creeping cat, looked
9335 The cat always leaves a mark on his friend.
9338 A herd of buffalo can move only as fast as the slowest buffalo.
9339 when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back
9340 that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a
9341 whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps
9342 improving by the regular culling of the weakest members.
9343 In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as
9344 the slowest brain cells. Intake of alcohol, we all know, kills brain
9345 cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells
9346 first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker
9347 brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.
9348 That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers.
9350 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech
9351 which you are used to seeing in print.
9352 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
9353 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
9354 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
9355 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon
9356 word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
9357 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything
9359 -- George Orwell, "Politics And The English Language."
9361 Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
9362 -- Felix von Leitner (leitner@inf.fu-berlin.de)
9364 linux: the choice of a GNU generation.
9365 -- ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on t-shirts in 1993
9367 There are two types of Linux developers--those who can
9368 spell, and those who can't. There is a constant pitched
9369 battle between the two.
9371 > Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain
9372 > why I should use Linux over BSD?
9374 No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on
9375 creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and
9376 it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just
9377 to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name".
9378 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird
9379 abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people
9380 just because it sounds too technical.
9381 -- Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about Linux
9383 When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people
9384 just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the
9385 system, *for free*".
9388 We come to bury DOS, not to praise it.
9389 -- Paul Vojta, regarding Linux
9391 How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers
9392 are for. I only coded it.
9393 -- Attributed to Linus Torvalds
9395 I develop for Linux for a living, I used to develop for DOS.
9396 Going from DOS to Linux is like trading a glider for an F117.
9399 I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated
9400 Development That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you.
9401 -- Vance Petree, Virginia Power
9403 If you want to travel around the world and be invited to
9404 speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix
9408 All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...
9411 Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows NT (also known as
9412 the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).
9415 I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source
9416 code than 10 minutes listening to Muzak waiting for technical
9417 support which isn't.
9418 -- Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center
9420 Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one
9421 hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix.
9422 -- Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum
9424 We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications.
9425 Having the source code means that we are not held hostage
9426 by anyone's support department.
9427 -- Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software
9429 We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.
9431 The chat program is in public domain. This is not the GNU
9432 public license. If it breaks then you get to keep both pieces.
9433 -- Copyright notice for the chat program
9435 DOS: n., A small annoying boot virus that causes random
9436 spontaneous system crashes, usually just before saving
9437 a massive project. Easily cured by UNIX. See also
9438 MS-DOS, IBM-DOS, DR-DOS.
9441 MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight--it took over
9442 ten years of careful development.
9443 -- dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca
9445 On the Internet, no one knows you're using Windows NT.
9448 People disagree with me. I just ignore them.
9449 -- Linus Torvalds, regarding the use of C++ for the Linux kernel
9451 Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion.
9454 The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
9457 Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
9458 kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
9459 "happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
9460 Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
9461 series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
9462 and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
9463 -- Linus Torvalds, in the announcement for Linux kernel version 1.3.27
9465 > Linux is not user-friendly.
9467 It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly
9470 I tried to get some documentation out of Digital on this, but
9471 as far as I can tell even _they_ don't have it ;-)
9474 Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence,
9475 no matter _what_ the circumstances.
9478 Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin
9479 really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me
9480 they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in
9481 excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what
9482 they say if they had.
9483 -- Linus Torvalds, announcing Linux v2.0
9485 Ooohh... "FreeBSD is faster over loopback, when compared to Linux
9486 over the wire". Film at 11.
9489 C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
9490 -- Dennis M. Ritchie
9492 If Bill Gates is the Devil then Linus Torvalds must be the Messiah.
9494 Let's put it this way:
9495 1. A 32-bit counter will expire in little over a year.
9496 2. A 64-bit counter will expire in little over 2^32 years,
9497 or roughly the time the sun (not the Sun) is expected to expire.
9498 3. The odds of your computer hardware surviving the
9499 aforementioned event without reboot are very slim.
9502 The only way tcsh "rocks" is when the rocks are attached
9503 to its feet in the deepest part of a very deep lake.
9506 In accord to UNIX philosophy, PERL gives you enough rope
9508 -- Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz: Programming Perl
9509 (aka the Camel Book).
9511 Anyone can build a fast processor.
9512 The trick is to build a fast system.
9515 Hoping the problem magically goes away by ignoring
9516 it is the "Microsoft approach to programming" and
9517 should never be allowed.
9520 One OS to rule them all,
9521 One OS to find them.
9522 One OS to call them all,
9523 And in salvation bind them.
9524 In the bright land of Linux,
9525 Where the hackers play.
9526 -- J. Scott Thayer, with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien
9528 I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil.
9529 I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the
9530 devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.
9531 -- From N. Petreley's column, "Down to the Wire",
9532 Sept. 1996 issue of Inforworld.
9534 After all, how do you give Microsoft the benefit of the
9535 doubt when you know that if you throw it into a room with
9536 truth, you'd risk a matter/anti-matter explosion.
9537 -- From N. Petreley's column, "Down to the Wire",
9538 Sept. 1996 issue of Inforworld)
9540 The local betaware broker was sitting in the bar, keeping an eye
9541 for potential customers. It was easy to spot him, once you knew
9542 the signs. A slightly paranoid look, but still eager to meet
9543 new people. Not unlike a drug dealer or prostitute. This guy,
9544 however, was carrying a laptop.
9545 I sat in the chair beside him. "Any new stuff for
9546 Linux configuration?", I said, looking at the opposite wall
9548 The broker looked at me, startled, then quickly away. Then
9549 back at me. "What are you, a cop?" The traditional greeting of
9550 the underworld. It made me feel right at home.
9551 "Nope, I just want to install Deb..."
9552 "Shutup. I don't want to go to jail."
9553 I turned around, looked around, then turned back, and put my
9554 knife against his ribs. "Sing or die: where's software for
9555 managing a group of Debian boxes easily?"
9556 His face was pale, and he whispered through his teeth.
9557 "cfgtool. At Lasu's site. http://www.iki.fi/liw/programs/".
9558 I stood up, and walked quickly to the kitchen, and on
9559 out. As I was closing the kitchen door behind me, I heard the
9560 all too familiar sound of MessySoft Police Cars braking in the
9561 street. It would be a hectic night, but I was still one step
9563 -- Lars Wirzenius, advertising his cfgtool program
9565 Microsoft seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of the
9566 C2 rating for NT with no network connection. I wonder if a B3
9567 rating for Linux with no power cord might be of value.
9568 -- riordan@math.umn.edu
9570 In the United States there is more space where nobody is
9571 than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
9572 -- Gertrude Stein, explaining early 20th century America
9574 Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning
9575 "to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet".
9578 Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of
9579 it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.
9582 Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.
9585 I just broke up with someone and the last thing she said
9586 to me was, "You'll never find anyone like me again!"
9587 I'm thinking, "I should hope not! If I don't want you,
9588 why would I want someone like you?"
9591 If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: "I'm cheap!"
9594 According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable
9595 undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other
9596 women. They say that women are too judgemental, where, of course,
9597 men are just grateful.
9600 I am not the boss of my house. I don't know when I lost it.
9601 I don't know if I ever had it. But I have seen the boss's job
9602 and I do not want it.
9605 In the last couple of weeks I have seen the ads for the Wonder Bra.
9606 Is that really a problem in this country? Men not paying enough
9607 attention to women's breasts?
9610 My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care
9611 and vehicle maintenance.
9614 We have women in the military, but they don't put us in the front lines.
9615 They don't know if we can fight, if we can kill. I think we can.
9616 All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, "You see
9617 the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms."
9620 There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men
9621 are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause
9622 severe swelling. So what's the problem?
9625 There's very little sexual advice in men's magazines,
9626 because men don't think there's a lot they don't know.
9627 Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, "I know what
9628 I'm doing, just show me somebody naked."
9631 Men are liars. We'll lie about lying if we have to.
9632 I'm an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive.
9635 Men do not like to admit to even momentary imperfection.
9636 My husband forgot the code to turn off the alarm. When
9637 the police came, he wouldn't admit he'd forgotten the
9638 code... he turned himself in.
9641 If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.
9644 Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman
9645 I don't like and give her a house.
9648 One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting
9649 as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from
9650 expecting too much from mathematics.
9653 I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
9655 It is easy to guess why the rabble dislike cats.
9656 A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury,
9657 cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.
9658 -- Charles Baudelaire
9660 An artist must regulate his life.
9662 Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from
9663 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy
9664 ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another
9665 bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various
9666 occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation,
9667 dexterity, natation, etc.)
9669 Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm
9670 symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a
9671 week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.
9673 My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded
9674 bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in
9675 white water, moldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese
9676 (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their
9677 skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the
9678 Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of
9681 I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When
9682 walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.
9684 My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I
9685 always apologize very politely.
9687 I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a
9688 hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my
9689 temperature and gives me another.
9690 -- Erik Satie's description of "A Day in the Life of a Musician"
9692 Confront a child, a puppy and a kitten with sudden danger;
9693 the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy
9694 will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation,
9695 the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
9696 -- H.H. Munro (Saki)
9698 It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted;
9699 instead, men have been exhausted by the problems. Fresh talent approaching
9700 the analysis of a problem without prejudice will always see new
9701 possibilities -- some aspect not considered by those who believe that a
9702 subject is fully understood. Our knowledge is so fragmentary that
9703 unexpected findings appear in even the most fully explored topics...
9704 In summary, there are no small problems. Problems that appear small
9705 are large problems that are not understood. Instead of tiny details
9706 unworthy of the intellectual, we have men whose tiny intellects cannot rise
9707 to penetrate the infinitesimal. Nature is a harmonious mechanism where all
9708 parts, including those appearing to play a secondary role, cooperate in a
9709 functional whole. In contemplating this mechanism, shallow men arbitrarily
9710 divide its parts into essential and secondary, whereas the insightful
9711 thinker is content with classifying them as understood and poorly
9712 understood, ignoring for the moment their size and immediately useful
9713 properties. No one can predict their importance in the future."
9714 -- Santiago Ramon y Cajal, "Advice for a Young Investigator," 1897
9716 He who would do good to another must do it in Minute
9717 Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel,
9718 hypocrite and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot
9719 exist but in minutely organized particulars.
9722 The Atoms of Democritus
9723 And Newton's Particles of Light
9724 Are sands upon the Red Sea shore
9725 Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
9728 To see a world in a grain of sand
9729 And a heaven in a wild flower, and:
9730 And did those feet in ancient time
9731 Walk upon England's mountains green? ...
9732 And was Jerusalem builded here
9733 Among these dark Satanic mills?
9736 The harlot's cry from street to street,
9737 Shall weave Old England's winding sheet.
9740 Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
9741 In the forests of the night,
9742 What immortal hand or eye
9743 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
9745 Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
9748 The cat, an aristocrat in type and origin, whom we
9749 have slandered, merits at least our esteem.
9752 society's crumbling, but at least we're getting it televised.
9755 I think maybe it's my purpose in life.
9756 -- The "Guiness Book of World Records" TV show's winner for the category
9757 of longest combined finger nails for ten fingers.
9759 If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will
9760 leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for
9761 the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always
9762 uncertain. The English have developed their government in this direction, it
9763 is called 'muddling through,' and although a rather silly, stupid sounding
9764 thing, it is the most scientific way of progressing. To decide upon the
9765 answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door
9766 to the unknown ajar.
9767 We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of
9768 the development of the human mind, of intelligent life; we have years and
9769 years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give an answer today as
9770 to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and say:
9771 'This is the solution to it all.' Because we will be chained to the limit
9772 of our present imagination, we will only be able to do those things that we
9773 think are the things to do. Whereas, if we leave some room for discussion,
9774 and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will
9775 not arise. I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today,
9776 there may some day come a time, or I should hope, that the power of
9777 government should be limited. That governments ought not to be empowered to
9778 decide the validity of scientific theories. That is a ridiculous thing for
9779 them to try to do. That they are not to decide the various descriptions of
9780 history or of economic theory or of philosophy.
9781 Only in this way can the real possibilities of the future human race be
9782 ultimately developed.
9783 -- Richard Feynman, from "The Beat Of A Different Drum: The Life And
9784 Science of Richard Feynman," by Jagdish Mehra. Published by Oxford
9785 University Press 1996.
9787 hey, when you come to think of it, isn't it
9788 only the assholes in life who have zero tolerance
9789 about things? and now they're trying to promote
9790 that as a virtue. i just don't buy it.
9793 The spirit of the age cannot be compassed by the processes of human
9794 reason. It is an inclination, an emotional tendency that works upon weaker
9795 minds, through the unconscious, with an overwhelming force of suggestion
9796 that carries them along with it. To think otherwise than our contemporaries
9797 think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid
9798 or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is
9799 stupidly swimming against the social current. Just as formerly the
9800 assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise
9801 from the creative will of a God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century
9802 discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from
9803 material causes. Today the psyche does not build itself a body, but on the
9804 contrary, matter, by chemical action, produces the psyche. This reversal of
9805 outlook would be ludicrous if it were not one of the outstanding features of
9806 the spirit of the age. It is the popular way of thinking, and therefore it
9807 is decent, reasonable, scientific and normal. Mind must be thought to be an
9808 epiphenomenon of matter. The same conclusion is reached even if we say not
9809 "mind" but "psyche," and in place of matter speak of brain, hormones,
9810 instincts or drives. To grant the substantiality of the soul or psyche is
9811 repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy.
9812 -- Carl Jung, from his 1933 book, "Modern Man In Search Of A Soul"
9814 There are many ways to explain an event, and some are better than
9815 others. Even if neuroscientists someday decode the entire wiring
9816 diagram of the brain, human behavior makes the most sense when it
9817 is explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts
9818 and grams. Physics provides no insights into the machinations of a
9819 crafty lawyer, and even fails to enlighten us about many simpler
9820 acts of living things. As Richard Dawkins observed, 'If you throw
9821 a dead bird into the air it will describe a graceful parabola,
9822 exactly as physics books say it should, then come to rest on the
9823 ground and stay there. It behaves as a solid body of a particular
9824 mass and wind resistance ought to behave. But if you throw a live
9825 bird in the air it will not describe a parabola and come to rest on
9826 the ground. It will fly away, and may not touch land this side of
9827 the county boundary.' We understand birds in terms of their innards.
9828 To know why they move and grow, we cut them open and put bits under
9829 a microscope. We need yet another kind of explanation for artifacts
9830 like a chair and a crowbar: a statement of the function the object is
9831 intended to perform. It would be silly to understand why chairs have
9832 a stable horizontal surface by cutting them open and putting bits of
9833 them under a microscope. The explanation is that someone designed
9834 the chair to hold up a human behind.
9835 -- Steven Pinker, from his book, "How The Mind Works,"
9838 What wonder, then, that the world goes from bad to worse, and that
9839 its evils increase more and more, as boredom increases, and boredom is the
9840 root of all evil. The history of this can be traced from the very beginning
9841 of the world. The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored
9842 because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the
9843 world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was
9844 bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together, then Adam and Eve and
9845 Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world
9846 increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they
9847 conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens.
9848 This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a
9849 terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
9850 -- Soren Kierkegaard, from "Either/Or"
9852 Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man
9853 is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live
9854 without other security, than what their own strength, and their own
9855 invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place
9856 for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no
9857 Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be
9858 imported by Sea; no commodious building; no Instruments of moving, and
9859 removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the
9860 Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is
9861 worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of
9862 man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
9865 A house without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered
9866 cat, may be a perfect house perhaps, but how can it prove its title?
9869 The group cannot function if it has to maintain a large amount of
9870 individual preconceptions and personal experiences. The design group must,
9871 as a whole, have the ability and the opportunity to leave things behind,
9872 that is, select what to remember.
9873 If designers are to come up with novel ideas, they may have to forget
9874 what was 'named and framed' as a problem or solution earlier in the process.
9875 A group of designers needs to work its way through ideas, visions, and
9876 operative images without being held up by heavy demands for documentation of
9877 the process. In a creative design process one thing leads to another,
9878 analogies and metaphors influence the design thinking in new ways, and a
9879 certain amount of chaos is always present...
9880 The characteristics of oral cultures can be applied to group design...
9881 Group members need to repeat themselves, to be redundant and nonlinear in
9882 their arguments, to forget, to make references and analogies in a situated
9884 -- Tone Bratteteig & Erik Stolterman, "Design in Groups--And All That
9885 Jazz," in: M. Kyng & L. Mathiassen, "Computers and Design in Context,"
9888 Where science has progressed by searching for commonalities and
9889 patterns, the arts have celebrated diversity and have resisted attempts to
9890 encapsulate their activities in rules and formulae. They are the ultimate
9891 manifestations of the unpredictabilities and asymmetries of Nature. After
9892 all, what more chaotically unpredictable outcomes are there than some of
9893 those that issue from the human mind? So intractable has been the problem
9894 of finding pattern in creative activity, that few would even seek it. If
9895 one looks not at science and art, but at scientists and artists, one finds a
9896 reflection of this divide. Two populations that overlap only a little,
9897 convergent thinkers and divergent thinkers, specialists and generalists--
9898 these labels reflect the differences of which we speak...
9899 While science has enlarged its past horizons beyond order and symmetry
9900 to embrace diversity and unpredictability, the humanities have yet to
9901 appreciate the full force of commonality and pattern as a unifying factor in
9902 the interpretation of human creativity. Just as science has begun to
9903 appreciate the ways in which its view of Nature must reconcile the ways in
9904 which Nature is both simple and complex, so the arts and humanities must
9905 appreciate the lessons to be drawn from the regularities of Nature. It is
9906 not enough to collect examples of diversity: the coexistence of diversity
9907 with universal behavior is what requires exploration and reconciliation.
9908 -- John D. Barrow, from "The Artful Universe," Clarendon Press:
9911 I first became interested in Darwin in college when I read about
9912 Darwin's experience with John Gould. When Darwin returned to England after
9913 he visited the Galapagos, he distributed his finch specimens to professional
9914 zoologists to be properly identified. One of the most distinguished experts
9915 was John Gould. What was the most revealing was not what happened to Darwin,
9916 but what had not happened to Gould.
9917 Darwin's notes show Gould taking him through all the birds he had
9918 named. Gould kept flip-flopping back and forth about the number of
9919 different species of finches: The information was there, but he didn't quite
9920 know what to make of it. He assumed that since God made one set of birds
9921 when he created the world, the specimens from different locations would be
9922 identical. It didn't occur to him to look for differences by location. Gould
9923 thought that the birds were so different that they might be distinct species.
9924 What was remarkable to me about the encounter is the completely
9925 different impact it had on the two men. Gould thought the way he had been
9926 taught to think, like an expert taxonomist, and didn't see, in the finches,
9927 the textbook example of evolution unfolding right before him. Darwin didn't
9928 even know they were finches. So the guy who had the intelligence, knowledge,
9929 and the expertise didn't see the differences, and the guy with far less
9930 knowledge and expertise came up with an idea that shaped the way we think
9932 Darwin came up with the idea because he was a productive thinker. He
9933 generated a multiplicity of perspectives and theories. Gould would compare
9934 new ideas and theories with his existing patterns of experience. He thought
9935 reproductively. If the ideas didn't fit with what he had been taught, he
9936 rejected them as worthless. On the other hand, Darwin was willing to
9937 disregard what past thinkers thought and was willing to entertain different
9938 perspectives and different theories to see where they would lead.
9939 Most of us are educated to think like John Gould. We were all born
9940 to be spontaneous, creative thinkers. Yet a great deal of our education may
9941 be regarded as the inculcation of mind-sets. We were taught how to handle
9942 problems and new phenomena with fixed mental attitudes (based on what past
9943 thinkers thought) that predetermine our responses to problems or situations.
9944 In short, we were taught 'what' to think instead of 'how' to think. We
9945 entered school as a question mark and graduated a period.
9946 -- Michael Michalko, in "Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative
9947 Genius," Ten Speed Press, 1998.
9949 The wisdom of the late industrial era was always to start with what
9950 the customer needed and backtrack to which products and services those needs
9951 called for. That fit when the customer already understood the need and the
9952 product, and innovation meant a different shaped bottle for liquid detergent.
9953 In BLUR, technical change is happening so fast, your product must educate the
9954 customer (beepers for kids on dates?) and the customer must educate you. You
9955 can't afford the time delay to put something new in front of the customer.
9956 Instead, start with what technology will make possible, co-develop it as
9957 fast as you can with the customer, and be flexible and adaptive enough to
9958 adjust it according to customer needs as you go. As in software, the first
9959 release is your take on things. The customer enters the feedback loop and
9960 starts to influence things with release 2.0 and beyond.
9961 -- Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer, "Blur: The Speed Of Change In The
9962 Connected Economy," Addison-Wesley 1998.
9964 The traditional hidden curriculum of school demands that people of a
9965 certain age assemble in groups of about thirty under the authority of a
9966 professional teacher for from five hundred to a thousand times a year. It
9967 does not matter if the teacher is authoritarian so long as it is the
9968 teacher's authority that counts; it does not matter if all meetings occur
9969 in the same place so long as they are somehow understood as attendance. The
9970 hidden curriculum of school requires--whether by law or by fact--that a
9971 citizen accumulate a minimum quantum of school years in order to obtain his
9973 The translation of the need for learning into the demand for schooling
9974 and the conversion of the quality of growing up into the price tag of a
9975 professional treatment changes the meaning of 'knowledge' from a term that
9976 designates intimacy, intercourse, and life experience into one that
9977 designates professionally packaged products, marketable entitlements, and
9979 -- Ivan Illich, from "After Deschooling, What?"
9981 I consider children to be very expensive and complicated pets.
9984 History tells us that the most successful cures for poverty come from
9985 within. Foreign aid can help, but like windfall wealth, can also hurt. It
9986 can discourage effort and plant a crippling sense of incapacity. As the
9987 African saying has it, 'The hand that receives is always under the one that
9988 gives.' No, what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, and tenacity...
9989 To be sure, we are living in a dessert age. We want things to be
9990 sweet; too many of us work to live and live to be happy. Nothing wrong with
9991 that; it just does not promote high productivity. You want high productivity?
9992 Then you should live to work and get happiness as a by-product.
9993 Not easy. They who live to work are a small and fortunate elite. But
9994 it is an elite open to newcomers, self-selected, the kind of people who
9995 accentuate the positive. In this world, the optimists have it, not because
9996 they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they
9997 are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement,
9998 and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer
9999 the empty consolation of being right.
10000 The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles.
10001 No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a
10002 skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and
10003 define ends, the better to choose means.
10004 -- David Landis, from "The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations: Why Some Are
10005 So Rich And Some So Poor," W. W. Norton & Co., 1998.
10007 During my travels around the country, visiting inner-city neighborhoods
10008 and talking to young people I've met there, I have been struck again and
10009 again by the stark differences between their childhoods and my own. When I
10010 was growing up in the Bronx, I wasn't rich -- at least not in a material
10011 sense, but I had the matchless blessing of being reared by two devoted
10012 parents--backed up by a platoon of doting aunts and uncles--who gave me
10013 the love, discipline and motivation I needed to succeed.
10014 Too many of today's kids are not getting the same kind of nurturing
10015 environment that I -- and most Americans -- once took for granted. As many
10016 as 15 million youngsters are 'at risk' in today's America. They are in
10017 danger of being lost for good unless the more fortunate among us step
10018 forward and lend a hand... It is this glorious cycle of giving, receiving
10019 and giving back that we want to pass along to the next generation of
10020 Americans. We want them to believe in America, and we want them to know
10021 that America believes in them.
10022 -- Colin Powell's autobiography, "My American Journey" (Ballantine, 1996)
10024 In the past fifteen years one big American company after another has
10025 done this [i.e., downsized itself]--among them IBM, Sears, and GM. Each
10026 first announced that laying off 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 people would
10027 lead to an immediate turnaround. A year later there had, of course, been no
10028 turnaround, and the company laid off another 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000--
10029 again without results. In many if not most cases, downsizing has turned out
10030 to be something that surgeons have warned against: 'amputation before
10031 diagnosis.' The result is always a casualty.
10032 But there have been a few organizations--some large companies (GE,
10033 for instance) and a few hospitals (Beth Israel in Boston, for instance)--
10034 that quietly, and without fanfare, did turn themselves around, by rethinking
10035 themselves. They did not start out by downsizing. If fact, they knew that
10036 to start by reducing expenditures is not the way to get control of costs.
10037 The starting point is to identify the activities that are productive, that
10038 should be strengthened, promoted, and expanded. Every agency, every policy,
10039 every program, every activity should be confronted with these questions:
10040 'What is your mission?' 'Is it still the right mission?' 'Is it still
10041 worth doing?' 'If we were not already doing this, would we go into it now?'
10042 This questioning has been done often enough in all kinds of organizations--
10043 businesses, hospitals, churches, an even local governments--that we know
10045 The overall answer is almost never 'This is fine as it stands; let's
10046 keep on.' But in some--indeed, a good many--areas, the answer to the
10047 last question is 'Yes, we should go into this again, but with some changes.
10048 We have learned a few things.'
10049 -- Peter F. Drucker, from "Managing in a Time of Great Change,"
10050 Truman-Talley Books/Dutton, 1995.
10052 Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
10053 General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase 'It is
10054 the busiest man who has time to spare.' Thus, an elderly lady of leisure
10055 can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece
10056 at Bognor Reis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, half an
10057 hour in a search for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address,
10058 an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding
10059 whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the mailbox in the next
10060 street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man [or woman] for three
10061 minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person [man or woman]
10062 prostate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.
10063 Granted that work (and especially paperwork) is thus elastic in its
10064 demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no
10065 relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which
10066 it may be assigned. A lack of real activity does not, of necessity, result
10067 in leisure. A lack of occupation is not necessarily revealed by a manifest
10068 idleness. The thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a
10069 direct ration with the time to be spent. This fact is widely recognized,
10070 but less attention has been paid to its wider implications, more especially
10071 in the field of publication administration. Politicians and taxpayers have
10072 assume (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number
10073 of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done.
10074 Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication
10075 of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work
10076 for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem
10077 equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of officials and the
10078 quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the
10079 toil of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law and would be much the
10080 same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even
10081 disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a
10082 law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is
10084 The validity of this recently discovered law must rest mainly on
10085 statistical proofs, which will follow. Of more interest to the general
10086 reader is the explanation of the factors underlying the general tendency to
10087 which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities (which are
10088 numerous) we may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be
10089 represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements,
10090 thus: (1) 'An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals' and (2)
10091 'Officials make work for each other.'
10092 -- C. Northcote Parkinson, from "Parkinson's Law & Other Studies
10093 in Administration," (1957; Buccaneer Books ed., 1996).
10095 The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
10096 -- Leonardo Da Vinci
10098 Though it may be discomforting to admit, throughout history children
10099 have always played violent games. Early in this century, young boys played
10100 'war' with lines of tin soldiers, knocking them down one by one, or in one
10101 fell swoop, in a simulated battle. The next generation played cowboys and
10102 Indians or cops and robbers, where the youngsters themselves fell down and
10103 played dead. When parents stopped buying soldier figures and fake guns,
10104 children created their own weapons and continued to play out good guy/bad
10105 guy plots. Children are attracted to violence and critical studies of
10106 older media forms, including the fairy tale, suggest it is not always in
10107 children's best interests to remove from their cultural experience all
10108 material that parents deem is too provocative or violent.
10109 This is not a simple issue.
10110 Clearly much of the concern about violence in video games and other
10111 media is misplaced--the main sources of violent behavior lies elsewhere.
10112 These include parental violence toward children and violence between
10113 nations which portray the use of force in the real world by important
10114 institutions--parents and government--as an acceptable way to solve
10115 problems or vent anger.
10116 Nevertheless, the impact of video games, television, film or other
10117 media violence (such as the gory details of murders in the print media)
10118 probably has a negative impact on violent behavior in society, as does the
10119 proliferation of weapons.
10120 The impact of media violence on an individual child's behavior is
10121 probably very specific to the child and his or her social context. There
10122 is no evidence, for example, that the use of "Beat-'em-up" video games
10123 leads to violent behavior of well-adjusted youth coming from loving
10124 families. The impact is also probably specific to age. Just as it makes
10125 sense to restrict a 10-year-old's access to movies with extreme violent
10126 content, so it makes sense to restrict age-inappropriate video games. Age
10127 ratings on video game packages do appear to be helpful and appropriate.
10128 Most violent games today are cartoon-like. This will change as games
10129 become more realistic and, 3D, and eventually realistic of virtual reality,
10130 ensuring that this issue will not disappear.
10131 It is inappropriate for children of any age to spend significant
10132 parts of life using violent video games, or any video games for that
10133 matter. Conversely, for most children it makes little sense to deny access
10134 to age-appropriate games simply for fear that these will lead to antisocial
10135 behavior. Successful parenting is a question of balance.
10136 -- Don Tapscott, "Growing Up Digital"
10138 Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences, assumes
10139 that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must
10140 be literate. Just as the goal of industry was to turn out standardized
10141 products, education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy.
10142 Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. To
10143 those who have problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and
10144 dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the inability to
10145 cope with numbers. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive
10146 structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the
10147 use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous
10148 effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the
10149 sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing
10150 similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to
10151 means different from literacy...
10152 Education needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common
10153 denominator, based on the industrial model of standardization. Rather than
10154 taming and sanitizing the minds of students, education has not only to
10155 acknowledge differences in aptitudes and interests but also to stimulate
10156 them. Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not
10157 the result of leveling.
10158 -- Mihai Nadin, "The Civilization of Illiteracy," (1997)
10160 Anthropologists have identified a number of characteristics that seem
10161 common to most non-technological societies past and present. These
10162 societies tend to value practical rather than abstract knowledge, their
10163 'primitive' rituals are part of the regular day-to-day realities of life,
10164 the groups tend not to support specialists other than the shaman, every
10165 member of the group can to some extent do every task, and all share the
10166 responsibility for all others. Principally, the 'primitive' takes a holist
10167 view of life that examines all social decisions for their effect on the
10168 community and the environment.
10169 These social values may fit well in the webbed communities of the
10170 mid-twenty-first century because they are more appropriate to small,
10171 relatively simple social structures that up to now had seemed to be
10172 disappearing... For such communities, the most valuable skills would be
10173 generalist rather than specialist. They would prize the ability to
10174 connect, to think imaginatively, to understand how data are related, to see
10175 patterns in machine-generated innovation, and to assess its social effect
10176 before releasing it on society...
10177 Today, billions of human talents could be on the verge of
10178 self-expression if we are willing to take new views and see where they
10180 -- James Burke & Robert Ornstein, "The Axemaker's Gift: A Double-Edged
10181 History of Human Culture," (Grosset/Putnam 1995).
10183 (History is) indeed little more than the register of
10184 the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
10187 All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
10190 The beauty of the second amendment is that it will
10191 not be needed until they try to take it.
10192 -- Thomas Jefferson
10194 No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
10195 -- Thomas Jefferson
10197 Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are
10198 the people's liberty's teeth.
10199 -- George Washington
10201 Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks
10202 and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
10203 -- Thomas Jefferson
10205 Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force.
10206 Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.
10207 -- George Washington
10209 I have found a certain type calls himself a liberal... Now I always
10210 thought I was a liberal. I came up terribly surprised one time when I
10211 found out that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist...
10214 Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come
10215 from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history
10216 of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of
10217 governmental power, not the increase of it.
10220 I believe there are more instances of abridgment of freedom of the
10221 people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by
10222 violent and sudden usurpations...
10225 You vote for me and I'll give you family values... I promise you the
10226 most ethical administration in the history of our country.
10227 -- William Jefferson Clinton
10229 Many give lip service, but few delegate authority in important
10230 matters. And that means all they delegate is dog-work. A real
10231 leader does as much dog-work for his people as he can: he can do
10232 it, or see a way to do without it, ten times as fast. And he
10233 delegates as many important matters as he can because that creates
10234 a climate in which people grow.
10235 -- Robert Townsend, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car
10237 True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the
10238 enrichment of the leaders. In combat, officers eat last. Most
10239 people in big companies today are administered, not led. They are
10240 treated as personnel, not people.
10241 -- Robert Townsend, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car
10243 How do you spot a leader? They come in all ages, shapes, sizes,
10244 and conditions. Some are poor administrators, some are not overly
10245 bright. One clue: since most people per se are mediocre, the true
10246 leader can be recognized because, somehow or other, his people
10247 consistently turn in superior performances.
10248 -- Robert Townsend, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car
10250 Before you commit yourself to a new effort, it's worth asking
10251 yourself a couple of questions: "Are we really trying to do
10252 something worthwhile here? Or are we just building another
10253 monument to some diseased ego?"
10254 -- Robert Townsend, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car
10256 Beware the boss who walks on water and never makes a mistake.
10257 Save yourself a lot of grief and seek employment elsewhere.
10258 -- Robert Townsend, founder of Avis Rent-a-Car
10260 Every genius is a revolutionary who produces a good deal of commotion
10261 in the world. After he has abolished the old rules he writes his own, the
10262 new ones, which no one even half understands; and after he has stupefied
10263 and bewildered everybody, he leaves the world neither understood nor
10264 regretted. Not always does the next generation comprehend and appreciate
10265 him properly. Sometimes it may even take a whole century.
10266 -- Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
10268 To assume a cat's asleep
10269 Is a great mistake.
10270 He can close his eyes and keep
10271 Both his ears awake.
10274 A most nerve-wracking confirmation of this came some time ago during
10275 an interview with the producer and the writer of the TV mini-series 'Peter
10276 the Great.' Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama--which
10277 included a fabricated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton--the
10278 producer said that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful
10279 biography. The writer added that it is better for audiences to learn
10280 something that is untrue, if it is entertaining, than not to learn anything
10281 at all. And just to put some icing on the cake, the actor who played Peter,
10282 Maximilian Schell, remarked that he does not believe in historical truth and
10283 therefore sees no reason to pursue it.
10284 I do not mean to say that the trivialization of American public
10285 discourse is all accomplished on television. Rather, television is the
10286 paradigm for all our attempts at public communication. It conditions our
10287 minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other
10288 media to orient themselves in that direction...
10289 As a medium for conducting public business, language has receded in
10290 importance; it has been moved to the periphery of culture and has been
10291 replaced at the center by the entertaining visual image... When a culture
10292 becomes overloaded with pictures; when logic and rhetoric lose their
10293 binding authority; when historical truth becomes irrelevant; when the
10294 spoken or written word is distrusted or makes demands on our attention that
10295 we are incapable of giving; when our politics, history, education,
10296 religion, public information, and commerce are expressed largely in visual
10297 imagery rather than words, then a culture is in serious jeopardy.
10298 -- Neil Postman, from "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
10299 Discourse in the Age of Show Business," (Viking Press 1986).
10301 It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have
10302 'something worth fighting for,' they do not feel like fighting. People who
10303 live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own
10304 interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. Craving, not having,
10305 is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.
10306 'Things which are not' are indeed mightier than 'things that are.' In
10307 all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be
10308 built and gardens yet to be planted...
10309 It is strange, indeed, that those who hug the present and hang on to
10310 it with all their might should be the least capable of defending it. And
10311 that, on the other hand, those who spurn the present and dust their hands of
10312 it should have all its gifts and treasures showered on them unasked.
10313 Dreams, vision and wild hopes are mighty weapons and realistic tools.
10314 The practical-mindedness of a true leader consists in recognizing the
10315 practical value of these tools. Yet this recognition usually stems from a
10316 contempt of the present which can be traced to a natural ineptitude in
10317 practical affairs. The successful businessman is often a failure as a
10318 communal leader because his mind is attuned to the 'things that are' and his
10319 heart set on that which can be accomplished in 'our time.' Failure in the
10320 management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in
10321 the management of public affairs. And it is perhaps fortunate that some
10322 proud natures when suffering defeat in the practical world do not feel
10323 crushed but are suddenly fired with the apparently absurd conviction that
10324 they are eminently competent to direct the fortunes of the community and the
10326 -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer", 1951
10328 Bought me a cat, the cat pleased me,
10329 I fed my cat under yonder tree,
10330 Cat goes fiddle-i-fee, fiddle-i-fee.
10331 -- Traditional Folk Song
10333 Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orientation:
10334 the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow man, to himself and
10335 to nature. In the realm of thought, this productive orientation is
10336 expressed in the proper grasp of the world by reason. In the realm of
10337 action, the productive orientation is expressed in productive work, the
10338 prototype of which is art and craftsmanship. In the realm of feeling, the
10339 productive orientation is expressed in love, which is the experience of
10340 union with another person, with all men, and with nature, under the
10341 condition of retaining one's sense of integrity and independence. In the
10342 experience of love the paradox happens that two people become one, and
10343 remain two at the same time. Love in this sense is never restricted to one
10344 person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one
10345 person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man, I may be
10346 attached to this person in any number of ways, yet I do not love. If I can
10347 say, 'I love you,' I say, 'I love you in you also myself.' Self-love, in
10348 this sense, is the opposite of selfishness. The latter is actually a greedy
10349 concern with oneself which springs from and compensates for the lack of
10350 genuine love for oneself. Love, paradoxically, makes me more independent
10351 because it makes me stronger and happier--yet it makes me one with the
10352 loved person to the extent that individuality seems to be extinguished for
10353 the moment. In loving I experience 'I am you,' you-the loved person,
10354 you-the stranger, you-everything alive. In the experience of love lies the
10355 only answer to being human, lies sanity.
10356 -- Erich Fromm, from "The Sane Society", 1955
10358 # NO WARRANTY: THIS WORK IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS. THE AUTHOR
10359 # PROVIDES NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER, EITHER EXPRESS OR
10360 # IMPLIED, REGARDING THE WORK, INCLUDING WARRANTIES WITH
10361 # RESPECT TO ITS MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY
10362 # PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
10364 # Author contact: Peter Alexander Merel
10365 # Internet: pete@cssc-syd.tansu.oz.au
10366 # UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!munnari!cssc-syd!pete
10367 # Snail: 1/18-20 Orion Road, Lane Cove NSW 2066 Australia
10368 # Phone: +61 2 911 3130
10370 # Copyright: Copyright (C) 1992 Peter Alexander Merel
10371 # Permission to copy all or part of this work is granted,
10372 # provided that the copies are not made or distributed
10373 # for resale (except nominal copying fee may be charged),
10374 # and provided that the NO WARRANTY, author-contact, and
10375 # copyright notice are retained verbatim & are displayed
10376 # conspicuously. If anyone needs other permissions that
10377 # aren't covered by the above, please contact the author.
10382 # Peter Merel's Interpolation based upon the translations of:
10383 # Lin Yutang, Ch'u Ta-Kao, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English,
10384 # Richard Wilhelm, and Aleister Crowley.
10386 Seeing is of course indispensable to learning, particularly in
10387 science, which is of the eye. Visual aids therefore have a place in the
10388 laboratory. And most students, not being future scientists, will learn
10389 more from good films of important experiments than from their own fumbling
10390 attempts. But sometimes they must fumble too, and have a teacher who
10391 fumbles on occasion, and thinks all the time he is in class. One learns
10392 not by a photographic copying of things shown, but by an internal drama
10393 imitative of the action witnessed. When the instructor gropes for a word,
10394 corrects himself, interjects a comment or an analogy not directly called
10395 for, he gives a spectacle of man thinking which no slick film or televised
10397 -- Jacques Barzun, from "Science: The Glorious Entertainment", 1964
10399 Far from behaving (or should one say behavioring?) with the regular
10400 intelligibility of a clock, the bent of the living and of man in particular
10401 is to MISbehave, in all senses of the word--from developing allergies,
10402 which make poison out of delicacies, to committing crimes which, as in
10403 saints and statesman, can later seem the highest wisdom. It is even proved
10404 by research that man must have his ration of dreaming, that is, of
10405 irregular and inaccurate thinking. These facts of experience require that
10406 any science of the regularities of behavior be always qualified and
10407 admonished by another discipline, a learned lore of misbehavior.
10408 -- Jacques Barzun, from "Science: The Glorious Entertainment", 1964
10410 Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather
10411 a new wearer of clothes.
10412 -- Henry David Thoreau
10414 What men call social virtue, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue
10415 of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
10416 -- Henry David Thoreau
10418 The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
10419 What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
10420 -- Henry David Thoreau
10422 Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,
10423 as when you find a trout in the milk.
10424 -- Henry David Thoreau
10426 I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
10427 only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
10428 to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
10429 not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
10430 practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep
10431 and suck out all of the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike
10432 as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave
10433 close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and,
10434 if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of
10435 it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
10436 by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
10437 -- Henry David Thoreau, from "Walden; or Life in the Woods"
10439 The Mind has a different relish, as well as the Palate; and you will
10440 as fruitlessly endeavour to delight all Men with Riches or Glory, (which yet
10441 some Men place their Happiness in,) as you would to satisfie all Men's
10442 Hunger with Cheese or Lobsters; which though very agreeable and delicious
10443 fare to some, are to others extremely nauseous and offensive: And many
10444 People would with Reason prefer the griping of an hungry Belly, to those
10445 Dishes, which are a Feast to others. Hence it was, I think, that the
10446 Philosophers of old did in vain enquire, whether Summum bonum (the chief
10447 good) consisted in Riches, or bodily Delights, or Virtue, or Contemplation:
10448 And they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best Relish were to
10449 be found in Apples, Plumbs, or Nuts; and have divided themselves into Sects
10450 upon it. For as pleasant Tastes depend not on the things themselves, but
10451 their agreeableness to this or that particulate Palate, wherein there is
10452 great variety: So the greatest Happiness consists, in the having those
10453 things which produce the greatest Pleasure, and the absence of those which
10454 cause any disturbance, any pain, which to different Men are very different
10455 things. If therefore Men in this Life only have hope; if in this Life they
10456 can only enjoy, 'tis not strange, nor unreasonable, they should seek their
10457 Happiness by avoiding all things that disease them here, and by preferring
10458 all that delight them; wherein it will be no wonder to find variety and
10459 difference. For if there be no Prospect beyond the Grave, the inference is
10460 certainly right, Let us eat and drink, let us enjoy what we delight in, for
10461 to morrow we shall die. This, I think, may serve to shew us the Reason,
10462 why, though all Men's desires tend to Happiness, yet they are not moved by
10463 the same Object. Men may chuse different things, and yet all chuse right,
10464 supposing them only like a Company of poor Insects, whereof some are Bees,
10465 delighted with Flowers, and their sweetness; others, Bettles, delighted with
10466 other kinds of Viands; which having enjoyed for a Season, they should cease
10467 to be, and exist no more for ever.
10468 -- John Locke, from "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding."
10470 Businesses will not buy Linux because there is no one to sue.
10473 Even if something new does not require a disruption of the old, there
10474 is no space. People, time and resources are fully stretched--in many
10475 cases there is actually a cutting-back in resources.
10476 The paradox is that as we advance into the future the need for change
10477 gets greater and greater (to cope with changes in population, pollution,
10478 etc., and to make full use of our new technologies) but the possibility of
10479 change gets less and less because everything is already committed.
10480 A wise general does not commit all his troops but keeps a strategic
10481 reserve which can be used as the need and opportunity arise. Society does
10482 not do this, because we believe that we have all the bases covered and that
10483 progress will come about through evolution, the clash of opinions and the
10484 occasional lone innovator.
10485 In addition to allocating funds to research, most successful
10486 corporations also allocate funds to new business divisions or venture
10487 groups. Like the strategic reserves of a general, these groups are outside
10488 the day-to-day combat and are looking for new opportunities.
10489 Democracy could not easily tolerate this principle of strategic
10490 reserve, for the unallocated resources would be the target of every
10491 department or issue that felt it was under-funded. Emergency funds do
10492 exist, but not space and resources for change.
10493 The same thing applies on the thinking level. A person who knows all
10494 the answers, has an opinion on everything, has a certainty backed up by
10495 rational argument, has very little possibility of further progress. Such a
10496 person is unlikely to walk away from a discussion with anything more than a
10497 reaffirmation of how right he or she has been all along.
10498 -- Edward deBono, from "I Am Right, You Are Wrong" (Penguin Books, 1990)
10500 The pleasantest time of day here is at sunset. Then accompanied by
10501 some fifteen girls and little children I walk through the village to the end
10502 of Siufaga, where we stand on an iron bound point and watch the waves splash
10503 us in the face, while the sun goes down, over the sea and at the same time
10504 behind the cocoanut covered hills. Most of the adult population is going
10505 into the sea to bathe, clad in lavalavas with buckets for water borne along
10506 on shoulder poles. All the heads of families are seated in the fatele
10507 (village guesthouse) making kava. At one point a group of women are filling
10508 a small canoe with a solution of native starch (arrowroot). And perhaps,
10509 just as we reach the store, the curfew-angelus will stop us, a wooden bell
10510 will clang mellowly through the village. The children must all scurry to
10511 cover, if we're near the store, it's the store steps, and sit tight until
10512 the bell sounds again. Prayer is over. Sometimes we are all back safely in
10513 room when the bell sounds, and then the Lord's Prayer must be said in
10514 English, while flowers are all taken out of their hair and the siva song
10515 stopped in the middle. But once the bell sounds again, solemnity, never of
10516 a very reliable depth, is sloughed off, the flowers replaced in the girls'
10517 hair, the siva song replaces the hymn, and they begin to dance, by no means
10518 in a puritan fashion. Their supper comes about eight and sometimes I have a
10519 breathing spell, but usually the supper hours don't jibe well enough for
10520 that. They dance for me a great deal, they love it and it is an excellent
10521 index to temperament, as the dance is so individualistic, and the audience
10522 think it is its business to keep up incessant comment.
10523 -- Margaret Mead, from "Coming of Age in Samoa"
10525 There aren't any embarassing questions--only embarassing answers.
10528 Recently one of us was leading a group of thirty Western
10529 businesspeople through Japan to learn about Japanese management techniques.
10530 We took the bullet train from Hiroshima to Osaka, and since the train
10531 stopped for only twenty seconds in Hiroshima, it would have been impossible
10532 to get all the executives and their luggage on the train at the same time.
10533 So we hired a trucking company and crew to transfer the luggage separately.
10534 The crew removed all luggage from each individual's room in Hiroshima and
10535 placed it in his pre-checked room in another chain's hotel in Osaka. Can
10536 you imagine doing that in the United States and ever seeing your luggage
10538 One of the executives, thinking his shoes were too worn, had discarded
10539 them in the wastepaper basket in his Hiroshima hotel room. Imagine his shock
10540 when he entered his room in Osaka and saw his old shoes carefully laid in
10541 the wastepaper basket there. Was the Japanese trucking company politely
10542 saying that these shoes still had life and should yet be thrown away, or was
10543 the company accommodating a crazy foreigner who liked to keep his shoes in
10544 the wastepaper basket? Either way, the company was organized for highly
10545 intelligent service at every level.
10546 -- Stan David and Jim Botkins, from "The Monster Under the Bed: How
10547 Business is Mastering the Opportunity of Knowledge for Profit",
10548 (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
10550 The term 'information' appears to cover too much that seems
10551 distinctive: knowledge, data, information in a narrow sense that some treat
10552 as synonymous with data, news, intelligence, and numerous other colloquial
10553 and specialized denotations and connotations. However, the distinctions
10554 implied by oppositions such as observations/theories, data/knowledge, raw
10555 intelligence/finished intelligence, accounting details/management are
10556 secondary, not fundamental, in characterizing information resources. They
10557 reflect only relative judgments. For instance, one person's knowledge is
10558 often another's raw data. What a vice president for marketing, production,
10559 or finance thinks he knows is just data to the chief executive officer's
10560 staff. What a scientist thinks he knows about the merits of a flu vaccine
10561 or the safety of a nuclear reactor is just data for presidential policy and
10562 politics. Data or knowledge are just types of information content--of
10563 greater or lesser value, of greater or lesser cost.
10564 -- Anthony Oettinger, from "The Information Resources Policy Handbook"
10566 Given the fact that there seems to be a fundamental willingness to
10567 accept the machine as almost human, the issue of what type of relationship
10568 is possible seems to center around what friendship-cues might be
10569 artificially generated. Appearance and voice quality could certainly be
10570 tailored so that the machine would look and sound attractive and friendly.
10571 The software could be written to suggest an interesting and unique
10572 personality, and the conversational style might appear as humorous and
10573 good-natured. The machine would not only impress us with its intelligence
10574 and knowledge of the world, but would also convey the impression that it
10575 was warm and understanding. Its ability to integrate our interests and
10576 attitudes into its own framework and its willingness to be influenced by
10577 our point of view would also enhance our respect for the machine. The fact
10578 that it appeared to take our opinions seriously might be regarded as a
10579 compliment, and it is clear that if we are prepared to accept compliments
10580 from a computer then we are implicitly accepting it as a social agent.
10581 Friendships are not made in a day, and the computer would be more
10582 acceptable as a friend if it simulated the gradual changes that occur when
10583 one person is getting to know another. At an appropriate time it might
10584 also express the endearment that stimulates attachment and intimacy. The
10585 whole process would be accomplished with subtlety to avoid giving an
10586 impression of overfamiliarity or ingratiation, which would be likely to
10587 produce irritation or animosity. After experiencing a wealth of powerful,
10588 well-timed indicators, the user would be likely to accept the computer as
10589 far more than a machine and might well come to regard it as a friend.
10590 -- Neil Frude, from "The Intimate Machine: Close Encounters with
10591 Computers and Robots," 1983.
10593 By this time the stars were moving out of the Hollywood Hotel and
10594 beginning to live in their own private houses with servants, most of whom
10595 were their peers in everything but sex appeal--which pinpoints the reason for
10596 the film capital's mass misbehavior. To place in the limelight a great
10597 number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give
10598 them unlimited power and instant wealth, is bound to produce a lively and
10602 The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted.
10603 Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy
10604 disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a
10605 hundred--one percent of an education. He regarded himself as the
10606 only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole
10607 of it. He got barely half of an average.
10608 Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him back to
10609 teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or needed to know
10610 [medieval history], he diverted some dreary hours of faculty meetings
10611 by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself graded
10612 precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed --
10613 mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly
10614 universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and
10615 whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or
10616 the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed
10617 lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at
10618 worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read
10619 mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached
10621 -- Henry Adams, from "The Education of Henry Adams"
10623 The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of
10624 the child; and liberty is activity.
10625 Discipline must come through liberty. Here is a great principle which
10626 is difficult for followers of common-school methods to understand. How
10627 shall one obtain discipline in a class of free children? Certainly in our
10628 system, we have a concept of discipline very different from that commonly
10629 accepted. If discipline is founded upon liberty, consider an individual
10630 disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute
10631 and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not
10633 We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and
10634 can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to
10635 follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy
10636 either to comprehend or to apply. But certainly it contains a great
10637 educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and
10638 undiscussed coercion to immobility.
10639 -- Maria Montessori, inventor of the "Montessori Method"
10641 A company could conceivably have within it a monastery-style unit
10642 that writes software... a research team organized like an improvisational
10643 jazz combo... a compartmentalized spy-network, with need-to-know rules,
10644 operating within the law, to scout for merger or acquisition
10645 possibilities... and a sales force organized as a highly motivated 'tribe'
10646 complete with its own war songs and emotional membership rituals.
10647 ...(T)he units of a flex-firm may draw information, people, and money
10648 from one another and from outside organizations as needed. They may be next
10649 door to one another or continents apart. Their functions may partly
10650 overlap, like information in a hyper-media data base; for other purposes,
10651 the functions may be logically, geographically, or financially divided.
10652 Some may use many central services provided by headquarters; others may
10653 choose to use only a few.
10654 In turn this requires freer, faster flows of information. This will
10655 mean crisscrossing, up, down, and sideways conduits--neural pathways that
10656 bust through the boxes in the table of organization so that people can trade
10657 the ideas, data, formulae, hints, insights, facts, strategies, whispers,
10658 gesture, and smiles that turn out to be essential to efficiency.
10659 -- Alvin Toffler, from "Powershift"
10661 Here in the newspaper business, we have definitely caught Internet Fever.
10662 In the old days, we used to -- get this! -- actually CHARGE MONEY for our
10663 newspapers. Ha! What an old-fashioned, low-tech, non-digital concept!
10664 Nowadays all of the modern newspapers spend millions of dollars operating
10665 Web sites where we give away the entire newspaper for free. Sometimes we
10666 run advertisements in the regular newspaper urging our paying customers to
10667 go to our Web sites instead. 'Stop giving us money!' is the shrewd marketing
10668 thrust of these ads. Why do we do this? Because all the other newspapers
10669 are doing it! This is called 'market penetration.'
10672 A highly competitive person has a hard row to hoe. There is no
10673 satisfaction in winning a competition unless it is a stiff and fair one.
10674 Stiff is easy to define; it is stiff if one's own realistic assessment of
10675 one's abilities make the odds long--the longer the odds, the greater
10676 satisfaction on winning. Fair is harder to define, for if one wins a
10677 contest against long odds, there must be a reason. The odds weren't really
10678 long; they only appeared to be so. Isn't it unfair to appear to be an
10679 underdog when one really isn't? Let's start with some obvious distinctions:
10680 A professional gambler needs to win in order to earn his living. Fairness
10681 is not his concern. He tries to be unfair in various ways: Keeping cards up
10682 his sleeve is one way that the rest of us universally deplore; the morality
10683 of concealing his skill to attract dupes is hardly less questionable.
10684 Fairness means at least an honest deal (no hidden cards) and no intentional
10685 concealment of one's abilities.
10686 -- Herbert A. Simon, from "Models of My Life" (Basic Books, 1991)
10688 The United States is trying to promote democracy around the
10689 world and holds itself up as a model. However, it is obvious that
10690 our democracy has been reduced to charisma and money.
10691 Surely intelligent and conscientious citizens can make wise and
10692 informed decisions? I for one cannot... I do not know anyone who
10693 spends more hours than I do in search of information and wisdom, yet
10694 it avails me little. Many people with power spend much of their time
10695 flying around the world, being wined and dined, but that means they
10696 have little time to do their homework.
10697 Is the idea of democracy based on an informed electorate just a dream?
10699 -- Ronald Hilton, founder of WAIS (World Association of
10700 International Studies).
10702 When there is communication without need for communication,
10703 merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige
10704 of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative
10705 value of the message drop like a plummet... In the arts, the desire
10706 to find new things to say and new ways of saying them is the source
10707 of all life and interest. Yet every day we meet with examples of
10708 painting where, for instance, the artist has bound himself from the
10709 new canons of the abstract, and has displayed no intention to use these
10710 canons to display an interesting and novel form of beauty, to pursue
10711 the uphill fight against the prevailing tendency toward the commonplace
10713 I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns
10714 the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in
10715 science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes
10716 enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of
10717 great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original,
10718 for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies
10719 rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and
10720 limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and
10721 beauty, wherever it may be seen.
10722 -- Norbert Wiener, from "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics
10723 and Society" (1950)
10725 Please do not suppose that the only function of puzzles is to entertain.
10726 Puzzles are a way of teaching mathematics. Indeed, they are the best way to
10727 teach it. Fred Hoyle, the famous British astronomer who taught mathematics
10728 at Cambridge University for twenty years states in strong terms his belief
10729 that mathematics should never be 'taught' at all. Students must learn for
10730 themselves. How? By solving puzzles. The functions of the teacher should
10731 be, first, to select in a wise way the material on which the puzzles are
10732 based, second, to make sure the puzzles are well suited in difficulty to the
10733 sophistication of the student, third, to answer questions, and finally, if
10734 the teacher is capable of it, to give an occasional word of inspiration.
10737 A cat's idea of what is comfortable and what is not
10738 is incomprehensible to a human.
10741 In the sciences, hypothesis always precedes law, which is to say, there is
10742 always a lot of tall guessing before a new fact is established. The
10743 guessers are often quite as important as the fact-finders; in truth, it
10744 would not be difficult to argue that they are more important. New facts are
10745 seldom plucked from the clear sky; they have to be approached and smelled
10746 out by a process of trial and error, in which bold and shrewd guessing is an
10747 integral part. The Greeks were adept at such guessing, and the scientists
10748 of the world have been following the leads they opened for more than two
10750 -- H. L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy," 1982
10752 I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
10755 If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face,
10756 you should go home and examine your conscience.
10759 I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything,
10760 I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.
10763 Those sighs of a dog! They go to the heart so much more
10764 deeply than the sighs of our own kind because they are utterly
10765 unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from one who, heaving
10766 them, knows not that they have escaped him!
10769 (Of dogs) I marvel that such small ribs as these can
10770 cage such vast desire to please.
10773 'Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark
10774 Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw near home;
10775 'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark
10776 Our coming, and look brighter when we come.
10779 Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed
10780 Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without
10781 Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise,
10782 which would be unmeaning Flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is
10783 but a just Tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog.
10784 -- Inscription on the monument raised for Lord Byron's dog, Boatswain
10786 Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
10789 A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
10792 Living with a dog is easy--like living with an idealist.
10795 The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool
10796 of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you,
10797 but he will make a fool of himself too.
10798 -- Samuel Butler (d. 1902), Note-Book
10800 The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to his level
10801 of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
10804 I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.
10807 For the strength of the pack is the wolf,
10808 and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
10811 All of the animals except humans know that the
10812 principal business of life is to enjoy it.
10815 Cowardly dogs bark loudest. -- John Webster
10817 Dogs like to obey. It gives them security. -- James Herriot
10819 A dog's best friend is his illiteracy. -- Ogden Nash
10821 Take a dog for a companion and a stick in your hand. -- English Proverb
10823 A lean dog shames its master. -- Japanese Proverb
10825 The dog was created specially for children.
10826 He is a god of frolic.
10827 -- Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
10829 Dogs have not the power of comparing. A dog will take a small piece
10830 of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him.
10833 All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers,
10834 is contained in the dog.
10837 The dog has an enviable mind; it remembers the nice things in life
10838 and quickly blots out the nasty.
10839 -- Barbara Woodhouse
10841 If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along
10842 with them as we do with people.
10845 Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
10848 You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.
10849 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
10851 A dog has the soul of a philosopher. -- Plato
10853 The more I see of men, the more I like dogs. -- Madame Anne Maria de Stael
10855 The reason a dog has so many friends is that
10856 he wags his tail instead of his tongue.
10859 We see how he is at once in a world of smells of which
10860 we know nothing, which so occupy and absorb his attention
10861 as to make him practically blind to everything about him
10862 and deaf to all sounds, even his master's voice impatiently
10866 A man may smile and bid you hail
10867 Yet wish you to the devil;
10868 But when a good dog wags his tail,
10869 You know he's on the level.
10870 -- Submitted to www.dog.com by TJ Brown
10872 Old dogs, like old shoes, are comfortable.
10873 They might be a bit out of shape and a little
10874 worn around the edges, but they fit well.
10877 In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to
10878 train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open
10879 oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
10882 I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs.
10883 To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.
10886 Every dog should have a man of his own. There is nothing like a
10887 well-behaved person around the house to spread the blanket for him,
10888 or bring him his supper when he comes home man-tired at night.
10891 Not Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Astor
10892 together could have raised money enough
10893 to buy a quarter share in my little dog...
10894 -- Ernest Thompson Seton
10896 I'd rather have an inch of dog than miles of pedigree. -- Dana Burnet
10898 ...in a healthy dog-owner relationship, praise is virtually
10899 an automatic reaction, an attitude toward the dog, a way of
10900 living with the dog. The most common mistake is to consider
10901 praise as simply a reward.
10902 -- The Monks of New Skete
10904 Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of
10905 current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing
10906 all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are
10907 especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.
10910 A dog is not "almost human" and I know of no greater insult to the
10911 canine race than to describe it as such. The dog can do many things
10912 which man cannot do, never could do, and never will do.
10915 imagine yourself lying in the tall purple grass with the sharp blades
10916 rubbing up against your flesh like rusty razors while the dark red
10917 moon drops drips of blood into the oozing green lake down the hill.
10918 tattered fish things leap and whirl in the lake while the tired orange
10919 sun flickers on the verge of going out. the clacking and biting
10920 insects that infest the grass crawl in and out of your body as you lie
10921 there trying to relax while large unseen animals rummage in the forest
10922 causing trees to crash down as they pass. dust blows in thick
10923 whirlwinds making the sooty air impossible to breathe as you hack
10924 chunks of meat up from within, but symbiotic parasites rush to repair
10925 the damage while tickling your insides ferociously.
10929 It all comes from here, the stench and the peril. -- Frodo
10931 I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights providing
10932 clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion,
10933 freedom of the press, protection against standing armies,
10934 restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force
10935 of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of
10936 fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of
10938 -- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787
10940 A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against
10941 every government on earth, general or particular; and what no
10942 just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.
10943 -- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Papers, 12:440
10945 It astonishes me to find... [that so many] of our countrymen...
10946 should be contented to live under a system which leaves to their
10947 governors the power of taking from them the trial by jury in
10948 civil cases, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom
10949 of commerce, the habeas corpus laws, and of yoking them with a
10950 standing army. This is a degeneracy in the principles of
10951 liberty... which I [would not have expected for at least] four
10953 -- Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1788
10955 A bill of rights [will] guard liberty against the legislative as
10956 well as the executive branches of the government.
10957 -- Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 1789
10959 The declaration of rights is, like all other human blessings,
10960 alloyed with some inconveniences and not accomplishing fully its
10961 object. But the good in this instance vastly outweighs the evil.
10962 -- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789
10964 By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate
10965 freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce
10966 against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions
10967 of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters
10968 against doing evil which no honest government should decline.
10969 -- Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1788
10972 You must scratch me there!
10973 Yes, above my tail! Behold,
10977 prickly herbal scent
10978 flips me inside out and back;
10984 Tail of black dog keeps good time.
10985 Pounce! good dog! good dog!
10987 The best exercise for a cat is another cat.
10988 -- Jo and Paul Loeb
10991 In deep sleep hear sound
10992 Cat vomit hairball somewhere.
10993 Will find in morning.
10996 Is not a certain dullness their most visible characteristic?
10997 What is the history of their speculative mind? -- a blank.
10998 What their literature? -- a copy. They have left not a single
10999 discovery in any abstract science; not a single perfect or
11000 well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks, the perfection
11001 of narrow and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the ideal
11002 forms of self-idolizing art -- the Romans imitated and admired;
11003 the Greeks explained the laws of nature -- the Romans wondered and
11004 despised; the Greeks invented a system of numerals second only to
11005 that now in use -- the Romans counted to the end of their days
11006 with the clumsy apparatus which we still call by their name; the
11007 Greeks made a capital and scientific calendar -- the Romans began
11008 their month when the Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new
11009 moon. Throughout Latin literature, this is the perpetual puzzle
11010 -- Why are we free and they slaves? we praetors and they barbers?
11011 Why do the stupid people always win, and the clever people always
11016 The rule for today.
11017 Touch my tail, I shred your hand.
11020 'Well, then,' the Cheshire Cat went on, 'you see a dog growls
11021 when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now, I
11022 growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry.
11023 Therefore I'm mad.'
11024 -- Cheshire Cat (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
11028 stalk the birds with care--
11029 twitch my tail and they may scare;
11030 human gets a share.
11035 my flatness is intended,
11036 i have rubber bones.
11041 close to my sensitive tail
11042 may be time to shriek.
11046 fish in pond bigger
11047 than me; goldfish in bowl just
11048 the right size--kerchomp.
11051 Yet gentle will the griffin be,
11052 Most decorous and fat,
11053 And walk up to the Milky Way
11054 And lap it like a cat.
11058 Blur of motion, then--
11059 Silence, me, a paper bag
11064 Returns with gifts of plump birds
11065 Your foot just squashed one.
11067 Every good teacher has his own special art; with some, it is a genius
11068 for a clarity that sometimes is more lucid than the complexities of the
11069 subject justify. Sometimes it is a talent for apothegm or leading
11070 suggestion, a word that evokes a vista or an idea that opens a world. I
11071 cannot now quite remember what Professor Beard's special technique was. He
11072 was clear, he was suggestive, he was witty. But none of these things could
11073 quite account for the hold he had on the smug and the rebels alike, on both
11074 the pre-lawyers and pre-poets. I suspect it was a certain combination of
11075 poetry, philosophy, and honesty in the man himself, a sense he communicated
11076 that politics mattered far beyond the realm commonly called political, and
11077 an insight he conveyed into the life that forms of government furthered or
11078 betrayed. One morning he came into class as usual, stood against the wall,
11079 and half-closing his eyes, said:
11080 "Gentlemen, today we are to discuss the budget system in State
11081 government. I am sure that must seem to you a dull subject. But if you will
11082 tell me, gentlemen, how much per capita a nation spends on its Army, on its
11083 Navy, on education, on public works, I shall be able to tell you, I think,
11084 as much about that nation as if you gave me the works of its poets and
11086 We listened with revised and revived attention to an exposition, full
11087 of figures and detail, of the State budget system. Charles A. Beard showed
11088 us what politics had to do with the life beyond it and which it made
11089 possible. And he taught us, too, the difference between the forms of
11090 government and the living substance of its operations... Nobody who has ever
11091 listened to Beard can disdain the study of politics in favor of the study of
11092 "higher things". He has been too well taught, as tragic world events have
11093 since shown, how government may nourish or destroy "higher things".
11094 -- Irwin Edman, speaking of the historian Charles A. Beard
11096 There is no substitute for a lifetime.
11099 The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life
11100 are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound
11101 historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of
11102 cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to
11103 keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the
11104 technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every
11105 village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important
11106 technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.
11107 According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the
11108 decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from
11109 the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did
11110 not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough
11111 in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on
11112 horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay
11113 that allowed populations to grow and civilization to flourish among the
11114 forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and
11115 London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
11116 -- Freeman Dyson, from his 1985 Gifford Lectures
11119 Small brave carnivores
11120 Kill pine cones and mosquitoes,
11121 Fear vacuum cleaner
11125 Oh, no! Help! I got outside!
11126 Let me back inside!
11128 If you're a geek at a circus
11129 and the only tool you have is a sledgehammer,
11130 then you'll use it everywhere.
11131 We're Microsoft and
11132 Windows is our sledgehammer.
11135 An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile--
11136 hoping it will eat him last.
11137 -- Winston Churchill
11139 Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.
11142 When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting.
11145 Up to his shoulders
11146 In grasses coarse as silk,
11147 The white cat with the yellow eyes
11148 Sits with his paws together,
11149 Tall as a quart of milk.
11152 Life is a gamble, at terrible odds--if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
11155 What is the most innocent place in any country?
11156 Is it not the insane asylum?
11157 These people drift through life truly innocent,
11158 unable to see into themselves at all.
11161 We live by our genius for hope;
11162 we survive by our talent for dispensing with it.
11165 People change and forget to tell each other.
11168 Professional work of any sort tends to narrow the mind, to limit the point
11169 of view, and to put a hallmark on a man of a most unmistakable kind. On the
11170 one hand are the intense, ardent natures, absorbed in their studies and
11171 quickly losing interest in everything but their profession, while other
11172 faculties and interest 'fust' unused. On the other hand are the bovine
11173 brethren, who think of nothing but the treadmill and the corn. From very
11174 different causes, the one from concentration, the other from apathy, both
11175 are apt to neglect those outside studies that widen the sympathies and help
11176 a man to get the best there is out of life... the medical man, perhaps more
11177 than any other man, needs that higher education of which Plato speaks,
11178 'that education in virtue from youth upwards, which enables a man to pursue
11179 the ideal perfection.' It is not for all, nor can all attain it, but there
11180 is comfort and help in the pursuit, even though the end is never reached.
11183 We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us,
11184 but for ours to amuse them.
11187 Scientific research is solving puzzles. The pleasure to
11188 be got from it is the pleasure of the crossword or jig-saw addict.
11189 First the blank diagram, or the scatter of meaningless pieces; then
11190 an occasional tentative clue or the few pieces of the same colour
11191 that seem to fit together; next a period of frustration, going over
11192 and over the list of clues, or trying piece after piece in the most
11193 unlikely conjunctions; then--ah the sweet joy of the word that
11194 completes a doubtful acrostic, or the section that springs to life
11195 as a tree, or a house or a pot of flowers; finally, the completion
11196 of the pattern, with clue after clue solved in rapid succession, or
11197 the last few pieces tumbling into place. By accepting the challenge,
11198 the tension, the concentration, the frustration, we heighten the
11199 pleasure of the moment or revelation. The more difficult the puzzle,
11200 the greater the tension--and so much greater the delights of solution.
11203 The most certain way to succeed is to always try one more time.
11207 hmmm... box is stinky.
11208 where are those boots that he has?
11209 they smell close enough.
11212 This one is from my dogs to my cats:
11214 I will sniff your butt
11215 I like your litter box gifts
11219 You can drop humans anywhere and they'll thrive.
11220 Only the rat does as well.
11225 in heart may become a wolf
11226 when the catnip blooms
11229 housecat haiku of realization:
11231 birds flicker past me,
11232 safely in their cage of glass.
11233 wait! who's in the cage?
11237 At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud.
11238 I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest
11239 intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos,
11240 creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence,
11241 forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is
11242 preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more
11243 valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs
11244 of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and
11245 in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is
11246 ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put
11247 shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we
11248 avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I
11249 think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for
11250 convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and
11251 sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain
11252 individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
11253 -- Kenneth Clark, from "Civilization"
11255 If you want to feel proud of yourself, you need to do things of which
11256 to feel proud. Feelings follow actions.
11259 To learn and from time to time to apply what
11260 one has learned--isn't that pleasure?
11261 -- Confucious, 500 B.C.
11263 top 6 rejected ingredients in ben & jerry's "phish food" flavor:
11265 6. capers and whitefish
11266 5. caramel-covered seaweed nuggets
11268 3. magic mushroom ripple
11271 and the number one rejected ingredient...
11277 top 6 reasons to own a house rabbit:
11279 6. learning to splice electrical wires
11280 5. free compost everywhere in the house
11281 4. having your ankles bitten and scratched during rutting season
11282 3. finding out what night feces are and that special feeling they give
11283 when between your toes
11284 2. having guests ask "what is that incredible stench?"
11286 and the number one reason to own a house rabbit...
11288 1. if all else fails, there's always hasenpfeffer.
11292 My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send
11293 everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
11296 Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
11297 time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
11300 We will take almost any kind of criticism except the observation that
11301 we have no sense of humor. A man will admit to being a coward, a liar, a
11302 thief, an adulterer, a poor mechanic, or a bad swimmer, but tell him that
11303 he has a dreadful sense of humor and you might as well have slandered his
11304 mother. Even if he is civilized enough to pretend to make light of your
11305 statement, he will still secretly believe that he has, not only a good
11306 sense of humor, but one superior to most. This is all the more surprising
11307 when you consider that not one person in a million can give you any kind of
11308 intelligent answer as to what humor is or why he or she laughs.
11311 To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write
11312 for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired
11313 people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task
11314 for men who know good writing from bad.
11317 ugh. all thoughts scrambled. now eating them on toast. -- fred t. hamster
11319 I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
11322 Housework can kill you if done right.
11325 All human evil comes from a single cause--
11326 man's inability to sit still in a room.
11329 An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
11330 cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
11333 School curricula reinforce the impression that logical subjects like math
11334 and science require starting with basics and progressively adding more
11335 sophisticated conclusions and applications. But the very nature of logical
11336 laws make it equally feasible to work backward from conclusions, or
11337 observations, to hypotheses. Deduction and induction are entirely
11339 In reality, scientists and mathematicians do not do their crafts in the
11340 linear, progressive way their subjects are usually taught. Practitioners
11341 commonly start with a flash of insight (the stereotypical light bulb lighting),
11342 a hunch, a dream, a guess, an elaborate hypothesis or postulate, and then work
11343 backward, forward, and around it to try to make it fit with established
11344 knowledge. Physicists or engineers commonly try using complex mathematical
11345 gadgets to solve the problems that interest them without knowing or caring how
11346 the math was logically derived. Experimenters tinker in laboratories and make
11347 surprising discoveries that theoreticians then labor to try to explain
11348 logically. Alternatively, theorists like Einstein come up with wild new
11349 theories like relativity that experiments may have to struggle for decades to
11350 find a way to test and prove. Scientific knowledge does not grow incrementally
11351 down a predictable track. Rather it grows volcanolike, sometimes oozing in
11352 patient rivulets, sometimes erupting in fiery ferment, and occasionally
11353 exploding, blowing away the rock of established truth.
11354 Pedantic, linear teaching rarely conveys the true drama and mystery of the
11355 human quest for knowledge. School plods where human imagination naturally
11357 -- Lewis J. Perelman, from "School's Out"
11359 the people who are the most in need of help are often the
11360 same ones who cannot receive it. for example, those who
11361 believe all human minds are isolated and who have built their
11362 lives on that principle can only rarely come to appreciate the
11363 connections between us. their loneliness and self-imposed
11364 isolation seems to be the normal state of affairs to these
11365 people; little do they realize that if they relaxed their
11366 armored ego barrier, then the thoughts and emotions of others
11367 would start to be perceptible. they desperately cling to the
11368 belief system that IS their problem in such a way that they
11369 cannot see the solution, nor can they even believe that the
11370 solution exists. should these people consciously strive to
11371 relax that barrier, it would dissolve quickly. many just
11372 cannot do that and never will. many can however, and can
11373 relax in the invisible web of human mentation that underlies
11374 all of our consciousnesses like a huge, comfortable and active
11378 All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part
11379 of every organism to live beyond its income.
11382 Attempts to mimic the mind of man are as yet in their infancy.
11383 The road, however, is open, and it conjures up thoughts which are
11384 exciting but also in some ways frightening. What if man eventually
11385 were to produce a mechanical creature, with or without organic
11386 parts, equal or superior to himself in all respects, including
11387 intelligence and creativity? Would it replace man, as the superior
11388 organisms of the earth have replaced or subordinated the less well-
11389 adapted in the long history of evolution?
11390 It is a queasy thought: that we represent, for the first time
11391 in the history of life on the earth, a species capable of bringing
11392 about its own possible replacement. Of course, we have it in our
11393 power to prevent such a regrettable denouement by refusing to build
11394 machines that are too intelligent. But it is tempting to build them
11395 nevertheless. What achievement could be grander than the creation
11396 of an object that surpasses the creator? How could we consummate
11397 the victory of intelligence over nature more gloriously than by
11398 passing on our heritage, in triumph, to a greater intelligence--of
11400 -- Isaac Asimov, in "Asimov's Guide to Science"
11402 Home is the place where,
11403 when you have to go there,
11404 they have to take you in.
11407 The closer that journalism has approached the standing of an
11408 authentic profession, oddly enough, the less attractive its
11409 individual practitioners appear to have become in the public
11410 mind. This irony is traceable in large measure to the
11411 distinguished work of the press in its persistent recording
11412 of the futility and manifold injustices of the Vietnam War and
11413 its disclosures in the Watergate scandal. Those protracted
11414 traumas scarred the national psyche, which in turn found
11415 solace by blaming the press for battening on the troubles it
11416 apparently delighted in reporting. Reporters came to be seen
11417 as arrogant in the conduct of their duties, habitually
11418 adversarial in posture, often insensitive, and unapologetic
11419 about substituting their own right to demand the truth for the
11420 public's right not to be stalked ruthlessly like so much grist
11421 for the milling of tomorrow's headlines. This impression has
11422 been deepened by the coarseness of television news, which is
11423 essentially a headline service trading on its emotional graphic
11424 appeal and dealing so superficially with events and so rarely
11425 with the complex issues behind them that its effect is to
11426 divert rather than to inform; TV remains primarily an
11427 entertainment medium that has not challenged the role of
11428 newspapers as the prime recorders of the community's serious
11429 business. But because we see television correspondents
11430 questioning the President or putting it to the police chief,
11431 they become personalities in their own right, far more imposing
11432 than a faceless byline over a printed story.
11433 -- Richard Kluger, from "The Paper: The Life and Death of the New
11434 York Herald Tribune"
11436 The fat cat on the mat may seem to dream
11437 Of nice mice that suffice for him, or cream.
11438 -- J. R. R. Tolkien
11440 Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very
11441 unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the
11442 best lawyer in the world can't get you off.
11445 A man will never become a philosopher by worrying forever
11446 about the writings of other men, without ever raising his own
11447 eyes to nature's works in the attempt to recognize there the
11448 truths already known and to investigate some of the infinite
11449 number that remain to be discovered.
11452 A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
11455 One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight
11456 of the shore for a very long time.
11459 Today in America--the child of European imperialism--a new revolution
11460 is rising. It is the revolution of our time. It is the only revolution
11461 that involves radical, moral, and practical opposition to the spirit of
11462 nationalism. It is the only revolution that, to that opposition, joins
11463 culture, economic and technological power, and a total affirmation of
11464 liberty for all in the place of archaic prohibitions. It therefore
11465 offers the only escape for mankind today; the acceptance of technological
11466 civilization as a means and not as an end, and--since we cannot be saved
11467 either by the destruction of civilization or by its continuation--the
11468 development of the ability to reshape that civilization without
11470 -- Jean-Francois Revel
11472 There is a great man who makes every man feel small.
11473 But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
11474 -- G. K. Chesterton
11476 What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties
11477 are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most
11478 people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
11479 -- R. Buckminster Fuller
11481 Our memories are card indexes--consulted, and then put back in
11482 disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.
11485 More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency
11486 (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single
11487 reason--including blind stupidity.
11490 We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of
11491 the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
11494 The best is the enemy of the good.
11497 The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
11500 A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking big money.
11501 -- Senator Everett M. Dirksen
11503 During the last three decades, neuroscientists throughout the world
11504 have probed the nervous system in fascinating detail and have learned a
11505 great deal about the laws of mental life and about how these laws emerge
11506 from the brain. The pace of progress has been exhilarating, but--at the
11507 same time--the findings make many people uncomfortable. It seems somehow
11508 disconcerting to be told that your life, all your hopes, triumphs and
11509 aspirations simply arise from the activity of neurons in your brain. But
11510 far from being humiliating, this idea is ennobling, I think.
11511 Science--cosmology, evolution and especially the brain sciences--is
11512 telling us that we have no privileged position in the universe and that our
11513 sense of having a private nonmaterial soul "watching the world" is really an
11514 illusion (as has long been emphasized by Eastern mystical traditions like
11515 Hinduism and Zen Buddhism). Once you realize that far from being a
11516 spectator, you are in fact part of the eternal ebb and flow of events in the
11517 cosmos, this realization is very liberating. Ultimately this idea also
11518 allows you to cultivate a certain humility--the essence of all authentic
11519 religious experience.
11520 -- V. S. Ramachandran, in "Phantoms in the Brain"
11522 A celebrity is one who is known to many persons
11523 he is glad he doesn't know.
11526 Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest
11527 source of joy, and with death as his greatest source of anxiety.
11528 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
11530 By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man
11531 has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes
11532 in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
11535 Scientists, who nearly always speak extemporaneously in public
11536 presentations, note that humanists almost always read papers
11537 at professional meetings, and rarely show slides--except for
11538 art historians, who always use two screens simultaneously--even
11539 for the most visual subjects. Why, 'we' ask, do 'they' not
11540 realize that written and spoken English are different languages,
11541 and that very few people can read well in public--a particular
11542 irony since humanists supposedly hold language as their primary
11543 tool of professional competence. But 'they,' on the other hand,
11544 rightly ridicule 'our' tendencies to darken a lecture room even
11545 before we reach the podium and to rely almost entirely upon a
11546 string of pictures thereafter. A stale joke proclaims that if
11547 Galileo had first presented the revolutionary results of Siderius
11548 Nuncius as a modern scientific talk, his opening line could only
11549 have been: 'first slide please.'
11550 -- R. R. Shearer and S. J. Gould, in "Science," 5 Nov 99
11552 Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire,
11553 he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.
11556 Futurology is a fashion. The approach of the end of the current
11557 millennium has stimulated it. But it looks like a fashion in decline. It
11558 seems to have peaked when public interest in the future was enlivened by
11559 debate between scientific perfectibilians and apocalyptic visionaries. The
11560 optimists predicted a world made easy by progress, lives prolonged by
11561 medical wizardry, wealth made universal by the alchemy of economic growth,
11562 society rectified by the egalitarianism of technologically prolonged
11563 leisure. The pessimists foresaw nuclear immolation or population explosion
11564 or a purgative world revolution -- a cosmic struggle reminiscent of the
11565 millennium of Christian prophetic tradition -- which would either save or
11567 No one gets excited by such visions today. Scientific progress has
11568 been, at best, disappointing -- encumbering us with apparently insoluble
11569 social and moral problems, or else, at worst, alarming -- threatening us
11570 with the mastery of artificially intelligent machines or genetically
11571 engineered human mutants. Economic growth has become the bogey of the
11572 ecologically anxious. Meanwhile, world revolution and the nuclear holocaust
11573 have been postponed, and apocalyptic prophecy has resorted to forebodings --
11574 variously unconvincing or uncompelling -- about ecological cataclysms.
11575 Proliferation of nuclear weapons and the discovery that even peaceful
11576 nuclear installations can poison great parts of the world has, in some ways,
11577 made disaster impend more darkly; but lingering extinction and little local
11578 nuclear holocausts seem to lack, in public esteem the glamour of a sudden
11579 and comprehensive armageddon. The future has become depressing rather than
11580 dramatic, and futurology has lost allure.
11581 -- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in "Millennium: a History of the Last
11582 Thousand Years", 1995.
11584 We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.
11585 -- Jane Austen, in "Pride and Prejudice"
11589 dances with a beam of light,
11592 Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
11595 Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is
11596 supposed to be doing at that moment.
11600 He flies without wings,
11601 Fast as a shadow can go.
11602 Black slash on white snow.
11605 Once quick with rat life,
11606 Now just carnage: tail, head, fur.
11610 Willy stalks field mice,
11611 Wild Bill to small buffalo.
11612 Kills them just for show.
11615 Cats are like haiku:
11616 Subtle, delicate, perfect
11619 Once fat with meat.
11621 Rat food and bat food
11622 Supplement cat food.
11624 The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
11627 I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the
11628 Boston telephone directory than by the first two thousand people on the
11629 faculty of Harvard University.
11630 -- William F. Buckley
11632 Civility will always have its critics. In 1997, when New York's
11633 chief judge proposed rules requiring lawyers on opposing sides to be civil
11634 to each other, the prominent divorce lawyer Raoul Felder wrote a caustic
11635 response in the New York Times. "If lawyers truly care about the causes
11636 they represent, they should, on occasion, get hot under the collar, raise
11637 their voices, become pugnacious," he wrote. Conflict, argued Felder, is
11638 what the legal profession is about. Civility, he concluded, "may not always
11639 be the right reaction in an adversarial courtroom."
11640 This argument reminds me of the commentary by Ed Rollins that it
11641 was his job to diminish the reputation of his client's opponent. Nastiness,
11642 in other words, is not merely the option but the responsibility of the
11643 political profession. The legal profession too: "I have never heard a
11644 client complain that his or her lawyer was rude," Felder tells us. In both
11645 cases, law and politics, rudeness is evidently justified on the ground that
11646 rudeness is what the client is paying for.
11647 As any student of civility would, I find this a fascinating notion:
11648 that there are professions for which incivility is a requirement. I suppose
11649 I disbelieve it; or, rather, if there are such professions, I am skeptical
11650 of their morality, because they fail to convey a message that we are, all of
11651 us, not lone drivers but fellow passengers. It may be that law and politics
11652 seem so dismally rude because their principal ethic is merely one of
11653 victory, an ethic materially enriching and emotionally satisfying, but
11654 morally unimportant. If lawyers are paid to be rude and political
11655 consultants to be nasty, and if their incivility is linked to the fact that
11656 they are also paid to win, we should scarcely be surprised that professional
11657 athletes find it comfortable to brawl with fans, spit on umpires, take bites
11658 out of ears, and, in one unfortunate case nicknamed "Assassin," specialize
11659 in injuring fellow football players. After all, the athletes want to win too.
11660 Some etiquette. Some democracy.
11661 -- Stephen L. Carter, in "Civility", 1998
11663 A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes.
11666 A cat pours his body on the floor like water. It is restful just to see him.
11667 -- William Lyon Phelps
11669 Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea.
11670 -- "Alain" [Emile Chartier]
11672 Newspapers have changed their character during my lifetime. They used
11673 to be the principal carriers of the world's news, but television holds that
11674 position now. Television, however, has serious limitations; it is a visual
11675 medium, and it is dominated by the principle that nothing is news unless you
11676 can take a picture of it. It is here that the newspapers still hold their
11677 own; so much of what goes on in the political world cannot be effectively
11678 photographed; statesmen, in their expensive but uninteresting clothes, make
11679 very poor TV and their prolonged deliberations are dull when we see them on
11680 the box. Politics must be interpreted, and newspapers have become their
11681 untiring interpreters... Intelligence, not perhaps on its highest level
11682 but far beyond the sheer emotionalism of TV, has found its refuge in the
11684 -- Robertson Davies, from "The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading,
11685 Writing, & The World of Books".
11687 To improve communications, work not on the utterer but on the recipient.
11690 Despite the incorporated homicide or suicide called war, despite the
11691 crimes of individuals, the natural conflicts of domestic parties and
11692 national ambitions, I believe, after fifty years of studying history,
11693 that man is physically, mentally, and morally better, on the average,
11694 than at any time in the past; that our poverty, so disgraceful amid our
11695 unprecedented wealth, is not so shameless as the slavery that supported
11696 an enfranchised minority in Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome; that our
11697 marital chaos and moral laxity are no worse than in the England of
11698 Charles II or the France of Louis XV; that more good books are being
11699 published than ever before and more widely read; and that art will soon
11700 rise to a new level of self-discipline and social significance.
11701 I mourn the ugly slums of our cities and the distress of those who
11702 cannot find work for their hands to do; but I see realized around me,
11703 in an unparalleled proportion of our people, such a spread of home
11704 ownership, family income, physical comforts, educational opportunities,
11705 political freedom, and scientific powers as would amaze and gladden our
11706 Founding Fathers if they could return to see what their progeny and
11707 their institutions have done... This time, this moment, is as good as
11708 any that ever was, and is incomparably more wonderful.
11711 I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
11712 Imagination is more important than knowledge.
11713 Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
11716 You do not lead by hitting people over the head.
11717 That's assault, not leadership.
11718 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
11720 When elephants fight, only the grass gets hurt. -- Swahili Saying
11722 Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.
11723 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
11725 The gingham dog and the calico cat
11726 Side by side on the table sat;
11727 'Twas half-past eight and (what do you think!)
11728 Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink!
11731 bob1: I was going to just sublime into the roll
11732 and see what I could get....
11733 fred: slime, you mean? you're not going to evaporate, right?
11734 bob1: Whatever, formally declare I shall be in control
11735 and see if anyone listens...
11736 fred: that's the doctrine of the supine?
11737 bob1: By sublime I meant so slowly that you don't notice.
11738 fred: the lime doctor sublimes merging into the supine
11739 mesmerized accomplished cow-orking accomplices slimefully.
11740 bob1: mmm I see. Anyway I must rejoin the family and stuff.
11741 Perhaps I shall be back later. I must get into work early
11742 tomorrow if I want all this to work.
11743 fred: by the time i spline my spleen in the stream
11744 i will have strummed the strumpet's stoking stork.
11745 bob1: Holy f*ck batman.
11747 There is nothing to be learned from history anymore.
11748 We're in science fiction now.
11751 One of the interesting features of communication is that, broadly
11752 speaking, to be perceived, information must reside in more than one context.
11753 We know what something is by contrast with what it is not. Silence makes
11754 musical notes perceivable; conversation is understood as a contrast of
11755 contexts, speaker and hearer; words, breaks and breaths. In turn, in order
11756 to be meaningful, these contexts of information must be relinked through
11757 some sort of judgment of equivalence or comparability. This occurs at all
11758 levels of scale, and we all do it routinely as part of everyday life.
11759 None of this is new in theories of information and communication: we
11760 have long had models of signals and targets, background, noise and filters,
11761 signals, and quality controls. We are moving this insight here to the level
11762 of social interaction. People often cannot see what they take for granted
11763 until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted.
11764 -- Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Star, from "Sorting Things Out:
11765 Classification and Its Consequences," (MIT Press).
11767 If there is technological advance without social advance, there is,
11768 almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
11769 -- Michael Harrington
11771 Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
11774 When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
11777 Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
11780 He was a very valiant man who first adventured on eating of oysters.
11783 A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional, and are
11784 the portals of discovery.
11787 But this 'long run' is a misleading guide to current affairs.
11788 In the long run we are all dead.
11789 -- John Maynard Keynes
11791 Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove
11792 that they are not idiots.
11795 Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human
11796 intelligence long enough to get money from it.
11799 I don't like money actually, but it quiets my nerves.
11803 Black heart on white fur
11804 Green eyes ... last sight for poor rat,
11805 Plaything of a God.
11808 Black face, cold blue eyes
11809 fish pond, golden fish surprise.
11810 Wet paws ... not water!
11812 spelling offers more
11813 room for controversy than
11814 the world's religions
11818 caffeination in its most
11823 sangha are the three jewels
11824 a buddhist cleaves to
11828 charging into the twenty-first
11832 fred barks, lily hides
11833 two dogs of the same breeding
11836 haikus force structure
11837 on an otherwise very
11842 three celtic names held by three
11846 The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is
11847 conversation. I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of
11848 life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I
11849 should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and
11850 speech... The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats
11851 not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once. If I converse with
11852 an understanding man, and a rough disputant, he presses hard upon me and
11853 pricks me on both sides; his imaginations raise up mine to more than
11854 ordinary pitch; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up
11855 to something above my self...
11856 -- Michel Montaigne
11860 of meats, kibbles and catnip
11861 will i deign to sniff.
11865 fine fur flies from me
11866 filling all of your clean rooms
11872 to quizzical expression:
11873 "fix outdoors for me!"
11878 bores more cats even than own
11883 Open the door, Man!
11884 I wish to go out ... what's this?
11885 Wet fur? I think not.
11888 Monsoon for felines.
11889 They ground when wet. No static.
11890 Rainy faced disgrace.
11892 Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
11895 Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
11898 We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that
11899 silence can certainly kill.
11900 -- James Orbinski of "Doctors Without Borders", winners of the 1999 Nobel
11903 The masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own
11904 personal existence, and still less rule society in general.
11905 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
11907 It is precisely because man's vital time is limited, precisely because
11908 he is mortal, that he needs to triumph over distance and delay. For an
11909 immortal being, the motor-car would have no meaning.
11910 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
11912 We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of
11913 creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things,
11914 he is not lord of himself... Hence the strange combination of a
11915 sense of power and a sense of insecurity.
11916 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
11918 The mass-man is he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting
11919 along. Consequently, though his possibilities and his powers be enormous,
11920 he constructs nothing. And it is this type of man who decides in our time...
11921 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
11923 In the schools, which were such a source of pride to the last century, it
11924 has been impossible to do more than instruct the masses in the technique
11925 of modern life; it has been found impossible to educate them.
11926 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
11928 Like cars over the years, computers are getting easier to use, and in
11929 some respects the changes are analogous to the placement of gauges by idiot
11930 lights. And, like drivers who favor gauges, some computer users belittle the
11931 trend toward easy-to-use systems. These users appear to thrive on
11932 complexity. They are often experts who enjoy getting the most out of their
11933 computers; they view computing as an end rather than a means.
11934 Unlike cars, easy-to-use computers aren't called idiot-proof, they're
11935 called user-friendly. As a marketing achievement, this terminology ranks
11936 with 'Palmetto bugs,' which is a term used in Florida-at the instigation of
11937 some genius in the real estate industry, I'm told-for large, flying
11939 -- John Shore, from "The Sachertorte Algorithm: And Other Antidotes
11940 to Computer Anxiety".
11942 Ads manipulate us into being dissatisfied... We are encouraged to feel
11943 anxious or sorry for ourselves. Advertising teaches us to live on the level
11944 of the pleasure principle. This leads to impulse-control problems and to
11945 feelings of entitlement. "I am the center of the universe and I want what I
11946 want now." This thinking creates citizens who are vulnerable to quick fixes.
11947 It leads to citizens filled with self-pity, which is the flip side of
11949 Advertising teaches that people shouldn't have to suffer, that pain
11950 is unnatural and can be cured. They say that effort is bad and convenience
11951 is good and that products solve complex human problems. Over and over people
11952 hear that their needs for love, security and variety can be met with
11953 products. They may reject the message of any particular ad, but over time
11954 many buy the big message -- buying products is important.
11955 -- Mary Pipher, in "The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families"
11957 I have no use for bodyguards, but I have a very special use for two
11958 highly trained certified public accountants.
11961 Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
11964 Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
11965 -- Jean-Paul Sartre
11967 Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful
11968 objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill
11969 gives us modern art.
11972 What is this talk of "release?" We do not make software "releases."
11973 Our software "escapes" leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality
11974 assurance people in its wake.
11975 -- MoncriefJM@gvl.esys.com, as seen on the on the PerlTK mailing list
11977 It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a
11978 corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
11979 -- Henry David Thoreau
11983 Cat on the carpet, melting...
11984 Here pussy. Here God!
11988 you don't eat all my buds, cat.
11989 i'll smoke you instead.
11991 The future is made of the same stuff as the present. -- Simone Weil
11993 he's such a tight ass that when he breaks wind all the dogs howl.
11996 See the kitten on the wall,
11997 Sporting with the leaves that fall,
11998 Withered leaves, one, two and three
11999 Falling from the elder tree,
12000 Through the calm and frosty air
12001 Of the morning bright and fair.
12002 -- William Wordsworth
12004 But the Kitten, how she starts,
12005 Crouches, stretches, paws and darts!
12006 -- William Wordsworth
12008 All those who succeed in America -- no matter what their circle of
12009 origin or their sphere of action -- are likely to become involved in the
12010 world of the celebrity... This world has not been built from below, as a
12011 slow and steady linking of local societies and metropolitan 400s. It has
12012 been created from above... With the incorporation of the economy, the
12013 ascendancy of the military establishment, and the centralization of the
12014 enlarged state, there have arisen the national elite, who, in occupying the
12015 command posts of the big hierarchies, have taken the spotlight of publicity
12016 and become subjects of the intensive build-up. At the same time, with the
12017 elaboration of the national means of mass communication, the professional
12018 celebrities of the entertainment world have come fully and continuously into
12019 the national view. As personalities of national glamour, they are at the
12020 focal point of all the means of entertainment and publicity. Both the
12021 metropolitan 400 and the institutional elite must now compete with and
12022 borrow prestige from these professionals in the world of the celebrity.
12023 But what are the celebrities? The celebrities are The Names that
12024 need no further identification. Those who know them so far exceed those of
12025 whom they know as to require no exact computation. Wherever the celebrities
12026 go, they are recognized, and moreover, recognized with some excitement and
12027 awe. Whatever they do has publicity value. More or less continuously, over a
12028 period of time, they are the material for the media of communication and
12029 entertainment. And, when that time ends -- as it must -- and the celebrity
12030 still lives -- as he may -- from time to time it may be asked, "Remember
12031 him?" That is what celebrity means.
12032 -- C. Wright Mills, from "The Power Elite," 1956
12034 I'm not really very good at what I do, but I'm very
12035 popular, because I return my pages.
12036 -- Unidentified computer support technician
12038 Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to
12039 recognize a mistake when you make it again.
12040 -- Franklin P. Jones
12042 Nobody roots for Goliath. -- Wilt Chamberlain
12046 By a bat. Rabid, frothing...
12049 I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
12050 and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold
12051 these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
12053 -- Martin Luther King Jr.
12055 We generally think of music as a product of art rather than commerce
12056 or technology. It depends, in fact, on all three. Together, these great
12057 dynamic systems match individual creativity and individual desire. They
12058 thus generate change, variety and an endless array of critics--all
12059 determined that music, like the rest of society, should conform to
12061 That would be a terrible deal. By tolerating music that pleases
12062 others but not ourselves, we preserve a system that has delivered a
12063 historical wonder... We can listen to perfectly performed music to suit
12064 any mood or taste at any time, music that moves us in ways particular to our
12065 individual senses and our individual souls.
12066 -- Virginia Postrel
12068 There are three rules for writing the novel.
12069 Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
12070 -- W. Somerset Maugham
12072 His lack of education is more than compensated for by his
12073 keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
12076 How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world,
12077 given my waist and shirt size?
12080 I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting
12081 the urge to conquer Poland.
12082 -- Woody Allen (Manhattan Murder Mystery)
12085 become unified as one
12089 urgh, mutual friends have we few
12090 of whom hooktown still has purview.
12091 lest we examine too far
12092 i wonder regarding your car--
12093 could it survive a furious country drive?
12094 for to hamster freehold must you arrive.
12095 many entertainments have we here...
12096 movies, a rabbit and beer.
12097 perhaps what you were chasing,
12098 twain's fuzz is constantly abasing.
12099 to extend no further this diatribe,
12100 why don't you drop over, or "arribe"?
12103 If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would
12104 have painted on the Sistine floor.
12107 It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble,
12108 it's what we know that ain't so.
12111 I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure
12112 is trying to please everyone.
12115 Today, when man seems to have reached the beginning of a new,
12116 richer, happier human era, his existence and that of the generations to
12117 follow is more threatened than ever. How is this possible?
12118 Man had won his freedom from clerical and secular authorities, he
12119 stood alone with his reason and his conscience as his only judges, but he
12120 was afraid of the newly won freedom; he had achieved 'freedom from' --
12121 without yet having achieved 'freedom to' -- to be himself, to be productive,
12122 to be fully awake. Thus he tried to escape from freedom. His very
12123 achievement, the mastery over nature, opened up the avenue for his escape.
12124 In building the new industrial machine, men became so absorbed in
12125 the new task that it became the paramount goal of his life. His energies,
12126 which once were devoted to the search for God and salvation, were now
12127 directed toward the domination of nature and ever-increasing material
12128 comfort. He ceased to use production as a means for a better life, but
12129 hypostatized it instead to an end in itself, an end to which life was
12130 subordinated. In the process of an ever-increasing size of social
12131 agglomerations, man himself became a part of the machine, rather than its
12132 master. He experienced himself as a commodity, as an investment; his aim
12133 became to be a success, that is, to sell himself as profitably as possible
12134 on the market. His value as a person lies in his salability, not in his
12135 human qualities of love, reason or in his artistic capacities. Happiness
12136 becomes identical with consumption of newer and better commodities, the
12137 drinking in of music, screen plays, fun, sex, liquor and cigarettes. Not
12138 having a sense of self except the one which conformity with the majority can
12139 give, he is insecure, anxious, depending on approval. He is alienated from
12140 himself, worships the product of his own hands, the leaders of his own
12141 making, as if they were above him, rather than made by him. He is in a
12142 sense back where he was before the great human evolution began in the second
12144 -- Erich Fromm, "The Sane Society"
12146 If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity,
12147 and let my efforts be known by their results.
12150 The fox knows many things -- the hedgehog knows one big thing.
12153 I've learned not to put things in my mouth that are bad for me.
12154 -- Monica Lewinsky on CNN's Larry King Live discussing her
12155 miraculous Jenny Craig weight-loss.
12157 Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge in the world
12158 at present are extremely ineffective, and thinkers of the forward-
12159 looking type whose ideas we are now considering, are beginning to
12160 realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial
12161 intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world
12162 organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and release of
12163 knowledge, than in any further tinkering with the highly conservative
12164 and resistant university system, local, national, and traditional in
12165 texture, which already exists.
12166 -- H. G. Wells (1937)
12168 a haiku for object bus overload...
12170 those data bursts have
12171 overturned my info cart--
12172 stranded on the net.
12176 Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex,
12177 and more violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot
12178 of courage--to move in the opposite direction.
12179 -- E. F. Schumacher
12181 It is amazing how much one can learn from somebody
12182 who is not generally thought of as successful.
12185 Half the world is composed of people who have
12186 something to say and can't, and the other have
12187 nothing to say and keep on saying it.
12190 Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature...
12191 Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.
12194 His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb.
12195 He cleans himself, he smoothes himself,
12196 he knows what is proper.
12199 To turn $100 into $110 is work.
12200 To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable.
12203 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
12204 -- Charles F. Kettering
12206 The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery
12207 and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.
12208 -- Edith Hamilton (1867-1963)
12210 fish flavored flappers
12211 squirm happily under tongue,
12212 cloak orgasmic clit.
12214 There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying
12215 to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
12216 -- Alfred North Whitehead
12218 Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman
12219 giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
12222 The cat has complete emotional honesty --
12223 an attribute not often found in humans.
12224 -- Ernest Hemingway
12226 no morning coffee...
12227 gray matter is not present,
12228 dial tone in my head.
12232 Synonym for 'penis' used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the denizens
12233 thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English but we're all
12234 too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't. --ESR]
12235 This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground
12236 comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead
12237 cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have
12238 confirmed that `choad' is in fact an Indian vernacular word equivalent
12239 to `f*ck'; it is therefore likely to have entered English slang via the
12242 The race may not be to the swift nor the victory
12243 to the strong, but that's how you bet.
12246 Basic research is when I'm doing what I don't know I'm doing.
12247 -- Wernher von Braun
12249 For decades, people have warned that pervasive databanks and
12250 surveillance technology are leading inevitably to the death of privacy and
12251 democracy. But these days, many people who hear the word 'privacy' think
12252 about those kooks living off in the woods with their shotguns: these folks
12253 get their mail at post office boxes registered under assumed names, grow
12254 their own food, use cash to buy what they can't grow for themselves, and
12255 constantly worry about being attacked by the federal government-or by space
12256 aliens. If you are not one of these people, you may well ask, "Why should I
12257 worry about my privacy? I have nothing to hide."
12258 The problem with this word 'privacy' is that it falls short of
12259 conveying the really big picture. Privacy isn't just about hiding things.
12260 It's about self-possession, autonomy, and integrity. As we move into the
12261 computerized world of the twenty-first century, privacy will be one of our
12262 most important civil rights. But this right of privacy isn't the right of
12263 people to close their doors and pull down their window shades -- perhaps
12264 because they want to engage in some sort of illicit or illegal activity.
12265 It's the right of people to control what details about their lives stay
12266 inside their own houses and what leaks to the outside...
12267 Today, more than ever before, we are witnessing the daily erosion of
12268 personal privacy and freedom. We're victims of a war on privacy that's being
12269 waged by government eavesdroppers, business marketers, and nosy neighbors...
12270 We know our privacy is under attack. The problem is that we don't know how
12272 -- Simson Garfinkel, in "Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in
12275 A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married
12276 immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the
12277 triumph of hope over experience.
12278 -- James Boswell's "Life of Johnson"
12280 One evening while dozing in my armchair, I was roused
12281 by the sound of the harpsichord. My cat had started
12282 his musical stroll... I had a sheet of paper to hand,
12283 and transcribed his composition.
12284 -- Domenico Scarlatti
12286 Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it
12287 everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying
12288 the wrong remedies.
12291 A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
12294 Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to
12295 any club that will accept me as a member.
12298 Let's find out what everyone is doing,
12299 and then stop everyone from doing it.
12302 I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any
12303 new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method
12304 it can be for creating the illusion of progress while
12305 producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
12306 -- Petronius Arbiter, quoted in Robert Townsend's
12307 "Up the Organization"
12309 With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in
12310 the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
12311 finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care
12312 for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and
12313 his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and
12314 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
12317 As we approach a new century and a changing international economic
12318 climate, we think that scientific and technological education should be our
12319 highest priority, and yet these fields, at least the way they are practiced
12320 today, only tangentially affect the heart and soul, where morality and
12321 values are rooted, while music goes right to the heart.
12322 Studying music, one learns about talent, thought, work, expression,
12323 beauty, technique, collaboration, aesthetic judgment, inspiration, taste,
12324 and a host of other elements that shape life in all its aspects. As we
12325 learn to control our fingers, lips, and breath in making music, subliminally
12326 music is shaping us, making us people of sensitivity and judgment.
12327 -- Thomas Moore, in "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life"
12329 How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would
12330 spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
12333 A bad attitude is the worst thing that can happen to
12334 a group of people. It's infectious.
12335 -- Roger Allan Raby
12337 All that is gold does not glitter; not all who wander are lost.
12338 -- J. R. R. Tolkien
12340 What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
12341 -- Dean William R. Inge (ed: what a psycho...)
12343 True genius doesn't fulfill expectations, it shatters them.
12346 Let me listen to me and not to them.
12349 If like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms.
12350 For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the liar would say.
12351 But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
12354 The truth is multi-faceted; no one person can see all of it and no single
12355 viewpoint can capture all of it. This is why any attempt to record the
12356 nature of reality in one majestic work of science or religion or philosophy
12357 is doomed to fail; that grand catalog is a necessarily-flawed perspective
12358 upon the shimmering mind-blower that is the full totality of truth.
12359 Still, we must try to get our minds around it during our whole lives.
12362 I am a great believer, if you have a meeting, in knowing
12363 where you want to come out before you start the meeting.
12364 Excuse me if that doesn't sound very democratic.
12365 -- Nelson Rockefeller
12367 Lawyers have, as Jonathan Swift observed, "a peculiar cant and
12368 jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand". They take care
12369 to ensure that all legal business, including the drafting of legislation, is
12370 conducted in this language "so that it will take thirty years to decide
12371 whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me
12372 or to a stranger three hundred miles off". This language, condemned by
12373 Jeremy Bentham as "literary garbage", "lawyers' cant", and "flash language",
12374 serves various purposes, none of them in the public interest. It unites
12375 lawyers, distinguishing them from laymen. It makes the law mysterious and
12376 incomprehensible to those laymen, thus ensuring a steady supply of work for
12377 lawyers who are needed to interpret the language they have invented. The
12378 language of the law fosters the illusion that legal problems are remediable
12379 only by the application of the medicine of the specialist. Only a lawyer,
12380 can resolve the complexities of the problem: "Better see a lawyer; don't
12381 trust Whatsisname" (as the memorable Law Society advertisement warned
12382 consumers). Legal language also enshrouds the law, hiding it from the
12383 public it exists to serve. The idiom of the lawyer leads to public ignorance
12384 of the content of the law (which paradoxically refuses to recognize that
12385 ignorance of the law should be a defence), to uninformed criticism and to
12386 unmerited praise. It provokes the indifference of too many laymen towards
12387 the law and the contempt of so many litigants for a legal system they do not
12389 -- David Pannick, barrister and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
12391 It usually takes me more than three weeks
12392 to prepare a good impromptu speech.
12395 Hollywood films, in general, either want to tell us a truth we
12396 already know or a falsehood we want to believe in.
12399 The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
12402 Men of Athens, fellow citizens, this is not a trial of Socrates, but
12403 of ideas, and of Athens. You are not prosecuting me for any unlawful or
12404 impious act against our city or its altars. No evidence of any such sort
12405 has been brought against me. You are not prosecuting me for anything I did,
12406 but for what I have said and taught. You are threatening me with death
12407 because you do not like my views and my teaching. This is a prosecution of
12408 ideas and that is something new in our city's history. In this sense,
12409 Athens is in the dock, not Socrates. Each of you, as my judges, is a
12411 Let me be frank. I do not believe in your so-called freedom of
12412 speech, but you do. I believe the opinions of ordinary men are only beliefs
12413 without substance, pale shadows of reality, not to be taken seriously, and
12414 only likely to lead a city astray. I think it absurd to encourage the free
12415 utterance of unfounded or irrational opinions, or to base civic policy on a
12416 count of heads, like cabbages. Hence I do not believe in democracy. But
12417 you do. This is your test, not mine. How can you boast of your free speech
12418 if you suppress mine?
12419 The test of truly free speech is not whether what is said or taught
12420 conforms to any rule or ruler, few or many. Even under the worst dictator,
12421 it is not forbidden to agree with him. It is the freedom to disagree that
12422 is freedom of speech. This has been the Athenian rule until now, the pride
12423 of our city, the glory on which your orators dwell. Will you turn your back
12424 on it now? Ideas are not as fragile as men. They cannot be made to drink
12425 hemlock. My ideas--and my example--will survive me. But the good name of
12426 Athens will wear a stain forever, if you violate its traditions by
12427 convicting me. The shame will be yours, not mine.
12428 -- I. F. Stone, suggesting a defense for Socrates
12430 I do not seek. I find.
12433 The one thing that is certain is that anyone who uses the phrase
12434 "outside the box" is as deeply inside the box as a person can be.
12437 I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel
12438 when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
12441 Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous
12442 nothings in idle moments, when the wearied brain is unable to perform the
12443 serious labors of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way.
12444 The writing of solid, instructive stuff, fortified by facts and figures, is
12445 easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the
12446 folklore of Central China, or a statistical inquiry into the declining
12447 population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own
12448 mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be
12449 achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner
12450 have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
12453 It's easier to find a travel companion than to get rid of one.
12456 God must love the rich or he wouldn't have divided
12457 so much among so few of them.
12460 I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the famous.
12461 They are more often themselves. They have had no need to create a
12462 figure to protect themselves from the world or to impress it. Their
12463 idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limited circle
12464 of their activity, and since they have never been in the public eye
12465 it has never occurred to them that they have anything to conceal.
12466 They display their oddities because it has never struck them that
12467 they are odd. And after all it is with the common run of men that
12468 we writers have to deal; kings, dictators, commercial magnates are
12469 from our point of view very unsatisfactory. To write about them is
12470 a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has
12471 attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to
12472 form a proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real.
12473 The ordinary is the writer's richer field. Its unexpectedness, its
12474 singularity, its infinite variety afford unending material. The
12475 great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is
12476 a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never
12477 come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For my
12478 part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a
12479 veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.
12480 -- W. Somerset Maugham, from "The Summing Up"
12482 Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts
12483 when you have forgotten your aim.
12484 -- George Santayana
12486 The importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge is forcing
12487 organizations to realize that knowledge lies less in its databases than in
12488 its people. It's been said, for example, that if NASA wanted to go to the
12489 moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data,
12490 but the human expertise that took it there last time. Similarly, Tom
12491 Davenport and Larry Prusake argue that when Ford wanted to build on the
12492 success of the Taurus, the company found that the essence of that success
12493 had been lost with the loss of the people that created it. Their knowledge
12494 was not stored in information technologies. It left when they left.
12495 -- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, in "The Social Life of Information"
12497 Either we live by accident and die by accident,
12498 or we live by plan and die by plan.
12501 Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
12502 -- William Butler Yeats
12504 ...the act of producing a letter, even one which is never mailed,
12505 necessitates a form of creative concentration which can improve our
12506 lives. Copies of our own letters are useful for our records and
12507 memories. If their recipients think them worth saving, they can have
12508 value and effect far beyond that of the spoken word. In friendship,
12509 the letter is not only a message but a gift, a physical symbol of
12510 esteem and affection. In business or politics, the letter can not
12511 only express the concerns of the moment but remain as a document of
12512 such concerns, available for prolonged scrutiny by more than one
12513 reader. Moreover, while speakers and listeners in a debate are
12514 vulnerable to emotion and subject to fallacy, the well-written letter
12515 remains calm and crisp and is subject to nothing except superior reason.
12516 It can convince the open-minded, goad the weak-hearted, give our
12517 opponents an exact index of the level and intensity of our commitment,
12518 and be quoted by those who agree with us. But perhaps most importantly,
12519 our letters are the proof and body of our concern for life in its detail
12520 and our conviction that this concern should be shared with others.
12521 -- Robert Grudin, from "Time and the Art of Living"
12523 Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a
12524 person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
12525 -- Marshall McLuhan
12527 You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch
12528 on to the affirmative, and don't mess with Mister In-Between.
12531 Once, as promised, bots start interacting with one another,
12532 understanding bot behavior may become impossible. Anyone who has
12533 had to call a help line with a problem about the way an operating
12534 system from one vendor and program from another are working together--
12535 or failing to work--knows how hard it is to get anyone to take
12536 responsibility for software interactions. Support staff rapidly
12537 renounce all knowledge of (and usually interest in) problems that
12538 arise from interactions because there are just too many possibilities.
12539 So it's easy to imagine sophisticated programmers, let alone ordinary
12540 users, being unable to unravel how even a small group of bots reached
12541 a particular state autonomously. The challenge will be unfathomable
12542 if, as one research group has it, we can "anticipate a scenario in
12543 which billions of intelligent agents will roam the virtual world,
12544 handling all levels of simple to complex negotiations and transactions.
12545 If human agents are confused with digital ones, if human action is
12546 taken as mere information processing, and if the social complexities of
12547 negotiation, delegation, and representation are reduced to "when x, do y,"
12548 bots will end up with autonomy without accountability. Their owners, by
12549 contrast, may have accountability without control.
12550 -- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, in "The Social Life of Information"
12552 Life does not consist mainly--or even largely--of facts and
12553 happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that
12554 is forever blowing through one's head.
12557 Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side?
12558 And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
12559 -- Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
12561 Every other country scorns American materialism while striving in
12562 every big and little way to match it. Envy obviously has something to do
12563 with it, but there is a true basis for this debate, and it is whether
12564 America is in its ascendance or its decline.
12565 I myself think I recognize here several of the symptoms that Edward
12566 Gibbons maintained were signs of the decline of Rome, and which arose not
12567 from external enemies but from inside the country itself. A mounting love
12568 of show and luxury. A widening gap between the very rich and the very poor.
12569 An obsession with sex. Freakishness in the arts masquerading as
12570 originality, and enthusiasm pretending to creativeness...
12571 There is, too, the general desire to live off the state, whether it
12572 is a junkie on welfare or an airline subsidized by the government: in a
12573 word, the notion that Washington -- Big Daddy -- will provide. And, most
12574 disturbing of all, a developing moral numbness to vulgarity, violence, and
12575 the assault on the simplest human decencies.
12576 Yet the original institutions of this country still have great
12577 vitality: the Republic can be kept, but only if we care to keep it. Much of
12578 the turmoil in America springs from the energy of people who are trying to
12579 apply those institutions to forgotten minorities who have awakened after a
12581 As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent
12582 idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence
12583 and its vitality. There are the woes, which we share with the world, that
12584 you can see from your window: overpopulation; the pollution of the
12585 atmosphere, the cities and the rivers; the destruction of nature. I find it
12586 impossible to believe that a nation that produced such dogged and ingenious
12587 humans as Jefferson and Eli Whitney, John Deere and Ford, Kettering and
12588 Oppenheimer and Edison and Franklin, is going to sit back and let the worst
12589 happen. There is now a possibility, at least, that nuclear energy can help
12590 us to cure incurable diseases, to preserve our food indefinitely, and
12591 through breeder reactors, which renew more power in the act of spending it,
12592 can actually clean the cities and, let us pray, the oceans. And that would
12593 take us over a historical watershed that none of us has ever conceived.
12596 There are some enterprises in which a careful
12597 disorderliness is the true method.
12600 The dollar bills the customer gets from the tellers in four banks
12601 are the same. What is different are the tellers.
12604 I grew up in the last days of the British Empire. My childhood fell
12605 in that era when the words 'imperialism' and 'the West' had not yet acquired
12606 the connotations they have today -- they had not yet become, that is, mere
12607 synonyms for 'racism,' 'oppression,' and 'exploitation'.
12608 Or, at any rate, they had not yet become so among the intellectual,
12609 professional, and governing classes of Egypt. In Cairo it was entirely
12610 ordinary, among those classes, to grow up speaking English or French or
12611 both, and quite ordinary to attend an English or French school. It was taken
12612 for granted among the people who raised us that there was unquestionably
12613 much to admire in and learn from the civilization of Europe and the great
12614 strides that Europe had made in human advancement. No matter that the
12615 European powers were politically oppressive and indeed blatantly unjust; nor
12616 did it seem to matter that the very generation which raised us were
12617 themselves locked in struggle with the British for Egypt's political
12618 independence. There seemed to be no contradiction for them between pursuing
12619 independence from the European powers and deeply admiring European
12620 institutions, particularly democracy, and Europe's tremendous scientific
12622 -- Leila Ahmed, from "A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--
12625 the only possible mental bases for racism must ultimately be ignorance
12626 or stupidity or both. it's only a little-minded weak person that has to
12627 feel superior to another person just because of their skin color or
12628 nationality. but i try not to in turn feel superior to racists; i find
12629 only sadness for them instead. by imagining them trapped inside such an
12630 awful and constraining mental prison, my compassion is evoked for these
12633 Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.
12634 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
12636 One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat
12637 in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. His response was
12638 a question: "Where do you want to go?" "I don't know," Alice
12639 answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
12642 It's not true that life is one damn thing after another--
12643 it's one damn thing over and over.
12644 -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
12646 Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. If your stomach
12647 disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep
12648 the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go
12649 very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The
12650 social life ain't restful. Avoid running at all times. Don't
12651 look back. Something may be gaining on you.
12652 -- Leroy "Satchel" Paige, from his autobiography,
12653 "How To Stay Young."
12655 Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different.
12656 They all may become different. They all may collapse together.
12657 -- George Santayana
12664 Begins to live that day.
12667 Thinking about it the other day, I realized that some of my unhappiest moments
12668 have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do
12669 things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had
12670 people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings
12671 rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good and have been
12672 required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished
12673 it... In my worst moments I have thought that organizations were places
12674 designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists....
12677 The best organizations to be in, it seems, are the busiest ones as long
12678 as they are busy for someone else. The worst are those that are obsessed
12679 with their own innards... The healthiest are those which exist for others,
12680 not for themselves. Show me a business or a school or a church that is
12681 preoccupied with its customers or clients, determined to do its best for them
12682 and not just to survive for the sake of surviving, and I'll bet you that they
12683 don't have time for too many committees, for forms, for politicking or for
12684 nitpicking about mistakes. Those are the organizations which are fun to be
12685 in, which give you room to be yourself, to express yourself, to grow.
12688 The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
12691 Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything
12692 that should have been obvious at the time.
12693 -- John D. MacDonald
12695 If work was a good thing the rich would have it all
12696 and not let you do it.
12699 Any law that takes hold of a man's daily life cannot prevail
12700 in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are
12701 actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative
12702 are the laws which protect life.
12703 -- Henry Ward Beecher
12705 The graveyard is full of indispensable men.
12706 -- Charles de Gaulle
12708 I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary
12709 priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
12710 "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know."
12711 "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?"
12714 The day came when Grandmother couldn't keep all her stuff in the two
12715 tiny rooms to which she was finally reduced. So she packed everything
12716 she didn't need into enormous shopping bags and took off for the bank
12717 in the center of the city where she kept her account, by then down to
12718 a few pennies. Her husband had started the bank and had been its
12719 chairman until he died, and she was still treated with the consideration
12720 due his widow. But when she appeared with her shopping bags and asked
12721 to have the contents put on her account, the manager balked. "We can't
12722 put things on an account," he said, "only money."
12723 "That's mean and ungrateful of you," said Grandmother, "you only do
12724 this to me because I am a stupid old woman."
12725 And she promptly closed her account and drew out the balance. Then
12726 she went down the street to the nearest branch of the same bank, reopened
12727 her account there, and never said a word about her shopping bags.
12728 "Grandmother," we'd say, "if you thought the bank was unfriendly why
12729 did you reopen your account at another branch?"
12730 "It's a good bank," she said; "after all, my late husband founded it."
12731 "Then why not demand that the manager at the new branch take your
12733 "I never banked there before. He didn't owe me anything."
12734 -- Peter Drucker, "Adventures of a Bystander"
12736 Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
12739 Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
12742 Writing about music is like dancing about architecture--
12743 it's a really stupid thing to want to do.
12744 -- Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled
12745 "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine
12746 No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.
12748 The pressures for upscale consumption, and the work schedules
12749 that go along with it, created millions of exhausted, stressed-
12750 out people who started wondering if the cycle of work and spend
12751 was really worth it. And some concluded that it wasn't. So
12752 they started downshifting, reducing their hours of work and, in
12753 the process, earning and spending less money. Downshifters are
12754 opting out of excessive consumerism, choosing to have more
12755 leisure and balance in their schedules, a slower pace of life,
12756 more time with their kids, more meaningful work, and daily lives
12757 that line up squarely with their deepest values. These are not
12758 just fast-track yuppies leaving $200,000 jobs in Manhattan to
12759 settle in Montana, although there are plenty of those.
12760 Downshifters can be found at all income levels, from the
12761 comfortable suburbanites whose homes are paid for, to those who
12762 are counting every penny, resigned to the fact that they'll never
12763 own a home. Their jobs were leaving them drained, depressed, or
12764 wondering what life is all about. Now they may not have as much
12765 money, but they are spending every day answering that all-
12766 important question.
12769 The right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and
12770 the right most valued by civilized men.
12771 -- Louis D. Brandeis
12773 The need to reach better mutual understanding through dialogue
12774 is strong in all sectors of society, but in none more than the
12775 business community. The growth of technology, the increase in
12776 the number of knowledge workers, and the blurring of boundaries
12777 of all kinds are transforming relationships at all levels of
12778 business. The traditional top-down style of leadership in a
12779 fortress-type company semi-isolated from others is increasingly
12780 out of vogue. It is being replaced by what I have come to
12781 think of as "relational leadership," where the defining task of
12782 leaders is developing webs of relationships with others rather
12783 than handing down visions, strategies, and plans as if they
12784 were commandments from the mountaintop.
12785 -- Daniel Yankelovich, "The Magic of Dialogue"
12787 Life is one long process of getting tired.
12790 Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can
12791 recalled and perhaps remedied.
12794 Fortunately, many teachers intuitively know that the best way to
12795 achieve their goals is to enlist students' interest on their side.
12796 They do this by being sensitive to students' goals and desires, and
12797 they are thus able to articulate the pedagogical goals as meaningful
12798 challenges. They empower students to take control of their learning;
12799 they provide clear feedback to the students' efforts without
12800 threatening their egos and without making them self-conscious. They
12801 help students concentrate and get immersed in the symbolic world of
12802 the subject matter. As a result, good teachers still turn out
12803 children who enjoy learning, and who will continue to face the world
12804 with curiosity and interest.
12805 It is to be hoped that with time the realization that children
12806 are not miniature computing machines will take root in educational
12807 circles, and more attention will be paid to motivational issues.
12808 Unless this comes to pass, the current problems we are having with
12809 education are not likely to go away.
12810 -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from "Creativity: Flow and Psychology
12811 of Discovery and Invention"
12813 The more human beings proceed by plan the more effectively they may
12814 be hit by accident.
12815 -- Friedrich Duerrenmatt
12817 We never see what's under our feet;
12818 we're too busy trying to see
12819 what's in the stars.
12822 Paradoxes have played a dramatic role in intellectual history,
12823 often foreshadowing revolutionary developments in science,
12824 mathematics, and logic. Whenever, in any discipline, we discover
12825 a problem that cannot be solved within the conceptual framework
12826 that supposedly should apply, we experience shock. The shock may
12827 compel us to discard the old framework and adopt a new one. It
12828 is to this process of intellectual molting that we owe the birth
12829 of many of the major ideas in mathematics and science. Zeno's
12830 paradox of Achilles and the tortoise gave birth to the idea of
12831 convergent infinite series. 'Antinomies' (internal contradictions
12832 in mathematical logic) eventually blossomed into Godel's theorem.
12833 The paradoxical result of the Michelson-Morley experiment on the
12834 speed of light set the stage for the theory of relativity. The
12835 discovery of wave-particle duality of light forced a reexamination
12836 of deterministic causality, the very foundation of scientific
12837 philosophy, and led to quantum mechanics.
12840 Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the
12841 greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
12842 -- Charles Caleb Colton
12844 More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.
12845 One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
12846 The other, to total extinction.
12847 Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
12850 Some books are undeservedly forgotten;
12851 none are undeservedly remembered.
12854 Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce
12855 life early and the human race come to an end.
12858 Why is autobiography the most popular form of nonfiction
12859 for modern readers? Why are so many people moved to write their
12860 life stories today? And what is it about the genre that makes
12861 it appeal to readers not just in the Western world, but also in
12862 non-Western cultures, like those of Japan and India or the many
12863 cultures of Africa?...
12864 What makes the reading of autobiography so appealing is the
12865 chance it offers to see how this man or that woman whose public
12866 self interests us has negotiated the problem of self-awareness
12867 and has broken the internalized code a culture supplies about
12868 how life should be experienced. Most of us, unless faced with
12869 emotional illness, don't give our inner life scripts a fraction
12870 of the attention we give to the plots of movies or TV specials
12871 about some person of prominence. Yet the need to examine our
12872 inherited scripts is just beneath the surface of consciousness,
12873 so that while we think we are reading a gripping story, what
12874 really grips us is the inner reflection on our own lives the
12875 autobiographer sets in motion.
12878 Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules.
12879 Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
12882 The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working
12883 the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop
12884 until you get into the office.
12887 We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any
12888 in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the
12889 difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know
12890 anything and can't read.
12893 If you start to think about your physical or moral condition,
12894 you usually find that you are sick.
12895 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
12897 A modest man is usually admired--if people ever hear of him.
12898 -- Edgar Watson Howe
12900 Modern housekeeping, despite its bad press, is among the most
12901 thoroughly pleasant, significant, and least alienated forms of work
12902 that many of us will encounter even if we are blessed with work
12903 outside the home that we like. Once, it was so physically onerous
12904 and arduous that it not infrequently contributed to a woman's total
12905 physical breakdown. Today, laundry, cleaning, and other household
12906 chores are by and large physically light or moderate work that doctors
12907 often recommend to people for their health, as evidence shows that
12908 housework is good for weight control and healthy hearts.
12909 Seen from the outside, housework can look like a Sisyphean task
12910 that gives you no sense of reward or completion. Yet housekeeping
12911 actually offers more opportunities for savoring achievement than
12912 almost any other work I can think of. Each of its regular routines
12913 brings satisfaction when it is completed. These routines echo the
12914 rhythm of life, and the housekeeping rhythm is the rhythm of the body.
12915 You get satisfaction not only from the sense of order, cleanliness,
12916 freshness, peace and plenty restored, but from the knowledge that you
12917 yourself and those you care about are going to enjoy these benefits.
12918 -- Cheryl Mendelson
12920 I'll tell you what it's like to be No. 1. I compare it to climbing
12921 Mount Everest. It's very difficult. Lives are lost along the way.
12922 You struggle and struggle and finally you get up there. And guess
12923 what there is once you get up there? Snow and ice.
12926 Never ask a person what to do, always tell him or her.
12927 If it's the wrong thing to do, or if there is a better way,
12928 they'll come back and tell you. But if you don't tell them
12929 what to do, they won't do anything but make a study.
12930 -- Eugenia Schwartzwald
12932 War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject,
12933 mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its
12934 effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a
12935 desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their
12936 discontents. This is not mere idealism. Mankind does have the capacity,
12937 over time, to correlate the costs and benefits of large and universal
12939 Throughout much of the time for which we have a record of human
12940 behaviour, mankind can clearly be seen to have judged that war's benefits
12941 outweighed its costs, or appeared to do so when a putative balance was
12942 struck. Now the computation works in the opposite direction. Costs
12943 clearly exceed benefits. Some of these costs are material. The
12944 superinflationary expense of weapon procurement distorts the budgets even
12945 of the richest states, while poor states deny themselves the chance of
12946 economic emancipation when they seek to make themselves militarily
12948 The human costs of actually going to war are even higher. Rich
12949 states, as between themselves, recognize that they are not to be borne.
12950 Poor states which fall into war with rich states are overwhelmed and
12951 humiliated. Poor states which fight each other, or are drawn into civil
12952 war, destroy their own well being, and even the structures which make
12953 recovery from the experience of war possible. War truly has become a
12954 scourge, as was disease throughout most of human history. The scourge
12955 of disease has, almost within living memory, been very largely defeated
12956 and, though it is true that disease had no friends as war has had friends,
12957 war now demands a friendship which can only be paid in false coin.
12958 A world political economy which makes no room for war demands, it
12959 must be recognized, a new culture of human relations. As most cultures of
12960 which we have knowledge were transfused by the warrior spirit, such a
12961 cultural transformation demands a break with the past for which there are
12962 no precedents. There is no precedent, however, for the menace with which
12963 future war now confronts the world.
12964 -- John Keegan, "A History of Warfare"
12966 Creditors are a superstitious sect,
12967 great observers of set days and times.
12968 -- Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard's Almanack"
12970 Despite the abundant evidence that compassion is a basic
12971 human trait, the view has long prevailed that human beings are
12972 either heartless or brutal toward most of their fellows. Every
12973 compendium of familiar quotations has an abundance of statements
12974 like "The greatest enemy to man is man" (Robert Burton) but
12975 almost none like "Precious is man to man" (Thomas Carlyle).
12976 Altruism research attests that kindness is as integral to human
12977 nature as cruelty, yet in the news and in the historical record
12978 cruel acts vastly outnumber kind ones.
12979 Why are we keenly aware of the despicable in us but largely
12980 insensible of the admirable? Not, I suggest, because the
12981 despicable is common and the admirable rare but the very reverse.
12982 Prosocial behavior of all sorts, including altruism, is so normal
12983 and expected that we scarcely notice it but are struck by its
12984 absence or opposite. We see nothing unusual in a passerby's
12985 helping a fallen elderly person to his feet but are surprised and
12986 disturbed if the passerby ignores him. We expect people to be
12987 kind and helpful to a stranger in distress; we are startled and
12988 troubled when they look away and hurry past. Cruelty is
12989 attention-getting, kindness unremarkable, and so we agree with
12990 Seneca that "man delights to ruin man" and with William James that
12991 "of all the beasts of prey... [man is] the only one that preys
12992 systematically on its own species".
12993 -- Morton Hunt, "The Compassionate Beast"
12995 Life is all memory, except for the one present moment
12996 that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.
12997 -- Tennessee Williams
12999 There are serious reasons members of my generation are feeling a high
13000 level of anxiety and unhappiness these days, but it is interesting to look
13001 at how we "know" this: the polls. I used to like polls because I like vox
13002 pop, and polls seemed a good way to get a broad sampling. But now I think
13003 the vox has popped--the voice has cracked from too many command performances.
13004 Polls are contributing to a strange new volatility in public opinion...
13005 The dramatic rises and drops are fueled in part by mass media and their
13006 famous steady drumbeat of what's not working, from an increase in reported
13007 child abuse to a fall in savings. When this tendency is not prompted by
13008 ideology it is legitimate: good news isn't news. But the volatility is also
13009 driven by the polls themselves. People think they have to have an answer
13010 when they are questioned by pollsters, and they think the answer has to be
13011 "intelligent" and "not naive". This has the effect of hardening opinions
13012 that haven't even been formed yet. Poll questions do not invite subtlety or
13013 response. This dispels ambiguity, when a lot of thoughts and opinions are
13015 And we are polled too often. We are constantly having our temperature
13016 taken, like a hypochondriac who is looking for the reassurance no man can
13017 have, i.e., that he will not die... Nations that use polls as daily
13018 temperature readings inevitably give inauthentic readings, and wind up not
13019 reassured but demoralized.
13022 The chief object of education is
13023 not to learn things but to unlearn things.
13024 -- G. K. Chesterton
13026 When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
13029 He will kill mice and he will be kind to babies...
13030 but when the moon gets up and the night comes, he is
13031 the Cat that Walks by Himself.
13034 Everyone is a prisoner of his own prejudices.
13035 No one can eliminate prejudices--just recognize them.
13036 -- Edward R. Murrow
13038 I am the least difficult of men.
13039 All I want is boundless love.
13042 If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
13043 -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
13045 Let's face it, life is mainly wasted time.
13048 Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
13051 Time spent with cats is never wasted.
13054 Most of us find ourselves at one time or another in a toy shop,
13055 looking for a gift for a child. Those of us who have not been in such
13056 stores since our youth can easily be bewildered, especially if we were
13057 born before the 1960s. Our favorite toys or games--fire engines,
13058 Tinkertoys, or baby dolls--have disappeared or are hidden in row after
13059 row of heroic fighters, fashion dolls, and exotic stuffed animals. The
13060 more practical of us enter the store with a list of items desired by
13061 the child--this season's action figure, the newest Barbie, or the
13062 latest video game. Veteran toy shoppers may enjoy the inevitable
13063 transformations as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles give way to Mighty
13064 Morphin Power Rangers and Locket Surprise Barbie to Tropic Splash
13065 Barbie. But equally we may be appalled to think about the dozens of
13066 Ninja Turtles that an older boy just had to have a year earlier but
13067 that were then shunned by a younger brother who just had to have Power
13068 Rangers. Why don't kids pass down their toys as we remember giving our
13069 building blocks and dollhouses to our younger brothers and sisters? It
13070 is easy to wonder whether each year's must-have toys are really for
13071 children's play or whether their ever-changing forms represent other
13073 There have been disturbing changes in the making of playthings in
13074 the last few decades. Since the late 1960s many old toy companies,
13075 venerated for manufacturing toys passed from one generation to the
13076 next, have disappeared...
13077 A tradition of manufacturing boys' construction and science sets
13078 promised parents that their children would be preparing to join the
13079 adult world of engineering, industry, and science... The old kitchen
13080 play sets, dollhouses, and baby dolls that were to teach girls the arts
13081 of housekeeping and childcare are also less in evidence today. Toys
13082 that seem to prepare children for adult life have become harder to
13084 The ever-expanding toy industry reflects a general American
13085 commitment to unrestrained markets and to constant change, a commitment
13086 at least a century old. Americans have long admired the new and have
13087 enriched those who produce it. For decades American parents have
13088 enjoyed sharing the world of consumption with their offspring. At
13089 first they did so knowing that they ultimately mediated between toys
13090 and their children. When the floodgates were opened and torrents of
13091 toys were presented directly to kids, parents found themselves merely
13092 providers of funds to buy toys.
13093 -- Gary Cross, "Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American
13096 Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must
13097 do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
13100 If you assign people duties without granting
13101 them any rights, you must pay them well.
13102 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
13104 It is far easier to write ten passable effective sonnets,
13105 good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic,
13106 than one effective advertisement that will take in a few
13107 thousand of the uncritical buying public.
13110 tail end of the day
13111 work escapes my fat fingers
13112 like greasy wieners
13115 Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent.
13116 Its sale is proof of utility and utility is success.
13117 -- Thomas Alva Edison
13119 Our lives are suspended like our planet in gimbals of duality,
13120 half sunlight and half shadow. If we plead with nature, it is
13121 in vain; she is wonderfully indifferent to our fate, and it is
13122 her custom to try everything and to be ruthless with incompetence.
13123 Ninety-nine percent of all the species that have lived on Earth
13124 have died away, and no stars will wink out in tribute if we in
13125 our folly soon join them.
13128 It is characteristic of the present time always to be conscious
13129 of the medium. It is almost bound to end in madness, like a man
13130 who whenever he looked at the sun and the stars was conscious of
13131 the world going round.
13134 The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
13137 There are two means of refuge from the
13138 miseries of life: music and cats.
13139 -- Albert Schweitzer
13141 Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily.
13142 When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer
13143 giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth
13144 often confuse giving with taking.
13147 Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical
13148 pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power
13149 chooses to prohibit.
13152 People are more violently opposed to fur than
13153 leather because it's safer to harass rich women
13154 than motorcycle gangs.
13157 A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't
13158 change the subject.
13159 -- Winston Churchill
13161 Do not criticize your government when out of the
13162 country. Never cease to do so when at home.
13163 -- Winston Churchill
13165 Some civil servants are neither servants nor civil.
13166 -- Winston Churchill
13168 Golf is a game whose sole aim is to hit a very small
13169 ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons
13170 singularly ill designed for that purpose.
13171 -- Winston Churchill
13173 If it is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.
13174 -- Winston Churchill
13176 In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
13177 -- Winston Churchill
13179 Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free
13180 to say anything they like, but if anyone says anything
13181 back, that is an outrage.
13182 -- Winston Churchill
13184 I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is
13185 prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another
13187 -- Winston Churchill
13189 If you destroy a free market you create a black market.
13190 -- Winston Churchill
13192 If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy
13193 all respect for the law.
13194 -- Winston Churchill
13196 Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at
13198 -- Winston Churchill
13200 It is a socialist ideal that making profits is a vice.
13201 I consider the real vice is making losses.
13202 -- Winston Churchill
13204 If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some.
13205 -- Benjamin Franklin
13207 The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
13208 -- Gerard Manley Hopkins
13210 The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
13213 Expertise, it may be argued, sacrifices the insight of common sense
13214 to intensity of experience. It breeds an inability to accept new views from
13215 the very depth of its preoccupation with its won conclusions. It too often
13216 fails to see round its subject. It sees its results out of perspective by
13217 making them the centre of relevance to which all other results must be
13218 related. Too often, also, it lacks humility; and this breeds in its
13219 possessors a failure in proportion which makes them fail to see the obvious
13220 which is before their very noses. It has, also, a certain caste-spirit about
13221 it, so that experts tend to neglect all evidence which does not come from
13222 those who belong to their own ranks.
13223 Above all, perhaps, and this most urgently when human problems are
13224 concerned, the expert fails to see that every judgment he makes not purely
13225 factual in nature brings with it a scheme of values which has no special
13226 validity about it. He tends to confuse the importance of his facts with the
13227 importance of what he proposes to do about them.
13228 -- Harold J. Laski, "The Limitations of the Expert"
13230 If women are to do the same work as men,
13231 we must teach them the same things.
13234 Dogs may fawn on all and some
13236 You, a friend of loftier mind,
13237 Answer friends alone in kind;
13238 Just your foot upon my hand
13239 Softly bids it understand.
13240 -- Algernon Charles Swinburne
13242 The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
13245 The machine does not isolate man from the great problems
13246 of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
13247 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
13249 Today in USA Today, experts were quoted as saying that the breakup of
13250 Microsoft would result in shoddy products and missed deadlines...
13252 And Microsoft is worrying about being able to do business as usual.
13254 The justice department has released its recommendations on
13255 names for the two parts of Microsoft, post split:
13257 MICROS~1 and MICROS~2
13259 I think we should partition Microsoft into an OS company
13260 (called "C:") and an apps company ("D:"). Then we should
13261 blow away both partitions....
13264 Microsoft has argued in court that the US government's plan
13265 to break up the company is "defective in numerous respects,
13266 making the document vague and ambiguous."
13268 In which respect it's much like Microsoft's documentation.
13270 Immediately after the announcement by Judge Penfield of splitting
13271 the company in two, Microsoft sued Micro.Com Specialists, LLC, and
13272 Software Research, Inc. (owners of www.soft.com) for infringement
13273 of copyrights and cyber-squatting.
13275 your brain will enlarge as necessary. just don't get angry or
13276 confused or scared or sad, if possible... you'll be amazed at
13277 what that blob of cells is capable of.
13280 If you like laws and sausage, you should
13281 never watch either being made.
13282 -- Otto von Bismarck
13284 The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself
13285 would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
13286 -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
13288 A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only
13289 advise his clients to plant vines.
13290 -- Frank Lloyd Wright
13292 He taught me housekeeping; when I divorce I keep the house.
13293 -- Zsa Zsa Gabor, speaking of her ex-husband
13295 There is really no such thing as bad weather,
13296 only different kinds of good weather.
13299 She's not a babe. She's a sophisticated real-time computer system.
13300 -- Spokesman for Ananova, a virtual news anchor
13302 The man who laughs has not yet been told the terrible news.
13305 I am easily satisfied with the very best.
13306 -- Winston Churchill
13308 Uncertainty and expectations are the joys of life.
13309 Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and
13310 possessing of a wish, discovers the folly of the chase.
13311 -- William Congreve
13313 Sleep is simply not dispensable, regardless of the attempts in
13314 today's society to treat it as if it were simply unproductive 'downtime'.
13315 The desire to get more sleep is not a sign of laziness, nor does it
13316 represent a lack of ambition. The need for sleep is real...
13317 When we try to sleep less than the 8-hour minimum, things start to
13318 deteriorate. First of all, the effects of less than 8 hours of sleep a
13319 night seem to accumulate as a sleep debt. If you lose 2 hours today and 2
13320 hours tomorrow, on the third day your efficiency is as low as if you had
13321 lost 4 hours in one night. This is the way our sleep debt builds up.
13322 Eventually, if the sleep debt becomes large enough, we become slow, clumsy,
13323 stupid, and, possibly, dead. This is not an exaggeration. Remember, the
13324 national death rate by accidents jumps 6 percent as a result of simply
13325 losing 1 hour of sleep as we shift to daylight savings time in the spring...
13326 Perhaps someday society will act to do something about sleepiness.
13327 It may even come to pass that someday the person who drives or goes to work
13328 while sleepy will be viewed as being as reprehensible, dangerous, or even
13329 criminally negligent as the person who drives or goes to work while drunk.
13330 If so, perhaps the rest of us can all sleep a little bit more soundly.
13333 You haven't lived until you've lived with a cat.
13336 When you appeal to force, there's one thing you must never do--lose.
13337 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
13339 It is because the body is a machine that education is possible.
13340 Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an
13341 artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
13342 -- Thomas H. Huxley
13344 If someone asks you, "Where do you live?" you are likely to answer
13345 with the name of a neighborhood, or a nearby geographic landmark. But if you
13346 give the question a sharper focus and ask yourself "And do I really live
13347 there?" then the answer becomes more vexing. Most of us can't claim to
13348 really live in the neighborhoods where we sleep. Few of us have the time to
13349 take part in the life of the community, and in many cases there is no
13350 community life to take part in. To varying degrees many of us can say of
13351 our neighborhoods what Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: "There is no _there_
13353 Bodenstandigkeit is German philosopher Martin Heidegger's term for
13354 the sense of being rooted in a place. It is this connection to a place that
13355 grounds us in Being, Heidegger claimed, and even if you don't buy into the
13356 existential mumbo-jumbo, it's not hard to understand the underlying insight:
13357 People who have no rootedness to a place are tumbleweeds, blown about on the
13358 currents of the zeitgeist. You have to be somebody, from somewhere, to know
13362 You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
13365 When you confer spiritual authority on another person, you
13366 must realize that you are allowing them to pick your pocket
13367 and sell you your own watch.
13370 What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a
13371 better answer than that which the experience of the past has already
13372 discovered--which consists, I believe, in gymnastic for the body and
13373 music for the mind.
13376 The word 'genius' isn't applicable in football.
13377 A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
13378 -- Joe Theisman, NFL quarterback
13380 Sometimes the only way you can feel good about yourself is by making
13381 someone else look bad. And I'm tired of making other people feel good
13385 I was determined to know beans.
13386 -- Henry David Thoreau
13388 Today, the notion of a star-spangled melting pot seems quaint,
13389 of another age. Increasingly, America is a fractured landscape,
13390 its people partitioned into dozens of cultural enclaves, its
13391 ideals reflected through differing prisms of experience. And
13392 this fracturing is likely to continue as the self-concept of
13393 America shifts from a majority white-minority black nation to
13394 a pluralistic society of many ethnic and racial groups. At the
13395 close of what's been called the American Century, during which
13396 the nation emerged as the dominant world power in commerce and
13397 politics, old myths are dying hard and new ones are just being
13398 forged. In this clustered world, the national identity is
13399 changing, and most of us don't even know it. Forget the melting
13400 pot. America today would be better characterized as a salad bar.
13401 -- Michael J. Weiss
13403 Personally, I'm always ready to learn,
13404 although I do not always like being taught.
13405 -- Winston Churchill
13407 The Constitution only gives people the right to
13408 pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
13411 Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when
13412 you fall down an open manhole and die.
13415 As a general rule, the most successful man in
13416 life is the man who has the best information.
13417 -- Benjamin Disraeli
13419 It is one of the blessings of old friends that
13420 you can afford to be stupid with them.
13421 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
13423 A child of five would understand this.
13424 Send someone to fetch a child of five.
13427 Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
13430 I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns
13431 on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
13434 I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
13437 I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
13438 But this wasn't it.
13441 Those are my principles, and if you don't like
13442 them... well, I have others.
13445 When I picked up your book I was so convulsed with laughter
13446 that I had to set it down, but one day I intend to read it.
13449 Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance.
13450 There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance,
13451 your wife is bound to interfere.
13454 God has made the cat to give man the
13455 pleasure of caressing the tiger.
13458 We are not without accomplishment. We have
13459 managed to distribute poverty equally.
13460 -- Nguyen Co Thatch, Vietnamese Foreign
13462 Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be
13463 always cast. In the pool where you least expect
13464 it, will be a fish.
13467 If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is
13468 because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music
13469 which he hears, however measured or far away.
13470 -- Henry David Thoreau
13472 The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can
13473 be true and untrue at the same time.
13474 -- Arthur Schopenhauer
13476 God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
13479 People often applaud an imitation and then sneer at the real thing.
13482 A thought which does not result
13483 in an action is nothing much,
13484 and an action which does not proceed
13485 from a thought is nothing at all.
13486 -- Georges Bernanos
13490 Security holes are only software bugs when
13491 one of the software's requirements is security.
13495 do outlook, internet explorer and, indeed, windows
13496 itself have 'bugs'? because that would indicate
13497 that microsoft has a requirement of security...
13498 it seems more likely that any security problems are just
13499 a by-product of the microsoft swiss cheese development
13500 methodology(tm)... if it doesn't stink and have a lot
13501 of holes, then it's not from microsoft.
13504 The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work
13505 supremely well, without attending to appearance.
13508 Now and then there is a person born who is so unlucky that he runs
13509 into accidents which started out to happen to somebody else.
13512 Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture,
13513 which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers
13514 perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a
13515 fair amount of what they call work consists of little more
13516 than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure
13517 should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a
13518 daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought,
13519 daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result
13520 (if any), the very process of daydreaming is pleasurable.
13521 And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity.
13522 For isn't it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of
13523 what we are about? Where we try on futures and practice our
13524 voices before committing ourselves to words or deeds?
13525 Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more
13526 likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people.
13527 Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the
13528 size and shape of the estimation of others.
13531 Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe,
13532 a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride,
13533 and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently
13534 regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are
13535 entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and
13536 vagaries of the crowd.
13537 -- Dame Edith Sitwell
13539 There are times when I think that the ideal library is
13540 composed solely of reference books. They are like
13541 understanding friends--always ready to change the subject
13542 when you have had enough of this or that.
13545 Mothers, fathers, aren't supposed to change, any more than
13546 they are supposed to leave, or die. They must not do that.
13549 The greatest obstacle to discovery is not
13550 ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge.
13551 -- Daniel J. Boorstin
13553 Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing.
13554 Nobody listens--and then everybody disagrees.
13557 All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.
13558 -- Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong
13560 Creative minds have always been known
13561 to survive any kind of bad training.
13564 Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
13565 -- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower
13567 I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry.
13568 That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.
13569 -- David Bissonette
13571 I married the first man I ever kissed.
13572 When I tell my children that they just about throw up.
13575 The trouble with some women is they get all excited
13576 about nothing--and then they marry him.
13579 Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people
13580 who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm.
13581 But the harm does not interest them.
13584 When you're finished changing, you're finished.
13585 -- Benjamin Franklin
13587 It is time we start searching for the fountain of age, time that
13588 we stop denying our growing older and look at the actuality of our
13589 own experience, and that of other women and men who have gone
13590 beyond denial to a new place in their sixties, seventies, eighties.
13591 It is time to look at age on its own terms, and put names on its
13592 values and strengths as they are actually experienced, breaking
13593 through the definition of age solely as deterioration or decline
13594 from youth. Only then will we see that the problem is not age
13595 itself, to be denied or warded off as long as possible, that the
13596 problem is not those increasing numbers of people living beyond
13597 sixty-five, to be segregated from the useful, valuable, pleasurable
13598 activities of society so that the rest of us can keep our illusion
13599 of staying forever young. Nor is the basic political problem the
13600 burden on society of those forced into deterioration, second
13601 childhood, even senility. The problem is not how we can stay young
13602 forever, personally--or avoid facing society's problems politically
13603 by shifting them onto age. The problem is, first of all, how to
13604 break through the cocoon of our illusory youth and risk a new stage
13605 in life, where there are not prescribed role models to follow, no
13606 guidepost, no rigid rules or visible rewards, to step out into the
13607 true existential unknown of these new years of life now open to us,
13608 and to find our own terms for living it.
13611 When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third
13612 of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and
13613 two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
13616 Blessed are they who have nothing to say
13617 and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
13618 -- James Russell Lowell
13620 Personal computers are less able to sense human presence
13621 than are modern toilets or outdoor floodlights that have simple
13622 motion sensors. Your inexpensive auto-focus camera has more
13623 intelligence about what is in front of it than any terminal or
13625 When you lift your hands from your computer keyboard, it
13626 does not know whether the pause is reflective, a nature break,
13627 or an interruption for lunch. It cannot tell the difference
13628 between talking to you alone or in front of six other people.
13629 It does not know if you are in your night-or party clothes or
13630 no clothes at all. For all it knows, you could have your back
13631 to it while it was showing you something important, or you
13632 could be out of earshot altogether while it was speaking to you.
13633 We think today solely from the perspective of what would
13634 make it easier for a person to use a computer. It may be time
13635 to ask what will make it easier for computers to deal with
13636 humans. For example, how can you possibly hold a conversation
13637 with people if you don't even know they are there? You can't
13638 see them, and you don't know how many there are. Are they
13639 smiling? Are they even paying attention? We talk longingly
13640 about human-computer interactions and conversational systems,
13641 and yet we are fully prepared to leave one participant in this
13642 dialogue totally in the dark. It is time to make computers see
13644 -- Nicholas Negroponte
13646 The energy produced by the breaking down of the
13647 atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who
13648 expects a source of power from the transformation
13649 of these atoms is talking moonshine.
13650 -- Ernest Rutherford
13652 Finance is the art of passing currency from
13653 hand to hand until it finally disappears.
13654 -- Robert W. Sarnoff
13656 The scientific community speaks about its work in a cool
13657 and disinterested manner. To present an exciting profile
13658 would be unprofessional. Any excess of emotion would suggest
13659 a lack of neutrality and therefore a tendency to read what
13660 they want in the facts rather than reporting what they see.
13661 Scientific objectivity must therefore appear to be boring.
13662 Scientists are well aware that their work is neither
13663 boring nor objective. If it were, very few discoveries would
13665 Social science, being falsely empirical, is triply
13666 obsessed by the obligation to present itself as the objective
13667 interpretation of observed reality. Since the more or less
13668 hard edges of scientific inquiry are not involved, social
13669 scientists are free to be more categorical about truth,
13670 reality and what they call facts. They therefore seek to be
13671 more boring than scientists.
13672 -- John Ralston Saul
13674 Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
13675 -- William M. Thackeray
13677 A genius is someone who can do anything except make a living.
13680 If you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him,
13681 you may say with confidence that he is a good man.
13682 -- Fyodor Dostoevski
13684 Fortune befriends the bold.
13687 Success in almost any field depends more on energy
13688 and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains
13689 why we have so many stupid leaders.
13692 Socialism is Bolshevism with a shave.
13695 I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
13698 Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day.
13699 Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
13701 It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic,
13702 and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.
13705 Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best
13706 strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You
13707 can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse.
13708 You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can
13709 declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness
13710 several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things,
13711 you're still going to have to dismount.
13714 You think it's a conspiracy by the networks to put bad shows on TV.
13715 But the shows are bad because that's what people want. It's not like
13716 Windows users don't have any power; I think they are happy with
13717 Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought.
13720 Coaches have to watch for what they don't want to see
13721 and listen to what they don't want to hear.
13724 Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting
13725 pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to
13726 babble and backtrack nervously.
13729 Florence Nightingale, on her kitten's reaction to an older cat:
13731 "The little one stands her ground, and when the old enemy comes near
13732 enough kisses his nose and makes the peace. That is the lesson of
13733 life: to kiss one's enemy's nose always standing one's ground."
13735 In the game known as Broken Telephone (or Chinese Whispers) a child
13736 whispers a phrase into the ear of a second child, who whispers it into
13737 the ear of a third child, and so one. Distortions accumulate, and when
13738 the last child announces the phrase, it is comically different from the
13739 original. The game works because each child does not merely degrade the
13740 phrase, which would culminate in a mumble, but reanalyzes it, making a
13741 best guess about the words the preceding child had in mind.
13742 All languages change through the centuries. We do not speak like
13743 Shakespeare (1564-1616), who did not speak like Chaucer (1343-1400), who
13744 did not speak like the author of Beowulf (around 750-800). As the
13745 changes take place, people feel the ground eroding under their feet and
13746 in every era have predicted the imminent demise of the language. Yet
13747 the twelve hundred years of changes since Beowulf have not left us
13748 grunting like Tarzan, and that is because language change is a game of
13750 A generation of speakers uses their lexicon and grammar to produce
13751 sentences. The younger generation listens to the sentences and tries to
13752 infer the lexicon and grammar, the remarkable feat we call language
13753 acquisition. The transmission of a lexicon and grammar in language
13754 acquisition is fairly high in fidelity -- you probably can communicate
13755 well with your parents and your children -- but it is never perfect.
13756 Words rise and fall in popularity, as the needs of daily life change, and
13757 also as the hip try to sound different from the dweebs and graybeards.
13758 Speakers swallow or warp some sounds to save effort, and enunciate or
13759 shift others to make themselves understood. Immigrants or conquerors
13760 with regional or foreign accents may swamp the locals and change the pool
13761 of speech available to children.
13762 Children, for their part, do not mimic sentences like parrots but try
13763 to make sense of them in terms of underlying words and rules. They may
13764 hear a mumbled consonant as no consonant at all, or a drawn-out or
13765 mispronounced vowel as a different vowel. They may fail to discern the
13766 rationale for a rule and simply memorize its outputs as a list. Or they
13767 may latch on to some habitual way of ordering words and hypothesize a new
13768 rule to make sense of it. The language of their generation will have
13769 changed, though it need not have deteriorated. Then the process is
13770 repeated with their children. Each change may be small, but as changes
13771 accumulate over centuries they reshape the language just as erosion and
13772 sedimentation imperceptibly sculpt the earth.
13775 Ideas won't keep: something must be done about them.
13776 -- Alfred North Whitehead
13778 Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual
13779 mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
13780 -- Alfred North Whitehead
13782 Ninety-Ninety Rule n.
13783 "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the
13784 development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the
13785 other 90% of the development time." Attributed to Tom Cargill of
13786 Bell Labs, and popularized by Jon Bentley's September 1985
13787 "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" column in "Communications of
13789 It was there called the "Rule of Credibility", a name which
13790 seems not to have stuck. Other maxims in the same vein include
13791 the law attributed to the early British computer scientist Douglas
13792 Hartree: "The time from now until the completion of the project
13793 tends to become constant."
13795 Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
13798 No matter how bad things get
13799 you got to go on living,
13800 even if it kills you.
13803 A man's palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything.
13804 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
13806 Because they did not see merit where they should have seen it,
13807 people, to express their regret, will go and leave a lot of
13808 money to the very people who will be the first to throw stones
13809 at the next person who has anything to say and finds a difficulty
13810 in getting a hearing.
13813 I praise loudly, I blame softly.
13814 -- Catherine II of Russia
13816 Deny yourself! You must deny yourself!
13817 That is the song that never ends.
13820 There are few more doleful sounds than the
13821 laughter of a man without humour.
13824 Children are the first to lose their innocence,
13825 artists the second: idiots never.
13828 What is the good of being an island,
13829 if you are not a volcanic island?
13832 Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you
13833 have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
13836 Most human beings have to spend their lives in utter vulnerability.
13837 All are murderable and torturable, and survive only through the restraint
13838 shown by more powerful neighbors. All are born unequal, in terms of
13839 capacity or strength. All are born to the inherent frailty of the human
13840 condition, naked and helpless, vulnerable all through life to the will of
13841 others, limited by ignorance, limited by physical weakness, limited by
13842 fear, limited by the phobias that fear engenders.
13843 For nearly three thousand years now, the political and social genius
13844 of what we can permissibly call 'Western man' has struggled with these
13845 brute facts of our unsatisfactory existence. Ever since the Hebrews
13846 discovered personal moral responsibility and the Greeks discovered the
13847 autonomy of the citizen, the effort has been made--with setbacks and
13848 defeats, with dark ages and interregnums and any number of irrelevant
13849 adventures on the side-to create a social order in which weak, fallible,
13850 obstinate, silly, magnificent man can maintain his dignity and exercise his
13851 free and responsible choice.
13854 Let us work without theorizing. It's the only way to
13855 make life endurable.
13858 At many human faults a cat
13859 Will never take offense:
13860 Two things though they cannot stand:
13861 The wretched Door, the horrid Fence.
13864 I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
13867 [Chess is] as elaborate a waste of human intelligence
13868 as you can find outside an advertising agency.
13869 -- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) U.S. crime-fiction writer
13871 Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are
13872 doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.
13873 -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1960) Irish playwright, critic
13875 Every moment in life is precious; that's why I play chess.
13876 -- Joseph Siroker, coffee house chess player and guru
13878 I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody
13879 to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
13882 A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can
13883 prove that you don't need it.
13886 Giving money and power to government is like
13887 giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
13890 The very moral person usually has quite good manners because good
13891 manners are usually some sort of basic consideration.
13892 -- Louis Auchincloss
13894 It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose,
13895 a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
13898 On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr.
13899 Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
13900 come out?" I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of
13901 ideas that could provoke such a question.
13904 Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
13907 The man who can drive himself further once the
13908 effort gets painful is the man who will win.
13911 You grow up on the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.
13914 I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is
13915 because I'm wearing a tie. You have to be different.
13918 When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
13921 With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half,
13922 and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.
13923 -- Otto Von Bismarck
13925 Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
13928 I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character
13929 we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything.
13932 There are no small parts, only small actors.
13935 Charm is a way of getting the answer 'yes'
13936 without having asked any clear question.
13939 Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it
13940 ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the
13941 wisdom we've learned and create something.
13944 Life at university, with its intellectual and inconclusive discussions
13945 at a postgraduate level is on the whole a bad training for the real world.
13946 Only men of very strong character surmount this handicap.
13949 The First Daily Sin is imitation. How can the network evening
13950 news programs be so similar? We're in a commercial, highly competitive
13951 struggle for viewers, and yet our solution for standing out in the
13952 marketplace is--do just what the competition is doing. CBS research shows
13953 that half the viewers of any given evening news broadcast--on CBS, NBC, or
13954 ABC--only watch that particular program one night a week. The implication
13955 is obvious: To these viewers, it doesn't make much of a difference which
13956 one they watch--or whether they watch at all.
13957 The Second Daily Sin is predictability. How often are you surprised
13958 by something you see on the news?
13959 The Third Daily Sin is artificiality. If you stop and really
13960 listen to how a typical television reporter tells a story, you'll hear how
13961 artificial it sounds. Even words--'pontiff' comes quickly to mind--that you
13962 never hear in real life. Nobody talks that way--except for us.
13963 The Fourth Daily Sin is laziness. The people I work with put in
13964 long hours and are very devoted to their jobs. They're certainly not lazy
13965 in the conventional sense. But I think we've all become lazy in our
13966 thinking, in our reluctance to dig out original stories and come up with
13967 new ways to tell them.
13968 The Fifth Daily Sin is oversimplification. Our audience is smarter
13969 and more thoughtful than a lot of us think. The people out there in America
13970 know that life is not as simple as what they see on the news: a world of
13971 heroes and villains, winners and losers, exploiters and victims. Yet that's
13972 what we show them, night after night.
13973 The Sixth Daily Sin is hype. Can you remember the last 'story
13974 you'll never forget?' How about the one before that? I can't. Over the
13975 years we've exaggerated so much that we've eroded our own ability to convey
13976 what's truly significant.
13977 The Seventh Daily Sin is cynicism. I think we're cynical about the
13978 audience and cynical about our ability to make a difference in peoples'
13979 lives. Journalists today are held in low esteem, but that doesn't have to
13980 be. Our viewers and listeners are also hungry for honest information, for
13981 help in coping with a bewildering world. We have an enormous opportunity to
13982 win our good name back--and insure our own survival in the bargain.
13983 -- Andrew Heyward, President of CBS News
13985 Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.
13986 -- Benjamin Disraeli
13988 Dr. Laura eats the Bible, live
13989 ------------------------------
13990 Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to
13991 people who call in to her radio show. Paramount Television Group is
13992 currently producing a "Dr. Laura" television show. She has become a
13993 convert to Judaism, and now she is Ba'al T'shuvah.
13994 Recently, she made some statements about homosexuals, based on
13995 biblical edicts. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura that
13996 was posted on the internet.
14001 Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law.
14002 I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that
14003 knowledge with as many people as I can.
14004 When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example,
14005 I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an
14006 abomination. End of debate.
14007 Now I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the
14008 specific laws and how to best follow them.
14009 a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates
14010 a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev.1:9). The problem is my neighbours.
14011 They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
14012 b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
14013 Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
14015 c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in
14016 her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev.15:19-24). The problem is, how
14017 do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
14018 d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and
14019 female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend
14020 of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can
14021 you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
14022 e) I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
14023 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated
14024 to kill him myself?
14025 f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
14026 Abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality.
14027 I don't agree. Can you settle this?
14028 g) Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
14029 have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses.
14030 Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
14031 h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
14032 around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
14033 19:27. How should they die?
14034 i) I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
14035 me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
14036 j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two
14037 different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments
14038 made of two different kinds of thread (cotton / polyester blend). He
14039 also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we
14040 go to the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them?
14041 (Lev. 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family
14042 affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
14043 I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident
14044 you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is
14045 eternal and unchanging.
14046 Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,
14049 Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect
14050 when taken in too large quantities.
14053 It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
14056 It is theory that decides what can be observed.
14059 It would be too pat, perhaps, to say that modern people, men and
14060 women, expect the unexpected. But they certainly expect, or are inured
14061 to, constant change... Unquestionably, people sense constant movement,
14062 change, alteration, and 'progress'. Even clothes are supposed to change
14063 from year to year: there is this year's fashion, and last year's fashion,
14064 and the fashions of the year before.
14065 Then there is the idea of 'news,' that is, of something novel
14066 happening every day, something worth reporting. Millions of people wake up
14067 in the morning and watch the news on television; they may also listen to
14068 radio news throughout the day and later catch the evening television news.
14069 It would be unthinkable to read in the newspapers or to hear on television
14070 that 'nothing much happened today.' There is always news, always something
14071 going on, always change. Some days bring major headlines; other days are
14072 quieter. But there is never no news: the message we get every day is that
14073 things are never exactly the same.
14074 -- Lawrence M. Friedman, from "The Horizontal Society"
14076 Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices
14077 call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
14080 I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier
14081 to answer questions. I can't answer your question.
14082 -- Presidential candidate GW Bush, in response to a question about
14083 whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the
14084 first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000
14086 Notice the difference between what happens when a man
14087 says to himself, "I have failed three times," and what
14088 happens when he says, "I am a failure."
14091 If you always do what interests you,
14092 at least one person is pleased.
14093 -- Katharine Hepburn
14095 I cannot imagine a pleasant retired life of peace
14096 and meditation without a cat in the house.
14097 -- Paul Von Hindenberg
14099 Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of
14100 are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the
14101 past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping.
14104 It is cheering to see that the rats are
14105 still around--the ship is not sinking.
14108 Always keep faith in the mind of clear light and be safe!
14111 Until now, in the Western world, leisure was the exclusive
14112 possession of a privileged class, which took upon itself the task of
14113 playing on behalf of the whole overworked society. For all the injustices
14114 which this entailed, it can be argued that this inequality in the
14115 distribution of leisure gave the minority that enjoyed it a certain
14116 responsibility for the quality of its amusements.
14117 Today our machines have turned leisure into an almost universal
14118 and obligatory state, one which many of us are finding enervating and even
14119 painful. To live free of the burden of grinding toil is the oldest of
14120 man's dreams. Yet no sooner has he rid himself of the accursed necessity
14121 of earning his living by the sweat of his brow, then he is confronted by a
14122 huge and alarming vacuum which -- if he is not to go mad -- must be quickly
14123 and entirely filled. With this new and abundant leisure come certain
14124 inescapable demands not to squander unimaginatively the resources that
14125 industrialization has opened for us. Many of us-consciously seldom, but
14126 unconsciously often-find this challenge so disturbing that we flee back to
14127 artificially strenuous work or even to war in order to escape the
14128 perplexities of choice presented to abundant leisure.
14129 This is a problem which you, as members of the Mass Audience, will
14130 be sharing with hundreds of millions of your fellow citizens the world over.
14133 If you want to write, keep cats.
14136 It is because the body is a machine that education is possible.
14137 Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial
14138 organization upon the natural organization of the body.
14139 -- Thomas H. Huxley
14141 If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
14144 Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of
14145 a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.
14148 The surest way to forfeit the esteem of a cat is to
14149 treat him as an inferior being.
14152 When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you.
14155 Don't tell me how hard you work.
14156 Tell me how much you get done.
14159 The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
14160 -- James Russell Lowell
14162 Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
14165 A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has
14166 cheated some woman out of a divorce.
14169 Serocki's Stricture: Marriage is always a bachelor's last option.
14171 The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines.
14172 They gave him love and he invented marriage.
14174 When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane,
14175 most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear
14176 that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition
14177 continuously until death do them part.
14178 -- George Bernard Shaw
14180 Marriage is nature's way of keeping people from fighting with strangers.
14182 If you're upset and wonder what your wife does with
14183 all the grocery money, stand sideways and look at yourself.
14185 I don't worry about terrorism;
14186 I was married for two years.
14189 Every man wants a wife who is beautiful, understanding,
14190 economical and a good cook. Unfortunately, the law allows
14193 Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or
14194 manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they
14195 will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
14196 -- John Stuart Mill
14198 Most of America's millionaires are first-generation rich. How is
14199 it possible for people from modest backgrounds to become millionaires in
14200 one generation? Why is it that so many people with similar socioeconomic
14201 backgrounds never accumulate even modest amounts of wealth?
14202 Most people who become millionaires have confidence in their own
14203 abilities. They do not spend time worrying about whether or not their
14204 parents were wealthy. They do not believe that one must be born wealthy.
14205 Conversely, people of modest backgrounds who believe that only the wealthy
14206 produce millionaires are predetermined to remain non-affluent. Have you
14207 always thought that most millionaires are born with silver spoons in their
14208 mouths? If so, consider the following facts that our research uncovered
14209 about American millionaires:
14210 * Only 19 percent receive any income or wealth of any kind from a
14211 trust fund or an estate.
14212 * Fewer than 20 percent inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth.
14213 * More than half never received as much as $1 in inheritance.
14214 * Fewer than 25 percent ever received "an act of kindness" of $10,000
14215 or more from their parents, grandparents, or other relatives.
14216 * Ninety-one percent never received, as a gift, as much as $1 of the
14217 ownership of a family business.
14218 * Nearly half never received any college tuition from their parents
14219 or other relatives.
14220 * Fewer than 10 percent believe they will ever receive an inheritance
14222 America continues to hold great prospects for those who wish to
14223 accumulate wealth in one generation. In fact, America has always been a
14224 land of opportunity for those who believe in the fluid nature of our
14225 nation's social system and economy.
14226 -- from the book "The Millionaire Next Door"
14228 In Rome, Athens, and Sparta, honor alone was the reward for the
14229 greatest of services. A wreath of oak-leaves or laurel, a statue or public
14230 congratulations was an immense reward for winning a battle or capturing a town.
14231 In these cities, a man who had accomplished some great feat was
14232 sufficiently rewarded by the accomplishment itself. He could not meet any
14233 of his fellow-citizens without feeling the pleasure of having done
14234 something for them; he could calculate the extent of his services by the
14235 number of his countrymen. Everybody is capable of doing good to one man,
14236 but it is god-like to contribute to the happiness of an entire society."
14239 I'll let you in on a secret. George Bush is not going to
14240 be the next president of the United States. Get over it,
14241 folks. It's not going to happen.
14242 -- Michael Moore, 9/21/2000, quoted by Eun-Kyung Kim (AP)
14244 As I considered the premise put forth in the meeting room: that
14245 the shortest road to wisdom and peace with the world is the one that turns
14246 inward, away from direct sensory contact with other creatures. I will not
14247 assert that meditation, psychotherapy, and philosophical introspection are
14248 unproductive, but I simply can't accept that inward is the only or best way
14249 for everyone to turn. The more disciplined practitioners of contemplative
14250 traditions can turn inward and still get beyond the self, but many others
14251 simply become swamped by self-indulgence. There are far too many people
14252 living in our society who forget daily that other creatures--five kingdoms'
14253 worth of them--are cohabiting the planet with us.
14254 Over half a century ago, Robinson Jeffers suggested that it may be
14255 just as valid to turn outward: "The whole human race spends too much
14256 emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist
14257 investigating nature or the artist admiring it, the person who is
14258 interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human
14259 beings, let him regard them objectively as a small part of the great music."
14260 -- Gary Paul Nabhan
14262 SWM 33, black belt kama sutra, seeking wonder woman. bring me your
14263 inhibitions and i will shatter them, you sweet thing. no violence.
14264 no caustics. sin is the word of restriction, so come pet my crowley.
14265 aleister can cook; aunt jemima treatment for all.
14267 Chance favors only the prepared mind.
14270 I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
14271 I lift my eyes and all is born again.
14274 Books do furnish a room.
14277 For the benefit of the two or three other people in this society
14278 who don't know what 'Cats' is about, here's the answer: It's about a bunch
14279 of cats. The cats jump around in a postnuclear junkyard for some two and a
14280 half hours, bumping and grinding to that curiously Mesozoic pop music for
14281 which Andrew Lloyd Webber is famous--the kind of full-tilt truckin' that
14282 sounds like the theme from 'The Mod Squad.' There's an Elvis impersonator
14283 cat, and a cat that looks like Cyndi Lauper, and a cat that looks like
14284 Phyllis Diller. All the other cast members look like Jon Bon Jovi with two
14285 weeks of facial growth.
14286 Sure, 'Cats' is allegedly based upon the works of T. S. Eliot, but
14287 from what I could tell, the show had about as much to do with the author of
14288 'The Waste Land' as those old Steve Reeves movies had to do with Euripides.
14289 'Cats' is what 'Grease' would look like if all the cast members dressed up
14290 like KISS. To give you an idea of how bad 'Cats' is, think of a musical
14291 where you're actually glad to hear 'Memory' reprised a third time because
14292 all the other songs are so awful. Think of a musical where the songs are so
14293 bad that 'Memory' starts to sound like 'Ol' Man River' by comparison.
14294 That's how bad 'Cats' is.
14297 Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else--and failing.
14298 -- Raymond Radiguet
14300 green sandwich glowing bright, thou droppest mushrooms
14301 on my tights, i slackly drool and whine and moan, for i
14302 will soon give you a better, more acidic home.
14304 By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become
14305 happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.
14308 The life of the creative man is lead, directed, and controlled by
14309 boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
14312 The new generation of software must be designed from day one to be pirated.
14313 -- CinemaElectric CEO Jim Robinson
14315 thought is the only antidote to stupidity,
14316 but stupid people don't realize they need it.
14319 i don't have to speak
14320 in haiku at all times since
14324 What is more interesting in this world than our fellow human
14325 beings and other living creatures? Why do we know so few of what must be
14326 out there? What kind of philistines are we? Yet we can make a more
14327 practical point than this. We need to interact with other species whether
14328 we want to or not. They are our food and our environment: homes, scenery,
14329 soil, even the oxygen in the air is provided by courtesy of plants and
14330 photosynthesizing bacteria. We need actively to exploit our fellow
14331 creatures to survive. This is not an option: we have to exploit them unless
14332 we prefer to die. Therefore purely for selfish reasons (as well as for
14333 reasons that we may hope are less selfish) we also need to conserve them.
14334 Besides, even if we learnt to do without our fellow creatures--perhaps
14335 found some inexhaustible supply of food on some distant planet--they would
14336 not necessarily ignore us. We are flesh, too, for all our conceit, and many
14337 are more than happy to feed upon us. To contain, exploit, or conserve our
14338 fellow creatures we need to keep tabs on them.
14341 Nature's technology occurs on the surface of the same planet as
14342 that of human culture, so it endures the same physical and chemical
14343 limitations and must use the same materials. But nature copes and invents
14344 in a way fundamentally different from what we do. At the very least, the
14345 rate at which she alters herself is glacial by our cultural standard.
14346 The very shapes of the two technologies differ dramatically. Just
14347 look around you. Right angles are everywhere: the edges of this page, desk
14348 corners, street corners, floor corners, shelves, doors, boxes, bricks, and
14349 on and on. Then look at field, park, or forest. Where are the right angles?
14350 Absent? No, but rare, which raises questions. Why so few right angles in
14351 nature? Why do civilizations find them so serviceable?
14352 Natural and human technologies differ extensively and pervasively.
14353 We build dry and stiff structures; nature mostly makes hers wet and
14354 flexible. We build of metals; nature never does. Our hinges mainly slide;
14355 hers mostly bend. We do wonders with wheels and rotary motion; nature makes
14356 fully competent boats, aircraft, and terrestrial vehicles that lack them
14357 entirely. Our engines expand or spin; hers contract or slide. We fabricate
14358 large devices directly; nature's large things are cunning proliferations of
14360 -- Steven Vogel's, from "Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds
14361 of Nature and People"
14363 If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
14366 I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
14367 world's shortest speech. He said I will be so brief I have already
14368 finished, and he sat down.
14369 -- Edward O. Wilson
14371 yahoo throws a shoe;
14372 trouble in digital zone
14373 e-log drops out chute
14376 Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot.
14377 His bite is incurable.
14380 A great sailor can sail even with a torn canvas. -- Seneca
14382 What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
14383 In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
14386 Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution
14387 introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what
14388 we can learn from her... 'doing it nature's way' has the potential to
14389 change the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal
14390 ourselves, store information, and conduct business.
14391 In a biomimetic world, we would manufacture the way animals and
14392 plants do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable
14393 fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms, modeled on prairies,
14394 would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant. To find new drugs or crops,
14395 we would consult animals and insects that have used plants for millions of
14396 years to keep themselves healthy and nourished. Even computing would take
14397 its cue from nature, with software that "evolves" solutions, and hardware
14398 that uses the lock-and-key paradigm to compute by touch.
14399 In each case, nature would provide the models: solar cells copied
14400 from leaves, steely fibers woven spider-style, shatterproof ceramics drawn
14401 from mother-of-pearl, cancer cures compliments of chimpanzees, perennial
14402 grains inspired by tallgrass, computers that signal like cells, and a
14403 closed-loop economy that takes its lessons from redwoods, coral reefs, and
14404 oak-hickory forests.
14405 The biomimics are discovering what works in the natural world, and
14406 more important, what lasts. After 3.8 billion years of research and
14407 development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to
14408 survival. The more our world looks and functions like this natural world,
14409 the more likely we are to be accepted on this home that is ours, but not
14411 -- Janine M. Benyus
14413 It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep,
14414 than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
14418 my eye, i must cry out at
14419 your nail gouge like lye.
14422 What one knows is, in youth, of little moment;
14423 they know enough who know how to learn.
14426 One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
14429 A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation
14430 with the bricks that others throw at him or her.
14433 Nobody who is not prepared to spoil cats will get
14434 from them the reward they are able to give.
14435 -- Compton MacKenzie
14437 The other night when I went into a restaurant in Santa Monica,
14438 there was one president--Clinton. When I ordered a pizza there
14439 was another one--Gore. When I paid the bill there was a third
14440 president--Bush, and when I walked out onto Ocean Boulevard there
14441 was no president because Bill is now the husband of a senator from
14443 Today I am witnessing the spectacle of a hyper-technological
14444 America which is sitting on the ruins of its electoral system
14445 waiting for absentee ballots in the mail.
14446 -- Bepe Severgnini, columnist for Milan's Corriere della Sera
14448 do you think it would hurt very much to swallow a whole egg, in shell?
14449 would it be better to boil it first so it's hard or to leave it runny?
14450 i'm wondering which way would be most likely to keep the shell from
14451 breaking before it exits the body...
14453 I will do everything in my power to restrict abortions.
14454 -- George W. Bush, Dallas Morning News, October 22, 1994
14456 I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?
14457 You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of
14459 -- George W. Bush, whose state ranks 2nd in total number of children
14460 living in poverty, to Austin American Statesman, 12/18/99
14462 "Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."
14463 -- Bush mocking what Karla Faye Tucker said on Larry King when asked,
14464 "What would you say to Governor Bush?" prior to her execution by
14465 lethal injection as reported by Talk magazine, September 1999
14467 An atmosphere of adolescence, a lack of gravitas--a carelessness, even a
14468 recklessness, perhaps born of things having gone a bit too easily so far.
14469 -- George Will, August 11, 1999, referring to Talk magazine's
14470 interview with Bush
14472 Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on
14473 public policy or philosophy or something.
14474 -- GW Bush was asked to name something he isn't
14475 good at by Talk magazine, September 1999 issue
14477 Bush should not advertise any allergy to serious things. A critical
14478 mass of lightness in a candidate causes the public mind to snap closed,
14479 with the judgement, "Not ready for prime time."
14480 -- George Will, August 11, 1999
14482 Bush is taking a political party on his ride. He and it will care if
14483 on Nov. 7, 2000, people think of Gore or Bradley as an unexciting but
14484 serious professor and of him as an amiable fraternity boy, but a boy.
14485 -- George Will, August 11, 1999
14487 What I'm against is quotas. I'm against hard quotas, quotas that
14488 basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate,
14489 quotas, I think, vulcanize society.
14490 -- George W. Bush (Austin American-Statesman 3/23/99)
14492 Son, I love your strategy: Don't let them get to know you.
14495 If George is elected President, it would destroy my faith
14496 in the office because he is such an ordinary guy.
14497 -- David Rosen, Midland geologist & former neighbor of GW Bush
14499 He's this week's pet rock.
14500 -- unknown, regarding GW Bush
14502 There ought to be limits to freedom. We're aware of the site,
14503 and this guy is just a garbage man.
14504 -- GW Bush, commenting on the website www.gwbush.com
14506 The Bush network is the only genuine network in the
14507 Republican Party. It is the Establishment.
14508 -- Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard
14510 "I will look at each piece of legislation when
14511 it makes it to my desk," and "I will review that
14512 when it makes it to my desk."
14513 -- GW Bush, refusing to comment on anything
14514 before it's absolutely unavoidable
14516 Reporters noticed four Latino men sitting at the Plaza, looking bored,
14517 wearing matching shirts from Buena Vista Farms. Buena Vista, it turns
14518 out, is a horse ranch run by Gerald Parsky, Bush's California chairman.
14519 The four men said they were brought to the event and were being paid
14520 their regular wages for attending.
14521 -- Salon Magazine reporting on a Bush fundraiser in California
14523 Asked how he would define "compassionate conservatism," Bush replied:
14524 "Making sure every child can read, making sure that we encourage
14525 faith-based organizations... when it comes to helping neighbors in
14526 need, making sure that our neighborhoods are safe, making sure that
14527 the state of Texas recognizes that people from all walks of life have
14528 got a shot at the Texas dream but, most importantly, making sure that
14529 government is not the answer to people's problems."
14530 This may be the only time a candidate promised not to solve any problems
14531 (with the possible exception of Utah Phillips, who ran on the "Sloth &
14532 Indolence" platform.)
14533 -- from georgebush2000.com
14535 I'd demand a recount.
14536 -- William F. Buckley, in the early '60s, in response to a
14537 reporter's question asking him what he would do if he
14538 were to win in his race for the office of Mayor of New York
14540 Half of the American people have never read a newspaper.
14541 Half never voted for President.
14542 One hopes it is the same half.
14545 Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. -- W. C. Fields
14547 Every man wishes to be wise,
14548 and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning.
14551 Finally, in conclusion, let me say just this.
14554 When issues of public policy are discussed in the outward form
14555 of an argument, often the conclusions reached are predetermined by
14556 the assumptions and definitions inherent in a particular vision of
14557 social processes. Different visions, of course, have different
14558 assumptions, so it is not uncommon for people who follow different
14559 visions to find themselves in opposition to one another across a
14560 vast spectrum of unrelated issues, in such disparate fields as law,
14561 foreign policy, the environment, racial policy, military defense,
14562 education, and many others. To a remarkable extent, however,
14563 empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after
14564 a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshaled for a position
14565 already taken, but that is very different from systematically
14566 testing opposing theories by evidence. Momentous questions are
14567 dealt with essentially as conflicts of vision.
14568 -- Thomas Sowell, from "The Vision of the Anointed"
14570 An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the
14571 blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
14572 -- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah," 1921
14574 If a person is obviously mentally disabled, such as having Down's
14575 syndrome or Alzheimer's, decent people respond with sympathy and
14576 understanding; and so why, if people merely have low IQs, are they
14577 treated with ridicule and contempt?
14580 Always go to other people's funerals,
14581 otherwise they won't come to yours.
14584 Animals are such agreeable friends--
14585 they ask no questions,
14586 they pass no criticisms.
14589 All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height.
14594 Willy flies without wings,
14595 Fast as a shadow can go.
14596 Black slash on white snow.
14598 Black face, cold blue eyes
14599 fish pond, golden fish surprise.
14600 Wet paws ... cold water!
14602 Black heart on white fur
14603 Green eyes ... last sight for poor mouse,
14604 Punctured by Willy.
14606 Willy stalks field mice.
14607 Wild Bill to small buffalo.
14608 Kills them just for show.
14610 Cat slays Two in Dawn
14611 Homicide. Gruesome Remains
14612 Left On Welcome Mat.
14617 Pete's eyes spit light;
14618 Blue diamond icicles,
14621 Sharp nose, fast heart, mouse
14622 Scrounges by the sewer. Pete
14623 Pounces, sharp claws out.
14625 Once quick with mouse life,
14626 Now just carnage: tail, fur, skull.
14630 Or goldfish or cardinal
14631 who loves our Petey.
14633 They hate Pete there,
14634 Crouched on the mossy rocks,
14635 Prospecting for gold.
14640 Louis wants to play.
14641 Its asthma, Lou! My asthma
14642 Tears us apart, m'boy.
14644 Louis -- scared by deer --
14645 spent all July and August
14648 We don't let Louis out.
14649 He is too dumb even for inside.
14650 Eyes blue oceans of space.
14652 Hot air fluffs Louis.
14653 Willy warms the newspapers.
14654 Pete? Purrs in her arms.
14657 dharma farm glistens
14658 like an earthy gem; yaks romp
14659 on verdant old hills.
14662 Noir comme le diable, [ Black as the devil,
14663 chaud comme l'enfer, [ hot as hell,
14664 pur comme un ange, [ pure as an angel,
14665 doux comme l'amour. [ sweet as love.
14666 -- Talleyrand, 18th century French diplomat, describing his concept
14667 of a good cup of coffee
14669 Coffee has two virtues. It is wet and it is warm. -- Dutch proverb
14671 Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold, it brings
14672 to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility.
14673 -- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, In Praise of Coffee, 1587
14675 Another head--and a black alpaca jacket and a
14676 serviette this time--to tell us coffee is ready.
14677 Not before it is time, too.
14678 -- D. H. Lawrence, from "Sea and Sardinia"
14680 Give a frontiersman coffee and tobacco,
14681 and he will endure any privation,
14682 suffer any hardship, but let him be without
14683 these two necessaries of the woods, and he
14684 becomes irresolute and murmuring.
14685 -- U.S. Army Lt. William Whiting, 1849
14687 Coffee is real good when you drink it it gives you time to think.
14688 It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening.
14689 Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a
14690 location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time,
14691 but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be
14692 yourself, and have a second cup.
14695 Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,
14696 Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore.
14697 Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip,
14698 Digestion waits on pleasure as you sip.
14701 A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink
14702 and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they
14703 drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody,
14704 without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as
14705 they can, sipping it a little at a time.
14706 -- German physician and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf in 1582
14708 The little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number,
14709 would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic,
14710 acres of territory would be illuminous with them. Soon they
14711 would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an inevitable
14712 rule to cook their coffee first.
14713 -- John D. Bilings, a Union veteran, in his book, Hardtack and Coffee
14715 Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass
14716 all four essential food groups:
14717 alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.
14720 Strong coffee, much strong coffee, is what awakens me.
14721 Coffee gives me warmth, waking, an unusual force and
14722 a pain that is not without very great pleasure.
14723 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
14725 I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless.
14726 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
14728 The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity
14729 as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for
14730 any other under the sun.
14731 -- John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
14733 If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee;
14734 it is the intelligent beverage.
14737 Wine is for aging, not coffee.
14738 -- Ken Hutchinson, Starsky and Hutch
14740 I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
14743 After a few months' acquaintance with European "coffee" one's mind
14744 weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich
14745 beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of
14746 it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
14747 -- Mark Twain, in "A Tramp Abroad"
14749 The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the
14750 cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot
14751 be expected to reproduce.
14752 -- Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.
14754 It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means
14755 it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make
14756 it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you
14757 ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be
14758 strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
14759 -- Malcolm X, 196, Message to the Grass Roots
14761 Make my coffee like I like my men: hot, black, and strong.
14762 -- Willona Wood, Good Times
14764 Never drink black coffee at lunch;
14765 it will keep you awake in the afternoon.
14766 -- Jilly Cooper, 1970, "How to Survive from Nine to Five"
14768 Resolve to free yourselves from the slavery
14769 of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle.
14770 -- William Cobbett, 1829, "Advise to Young Men"
14772 Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid,
14773 strichnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time.
14774 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Society and Solitude: Old Age"
14776 Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body
14777 what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.
14778 -- Isak Dinesen, 1934
14780 Coffee: we can get it anywhere, and get as loaded
14781 as we like on it, until such teeth-chattering,
14782 eye-bulging, nonsense-gibbering time as we may be
14783 classified unable to operate heavy machinery.
14784 -- Joan Frank, 1991
14786 Many people are like instant coffee:
14787 the minute they get in hot water they dissolve.
14788 -- Anonymous, from Toronto Globe and Mail; July 10, 1993
14790 The discovery of coffee has enlarged the realm of illusion
14791 and given more promise to hope.
14794 The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional
14795 to the quantity of coffee he drank.
14796 -- Sir James MacKintosh, 18th century philosopher
14798 If it wasn't for coffee, I'd have no discernible personality at all.
14799 -- David Letterman Esquire Interview Fall '94
14801 Ah! How sweet coffee tastes!
14802 Lovelier than a thousand kisses,
14803 sweeter far than muscatel wine!
14804 -- From J. S. Bach's "Coffee Cantata," 1732
14806 You make good coffee... You're a slob,
14807 but you make good coffee.
14808 -- Cher, in "Moonstruck"
14810 See how special you are? I serve you coffee in the parlor.
14811 -- Anthony Quinn to Sophia Loren in "The Black Orchid"
14813 The first cup is for the guest,
14814 the second for enjoyment,
14815 the third for the sword.
14816 -- Arabic proverb about coffee
14818 The vacuum pot is truly the CD player of coffeemakers;
14819 all you taste is the coffee.
14820 -- Corby Kummer, food expert
14822 People are kind of like zombies in Hong Kong nowadays.
14823 You don't see that glow anymore. In terms of colour
14824 Hong Kong looks a bit grey. To counter that, I think
14825 we should give out free espresso samples to give people
14826 more caffeine; triple espresso with Irish cream syrup,
14827 iced! People just need to get a bit more wired.
14828 -- David Wu, Actor and Channel V VJ, quoted in Post Magazine 29 August 99
14830 a small fish is this
14831 with so many other big
14832 tasks still to complete
14834 For myself I am an optimist--it does not seem
14835 to be much use being anything else.
14836 -- Winston Churchill
14838 One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one
14839 is constantly making exciting discoveries.
14842 Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
14845 There are two means of refuge from the
14846 miseries of life: music and cats.
14847 -- Albert Schweitzer
14849 Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator,
14850 but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
14853 A clever man commits no minor blunders.
14854 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
14856 my fingers have slipped;
14857 keyboard greasy from pizza
14861 One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that,
14862 in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers
14863 and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are
14864 not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
14867 Fine things books, but perhaps the moment has come to stop taking them
14868 so seriously. Who was it that said people who are always reading never
14869 discover anything? I'm not sure if that is true, but I do know that
14870 reading and thinking are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes
14871 reading supplies the most cunning of all means of avoiding thought. It
14872 would be good once in awhile to try thinking without the stimulus of
14873 books, to become not an out of-the-box -- never, please, that -- but at
14874 least an out-of-the-book thinker. Books may furnish a room, but there
14875 surely are other things quite as suitable for furnishing a mind. Time,
14876 I think, for me to attempt to find out what these might be.
14879 Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
14880 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
14882 You can observe a lot by just watching. -- Yogi Berra
14884 No wonder Al Gore thinks he is president--this is a most confusing time.
14885 The leading rap singer is white, the world's best golfer is black, and
14886 Bill Clinton just got back from Vietnam.
14887 -- Paul Harvey, Early December 2000
14889 The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
14890 discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but "That's funny...".
14893 Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
14894 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
14896 Dr. Seuss takes a look at election recounts:
14897 I cannot count them in a box.
14898 I cannot count them with a fox.
14899 I cannot count them by computer.
14900 I will not with a Roto-Rooter.
14901 I cannot count them card-by-card.
14902 I will not 'cause it's way too hard.
14903 I cannot count them on my fingers.
14904 I will not while suspicion lingers.
14905 I'll leave the country in a jam--
14906 I won't count ballots, Sam-I-Am.
14908 For some years, we have been surprised and distressed by the
14909 intellectual trends in certain precincts of American academia.
14910 Vast sectors of the humanities and the social sciences seem to
14911 have adopted a philosophy that we shall call, for want of a better
14912 term, "postmodernism": an intellectual current characterized by
14913 the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition
14914 of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from
14915 any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism
14916 that regards science as nothing more than a 'narration,' a 'myth'
14917 or a social construction among many others.
14918 To respond to this phenomenon, one of us (Sokal) decided to try
14919 an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled), experiment: submit to
14920 a fashionable American cultural-studies journal, "Social Text," a
14921 parody of the type of work that has proliferated in recent years,
14922 to see whether they would publish it. The article, entitled
14923 "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics
14924 of Quantum Gravity", is chock-full of absurdities and blatant
14925 non-sequiturs. In addition, it asserts an extreme form of cognitive
14926 relativism: after mocking the old-fashioned "dogma" that "there
14927 exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any
14928 individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole", it
14929 proclaims categorically that "physical `reality', no less than
14930 social `reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct".
14931 By a series of stunning leaps of logic, it arrives at the conclusion
14932 that "the [Pi] of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be
14933 constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable
14934 historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered,
14935 disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can
14936 no longer be defined by geometry alone". The rest is in the same vein.
14937 And yet, the article was accepted and published. Worse, it was
14938 published in a special issue of 'Social Text' devoted to rebutting the
14939 criticisms leveled against postmodernism and social constructivism by
14940 several distinguished scientists. For the editors of 'Social Text,'
14941 it was hard to imagine a more radical way of shooting themselves in
14943 -- Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
14944 Intellectuals' Abuse of Science."
14946 May you live all the days of your life.
14949 We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication
14950 below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its
14951 faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
14952 'I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa
14953 Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me
14954 the truth, is there a Santa Claus?' -- Virginia O'Hanlon
14955 Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by
14956 the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see.
14957 They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little
14958 minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are
14959 little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in
14960 his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured
14961 by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
14962 Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
14963 He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and
14964 you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.
14965 Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would
14966 be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike
14967 faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We
14968 should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light
14969 with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
14970 Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies.
14971 You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on
14972 Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus
14973 coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no
14974 sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are
14975 those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies
14976 dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not
14977 there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and
14978 unseeable in the world.
14979 You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside,
14980 but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man,
14981 nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could
14982 tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain
14983 and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real?
14984 Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
14985 No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand
14986 years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will
14987 continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
14988 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!
14989 -- The editorial "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus," first printed
14990 in the New York Sun in 1897.
14992 Most Internet appliances that I've seen are simply dumbed-down
14993 PCs, and some analysts call any damn thing that can access the
14994 Internet--other than a PC--an Internet appliance, even if it's
14995 your cell phone or a wireless PDA. That leads to some huge
14996 market projections, which are pretty much meaningless as a
14997 single figure. I think the idea of Internet appliances as a
14998 unique market is a pipe dream, with a lot of people sucking
15000 -- Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a market
15003 Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
15006 Ah but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
15009 She played with her cat, and it was a wonder to watch the white hand
15010 and the white paw frolic in the shade of night.
15013 Just because something doesn't do what you planned
15014 it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
15015 -- Thomas Alva Edison
15017 Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible.
15021 drools on oval office desk
15022 while country expires
15023 -- about the dubya years
15025 brave new president
15026 laughs as he pulls death switch for
15028 -- about the dubya years
15030 they call me a shrub
15031 but i shrug and ask daddy
15032 for black ops killing
15033 -- about the dubya years
15036 moron ever known on earth:
15037 gee dubya bee, dude.
15038 -- about the dubya years
15041 means "we do it my way" and
15043 -- about the dubya years
15045 smiling lies, dumb looks,
15046 idea-free, insults all,
15048 -- about the dubya years
15050 my feeling is that humans are both divine and full of sh*t.
15051 most people are drowning in their own mental diarrhea.
15053 solution? a sewer pipe for the mind, perhaps. or at least to
15054 realize that the contagion is part of us and has to be purified
15055 from within. there is no external enemy to kill or persecute;
15056 all evil deeds and words and thoughts are our own property.
15057 no one else can take them away for you; you must "dispose of
15058 properly". clean these damaged mental constituents using your
15059 will to heal your consciousness.
15061 If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will
15062 change a past or future event, then you are residing on another
15063 planet with a different reality system.
15066 Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns;
15067 he should be drawn and quoted.
15070 A day without rebooting is like a day without Microsoft. -- fred t. hamster
15072 I've met many thinkers and many cats,
15073 but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
15076 People living and working in a business system cannot change it.
15077 Their perspectives are foreshortened, their information gathering and
15078 measurement systems reinforce the past, and their incentives encourage
15079 continuity. Archimedes proclaimed, 'Give me where to stand, and I will move
15080 the earth.' But where should those who might change a business system be
15082 The answer is that every organization needs two business systems.
15083 Borrowing a term from linguistics, we shall call them the 'surface system'
15084 and the 'deep system.' The surface system is comprised of the organized
15085 tasks of the business processes, with their attendant jobs, structures,
15086 systems, and values. But this surface system is in periodic need of major
15087 change. Accomplishing that change is the job of the deep system.
15088 The deep system creates no customer value; it makes no products and
15089 delivers no services. It doesn't process orders, develop new products, or
15090 create value for customers. Rather it monitors, governs, adjusts, and
15091 reforms the surface system that does create customer value. A company's
15092 deep system bears the responsibility for detecting external changes,
15093 determining what those changes mean, and intervening to modify or transform
15094 the surface system accordingly. The deep system, working beneath the
15095 surface, embodies the capacity to change.
15096 The deep system continually hurls challenges: Is this still the
15097 right way or the best way to do things? If not, what is? The deep system
15098 ensures that the appropriate internal change--moderate or radical--takes
15099 place, shaping and reshaping the organization to take account of, and
15100 whenever possible take advantage of, ongoing external change.
15103 There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to
15104 conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the
15105 introduction of a new order of things.
15106 -- Nicolas Machiavelli
15108 Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy
15109 about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely.
15112 I am opposed to millionaires, but it would
15113 be dangerous to offer me the position.
15116 Never eat more than you can lift. -- the muppet Miss Piggy
15119 politics are poison, but
15120 it has to be said...
15122 dubya bush will lead
15123 to lower expectations
15127 Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile
15128 becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles
15129 whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world,
15130 you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community
15131 of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
15132 Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any
15133 meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again
15134 you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite
15136 You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no
15137 special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants;
15138 you exist in tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of
15139 exasperation, 'far removed from the seats of strife,' as the early
15140 explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required
15141 of you is a willingness to trudge.
15142 There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going
15143 anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same
15144 place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will
15145 be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in
15146 the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every
15147 glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your
15148 route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it
15149 would hardly matter.
15150 -- Bill Bryson, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the
15151 Appalachian Trail."
15153 You can't cheat an honest man. -- W. C. Fields
15155 Most conversations are simply monologues
15156 delivered in the presence of a witness.
15159 There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down
15160 at a typewriter and open a vein.
15163 Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence
15164 should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary
15165 sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no
15166 unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
15167 -- William Strunk Jr.
15169 The small and elite group of scientists who create most of the
15170 flavor in most of the food now consumed in the United States are
15171 called 'flavorists.' They draw on a number of disciplines in their
15172 work: biology, psychology, physiology, and organic chemistry. A
15173 flavorist is a chemist with a trained nose and a poetic sensibility.
15174 Flavors are created by blending scores of different chemicals in
15175 tiny amounts--a process governed by scientific principles but
15176 demanding a fair amount of art. In an age when delicate aromas and
15177 microwave ovens do not easily co-exist, the job of the flavorist is
15178 to conjure illusions about processed food and, in the words of one
15179 flavor company's literature, to ensure 'consumer likeability.' The
15180 flavorists with whom I spoke were discreet, in keeping with the
15181 dictates of their trade. They were also charming, cosmopolitan, and
15182 ironic. They not only enjoyed fine wine but could identify the
15183 chemicals that give each grape its unique aroma. One flavorist
15184 compared his work to composing music. A well-made flavor compound
15185 will have a 'top note' that is often followed by a 'dry-down' and a
15186 'leveling-off,' with different chemicals responsible for each stage.
15187 The taste of a food can be radically altered by minute changes in the
15188 flavoring combination. 'A little odor goes a long way,' one
15190 In order to give a processed food a taste that consumers will
15191 find appealing, a flavorist must always consider the food's
15192 'mouthfeel'--the unique combination of textures and chemical
15193 interactions that affect how the flavor is perceived. Mouthfeel can
15194 be adjusted through the use of various fats, gums, starches,
15195 emulsifiers, and stabilizers. The aroma chemicals in a food can be
15196 precisely analyzed, but the elements that make up mouthfeel are much
15197 harder to measure. How does one quantify a pretzel's hardness, a
15198 french fry's crispness? Food technologists are now conducting basic
15199 research in rheology, the branch of physics that examines the flow and
15200 deformation of materials. A number of companies sell sophisticated
15201 devices that attempt to measure mouthfeel. The TA.XT2i Texture
15202 Analyzer, produced by the Texture Technologies Corporation, of
15203 Scarsdale, New York, performs calculations based on data derived from
15204 as many as 250 separate probes. It is essentially a mechanical mouth.
15205 It gauges the most-important rheological properties of a food--bounce,
15206 creep, breaking point, density, crunchiness, chewiness, gumminess,
15207 lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness,
15208 softness, wetness, juiciness, spreadability, springback, and tackiness.
15209 -- Eric Schlosser, from "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good",
15210 Atlantic Monthly, 2001.
15212 We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that
15213 won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.
15216 If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that
15217 only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them
15218 would know the them song from 'The Beverly Hillbillies'.
15221 The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is
15222 non-interference with their own particular ways of being
15223 happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by
15224 violence with ours.
15227 My dad was the town drunk. Usually that's not so bad, but New York City?
15230 Ninety percent of the politicians give the other
15231 ten percent a bad name.
15234 You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy.
15237 We must abandon the prevalent belief in the
15238 superior wisdom of the ignorant.
15241 If the primary effect of the media in the late twentieth century was
15242 to turn nearly everything that passed across their screens into
15243 entertainment, the secondary and ultimately more significant effect was
15244 to force nearly everything to turn itself into entertainment in order to
15245 attract media attention. Daniel Boorstin had coined the term 'pseudo-
15246 event' to describe events that had been concocted by public relations
15247 practitioners to get attention from the press. Movie premieres,
15248 publishing parties, press conferences, balloon crossings, sponsored
15249 sporting contests, award ceremonies, demonstrations and hunger strikes,
15250 to name just a few examples, all were synthetic, manufactured pseudo-
15251 events that wouldn't have existed if someone hadn't been seeking
15252 publicity and if the media hadn't been seeking something to fill their
15253 pages and airwaves, preferably something entertaining.
15254 But the idea of pseudo-events almost seemed quaint by the late
15255 twentieth century. Most people realized that the object of virtually
15256 everyone in public life of any sort was to attract the media and that
15257 everyone from the top movie stars to the parents of septuplets now had
15258 to have a press agent to promote them. What most people were also coming
15259 to realize, if only by virtue of how much the media had grown, was that
15260 pseudo-events had proliferated to such an extent that one could hardly
15261 call them events anymore because there were no longer any seams between
15262 them and the rest of life, no way of separating the pseudo from the
15263 so-called authentic. Almost everything in life had appropriated the
15264 techniques of public relations to gain access to the media, so that it
15265 wasn't the pseudo-event one was talking about anymore when one cited the
15266 cleverness of PR men and women: it was pseudo-life.
15267 Yet not even pseudo-life did full justice to the modern condition.
15268 That's because the media were not just passively recording the public
15269 performances and manipulations of others, even when life was nothing but
15270 manipulations. Having invited these performances in the first place,
15271 the media justified covering them because they were receiving media
15272 attention, which is every bit as convoluted as it sounds. The result
15273 was to make of modern society one giant Heisenberg effect, in which the
15274 media were not really reporting what people did; they were reporting
15275 what people did to get media attention. In other words, as life was
15276 increasingly being lived for the media, so the media were increasingly
15277 covering themselves and their impact on life.
15278 -- Neal Gabler, in "Life, the Movie"
15280 So little time, so little to do.
15283 Consistency requires you to be as ignorant
15284 today as you were a year ago.
15285 -- Bernard Berenson
15287 Who becomes a CPO? Stephanie Perrin, the chief privacy officer of
15288 Montreal-based Zero-Knowledge Systems, explains: "Obviously, we're
15289 not going to just pick somebody from the legal department," because
15290 privacy is more than a matter of just following the law. "You have
15291 to have a fundamental commitment to--dare I say it?--morality.
15292 Privacy is not just good business. We are framing the information
15293 age, and it is important to take that job seriously. We really do
15294 look at privacy as a human right, and not just a luxury item for
15295 spoiled North Americans. We're talking about the global information
15298 The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
15301 He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
15304 No easy problems ever come to the president of the United States.
15305 If they are easy to solve, someone else has solved them.
15306 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
15308 Your presence in the class is disruptive and affects the other students!
15309 -- A teacher's complaint to the teenage Albert Einstein
15311 When you're in a world of experts and so-called professionals, the
15312 common sense of the people is marginalized.
15313 I'll give you an example. We're talking about building a building
15314 not too far from where I live, in this warehouse district. It's an old,
15315 totally undistinguished warehouse in what has been designated a historic
15316 district. So we're working up the Environmental Impact Report, and you hire
15317 a consultant. The consultant is this young lady who says, 'The developer
15318 wants to tear this whole warehouse down and build an eight-story building,
15319 and that would have a negative impact on the historic warehouse district.'
15320 I say, 'Wait a minute. Why? It's an eight-story building. What's
15321 different? Why do you say it's negative? Why isn't it positive? It will
15322 bring more people -- there are not enough people down here.'
15323 'No,' she said, 'in my professional judgment...' And that is given
15324 weight by the courts. Her opinion could have more sway than the city
15325 council, the manager, the mayor, and all the people of Oakland put together.
15326 That's amazing. That's what I call 'expertise versus common sense.'
15327 What do they call those guys in Russia: the nomenklatura? The class of
15328 folks who run things. I think that's an important issue: reclaiming the
15329 power of ordinary people to control their lives. Every time we turn around,
15330 we've got some kind of a state or federal rule or regulation.
15331 'In my professional judgment...' That whole academic discipline was
15332 probably created less than 25 years ago, and that lore -- I call it lore;
15333 these are like stories you tell around the campfire -- is then raised to
15334 the level of legal significance with greater authority than the vote of the
15335 people and the elected representatives. The people have lost their
15336 democratic right to make a decision over the shape of their lives, and you
15337 can find that happening on a lot of issues more controversial than historic
15341 Gardens are not made by sitting in the shade.
15344 Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
15347 Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps
15348 the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of
15349 arts and of sciences.
15352 You make men love their government and their country by giving them the
15353 kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love;
15354 a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in
15355 order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that
15356 refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens
15357 vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable
15358 ideas to counterargument and time.
15359 -- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
15361 Kites rise highest against the wind--not with it.
15362 -- Winston Churchill
15364 Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every
15365 man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
15366 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
15368 A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with
15369 pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.
15372 Technology is often defined as the creation of tools to gain control
15373 over the environment. However, this definition is not entirely sufficient.
15374 Humans are not alone in their use or even creation of tools. Orangutans in
15375 Sumatra's Suaq Balimbing swamp make tools out of long sticks to break open
15376 termite nests. Crows fashion tools from sticks and leaves. The leaf-cutter
15377 ant mixes dry leaves with its saliva to create a paste. Crocodiles use tree
15378 roots to anchor dead prey.
15379 What is uniquely human is the application of knowledge--recorded
15380 knowledge--to the fashioning of tools. The knowledge base represents the
15381 genetic code for the evolving technology. And as technology has evolved,
15382 the means for recording this knowledge base has also evolved, from the oral
15383 traditions of antiquity to the written design logs of nineteenth-century
15384 craftsmen to the computer-assisted design databases of the 1990s.
15385 Technology also implies a transcendence of the materials used to
15386 comprise it. When the elements of an invention are assembled in just the
15387 right way, they produce an enchanting effect that goes beyond the mere
15388 parts. When Alexander Graham Bell accidentally wire-connected two moving
15389 drums and solenoids (metal cores wrapped in wire) in 1875, the result
15390 transcended the materials he was working with. For the first time, a human
15391 voice was transported, magically it seemed, to a remote location. Most
15392 assemblages are just that: random assemblies. But when materials--and in
15393 the case of modern technology, information--are assembled in just the
15394 right way, transcendence occurs. The assembled object becomes far greater
15395 than the sum of its parts.
15398 All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
15401 The foresight of the astronomer who predicts with complete precision
15402 the state of the solar system many years in advance is absolutely the
15403 same in kind as that of the savage who predicts the next sunrise.
15404 The only difference lies in the extent of their knowledge.
15407 Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens
15408 the conscience like individual responsibility.
15409 -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
15411 The bug, that perverse and elusive malfunctioning of hardware and
15412 later of software, was born in the nineteenth century. It was already
15413 accepted shop slang as early as 1878, when Thomas Edison described his
15414 style of invention in a letter to a European representative: 'The first
15415 step is an intuition and it comes with a burst, then difficulties arise--
15416 this thing gives out and then that--"Bugs"--as such little faults and
15417 difficulties are called--show themselves, and months of intense watching,
15418 study and labor are requisite before commercial success--or failure--is
15419 certainly reached.'
15420 Edison implies that this use of 'bug' had not begun in his laboratory
15421 but was already standard jargon. The expression seems to have originated
15422 as telegrapher's slang. Western Union and other telegraph companies, with
15423 their associated branch offices, formed America's first high-technology
15424 system. About the time of Edison's letter, Western Union had over twelve
15425 thousand stations, and it was their condition that probably helped inspire
15426 the metaphor. City offices were filthy, and clerks exchanged verse about
15427 the gymnastics of insects cavorting in the cloakrooms. When, in 1945, a
15428 moth in a relay crashed the Mark II electromechanical calculator that the
15429 Navy was running at Harvard--it can still be seen taped in the original
15430 logbook--the bug metaphor had already been around for at least seventy-
15432 -- Edward Tenner, from "Why Things Bite Back"
15434 Look back, and smile on perils past.
15435 -- Sir Walter Scott
15437 I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
15443 -- William Butler Yeats' auto-epitath
15445 The bug, that perverse and elusive malfunctioning of hardware and
15446 later of software, was born in the nineteenth century. It was already
15447 accepted shop slang as early as 1878, when Thomas Edison described his
15448 style of invention in a letter to a European representative: 'The first
15449 step is an intuition and it comes with a burst, then difficulties arise--
15450 this thing gives out and then that--"Bugs"--as such little faults and
15451 difficulties are called--show themselves, and months of intense watching,
15452 study and labor are requisite before commercial success--or failure--is
15453 certainly reached.'
15454 Edison implies that this use of 'bug' had not begun in his
15455 laboratory but was already standard jargon. The expression seems to have
15456 originated as telegrapher's slang. Western Union and other telegraph
15457 companies, with their associated branch offices, formed America's first
15458 high-technology system. About the time of Edison's letter, Western Union
15459 had over twelve thousand stations, and it was their condition that probably
15460 helped inspire the metaphor. City offices were filthy, and clerks exchanged
15461 verse about the gymnastics of insects cavorting in the cloakrooms. When, in
15462 1945, a moth in a relay crashed the Mark II electromechanical calculator
15463 that the Navy was running at Harvard--it can still be seen taped in the
15464 original logbook--the bug metaphor had already been around for at least
15465 seventy-five years.
15466 -- Edward Tenner, "Why Things Bite Back"
15468 But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not
15469 very transparent, that hide behind the--that don't let people in to take a
15470 look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes.
15471 The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger,
15472 try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll
15473 defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans.
15474 -- George W. Bush, Media roundtable, Washington, D.C., March 13, 2001
15476 The charity that is a trifle to us can be precious to others.
15479 It wasn't until late in life that I discovered
15480 how easy it is to say "I don't know".
15481 -- W. Somerset Maugham
15483 It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a
15484 pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
15487 He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
15488 -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
15490 Failure is not an option.
15493 The year 1950 was the last full cry of urban America, at least on
15494 the surface. It was the year many of the cities visited in this book
15495 reached their historic peaks in population. Everybody was working, in folk
15496 memory, and in fact. Armies clad in overalls poured out of plants at
15497 quitting time or watched as the next shift filed in. Houses cost a couple
15498 of thousand bucks, or in high-cost cities some fifteen thousand. The
15499 mortgage was often less than a hundred a month. The teeming ethnic ghettos
15500 of the early century had given way to a more comfortable life, with
15501 religion and ethnicity, race and class still used as organizing principles
15502 for the neighborhood. The rough edges of the immigrant 'greenhorns' were
15503 worn smooth, and a confident younger generation now entered a fuller,
15504 richer American life. Grandma and Grandpa had their accents and old ways
15505 intact, and still mumbled sayings in the language your parents used when
15506 they didn't want you to understand. You could still find Il Progresso,
15507 Freiheit, Norske Tidende, and Polish Daily Zgoda on the newsstands, but the
15508 neighborhoods themselves were no longer alien places. It was the ghetto,
15509 yes, but made benign by assimilation.
15510 It was this world that the first surge tide into the suburbs left
15511 behind. They were people for whom the city had done its work, making
15512 Americans out of families from Dublin to Donetsk. America had given the
15513 urban young educations, and expectations. For many, those expectations had
15514 been nurtured through world war and economic depression. Something better
15515 was needed for the baby boomers.
15516 Today we look back on it all in hurt and wonder. How did this
15517 happen? Where did that good life go? When an accidental detour or a missed
15518 expressway exit brings us into contact with the world we left behind, we
15519 can still place all the blame firmly and squarely elsewhere. The shuttered
15520 factories and collapsing row houses, the vacant storefronts and rutted
15521 streets are regarded with the same awe reserved for the scenes of natural
15522 disasters. We look out on a world that somehow, in the American collective
15523 memory, destroyed itself.
15524 -- Ray Suarez, PBS journalist
15526 The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our
15527 enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
15528 -- G. K. Chesterton
15530 Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
15533 If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
15534 -- Tallulah Bankhead
15536 Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when
15537 they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away
15538 when they are confused.
15539 -- Malcolm Gladwell
15541 We especially need imagination in science. It is not all
15542 mathematics, nor all logic, it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
15545 The masons have a "temple of living stones".
15546 Well, I have a temple of stoned living.
15547 Except that the temple is my parents' basement.
15549 Pain is just another form of information.
15552 The traditional image of Asian countries--and the one I held before
15553 we moved there--was of overwhelmingly poor societies: city dwellers
15554 starving in the streets and farmers slaving to raise barely enough rice
15555 to feed a family, while a tiny clique of well-connected magnates lived
15556 behind barbed-wire fences in ornate mansions. Today, those scenes can
15557 still be found in parts of East Asia. But for the most part, the Asian
15558 countries are building a huge middle class, in which most people have
15559 about as much as everybody else.
15560 Japan has been the model; when Japan became a rich country, it did
15561 so in ways that spread the wealth broadly and evenly. In opinion polls
15562 today, more than 90 percent of the Japanese people describe themselves
15563 as 'middle class.' In the other 'high-performing Asian economies' the
15564 economic boom has also been broadly distributed...
15565 You can legitimately question whether equal distribution of a
15566 nation's wealth is a sign of social success. The American dream, in
15567 economic terms, at least, has generally been the dream of enormous
15568 success--not of making as much money as everybody else but rather of
15569 getting really rich. And that dream has been one of the key reasons
15570 for the dynamism and resiliency of the United States over the decades.
15571 On the other hand, the egalitarian distribution of wealth, and the
15572 resulting sense that everybody is getting a relatively fair shake, is
15573 surely one of the reasons that Asian countries have civil and stable
15575 -- T. R. Reid, "Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East
15576 Teaches Us About Living in the West"
15578 Who will underrate the influence of loose popular
15579 literature in debauching the popular mind?
15582 There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.
15585 Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
15588 Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
15591 Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.
15592 Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
15595 This idea of breaking the world into pieces and then explaining
15596 the pieces in terms of smaller pieces is called reductionism. It
15597 would be perfectly justified to consider Murray Gell-Mann, the father
15598 of the quark, to be the century's arch-reductionist. But very early
15599 on, long before mushy notions of holism became trendy, Gell-Mann
15600 appreciated an important truth: While you can reduce downward, that
15601 doesn't automatically mean you can explain upward. People can be
15602 divided into cells, cells into molecules, molecules into atoms, atoms
15603 into electrons and nuclei, nuclei into subatomic particles, and those
15604 into still tinier things called quarks. But, true as that may be,
15605 there is nothing written in the laws of subatomic physics that can be
15606 used to explain higher-level phenomena like human behavior. There is
15607 no way that one can start with quarks and predict that cellular life
15608 would emerge and evolve over the eons to produce physicists. Reducing
15609 downward is vastly easier than explaining upward--a truth that bears
15611 -- George Johnson, "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the
15612 Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics"
15614 Perhaps no mightier conflict of mind occurs ever again in a lifetime
15615 than that first decision to unseat one's own tooth.
15618 The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the
15619 old ones that ramify, for those brought up as most of us have
15620 been, into every corner of our minds.
15621 -- John Maynard Keynes
15623 In the centuries preceding the introduction of the printing press,
15624 those who held power reinforced it by uses of language that mystified the
15625 powerless and kept them subservient. Even more so in today's world, power
15626 is inextricably tied to the use of language, and today's priesthood of
15627 professionals in many fields employs jargon-fueled mystification. That is a
15628 political use of language that deliberately excludes the 'powerless' lay
15629 audience from participation. The doctor whose technical terms confuse, no
15630 less than the politician whose equivocations obfuscate, the lawyer whose
15631 terms intimidate, and the accountant whose explanations obscure, is taking
15632 advantage of audiences through what are called 'gatekeeper' uses of
15633 language. They include euphemisms, jargon and other devices designed to
15634 prevent rather than augment the free flow of knowledge.
15635 Lawyers have been particularly egregious in this practice.
15636 Gatekeeper language also frequently masks what physicians do especially in
15637 circumstances that can be fraught with emotion. A relative of a cancer
15638 patient, seeking straight and hard informational answers to questions --
15639 how bad is the situation, how much time does she have left, is there any
15640 hope -- was informed by her doctor that his relative's cancer was
15641 'treatable' and her prognosis was 'guarded...'
15642 The philosopher Jrgen Habermas provides an insight into the
15643 political nature of gatekeeper uses of language through his identification
15644 of the 'scientization of the public sphere,' a process now occurring in
15645 many societies. In this trend, elites effectively disqualify members of the
15646 public from being able to participate in policy discussions by insisting
15647 that only specialists can really understand what is going on. When
15648 politicians come to believe that only they can understand what is going on
15649 in the high councils of government, and that their job is to translate it
15650 for us and to protect themselves in the process, the language they aim at
15651 the electorate takes on more and more aspects of purposeful deceit.
15652 -- Tom Shachtman, "The Inarticulate Society"
15654 If you think you are too small to make a difference,
15655 try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.
15658 It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations,
15659 if you live near him.
15660 -- J. R. R. Tolkien
15662 Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers
15663 is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
15666 Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
15667 -- John S. MacDonald
15669 authority does not exist.
15670 we are all equally feeble when compared
15671 with the profundity of the universe.
15674 Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
15675 -- Heywood Hale Broun
15677 Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information
15678 about life to last him the rest of his days.
15679 -- Flannery O'Connor
15681 Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food:
15682 frequently there must be a beverage.
15685 We live with strangers. Those we love most, with whom we share
15686 a shelter, a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap
15687 and flow together, there are depths of unknowing. Parents and children,
15688 partners, siblings, and friends repeatedly surprise us, revealing the
15689 need to learn where we are most at home. We even surprise ourselves
15690 in our own becoming, moving through the cycles of our lives. There is
15691 strangeness hidden in the familiar.
15692 At the same time there is familiarity hidden in the strange. We can
15693 look with curiosity and respect at the faces of men and women we have
15694 never met. Learning to recognize these strangers with whom we share an
15695 increasingly crowded and interdependent world, we can imagine ourselves
15696 joined in a single family, perhaps by a marriage between adventurous
15698 Strangers marry strangers, whether they have been playmates for
15699 years or never meet before the wedding day. They continue to surprise
15700 each other through the evolutions of love and the growth of affection.
15701 Lovers, gay and straight, begin in strangeness and often, for the zest
15702 of it, find ways to increase their differences.
15703 Children arrive like aliens from outer space, their needs and
15704 feelings inaccessible, sharing no common language, yet for all their
15705 strangeness we greet them with love. Traditionally, the strangeness of
15706 infants has been understood as temporary, the strangeness of incomplete
15707 beings who are expected to become predictable and comprehensible. This
15708 expectation has eased the transition from generation to generation, the
15709 passing on of knowledge and responsibility, on which every human society
15710 depends. Yet the gap between parent and child, like the gap between
15711 partners, is not left behind with the passage of time. Today, in a
15712 world of rapid change, it is increasing, shifting into new rhythms still
15714 -- Mary Catherine Bateson, in "Full Circles, Overlapping Lives:
15715 Culture and Generation in Transition"
15717 Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
15720 At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future,
15721 tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.
15722 -- Maurice Maeterlink
15724 Before you run in double harness, look well to the other horse.
15727 There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.
15730 The overly sure belief that one knows the truth,
15731 but that this truth doesn't need to be tested or verified,
15732 is the root of all human errors.
15735 Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.
15736 -- Henry David Thoreau
15738 How many cares one loses
15740 not to be something
15744 If someone says 'can't', that shows you what to do.
15747 Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
15750 If a thing can not go on forever, it will come to an end.
15753 Nothing ever gets anywhere.
15754 The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere.
15755 The moment is the only thing that counts.
15758 Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow;
15759 don't walk behind me, I may not lead;
15760 walk beside me, and just be my friend.
15763 Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest
15764 blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
15767 The following is a poem made up entirely of quotations from George
15768 W. Bush. The quotes have been arranged, for aesthetic reasons only,
15769 by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson.
15771 MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
15774 I think we all agree, the past is over.
15775 This is still a dangerous world.
15776 It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
15777 and potential mental losses.
15779 Rarely is the question asked
15780 Is our children learning?
15781 Will the highways of the internet
15783 How many hands have I shaked?
15785 They misunderestimate me.
15786 I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
15788 I know that the human being
15789 and the fish can coexist.
15791 Families is where our nation finds hope,
15792 where our wings take dream.
15794 Put food on your family!
15795 Knock down the tollbooth!
15798 Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
15803 When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard", I am always
15804 tempted to ask: "Compared to what?"
15807 What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough
15808 to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over
15809 the rim of every cup.
15812 Hard is the herte that loveth nought in May.
15813 -- Geoffrey Chaucer
15815 Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
15816 -- G. K. Chesterton
15818 {{ your mental acuity sharpens, your self image improves, your breath
15819 becomes minty fresh, the problems in your life all seem simpler and you
15820 feel you can deal with them each separately and conquer them one by one,
15821 your hair grows back in all the right places and stops growing in your
15822 ears and other inappropriate places, when i snap my fingers, you will
15823 feel wholly refreshed and renewed... }}
15829 If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem.
15830 If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
15833 The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish
15834 and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony
15835 approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping
15836 things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to
15837 manage a group of people," Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a
15838 Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. "When things get larger
15839 than that, people become strangers to one another."
15840 The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from contemporary
15841 evolutionary psychology. They've been following the 150 rule for
15842 centuries... At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens--
15843 something indefinable but very real--that somehow changes the nature
15844 of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer.
15845 They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be
15846 effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "If you
15847 get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have
15848 enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and
15849 that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost."
15850 Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies
15851 that had come near to that magic number and seen first-hand how
15852 things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the
15853 group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a
15854 gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two
15855 or three groups within the larger group. That is something you
15856 really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to
15858 -- Malcolm Gladwell, "The Tipping Point"
15860 If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open
15861 minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really
15862 desire the things they failed to obtain.
15865 Middle age is when you're sitting at home on Saturday night
15866 and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
15869 The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
15872 I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result
15873 is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the
15874 power is a value. Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist
15875 temple. In the temple a man said, "I am going to tell you something
15876 that you will never forget." And then he said, "To every man is
15877 given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates
15879 And so it is with science. In a way it is a key to the gates of
15880 heaven, and the same key opens the gates of hell, and we do not have
15881 any instructions as to which is which gate. Shall we throw away the
15882 key and never have a way to enter the gates of heaven? Or shall we
15883 struggle with the problem of which is the best way to use the key?
15884 That is, of course, a very serious question, but I think that we
15885 cannot deny the value of the key to the gates of heaven.
15886 All the major problems of the relations between society and
15887 science lie in this same area. When the scientist is told that he
15888 must be more responsible for his effects on society, it is the
15889 applications of science that are referred to. If you work to develop
15890 nuclear energy you must realize also that it can be used harmfully.
15891 Therefore, you would expect that, in a discussion of this kind by a
15892 scientist, this would be the most important topic. But I will not
15893 talk about it further. I think that to say these are scientific
15894 problems is an exaggeration. They are far more humanitarian problems.
15895 The fact that how to work the power is clear, but how to control it is
15896 not, is something not so scientific and is not something that the
15897 scientist knows so much about.
15898 -- Richard P. Feynman, "The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen
15901 If once a man indulges himself in Murder, very soon he comes to think
15902 little of Robbing, and from Robbing he comes next to Drinking and
15903 Sabbath-breaking, and from that to Incivility and Procrastination.
15904 -- Thomas De Quincey
15906 These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper,
15907 but minds alive on the shelves.
15910 Let us not look back in anger,
15911 nor forward in fear,
15912 but around in awareness.
15915 Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with
15916 the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for
15917 the right purpose, and in the right way--that is not easy.
15920 A nation in which grown men say things like "I am not a happy camper"
15921 at momentous junctures is manifestly not the Shining City on the Hill
15922 that our forefathers dreamed about.
15925 Among the devices that we use to impose order upon a complicated
15926 (but by no means unstructured) world, classification--or the division
15927 of items into categories based on perceived similarities--must rank
15928 as the most general and most pervasive of all. And no strategy of
15929 classification cuts deeper--while providing such an even balance of
15930 benefits and difficulties--than our propensity for division by two,
15932 Some basic attributes of surrounding nature do exist as complem-
15933 entary pairings--two large lights in the sky representing day and
15934 night; two sexes that must couple their opposing parts to produce a
15935 continuity of generations--so we might argue that dichotomization
15936 amounts to little more than good observation of the external world.
15937 But far more often than not, dichotomization leads to misleading or
15938 even dangerous oversimplification. People and beliefs are not either
15939 good or evil (with the second category ripe for burning); and
15940 organisms are not either plant or animal, vertebrate or invertebrate,
15941 human or beast. We seem so driven to division by two, even in
15942 clearly inappropriate circumstances, that I must agree with several
15943 schools of thought (most notably Claude Levi-Strauss and the French
15944 structuralists) in viewing dichotomization more as an inherent
15945 mechanism of the brain's operation than as a valid perception of
15947 -- Stephen Jay Gould
15949 Crude classifications and false generalizations
15950 are the curse of the organized life.
15953 Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine,
15954 shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?
15957 Those who really deserve praise are the people who, while human
15958 enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice
15959 than they are compelled to do by their situation.
15962 It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
15965 The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
15966 is for good men to do nothing.
15969 If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of
15970 Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
15973 It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.
15974 -- Diogenes Laertes
15976 The human race has reached a critical time in its social evolution
15977 when it has no choice but to make peace with its biological origins and
15978 to learn how to live once again as a member and partner of the natural
15979 community rather than as its dominator and destroyer. In other words,
15980 we must rediscover how to live as our savage ancestors once lived--in
15981 nature, rather apart from it, much less above it. We must, that is,
15982 invent the civilized analogue of the hunter-gatherer way of life, the
15983 only sustainable mode of human existence the planet has ever known.
15984 Suggesting that we live in a much simpler and more natural way does not
15985 imply a return to the Stone Age or anything like it: we have many
15986 possibilities open to us that were not available to our forebears, for
15987 we have been enormously enriched and enlightened by the long experience
15988 of civilization (or at least so one hopes). Nevertheless, how such a
15989 profound transformation of civilization toward a more experienced and
15990 wiser savagery can be achieved is obviously an immensely difficult
15991 question, because it will clearly entail radical changes in every aspect
15992 of our way of life.
15993 Just how radical is suggested by one of the most poignant and
15994 pointed critiques of modern civilization ever uttered. Breaking into
15995 a filmed interview on the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, an
15996 anonymous Kayapo Indian woman shouted, "We don't want your dams. Your
15997 mothers did not hold you enough. You are all orphans." It is perhaps
15998 too simple to say that the good society is one in which your mother--
15999 and by extension your father, your community, and indeed your entire way
16000 of life--holds you enough, so that you grow up feeling that the world is
16001 a good place and that life is intrinsically satisfying just as it is and
16002 that there is thus no need to make it more satisfying by accumulating
16003 endless wealth and power at others' expense. But this at least points
16004 in the right direction: to become more experienced and wiser savages, to
16005 meet the real political challenge of the twenty-first century, we shall
16006 have to create cultures so rich and nurturing that we would have no need
16007 to pursue happiness; we could simply enjoy it.
16008 -- William Ophuls, in "Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of
16009 the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium."
16011 The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.
16014 In Washington, it's dog eat dog.
16015 In academia, it's exactly the opposite.
16018 I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.
16019 -- James A. Garfield
16021 There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget
16022 something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance,
16023 therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
16024 -- Arthur Conan Doyle
16026 The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
16029 I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired
16030 at nine o'clock every morning.
16033 It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over forty
16034 billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially
16035 when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
16038 It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
16039 -- W. Edwards Deming
16041 A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done
16042 by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
16045 Those who desire to give up Freedom
16046 in order to gain Security, will not have,
16047 nor do they deserve, either one.
16048 -- Thomas Jefferson
16050 There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery.
16051 You can't do any business from there.
16052 -- Colonel (Harlan) Sanders
16054 To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
16057 There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion.
16058 There are only intersecting monologues.
16061 You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
16064 Memory's malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions
16065 or 'sins.' Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memory sins occur
16066 frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of us.
16067 Transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking are sins of omission: we fail to
16068 bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea. Transience refers to a weakening
16069 or loss of memory over time. It's probably not difficult for you to remember
16070 now what you have been doing for the past several hours. But if I ask you
16071 about the same activities six weeks, six months, or six years from now, chances
16072 are you'll remember less and less.
16073 Absent-mindedness involves a breakdown at the interface between attention
16074 and memory. Absent-minded memory errors--misplacing keys or eyeglasses, or
16075 forgetting a lunch appointment--typically occur because we are preoccupied with
16076 distracting issues or concerns, and don't focus attention on what we need to
16078 The third sin, blocking, entails a thwarted search for information that we
16079 may be desperately trying to retrieve. We've all failed to produce a name to
16080 accompany a familiar face. This frustrating experience happens even though we
16081 are attending carefully to the task at hand, and even though the desired name
16082 has not faded from our minds--as we become acutely aware when we unexpectedly
16083 retrieve the blocked name hours or days later.
16084 In contrast to these three sins of omission, the next four sins of
16085 misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence are all sins of
16086 commission: some form of memory is present, but it is either incorrect or
16087 unwanted. The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the wrong
16088 source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend
16089 told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper.
16090 Misattribution is far more common than most people realize, and has potentially
16091 profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility
16092 refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions,
16093 comments, or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience.
16094 The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge
16095 and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often edit or entirely rewrite
16096 our previous experiences--unknowingly and unconsciously--in light of what we
16097 now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific
16098 incident, or even of an extended period in our lives, which says more about how
16099 we feel now than about what happened then.
16100 The seventh sin -- persistence -- entails repeated recall of disturbing
16101 information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether:
16102 remembering what we cannot forget, even though we wish that we could. Recall
16103 the last time that you suddenly awoke at 3:00 a.m., unable to keep out of your
16104 mind a painful blunder on the job or a disappointing result on an important
16105 exam. In more extreme cases of serious depression or traumatic experience,
16106 persistence can be disabling and even life-threatening.
16107 -- Daniel Schacter, "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets
16110 When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were
16111 failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.
16112 -- George Bernard Shaw
16114 People demand freedom of speech as a compensation
16115 for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
16116 -- Soeren Kierkegaard
16118 Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
16119 Live the life you have imagined.
16120 -- Henry David Thoreau
16122 Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness
16123 on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
16124 -- G. K. Chesterton
16126 Being willing to accept that the past--
16127 even the priceless, irreplaceable past--
16128 will be largely lost is a sign of mental health.
16131 We are what we repeatedly do.
16132 Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
16135 Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. -- Voltaire
16137 It requires wisdom to understand wisdom:
16138 the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
16141 What difference does it make how much you have?
16142 What you do not have amounts to much more.
16145 We now all live in a society marked by increasing, not decreasing,
16146 interconnection and mutual reliance. Each of our lives is affected by
16147 more people than ever before. We generally need the cooperation of
16148 more people than ever to accomplish even those goals we set for
16149 ourselves. This insight needs no elaborate demonstration; one is
16150 reminded of it with every smoggy breath we take, and every time we step
16151 on an airplane and ponder how our life depends on the competent,
16152 attentive behavior of dozens of strangers, from the pilot to the air
16153 traffic controller to the ground mechanic who was supposed to inspect
16154 the extent of the metal fatigue on the wings. Technology increases the
16155 links that tie people together, voluntarily or not, and the complexity
16156 of our economic system and the organizations we work for multiplies
16158 To exercise control over what happens to you as an individual, you
16159 must be involved with others in a process that decides what happens to
16160 you and your fellow citizens collectively. We can no longer separate
16161 the quality of personal life from the quality of social life. To
16162 preserve private space, we must also preserve the commons.
16163 That is one reason why even in a society so seduced by and attached
16164 to autonomy, many people are now getting fed up with what can only be
16165 called acts of vandalism against the public space. Threatening,
16166 disrespectful, wanton, and manifestly selfish acts--from the warfare of
16167 crack dealers and gangs to the shameless greed of the S&L thieves and
16168 the destruction of our very environment by the industrial polluters--
16169 are poisonous to everyone, not just those directly harmed. Of course,
16170 we pay for such things as taxpayers and as consumers, but that is not
16171 the most important cost. All of us are morally impoverished by these
16172 assaults on the quality and integrity of our common life.
16173 -- Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings, "The Perversion of Autonomy:
16174 The Proper Uses of Coercion and Constraints in a Liberal Society"
16176 Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common
16177 belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
16178 -- W. Somerset Maugham
16180 Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
16183 The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved--
16184 loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
16187 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
16190 Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
16193 The wicked leader is one whom the people despise.
16194 The good leader is one whom the people revere.
16195 The great leader is one about whom the people say,
16196 "We did it ourselves."
16199 Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
16202 Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
16205 No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one
16206 concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.
16207 -- Niccolo Machiavelli
16209 Every exit is an entry somewhere.
16212 Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us
16213 nothing but the shape of the spoon.
16216 We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers
16217 connect us with our fellow men.
16220 There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
16221 -- Bertrand Russell
16223 If this is coffee, please bring me some tea,
16224 but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
16227 All men who have turned out worth anything have had
16228 the chief hand in their own education.
16229 -- Sir Walter Scott
16231 Few things can help an individual more
16232 than to place responsibility on him,
16233 and to let him know that you trust him.
16234 -- Booker T. Washington
16236 The last time somebody said, "I find I can write much
16237 better with a word processor," I replied, "They used to
16238 say the same thing about drugs."
16241 The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
16242 When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
16243 -- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), German playwright, poet
16245 Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
16248 Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time.
16249 Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become
16253 To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana.
16254 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
16256 the best part about killing software bugs is that
16257 there's no goo nor exoskeleton fragments left behind.
16259 Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares
16260 about doing it right, or doing it better.
16263 Great spirits have always encountered
16264 violent opposition from mediocre minds.
16267 There's a fine line between genius and
16268 insanity. I have erased this line.
16271 Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's
16272 original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
16275 Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves,
16276 or we know where we can find information upon it.
16279 Historically, consumer acceptance of new technologies has been
16280 slow and cumbersome, delaying anticipated profits by decades.
16281 Indeed, consumer acceptance of any innovation is typically slow,
16282 despite extraordinary benefits and convenience.
16283 When cake mixes were first created, they required consumers to
16284 only add water--a major behavioral shift. Consumers felt a cake
16285 made with such a mix could not possibly be as good as a homemade
16286 cake. So cake mix formulas were revised to require the addition of
16287 an egg and milk. The new mixes met with great success, because the
16288 behavior shift required of consumers was minor. Eventually some
16289 consumers became comfortable adding only water (some never will).
16292 An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even
16293 how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what
16294 you know and what you don't.
16297 A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
16300 All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely
16301 players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one
16302 man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
16303 -- Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
16305 Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
16306 -- James Bryant Conant
16308 I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this
16309 government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
16310 We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before
16311 us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
16312 You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea,
16313 and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given
16314 us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the
16315 dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
16316 You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory.
16317 Victory at all costs--Victory in spite of all terrors--Victory, however
16318 long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
16319 Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no
16320 survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for
16321 the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward
16323 I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause
16324 will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this
16325 juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, "Come then,
16326 let us go forward together with our united strength."
16327 -- Winston Churchill, first speech to Parliament, May 13, 1940
16329 Be it religion, love under all its forms, literature, or art,
16330 there is not a single spiritual force that does not become an
16331 object of commercial exploitation.
16334 History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
16335 -- James Joyce from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
16337 Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon,
16338 but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!
16339 -- John Parker, leader of the "Minutemen", April 19, 1775
16341 These are the times that try men's souls.
16344 Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a day which will live in infamy--the
16345 United states of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by
16346 naval and air forces of the empire of Japan... The attack yesterday
16347 on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and
16348 military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives
16349 have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported
16350 torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu... Japan
16351 has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the
16352 Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves.
16353 The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and
16354 well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our
16356 As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all
16357 measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation
16358 remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long
16359 it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American
16360 people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.
16361 I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the
16362 people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the
16363 uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery
16364 shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no
16365 blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests
16366 are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the
16367 unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable
16368 triumph. So help us God.
16369 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
16371 Our strength grows out of our weakness.
16372 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
16374 The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
16375 I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
16376 I shall use my time.
16379 What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly;
16380 it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
16383 it's hard not to blame microsoft for the new worm. they point at
16384 their feeble little patch (which actually doesn't stop all the
16385 types of attack nimda uses), but why aren't their operating systems
16386 automatically getting the patch if it's critical? also, why are
16387 there so many huge gaping holes in the first place? they'll never
16388 stop plugging them... it's like a dyke made out of sponges.
16391 after i got my millionth annoying spam today, i decided that there must
16392 be something to it after all. perhaps i can write spam all day while
16393 wearing only underpants and make money by magic too. clearly no one has
16394 shut off the spammers' internet connections yet, so they survive somehow.
16395 subsistence-level living based on a life of evil, here i come!
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16422 Courage is grace under pressure. -- Ernest Hemingway
16424 To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years.
16425 To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
16426 -- Winston Churchill
16428 I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that
16429 gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
16432 The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are
16433 worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all
16434 attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy
16435 ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of
16436 treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
16437 It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
16438 enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by
16439 violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of
16440 false and designing men.
16441 Of the latter we are in most danger at present; let us therefore be aware
16442 of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to
16443 maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the
16445 Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made,
16446 which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever,
16447 calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance.
16448 Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty,
16449 we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious
16450 consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn
16451 may be the miserable sharers in the event.
16452 -- Samuel Adams, tasty American Patriot
16454 The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is
16455 before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out
16459 I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself
16460 I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,
16461 and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble
16462 or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of
16463 truth lay all undiscovered before me.
16466 As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been
16467 used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
16470 Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
16471 -- George Bernard Shaw
16473 When fanatics are on top, there is no limit to oppression.
16476 Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
16477 Willing is not enough; we must do.
16478 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
16480 tkelele ekki eekkle cthulhu hurf hurf hurf *plat*
16481 -- H. P. Lovecraft's "cat" ejecting a hairball
16483 If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
16484 -- Reinhold Niebuhr
16486 Computer Science is no more about computers
16487 than astronomy is about telescopes.
16488 -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
16490 What we become depends on what we read after all of the
16491 professors have finished with us. The greatest university
16492 of all is a collection of books.
16495 The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in
16496 higher esteem those that think alike than those who think differently.
16497 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
16499 The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.
16503 crucial in these turbulent
16504 final days of earth...
16506 president shrub does
16507 wonders for sagging garment
16508 industry's profits.
16512 christian values? hate the bombs,
16513 but love the bombers?
16515 Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues.
16518 Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, "Certainly,
16519 I can!" Then get busy and find out how to do it.
16520 -- Theodore Roosevelt
16522 Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve
16523 greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
16524 -- William Shakespeare
16527 then he frittered it away
16531 Half this game is ninety percent mental.
16534 Action may not always bring happiness;
16535 but there is no happiness without action.
16536 -- Benjamin Disraeli
16538 The world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life
16539 and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies.
16540 -- Charles Krauthammer
16542 doomed bovines eat sand
16543 scrape on cactus in AZ
16544 then chowed on and gone
16547 To find out what one is fitted to do,
16548 and to secure an opportunity to do it,
16549 is the key to happiness.
16552 I have never understood Brahms. I believe he was
16553 burning the midnight oil trying to be complicated.
16554 -- Albert Einstein, in a conversation with Peter G. Neumann
16556 Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
16559 It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
16560 entertain a thought without accepting it.
16563 The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing
16564 by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.
16568 a brick; microsoft sinking
16569 fast as cement shoes
16571 Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.
16572 Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
16573 -- G. K. Chesterton
16575 We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
16576 -- Thomas Alva Edison
16578 Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet
16579 of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
16582 Any activity becomes creative when the doer
16583 cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
16586 Experience with technology teaches us that once a technology makes
16587 something possible, it gets applied, whether for good or bad.
16588 -- Donald A. Norman
16590 The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in
16591 other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
16594 Without education we are in a horrible and deadly
16595 danger of taking educated people seriously.
16596 -- G. K. Chesterton
16598 When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.
16601 Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only
16602 the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
16605 Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness
16606 that some things are really important, others not; and that the two
16607 kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
16608 -- Christopher Morley
16610 Nobody ever died of laughter.
16613 Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best
16614 to change the subject. "What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I
16616 "That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein
16617 Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What
16618 do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
16619 "About six inches to the mile."
16620 "Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six
16621 yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And
16622 then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the
16623 country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
16624 "Have you used it much?" I enquired.
16625 "It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers
16626 objected; they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out
16627 the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and
16628 I assure you it does nearly as well."
16629 -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno Concluded"
16631 The fly has an autonomous system that avoids being swatted. It has
16632 the ability to see and navigate and make decisions on millisecond time
16633 scales. We've never been able to make artificial vision systems that
16634 come within orders of magnitude of that, with all the computation we
16638 The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending,
16639 we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;
16640 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
16641 -- William Wordsworth
16643 You return and again take the proper course, guided by what?
16644 By the picture in mind of the place you are headed for.
16647 The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who
16648 are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
16651 Xtianity the Easy Way
16652 ---------------------
16654 jesus heal my head,
16655 so i won't drop dead;
16656 god better get me real happy,
16657 'cause he's my celestial pappy.
16659 yo god, i'll just lie around here at home,
16660 you fill my pockets with money while i moan.
16661 it'll make me real religious,
16662 if you ain't fictitious...
16664 being a zealot is a lot of hassle,
16665 and with my faith i must wrassle.
16666 'til jesus gets my brain repaired,
16667 to humans my butt remains bared.
16669 surmounting one's lot is for others,
16670 who have energy unsmothered,
16671 by wacky notions of invisible spirits,
16672 that reward and punish holy twits.
16674 heaven better live up to my imagination,
16675 and to its oft repeated reputation;
16676 the next life better not suck, holy dad,
16677 'cause this one on earth you f*cked pretty bad.
16680 When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so
16681 long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see
16682 the ones which open for us.
16683 -- Alexander Graham Bell
16685 The mind is its own place and
16686 in itself can make a heaven
16687 of hell, a hell of heaven.
16690 Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
16691 Willing is not enough; we must do.
16692 -- Johann von Goethe
16694 I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time.
16695 -- Charlie Brown, in Charles Schultz's cartoon "Peanuts"
16697 It is hard to say exactly when the monumentalization of the trivial became
16698 a way of life in America. It may have been when the National Football League
16699 started according contests between large men in skintight pants the sort of
16700 solemn designations formerly reserved for armed global conflicts.
16701 -- Michael Kelly, in "The Atlantic Monthly"
16703 When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second.
16704 When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.
16708 We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned,
16709 so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
16712 The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
16715 Unless one's predictions are confirmed more often than a random
16716 guesser's, we should be suspicious of their quality, however
16717 cogent they may have seemed when made.
16718 -- Richard A. Posner
16720 It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a
16721 sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate
16722 in all times and situations. They presented him with the words,
16723 "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening
16724 in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
16727 Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.
16728 Small people always do that, but the really great make you
16729 feel that you, too, can become great.
16732 The belief that microsoft has done it all right this time with Windows-XP
16733 is just like... the suspension of disbelief that allows people to think
16734 it's perfectly normal to see kids flying around on brooms in the Harry
16735 Potter movie while they're in the darkened movie theater. It's time to
16736 turn on the lights in your mental theater...
16739 We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love--
16740 first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
16743 The majority of important television commercials take the form of
16744 religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious
16745 parables, they put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to
16746 redemption, and a vision of Heaven. They also suggest what are the roots of
16747 evil and what are the obligations of the holy.
16748 Consider, for example, the Parable of the Ring Around the Collar. This
16749 is to television scripture what the Parable of the Prodigal Son is to the
16750 Bible, which is to say it is an archetype containing most of the elements of
16751 form and content that recur in the genre.
16752 The narrative structure of the Parable of the Ring Around the Collar is,
16753 indeed, comfortably traditional. The story has a beginning, a middle, and an
16754 end. A married couple is depicted in some relaxed setting--a restaurant, say--
16755 in which they are enjoying each other's company and generally having a
16756 wonderful time. But then a waitress approaches their table, notices that the
16757 man has a dirty collar, stares at it boldly, sneers with cold contempt, and
16758 announces to all within hearing the nature of his transgression. The man is
16759 humiliated and glares at his wife with scorn, for she is the source of his
16760 shame. She, in turn, assumes an expression of self-loathing mixed with a
16761 touch of self-pity...
16762 The parable continues by showing the wife at home using a detergent
16763 that never fails to eliminate dirt around the collars of men's shirts...
16764 In television-commercial parables, the root cause of evil is
16765 "Technological Innocence", a failure to know the particulars of the
16766 beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress...
16767 Technological innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents,
16768 drugs, sanitary napkins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs, but also to
16769 ignorance of technical machinery such as savings banks and transportation
16771 -- Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age
16774 Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some
16775 blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can.
16776 Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a
16777 spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
16778 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
16780 I don't know much about being a millionaire,
16781 but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
16784 term: Microflaccidity
16785 definition: An addiction to Microsoft products accompanied by a decrease in IQ.
16787 Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
16790 Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people". People
16791 say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each
16792 instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense
16796 [Hollywood is] a place where they shoot too many films and not enough actors.
16799 Money sometimes makes fools of important persons,
16800 but also makes important persons of fools.
16803 I made my money by selling too soon.
16806 Tell me who admires you and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.
16807 -- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beauve
16809 False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often
16810 endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm,
16811 for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness.
16814 I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.
16817 I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from
16818 listening carefully. Most people never listen.
16819 -- Ernest Hemingway
16821 Ten point list of lessons learned
16822 from the high-tech industry failures during 2001:
16824 1) Prediction tools must improve.
16825 2) It's hugely difficult to build chicken and egg simultaneously.
16826 3) Venture capital firms' demands that startups generate $50 million
16827 in revenue within three years were unrealistic.
16828 4) Companies used narrowcast to broadcast.
16830 6) We all, like sheep, will go astray (with enough pressure).
16831 7) Many startups were fundamentally uncreative and "un-Internet."
16832 8) Too early to market? Too bad.
16833 9) New stuff doesn't replace old.
16834 10) Nothing changes overnight.
16838 The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
16841 The ultimate result of shielding men from the
16842 effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
16845 Sports is the toy department of human life. -- Howard Cosell
16847 First keep the peace within yourself,
16848 then you can also bring peace to others.
16851 What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
16854 Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the
16855 King of England "the alleged King of England" to avoid libel suits.
16858 I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places.
16859 He told me to quit going to those places.
16862 Never mistake motion for action. -- Ernest Hemingway
16864 The first duty of a leader is to make himself
16865 be loved without courting love. To be loved
16866 without "playing up" to anyone--even to himself.
16869 All you need in this life is ignorance and
16870 confidence, and then success is sure.
16873 Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited
16874 energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of
16875 order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
16876 -- Norman Podhoretz
16878 If only I could master the skill of telefecalkinesis, the act of
16879 sh*tting on someone from any distance. Another useful skill is
16880 evilknievelportation, the ability to jump out of the way right
16881 before some horrible accident occurs. This is useful to avoid
16882 the telefecalkinetics.
16885 Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six,
16886 result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual
16887 expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
16888 -- Charles Dickens, in "David Copperfield"
16890 Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest
16891 way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
16894 It's the wonder of the world, it's a rocket to the moon, it gets you high,
16895 it gets you low, but once you get that glow... Love, love, hooray for love,
16896 who was ever too blase for love? Make this the night for love. If we have
16897 to fight, let's fight for love. Some sigh and cry for love--Ah, but in
16898 Pa-ree they die for love. Some waste away for love. Just the same--hooray
16902 Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
16905 Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.
16908 Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
16911 The young have aspirations that never come to pass,
16912 the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
16913 -- H.H. Monroe (Saki)
16915 An inventor is a person who makes an ingenious arrangement
16916 of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
16919 There's nothing quite like doing nothing.
16922 For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
16923 over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
16924 -- Richard Feynmann
16926 The mind commands the body and the body obeys.
16927 The mind commands itself and finds resistance.
16930 The English word "way" is perhaps the nearest translation that we can
16931 make to the Chinese word tao. It is usually pronounced "dow." The Tao
16932 means many things. Primarily, it means the way of nature, the process of
16933 the universe. But it also means a way of life, a way of living in
16934 accordance with that process. We have lost the idea that our occupations
16935 are vocations. Our idea of an occupation is that it is a way of making
16936 money. We make a very, very destructive division between work and play.
16937 We spend eight hours, or whatever it may be, at work in order to earn the
16938 money to enjoy ourselves in the other eight hours. And that is a perfectly
16939 ridiculous way of living. It is much better to be very poor indeed than to
16940 do something so stupid as boring ourselves and wasting ourselves for eight
16941 hours in order to be able to enjoy ourselves the other eight hours. The
16942 result of this fantastic division between work and play is that work
16943 becomes drudgery, and play becomes empty. When we say that our occupation
16944 should also be our vocation, we are speaking of a conception of life within
16945 which work and play should be identical.
16946 It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the
16947 universe, do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God,
16948 the Vishnu-lila, lila meaning "play." And they look upon the whole
16949 manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of
16950 dance--lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt. We in the
16951 West have tended to lose the idea of our work, our profession, as being a
16953 Now, mind you, these ways I am talking about in Asia are not followed
16954 by an enormous number of people, except in a kind of nominal, superficial
16955 way. And I am not trying to make any vast comparisons between Asian society
16956 and Western society or to say that the total Asian way of life is superior
16957 to ours. I do not think it is, but I do not think it is necessarily
16958 inferior, either; it is just different. But the fact remains that there is
16959 an aspect of Asian religion and philosophy that is very subdued in Western
16960 religion and philosophy, so that you might say that the Way, in the sense of
16961 the Chinese Tao, does not quite exist in the West, in any recognizable form.
16962 It does exist, yes. It exists unofficially, it exists occasionally, but it
16963 is never clearly recognized.
16964 -- Alan Watts, "The Way of Zen"
16966 It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
16969 We used to think that
16970 if we knew one, we knew two,
16971 because one and one are two.
16972 We are finding that we must
16973 learn a great deal more about "and".
16974 -- Sir Arthur Eddington
16976 The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics,
16977 not only advanced this subject, but, saturated with it, they fancied
16978 that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
16981 Civilization advances by extending the number of important
16982 operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
16983 -- Alfred North Whitehead
16985 Any solution to a problem changes the problem.
16988 I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure,
16989 could walk on a cloud without coming through.
16992 Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has
16993 never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.
16996 Do not ask things to happen as you wish, but wish them to
16997 happen as they do happen, and your life will go smoothly.
17000 One of the things most beguiling to cat lovers is the
17001 intractability of a cat... its refusal to surrender
17002 the least part of its spiritual independence.
17003 -- Marguerite Steen
17005 Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed.
17006 Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery
17007 and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they
17008 might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say
17009 to myself, "It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams
17010 come true than be selfish and worry about my liver."
17011 -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
17013 I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the
17014 morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
17017 The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.
17018 -- William Butler Yeats
17020 Drinking provides a beautiful excuse to pursue the one activity that
17021 truly gives me pleasure, hooking up with fat, hairy girls.
17024 What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
17027 Life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, so get
17028 wasted all of the time and have the time of your life.
17029 -- Michelle Mastrolacasa
17031 I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.
17034 Newscasters have gotten so repellant,
17035 talk shows so superficial,
17036 sitcoms so unfunny,
17038 movies so predictable,
17039 that the Food Network offers the best
17040 fare on TV in every sense of the word.
17043 My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four.
17044 Unless there are three other people.
17047 The people's good is the highest law. -- Cicero
17049 In all recorded history there has not been one economist who
17050 has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
17053 The great thing in this world
17054 is not so much where we stand,
17055 as in what direction we are moving.
17056 -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
17058 Reality is the leading cause of stress
17059 amongst those in touch with it.
17062 If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
17065 The nice thing about egotists is that
17066 they don't talk about other people.
17067 -- Lucille S. Harper
17069 Wisdom outweighs any wealth. -- Sophocles
17071 A problem is a chance for you to do your best. -- Duke Ellington
17073 It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing.
17074 It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.
17077 The human mind is like an umbrella--it functions best when open.
17080 They always say that time changes things, but
17081 you actually have to change them yourself.
17084 If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the
17085 computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles
17086 per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
17087 -- Robert X. Cringely
17089 The man who says he is willing to meet you
17090 halfway usually is a poor judge of distance.
17091 -- Laurence J. Peter
17093 To do two things at once is to do neither.
17096 We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.
17099 Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
17102 Hell, there are no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something.
17105 The days of the digital watch are numbered. -- Tom Stoppard
17107 A little drowsing cat is an image of perfect beatitude.
17110 World peace must develop from inner peace.
17111 Peace is not just mere absence of violence.
17112 Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.
17113 -- His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
17115 The human mind treats a new idea the same way
17116 the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
17119 A hat should be taken off when you greet a
17120 lady and left off for the rest of your life.
17121 Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
17124 Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
17127 It is a very sad thing that nowadays
17128 there is so little useless information.
17131 I was born not knowing and have had only a
17132 little time to change that here and there.
17135 I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the
17136 best of them, and I know how bad I am.
17139 Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.
17142 It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
17145 Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't
17146 mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
17147 -- Edward R. Murrow
17149 What can you say about a society that says that
17150 God is dead and Elvis is alive?
17153 Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
17154 -- G. K. Chesterton
17156 Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
17157 -- Edgar Bergen, as "Charlie McCarthy"
17159 A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can
17160 do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
17163 Whatever you do will be insignificant,
17164 but it is very important that you do it.
17167 Cats know how to obtain food without labor,
17168 shelter without confinement,
17169 and love without penalties.
17172 Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.
17173 -- Diogenes the Cynic
17175 When it is not necessary to make a decision,
17176 it is necessary not to make a decision.
17179 Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew
17180 and for several days we had nothing to live on but food and water.
17183 Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet? -- Lily Tomlin
17185 I took a speed reading course and read "War and
17186 Peace" in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
17189 Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
17190 -- Michel de Montaigne
17192 I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
17195 In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. -- Andy Warhol
17197 Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
17200 The reason grandparents and grandchildren get
17201 along so well is that they have a common enemy.
17204 A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
17207 The prayer of the scientist if he prayed, which is not likely:
17208 Lord, grant that my discovery may increase knowledge and help other men.
17209 Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man's destruction.
17210 Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in "Brain" be published before
17211 the destruction takes place.
17212 -- Walker Percy, in "Love in the Ruins"
17214 Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by
17215 confessing our parents' shortcomings.
17216 -- Laurence J. Peter
17218 Cooperate on Standards, Compete on Implementation
17219 -- Sun Corporations's Founding Principle
17221 If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.
17224 Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose
17225 all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.
17228 Kids who have yet to master spelling or basic math are in no position to
17229 dogmatize about scientific questions like global warming or nuclear power.
17232 If you can't ride two horses at the same time you shouldn't be in the circus.
17235 Whenever a person walks in on the middle of a film or a conversation, or
17236 starts a new friendship, opens a book, takes a new job, or moves to a new
17237 city, his first need is to orient himself. We all must know, in a general
17238 way, what to expect so that we can plan and respond intelligently and feel
17239 comfortable. And although all animals work with their senses and brains to
17240 orient themselves, human being do something unique. We live less simply and
17241 directly in the world than do other animals. We make a version of a world,
17242 an interpretation of it, and then we live in that. The degree of comfort
17243 and success that we achieve in our lives depends on how well that
17244 interpretation suits our circumstances.
17245 Another way to state this idea is that genetically built into people is
17246 a special organizing mode of perception. The philosopher Susanne Langer
17247 calls this mode transformational: we are co-creators of our own perceptions.
17248 In the very act of physically perceiving, we interpret; we transform the raw
17249 data gathered by our senses into complex symbolic meanings. We literally
17250 cannot function and survive without seeing in our world evidence of order
17251 and purpose. We take nothing at face value; we systematize, explain, weave
17252 a large network of connected meanings.
17253 While nonhuman animals toil for their lives, play, or lie in the sun--do
17254 whatever is suitable for the moment--only people fret and practice and
17255 struggle to achieve distant or abstract goals. We are the only animals who
17256 live partly removed from our immediate physical circumstances. This
17257 extravagance is the source of our language, art, science, music, religions,
17258 philosophies: those things we value most. Aside from such direct physical
17259 causes of death as hunger, exposure, old age, or disease, the one
17260 circumstance we truly cannot survive is living in a raw, uninterpreted
17261 place--in chaos. Each of us either finds a meaning in some traditional
17262 religion or philosophy or patches together one of his own, or else he
17263 panics, loses the will to live, and, in one way or another perishes.
17264 -- Shirley Park Lowery, "Familiar Mysteries: The Truth in Myth"
17266 I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific
17267 problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
17270 The operating system for the *world* is too important a resource to be
17271 entrusted to just one proprietary company. No one company can handle
17272 the responsibility, nor can any one company be trusted to stay honest
17273 and fair when wielding such awesome power.
17276 Middle age is when you've met so many people that every
17277 new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
17280 Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
17283 I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.
17286 Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not.
17287 In either case, the thought is staggering.
17288 -- R. Buckminster Fuller
17290 Birds fly over the rainbow, why then oh why can't I?
17293 The software business is the worst
17294 of all possible business models,
17295 except for all the others.
17298 Instant gratification takes too long.
17301 Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
17302 -- John Kenneth Galbraith
17304 No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have,
17305 and I think he's a dirty little beast.
17308 Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but
17309 man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
17310 -- Reinhold Niebuhr
17312 The great tragedy of Science--the slaying of a
17313 beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
17314 -- Thomas H. Huxley
17316 Against logic there is no armor like ignorance. -- Laurence J. Peter
17318 In mathematics you don't understand things.
17319 You just get used to them.
17320 -- John von Neumann
17322 Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
17325 As for me, except for an occasional heart attack,
17326 I feel as young as I ever did.
17329 Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
17330 -- Benjamin Franklin
17332 When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
17334 The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages,
17335 may be preserved by quotation.
17336 -- Benjamin Disraeli
17339 I am not familiar with the command RTFM.
17340 I tried giving it but got an warning that the command does not exist.
17343 -- A real user's response to advice
17345 A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
17346 -- Robertson Davies
17348 The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
17349 opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
17350 ability to function.
17351 -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
17353 Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and
17354 less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there
17355 are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a
17356 solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces.
17357 There are no straight lines.
17358 -- R. Buckminster Fuller
17360 Our happiness doesn't depend on somebody else's action or on anything
17361 else. It doesn't depend on our success, but rather on the effort we're
17362 willing to put into everything we do. Even if people disappoint or fail
17363 us left and right, even if people turn against us, hurt us, lie about us,
17364 don't understand us, even if they think they know everything about us and
17365 judge us unfairly, they can't infringe upon our happiness. True happiness
17366 means that we have a deep-seated peace and tranquility that transcends all
17367 the difficulties of life, that cannot be disturbed by the chaos and
17368 warfare that might touch our lives.
17369 Digging in the trenches of a Nazi concentration camp Victor Frankl once
17370 said to a fellow inmate: "This is where you've got to find your happiness--
17371 right here in this trench, in this camp." It is a simple matter of fact:
17372 you can be just as happy in a concentration camp, horrific and terrible as
17373 it surely is, as you can in any other circumstance in life.
17374 For this is where we're supposed to find our happiness--where we are
17375 now, wherever that might happen to be, in all that we do, in whatever
17376 circumstances we find ourselves. Being happy involves the intense
17377 struggle of entering intimately into all that we do.
17378 -- "The Monks of New Skete, In the Spirit of Happiness"
17380 Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
17381 Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
17382 Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
17383 Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
17384 Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
17385 To weave it into fabric.
17386 -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, from "Upon This Age"
17388 An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
17391 Everybody gets so much information all day long
17392 that they lose their common sense.
17395 Rationalists, wearing square hats,
17396 Think, in square rooms,
17397 Looking at the floor,
17398 Looking at the ceiling.
17399 They confine themselves
17400 To right-angled triangles.
17401 If they tried rhomboids,
17402 Cones, waving lines, ellipses--
17403 As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon--
17404 Rationalists would wear sombreros.
17407 I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
17408 -- G. K. Chesterton
17410 fat in dee head / fat in dee mind / thin on dee love / absent dee kind
17411 yon falwell got dee big head / falwell got dee tiny brain
17412 falwell don' like what you be liken' / falwell hate what he don' understan'
17413 which be everyteen' for dis one / falwell dee bigot boy.
17414 -- love poem to jerry f.
17416 The cat is, above all things, a dramatist.
17419 I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed
17420 us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
17423 The human mind treats a new idea the same way
17424 the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
17427 I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
17428 -- Bertrand Russell
17430 The key to being a good manager is keeping the people
17431 who hate me away from those who are still undecided.
17434 Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. -- Lily Tomlin
17436 To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison
17438 If I knew I was going to live this long,
17439 I'd have taken better care of myself.
17442 What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
17443 -- Benjamin Disraeli
17445 The cat is the mirror of the human mind, personality and attitude,
17446 just as the dog mirrors his human's physical appearance.
17447 -- Winfred Carriere
17449 Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy?
17450 I don't know and I don't care.
17453 Historians are like deaf people who go on
17454 answering questions that no one has asked them.
17457 There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you
17458 start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
17461 The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems
17462 to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
17465 I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you
17466 looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
17469 common sense is just the things your parents tell you that
17470 actually make it into your brain when you're a kid.
17472 don't touch hot things,
17473 look both ways when crossing the street,
17476 these ones work; thus they survive.
17479 Men have become the tools of their tools. -- Henry David Thoreau
17481 Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the
17482 ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
17483 -- Clare Booth Luce
17485 You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
17488 When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries
17489 disappear and life stands explained.
17492 Why was I born with such contemporaries? -- Oscar Wilde
17494 It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact. -- Edmund Burke
17496 What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement? -- Fred Allen
17498 The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof,
17499 a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an
17500 oracle, is inborn in us.
17503 The mad mind does not halt. If it halts, it is enlightenment.
17504 -- Chinese Zen Saying
17506 He who controls his mind and has cut off desire and anger realizes the Self.
17507 -- The Bhagavad Gita
17509 A fly, when it exists, has as much being as God. -- Soren Kierkegaard
17511 Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural.
17512 We move between two darknesses.
17515 If you have not lived through something, it is not true. -- Kabir
17517 I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it. -- Gertrude Stein
17520 So bright in the eyes of those
17521 clutching at the thought of death.
17524 The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you,
17525 the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
17526 And only she who listens can speak.
17527 -- Dag Hammarskjold
17529 If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self,
17530 then ignorance is better than such knowledge.
17533 When the eye wakes up to see again,
17534 it suddenly stops taking anything for granted.
17535 -- Frederick Franck
17537 Only when we know little things do we know
17538 anything; doubt grows with knowledge.
17539 -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
17546 He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates,
17547 knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.
17550 Words are just like a man carrying a lamp to look for
17551 his property, by which he can say: this is my property.
17552 -- The Lankavatara Sutra
17555 of a good man's life,
17556 His little, nameless,
17558 Of kindness and love.
17559 -- William Wordsworth
17561 I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm
17562 some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself
17563 in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
17566 Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.
17570 The cries of the cicadas
17571 Sink into the rocks.
17574 We live in a rainbow of chaos. -- Paul Cezanne
17576 love's like a purple dinosaur because it can't outrun a truck,
17577 life's like a bowl of nixons sometimes you f*ck.
17580 Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
17581 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
17583 Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the
17584 imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
17587 We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not
17588 unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of
17589 thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what
17590 we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
17593 The playful kitten, with its pretty little tigerish gambols, is infinitely
17594 more amusing than half the people one is obliged to live with in the world.
17595 -- Lady Sydney Morgan
17597 The mystery of life is not a problem to be
17598 solved but a reality to be experienced.
17599 -- Aart Van Der Leeuw
17601 Have no designs on becoming a Buddha. This has nothing
17602 whatever to do with sitting or lying down.
17605 When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves,
17606 it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
17607 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
17609 We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big
17610 difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which,
17611 over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
17612 -- Marian Wright Edelman
17614 Golf is a good walk spoiled.
17617 The day we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. -- Seneca
17619 Life is stressful enough without customer service. -- Thomas Oliver
17621 To assume a cat's asleep is a grave mistake.
17622 He can close his eyes and keep both his ears awake.
17625 Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged
17626 in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
17629 The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received
17630 a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of
17631 its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found,
17632 men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined
17633 that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.
17634 -- John Stuart Mill
17636 You aren't a failure until you start blaming others for your mistakes.
17639 The master, Hseuh-feng, asked a newly arrived monk where
17640 he had come from. The monk answered: "From the Monastery of
17642 The master said, "In the daytime we have sunlight; in the
17643 evening, lamplight. What is spiritual light?"
17644 The monk had no answer.
17645 The Master said, "Sunlight. Lamplight."
17648 There is no wealth but life. -- John Ruskin
17650 Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it
17651 and there is no end. You can't know it, but you
17652 can be it, at ease in your own life.
17655 And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where
17656 we started and know the place for the first time.
17659 There's an old saying in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in
17660 Tennessee--that says: Fool me once, shame on [pause] shame on you.
17661 [Pause] Fool me [long, uncomfortable, agonizing pause] you can't get
17663 -- Bush at East Literature Magnet School in Nashville yesterday.
17665 Concentration is my motto--first honesty,
17666 then industry, then concentration.
17669 Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. -- Charles de Gaulle
17671 If you would make a man happy, do not add to his possessions but
17672 subtract from the sum of his desires.
17675 Live life like your hair is on fire. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
17677 City people have a hard time handling the silences when they first
17678 come out to the country. After a certain period of solitude, I myself
17679 experiencing an aloneness that is sometimes disturbing, but the country
17680 eventually cleanses my spirit and purges my body of the sounds, fumes and
17681 toxins of urban life. I think cities feed psychological stress and tension
17682 in many ways, including an overload of electrical forces and energy. When
17683 you go to a country cabin without electricity, you will be surprised at how
17684 tensions fall away.
17685 Some practitioners advocate that urban dwellers removed from the
17686 country find a space in the yard or the garden and dig a hole deep enough
17687 to enfold the body. Lie down in the hole. Make sure your body can lie just
17688 below the surface of the ground. Stay in this hollow of earth. You will be
17689 surprised how rested you will feel simply because you have escaped for a
17690 moment the man-made influences. You have retreated for a moment to Mother
17691 Earth's very simple electrical systems. For the chemical and electrical
17692 balance of the body to be calibrated, you have to stay close to the earth
17693 itself, align yourself with its polarity so that your body can find harmony
17694 between the interior world and the exterior universe.
17695 Once we become detached from nature, we begin to think we can do
17696 without it. The lights of the Great White Way overpower the stars. It is
17697 very hard to see the brightest constellation when you live in or near a
17698 city. The dark solitude of the country reunites you with the universe of
17699 the stars. The woods and hills restore in you something primal in yourself.
17700 The sea's pulse sets your own heartbeat.
17701 -- James Earl Jones, "Voices and Silences"
17703 Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
17706 i think i found my other leak now. and this was a frelling dumb one.
17707 somehow the deletion of the memory was commented out. wtf?
17708 arrrrrrrhhhh... i don't know what i'm doing....
17709 i hate the C and everything coded in it.
17712 When men are pure, laws are useless;
17713 when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
17714 -- Benjamin Disraeli
17716 Only the mediocre are always at their best. -- Jean Giraudoux
17718 If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome;
17719 if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent;
17720 if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
17723 He is indebted to his memory for his jests
17724 and to his imagination for his facts.
17725 -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
17727 If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
17728 arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the
17729 physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of
17730 poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
17733 As a public company, and as a CEO, you have to worry about the stock price
17734 to some extent. But you figure out after a while that there are very few
17735 things you can do in the short term that can positively impact stock price.
17736 If you build a great company, the value of the company goes up. That's very
17737 important for employees to realize coming out of this age of day trading,
17738 mass hysteria and "we're all going to be bazillionaires." You've got to get
17739 people saying: "Why are we really here?" Well, we're here to build a great
17740 company. That takes time. You may have a great day today and the stock goes
17741 down, and you may have a horrible day tomorrow and the stock goes up. Short
17742 term, they don't have a lot to do with each other. But over a long period of
17743 time you build a great company, and it's going to be worth a lot. Customers
17744 will reward it. Shareholders will reward it. Employees will want to be a
17745 part of it and beat our door down to want to work here.
17746 -- Michael Dell, Founder of Dell Computers
17748 Cats have the gift of appearing at ease in any situation--high, low or
17749 anywhere in between.
17752 I am no more humble than my talents require. -- Oscar Levant
17754 Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
17755 -- Albert Schweitzer
17757 It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there
17758 is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.
17761 The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by. -- Chuang-Tzu
17763 I would patch them, but I have not a half-sheet of paper.
17764 Ah, well--at least torn windows don't need to be pushed open.
17765 The blowing wind puts out my lamp.
17766 Rain falling from the eaves wets my inkstone.
17769 The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
17770 Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
17773 I tell you: one must still have chaos in one,
17774 to give birth to a dancing star.
17775 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
17778 the frog is growing old now--
17779 among fallen leaves.
17782 Consciousness is a being,
17783 the nature of which
17784 is to be conscious of
17785 the nothingness of its being.
17786 -- Jean-Paul Sartre
17788 Since it is all too clear,
17789 It takes time to grasp it.
17790 When you understand that it's foolish
17791 To look for fire with fire,
17792 The meal is already cooked.
17795 May you live all the days of your life. -- Jonathan Swift
17797 How could there be any question of acquiring
17798 or possessing, when the one thing needful for
17799 a man is to /become/--to /be/ at last, and to die
17800 in the fullness of his being.
17801 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
17803 Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us;
17804 for while we exist death is not present,
17805 and when death is present we no longer exist.
17808 Singing and dancing are the voice of dharma. -- Hakuin
17810 All great truths begin as blasphemies. -- George Bernard Shaw
17812 Hope is not a strategy. -- Thomas McInerney
17814 I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month,
17815 and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
17816 -- Thomas Jefferson
17818 As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now
17819 to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
17822 Sometimes the veil between human and animal intelligence wears
17823 very thin--then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping
17824 a cat, or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat.
17825 -- Catherine Manley
17827 I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the
17828 roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single
17829 thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
17832 One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the
17833 belief that one's work is terribly important.
17834 -- Bertrand Russell
17836 The universality of change, when completely understood, is the seeing
17837 into the heart of all things, and the Mind that thus understands is
17838 the Mind that truly seeks the way.
17841 The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun,
17842 in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.
17845 To free oneself is nothing--the really arduous task is to
17846 know what to do with one's freedom.
17849 I hate women because they always know where things are. -- James Thurber
17851 I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting. -- Mark Twain
17853 Be careful about reading health books.
17854 You may die of a misprint.
17857 Autumn, cloud blades on the horizon.
17858 The west wind blows from ten thousand miles.
17859 Dawn, in the clear morning air.
17860 Farmers busy after long rain.
17861 The desert trees shed their few green leaves.
17862 The mountain pears are tiny but ripe.
17863 A Tartar flute plays by the city gate.
17864 A single wild goose climbs into the void.
17867 When you get there, there isn't any there there. -- Gertrude Stein
17869 I want to sing like birds sing,
17870 not worrying who hears or what they think.
17873 The practice of zazen is not
17874 for gaining a mystical mind.
17875 Zazen is for allowing a clear mind--
17876 as clear as a bright autumn day.
17879 ... and he was almighty because he had wrenched
17880 from chaos the secret of its nothingness.
17881 -- Jean-Paul Sartre
17883 Practice thirty more years. -- Zen proverb
17885 Student: "Roshi, what are you doing here?"
17886 Suzuki-roshi: "Nothing special."
17889 After the leaves fall in the village at the foot of Ogura Peak,
17890 one can see through the tree branches the moon shining in the clear.
17893 Chaos often breeds life, where order breeds habit.
17896 You yourselves must make the exertion.
17897 The Buddhas are only teachers.
17898 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
17900 Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words,
17901 and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your
17902 light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will
17903 drop away, and your original face will be manifest.
17906 Next time you have a bad day, imagine this: You are a Siamese twin.
17907 Your brother that is attached to you at the shoulder is gay.
17908 You are not. But you only have one ass.
17910 From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition
17911 is something up with which I will not put.
17912 -- Winston Churchill
17914 The meaning of life is to see. -- Hui-Neng
17916 Fundamentally not one thing exists. -- Hui-Neng
17918 In the blue heavens, cold geese calling.
17919 On the empty hills, leaves flying.
17922 When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
17923 -- George Bernard Shaw
17925 An intense love of solitude, distaste for involvement in worldly
17926 affairs, persistence in knowing the Self and awareness of the goal
17927 of knowing--all this is called true knowledge.
17928 -- The Bhagavad Gita
17930 Some people are born to lift heavy weights.
17931 Some are born to juggle with golden balls.
17934 Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for
17935 example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
17936 -- Lawrence J. Peter
17938 Smokey the Bear Sutra
17940 Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
17941 the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
17942 Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
17943 and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
17944 the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
17945 to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a
17946 seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning
17947 Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
17949 "In some future time, there will be a continent called
17950 America. It will have great centers of power called
17951 such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur,
17952 Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels
17953 such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon
17954 The human race in that era will get into troubles all over
17955 its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of
17956 its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature."
17958 "The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings
17959 of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth.
17960 My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and
17961 granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that
17962 future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure
17963 the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger:
17964 and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."
17966 And he showed himself in his true form of
17970 a.. A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs,
17971 showing that he is aroused and
17974 b.. Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath
17975 appearances; cuts the roots of useless
17976 attach- ments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
17978 c.. His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display -- indicating that all
17979 creatures have the full right to live to
17980 their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and
17981 lizards all grow in the realm of the
17984 d.. Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the
17985 countless men oppressed by a
17986 civilization that claims to save but often destroys;
17988 e.. Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that
17989 guard the Wilderness, which is the
17990 Natural State of the Dharma and the True Path of man on earth: all true
17991 paths lead through mountains --
17993 f.. With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the
17994 kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of
17995 those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is
17996 contained vast and free in the Blue Sky
17997 and Green Earth of One Mind;
17999 g.. Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has
18000 food enough for everyone who loves her
18003 h.. Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing
18004 the worms of capitalism and
18007 i.. Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses,
18008 canned foods, universities, and shoes;
18009 master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and
18010 fearlessly chop down the rotten
18011 trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn
18012 the leftover trash.
18014 Wrathful but Calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will
18015 Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or
18018 HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
18020 Thus his great Mantra:
18022 Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana
18023 Sphataya hum traks ham nam
18025 "I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND
18026 BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED"
18028 And he will protect those who love woods and rivers,
18029 Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick
18030 people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:
18032 And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television,
18033 or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:
18040 And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out
18041 with his vajra-shovel.
18043 a.. Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice
18044 willl accumulate merit as countless as the
18045 sands of Arizona and Nevada.
18047 b.. Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
18049 c.. Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
18051 d.. Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
18053 e.. Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a
18054 pine tree to sit at.
18056 f.. AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.
18058 thus have we heard.
18060 I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a
18061 nice letter saying that I approved of it.
18064 We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. -- Annie Dillard
18066 Today is the eighth of the month, tomorrow is the thirteenth. -- Zen proverb
18068 Often I am still listening when the song is over.
18069 -- Marquis de Saint-Lambert
18071 Worldly acquisitions of wealth and the need of clinging to them, as well as
18072 the pursuit of the Eight Worldly Aims, I regard with as much loathing and
18073 disgust as a man who is suffering from biliousness regardeth the sight of
18074 rich food. Nay, I regard them as if they were the murderers of my father;
18075 therefore it is that I am assuming this beggarly and penurious mode of life.
18083 Maturity is only a short break in adolescence. -- Jules Feiffer
18085 It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker
18086 that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
18089 Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
18090 that we have to alter it every six months.
18093 Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who
18094 can't talk for people who can't read.
18097 Bodhidharma sat facing the wall. The Second Patriarch, after standing
18098 outside in the snow for so long, cut off his arm. "My mind is not yet
18099 at peace. Please, Master, put my mind at peace."
18100 Bodhidharma said: "Bring me your mind and I will pacify it for you."
18101 The Second Patriarch replied: "Although I have searched for my mind,
18102 it is totally ungraspable."
18103 Bodhidharma said: "In that case I have pacified your mind for you."
18105 Explanation of the unspeakable cannot be finished. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
18107 We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness.
18110 Since it is the practice of enlightenment,
18111 that practice has no beginning and
18112 since it is enlightenment within the practice,
18113 that realization has no end.
18116 The quieter you become, the more you can hear. -- Baba Ram Dass
18118 As long as you seek for something, you will get
18119 the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
18122 Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least
18123 triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to
18124 recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
18125 -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
18127 I love being married. It's so great to find that one
18128 special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
18131 I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
18134 A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. -- Robertson Davies
18136 At this point in history genius has become
18137 a commodity, an ambition, even a lifestyle.
18140 A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. -- Jean le Carre
18142 Martyrdom is the only way in which a
18143 man can become famous without ability.
18144 -- George Bernard Shaw
18146 For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
18147 For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
18148 -- Christopher Smart
18150 It's not autumn's cold that keeps me awake,
18151 but what I feel before the grasses and trees in my courtyard.
18152 My banana tree has lost its leaves; my parasol tree is old;
18153 and night after night--the sound of wind, the sound of rain.
18156 I believe in an ultimate decency of things. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
18163 We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye
18164 which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything.
18165 That is to understand Zen.
18168 Yes it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth
18169 sometimes comes to the top.
18172 Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing. -- Paul Valery
18174 The cat was a creature of absolute convictions,
18175 and his faith in his deductions never varied.
18176 -- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
18178 Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay
18179 any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose
18180 any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
18183 With Henry Adams we see the moment when the pronouncements
18184 of philosophers ceased to be greeted with forehead slaps of
18185 recognition or shouts of "Heretic!" and began to be met
18186 with mumbles of "Oh, shut up."
18189 The nature of mind, when understood, no human words can
18190 compass or disclose. Enlightenment is naught to be obtained,
18191 and he that gains it does not say he knows.
18194 As long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,
18195 you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
18196 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
18198 Nirvana is right here, before our eyes. -- Hakuin
18200 It is the stars not known to science that I would know,
18201 the stars which the lonely traveler knows.
18202 -- Henry David Thoreau
18204 You've got to take the bitter with the sour. -- Sam Goldwyn
18206 And a man shall be free, and as pure as the day prior to
18207 his conception in his mother's womb, when he has nothing,
18208 wants nothing and knows nothing.
18211 Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything they do not make clear.
18214 Outside mind there is no Buddha,
18215 Outside Buddha there is no mind.
18218 They are ill discoverers that think there is no land,
18219 when they can see nothing but sea.
18220 -- Sir Francis Bacon
18222 My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be
18223 invented so he could hate that too.
18226 Opportunity is missed by most people because
18227 it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
18228 -- Thomas Alva Edison
18230 Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -- Benjamin Franklin
18232 When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus,
18233 it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV
18234 has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
18235 -- Edward R. Murrow
18237 In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
18240 The art of medicine consists in amusing the
18241 patient while nature cures the disease.
18244 I am enlightened, and always have been, simultaneously
18245 with the beginning of the universe.
18246 -- The Buddha, first words after realizing the truth
18248 A billion stars go spinning through the night,
18249 blazing high above your head.
18250 But in you is the presence that will be,
18251 when the stars are dead.
18252 -- Rainer Maria Rilke
18254 The goal of Buddhism is to bring about right human life, not to have
18255 the teaching, or teacher, or sentient beings, or Buddhism, or Buddha.
18256 But if you think that without any training you can have that kind of
18257 life, that is a big mistake.
18260 So much of what we call management consists
18261 in making it difficult for people to work.
18264 People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
18267 Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
18268 acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
18269 -- W. Somerset Maugham
18271 Everything you know is wrong. -- Firesign Theatre
18273 One day Yuan-wu took the high seat, and said:
18274 A monk asked Yun-men: 'Where did all the buddhas come from?'
18275 Yun-men answered: 'The East Mountain walks over the water.'
18276 But if I were asked, I would not answer that way.
18277 I would say: 'A fragrant breeze comes of itself from the south,
18278 and in the palace a refreshing coolness stirs.'
18281 I would believe only in a god who could dance. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
18283 The moon floats above the pines, and the night veranda is cold as the
18284 ancient, clear sound comes from your finger tips. The old melody usually
18285 makes the listeners weep, but Zen music is beyond sentiment. Do not play
18286 again unless the Great Sound of Lao-tzu accompanies you.
18289 Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. -- Oscar Wilde
18291 Logically considered, Zen may be full of contradictions and repetitions.
18292 But as it stands above all things, it goes serenely on its own way.
18295 Clouds come from time to time--and bring a chance
18296 to rest from looking at the moon.
18299 Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself.
18300 Stop looking in the other way of looking.
18303 Do not be an embodiment of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes;
18304 do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom.
18305 Wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received
18306 from Heaven but do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty, that
18307 is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror--going after nothing,
18308 welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.
18311 In the end, everything is a gag. -- Charlie Chaplin
18313 One can not be certain of living
18314 even into the evening.
18315 In the dim first light
18317 from a departing boat.
18320 The truth dazzles gradually, or else the world would be blind.
18323 All things in this world are impermanent.
18324 They have the nature to rise and pass away.
18325 To be in harmony with this truth brings true happiness.
18328 True words always seem paradoxical but no other form
18329 of teaching can take their place.
18332 Did you not know that at the edge of a deep valley there is an excellent
18333 pine tree growing up straight in spite of the many years of cold?
18336 Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
18339 In a snowfall that covers the winter grass
18340 a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear.
18343 Settle the self on the self. -- Shunryu Suzuki
18345 Finished, finished...
18346 when it is completely finished
18347 there is nothing to finish.
18350 I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. -- Tom Stoppard
18352 Which is the more beautiful, feline movement or feline stillness?
18353 -- Elizabeth Hamilton
18355 We cannot speak without incurring some risk, at least in theory;
18356 the only way of being absolutely safe is to say nothing.
18359 Numerous studies demonstrate that people can be motivated to creativity
18360 simply with the addition of an instruction to "be creative."
18361 -- Richard Saul Wurman
18363 Our obsessions with history and prophecy perhaps reflect an inability
18364 to comprehend the implications of geological time. The mind's traditional
18365 organization of duration into past, present, and future really has more
18366 relevance to the five-thousand-year-old earth of the seventeenth century
18367 than it does to the five-billion-year-old one of the twentieth. Past and
18368 future require certain limitations and symmetries to be meaningful--there
18369 must be a plot or at least a story. But time is really not much like a
18370 story. It is more like an ocean current that rises from imperfectly
18371 perceived depths and flows into unseen distances.
18372 This immensity might seem to diminish the present--the living moment--
18373 to utter insignificance, but actually the present looms much larger in
18374 geological time than in historical time. If time is a story, the present
18375 is merely a hiatus between the significant events that were and will be.
18376 If time is an ocean, however, the present is not less important than the
18377 other moments, which stretch away on all sides, any more than a single
18378 water molecule in an ocean is less important than the others. In a sense
18379 each living moment is the whole of time--an eternal present--because it
18380 can't be set apart from all the other moments.
18381 -- David Rains Wallace, from "Idle Weeds"
18383 Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
18384 -- Henry David Thoreau
18386 We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we
18387 discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
18390 You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
18393 Television has raised writing to a new low. -- Samuel Goldwyn
18395 I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue
18396 that I shall some day die, which is not so.
18399 People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
18402 He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
18405 If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he
18406 has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better
18407 public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
18410 i have eliminated every fault,
18411 except for pride...
18412 doomed to walk the earth
18416 In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. -- Laurence J. Peter
18418 Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matters of
18419 great concern should be treated lightly." Master Ittei commented, "Matters
18420 of small concern should be treated seriously." Among one's affairs there
18421 should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great
18422 concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be
18423 understood. Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly
18424 when the time comes is what this is all about. To face an event and solve
18425 it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will
18426 always be uncertainty in hitting your mark. However, if the foundation is
18427 laid previously, you can think of the saying, "Matters of great concern
18428 should be treated lightly," as your basis for action.
18429 -- Hagakure, book of the samurai
18431 There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with
18432 a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road.
18433 But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still
18434 get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be
18435 perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding
18436 extends to everything.
18437 -- Hagakure, book of the samurai
18439 I deserve good things.
18440 I am entitled to my share of happiness.
18441 I refuse to beat myself up.
18442 I am attractive person.
18443 I am fun to be with.
18446 The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous,
18447 the sensible man hardly anything.
18450 In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.
18451 -- Lawrence Summers
18453 I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the
18454 river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.
18455 I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the
18456 starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and
18457 brotherhood can never become a reality.
18458 I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must
18459 spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear
18460 destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will
18461 have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is
18462 stronger than evil triumphant.
18463 I believe that even amid today's motor bursts and whining bullets,
18464 there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded
18465 justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can
18466 be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of
18468 I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three
18469 meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and
18470 dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what
18471 self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still
18472 believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be
18473 crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive
18474 goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.
18475 -- Martin Luther King, Jr
18477 Every increased possession loads us with new weariness. -- John Ruskin
18479 If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind,
18480 what is the significance of a clean desk?
18481 -- Lawrence J. Peter
18483 I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
18486 I am not young enough to know everything. -- Oscar Wilde
18488 I had never held a position for more than four years,
18489 and did not so much plan my new jobs as flee my old ones.
18492 It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
18493 -- The White Queen, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
18495 I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by
18496 the animosities he excites among his opponents.
18497 -- Winston Churchill
18499 All things are difficult before they are easy. -- Thomas Fuller
18501 There's no business like show business, but
18502 there are several businesses like accounting.
18505 All truth passes through three stages.
18506 First, it is ridiculed.
18507 Second, it is violently opposed.
18508 Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
18509 -- Arthur Schopenhauer
18511 Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence
18512 but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to
18513 shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
18514 -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
18516 Talent is like the battery in a car. It'll get you started,
18517 but if the generator is bad, you don't go very far.
18520 No man ever listened himself out of a job. -- Calvin Coolidge
18522 I was unable to devote myself to the learning of this algebra and the continued
18523 concentration upon it, because of obstacles in the vagaries of time which
18524 hindered me; for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for
18525 a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to
18526 snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep, to devote themselves meanwhile to
18527 the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who
18528 imitate philosophers confuse the true with the false, and they do nothing but
18529 deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what they know of the
18530 sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see a certain
18531 person seeking for the right and preferring the truth, doing his best to refute
18532 the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, they make a fool
18533 of him and mock him.
18534 -- Omar Khayyam, "Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra"
18536 It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. -- Aeschylus
18538 Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good.
18539 It would be the end of everything we know.
18542 Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers
18543 at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ.
18544 -- Nicholas Negroponte
18546 We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.
18549 California is a fine place to live--if you happen to be an orange.
18552 Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.
18555 It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both
18556 incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted
18557 by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
18560 All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They
18561 never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced
18562 on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
18565 The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often
18566 talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing.
18569 The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
18570 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
18572 Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. -- H. G. Wells
18574 Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that,
18575 once it is competently programmed and working smoothly,
18576 it is completely honest.
18579 Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by
18580 confessing our parents' shortcomings.
18581 -- Laurence J. Peter
18583 No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing
18584 when they are feeling sensible.
18587 All truths are easy to understand once they are
18588 discovered; the point is to discover them.
18591 We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential.
18592 Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
18595 Considering how dangerous everything is,
18596 nothing is really very frightening.
18599 A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude
18600 without providing you with company.
18601 -- Gian Vincenzo Gravina
18603 What the world needs is more geniuses with humility.
18604 There are so few of us left.
18607 In the end, we will remember not the words of
18608 our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
18609 -- Martin Luther King
18611 Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the
18612 living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children,
18613 and by children to adults.
18616 You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience.
18617 -- Stanislaw W. Lec
18619 I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind!
18620 The answer is 12? I think I'm in the wrong building.
18621 -- Charles M. Schulz in "Peanuts"
18623 The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who
18624 hate me away from those who are still undecided.
18627 What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
18630 People who've never fired a gun ("weapon", in Army-talk) explain "fire power"
18631 realities. Nobody--yet--would pretend to be an expert on brain surgery. But
18632 military tactics and modern warfare? What could be easier, right?
18633 -- Kenneth G. Robinson
18635 When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
18636 -- William Wrigley Jr.
18638 Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an
18639 international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
18640 -- George Bernard Shaw
18642 Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
18645 A well-laid business plan is no guarantee against the
18646 disappearance of the industry on which it is based.
18649 The way to protect human freedom is to make sure that your society is one
18650 in which the benefits of being a member of the society are so tempting and
18651 so great that people will take responsibility in order for it to happen.
18654 Technology seems to always start out promising specialization and
18655 personalization. In the end, it delivers more homogenization instead.
18658 Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
18659 -- Thomas H. Huxley
18661 Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. -- Frank Zappa
18663 Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence
18664 as you can find outside an advertising agency.
18665 -- Raymond Chandler
18667 The only way to discover the limits of the possible
18668 is to go beyond them into the impossible.
18671 Life is full of misery, loneliness, and
18672 suffering--and it's all over much too soon.
18675 An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
18678 The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
18681 In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen;
18682 in small things they show themselves as they are.
18683 -- Nicholas Chamfort
18685 Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us. -- Charles Kingsley
18687 There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them. The education system
18688 in this country is just terrible, and we're not doing anything about it.
18691 Each of us inevitable; each of us limitless--
18692 each of us with his or her right upon the earth.
18695 In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the
18696 world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
18697 -- Sir William Osler
18699 It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept
18700 anything but the best, you very often get it.
18701 -- W. Somerset Maugham
18703 Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to,
18704 with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
18707 We have a natural opportunity to investigate the connections
18708 of a problem when looking back at its solution.
18711 Money teaches us to count, but science, inasmuch as it is
18712 not governed by money, might yet teach us to think.
18713 -- Christopher M. Kelty
18715 Painting, like flipping burgers or shearing sheep, is physical labor. It is
18716 enough nowadays to declare yourself an artist and then to declare some artifact
18717 in the vast world of found objects to be *your* work of art.
18720 The art of creation is older than the art of killing. -- Ed Koch
18722 In wisdom gathered over time I have found that
18723 every experience is a form of exploration.
18726 Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority
18727 uses not his understanding but his memory.
18728 -- Leonardo Da Vinci
18730 We've had a taste of Siemens before in the past. -- Bonafide PHB
18732 The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well
18733 as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
18736 A guilty conscience needs to confess.
18737 A work of art is a confession.
18740 When I examine myself and my methods of thought,
18741 I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy
18742 has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing
18743 positive knowledge.
18746 A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
18747 -- Laurence J. Peter
18749 No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into
18750 account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
18753 We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not
18754 the sole relation of human beings.
18757 No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
18758 His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his
18759 relation to the dead poets and artists.
18762 There's a moment coming. It's not here yet. It's still on the way.
18763 It's in the future. It hasn't arrived. Here it comes.
18764 Here it is... It's gone.
18767 Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art;
18768 it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
18771 It is easy to spot an informed man--
18772 his opinions are just like your own.
18773 -- Miguel de Unamuno
18775 If you see in any given situation only what everybody else
18776 can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of
18777 your culture that you are a victim of it.
18780 If you are going through hell, keep going. -- Winston Churchill
18782 The Founders of the American nation were one of the most creative
18783 groups in modern history. Some among them, especially in recent years,
18784 have been condemned for their failures and weaknesses--for their racism,
18785 sexism, compromises, and violations of principle. And indeed moral
18786 judgments are as necessary in assessing the lives of these people as of
18787 any others. But we are privileged to know and to benefit from the outcome
18788 of their efforts, which they could only hopefully imagine, and ignore their
18789 main concern: which was the possibility, indeed the probability, that their
18790 creative enterprise--not to recast the social order but to transform the
18791 political system--would fail: would collapse into chaos or autocracy.
18792 Again and again they were warned of the folly of defying the received
18793 traditions, the sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer
18794 borderlands of European civilization, knew better than the established
18795 authorities that ruled them; that they could successfully create something
18796 freer, ultimately more enduring than what was then known in the centers of
18798 Since we inherit and build on their achievements, we now know what the
18799 established world of the eighteenth century flatly denied but which they
18800 broke through convention to propose -- that absolute power need not be
18801 indivisible but can be shared among states within a state and among
18802 branches of government, and that the sharing of power and the balancing of
18803 forces can create not anarchy but freedom.
18804 We know for certain what they could only experimentally and prayerfully
18805 propose--that formal, written constitutions, upheld by judicial bodies, can
18806 effectively constrain the tyrannies of both executive force and populist
18808 We know, because they had the imagination to perceive it, that there
18809 is a sense, mysterious as it may be, in which human rights can be seen to
18810 exist independent of privileges, gifts, and donations of the powerful, and
18811 that these rights can somehow be defined and protected by the force of law.
18812 We casually assume, because they were somehow able to imagine, that
18813 the exercise of power is no natural birthright but must be a gift of those
18814 who are subject to it."
18815 -- Bernard Bailyn, from "To Begin The World Anew: The Genius and
18816 Ambiguities of the American Founders
18818 Discretion in speech is more than eloquence. -- Francis Bacon
18820 I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that
18821 I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
18824 I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep
18825 contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could
18826 share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.
18827 It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill
18828 of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping
18829 forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
18830 -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
18832 Another cause of your sickness, and the most important:
18833 you have forgotten what you are.
18836 All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of
18837 their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible,
18838 exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
18839 One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on
18840 by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
18843 When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.
18844 -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
18846 Did you ever see dishonest calluses on a man's hands? Hardly.
18847 When a man's hands are callused and women's hands are worn,
18848 you may be sure honesty is there. That's more than you can
18849 say about many soft white hands.
18852 The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which
18853 a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
18856 The American invents
18857 as the Greek chiseled,
18858 as the Venetian painted,
18859 as the modern Italian sings.
18862 If it's mechanical, has tits, or wheels, it will give you trouble.
18865 Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
18868 A small nose means a small penis. Small noses make for difficult breathing
18869 and small penises make for difficulty breeding.
18872 Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running
18873 on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes
18874 on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never
18875 stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
18876 -- Jean Baudrillard
18878 Every man bears in himself the germs of every human quality;
18879 but sometimes one quality manifests itself, sometimes another,
18880 and the man often becomes unlike himself,
18881 while still remaining the same man.
18884 You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
18887 If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
18888 -- Professor Irwin Corey
18890 When you wish to instruct be brief--so that people's minds can
18891 quickly grasp what you have to say, understand your point, and
18892 retain it accurately. Unnecessary words just spill over the
18893 side of a mind already crammed to the full.
18896 I just don't understand why anyone is unable to realize what a disaster
18897 a meeting is for a business. Never meet. If it can't be settled in a
18898 five minute conversation, it's probably insoluble no matter how many
18899 people talk about it for however long.
18902 Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. -- Sholem Asch
18905 led by the unknowing,
18906 are doing the impossible
18907 for the ungrateful.
18908 We have done so much for so long with so little
18909 We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
18910 -- Blue Collar Lament
18912 Endure, and save yourself for happier times. -- Virgil
18914 I don't think being funny is anyone's first choice. -- Woody Allen
18916 i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly
18917 spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
18918 which is natural which is infinite which is yes
18921 None but myself ever did me any harm. I was, I may say, the only enemy to
18922 myself: my own projects, that expedition to Moscow, and the accidents which
18923 happened there, were the causes of my fall. I must say, though, that those
18924 who failed to oppose me, who readily agreed with me, accepted all my views,
18925 and yielded easily to my opinions, were those who did me the most injury,
18926 and were my worst enemies, because, by surrendering to me so easily, they
18927 encouraged me to go too far... I was then too powerful for any man, except
18928 myself, to injure me.
18929 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
18931 If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better
18932 mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the
18933 world will make a beaten path to his door.
18934 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, attributed by Sarah B. Yule, Borrowings, 1889
18936 Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
18937 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18939 All conservatives are such from personal defects.
18940 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18942 The reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which
18943 protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
18944 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18946 We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
18947 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18949 The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
18950 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18952 Fame is proof that people are gullible.
18953 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18955 What is the hardest task in the world? To think....
18956 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
18958 The greatest discovery of any generation is that a
18959 human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.
18962 Were we perfectly acquainted with the object,
18963 we should never passionately desire it.
18964 -- Francois De La Rochefoucauld
18966 The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot
18967 stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.
18970 There were two "Reigns of Terror", if we could but remember and consider it;
18971 the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood;
18972 the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one
18973 inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million;
18974 but our shudders are all for the horrors of the momentary Terror, so to
18975 speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with
18976 lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city
18977 cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have
18978 all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France
18979 could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that
18980 unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see
18981 in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
18984 You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
18987 To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable. -- John Adams
18989 In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
18990 In practice, there is.
18993 The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy,
18994 chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly
18995 photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
18998 Literature is the art of writing something that will be
18999 read twice; journalism what will be read once.
19002 It takes at least a couple of decades to realize that you were well taught.
19003 All true education is a delayed-action bomb assembled in the classroom for
19004 explosion at a later date. An educational fuse of 50 years long is by no
19006 -- Kenneth D. Gangel
19008 When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy,
19009 it ceases to be a subject of interest.
19012 Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the
19013 industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
19016 An author is a fool who, not content with boring those
19017 he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
19018 -- Charles de Montesquieu
19020 Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you
19021 don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's
19022 a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
19025 If knowledge can create problems, it is not through
19026 ignorance that we can solve them.
19029 A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. -- Sir Francis Bacon
19031 The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
19032 And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little
19033 we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our
19034 thoughts and deeds.
19037 People who are unhappy with the way things are tend to remain unhappy
19038 even after they have changed them. The nature of their unhappiness
19039 is such that change does not slake it.
19042 The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
19043 production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
19044 draws all nations into civilization.
19047 I learned one really sad fact from my career as a columnist: nobody changes
19048 their mind about anything. Ever. Once we form the opinion, we become
19049 evidence processors and we just collect all the evidence that supports our
19050 opinion and reject all the evidence that disputes it.
19053 I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first
19054 dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
19057 The end of the road map is a cliff that both sides will fall off.
19058 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, on the Mideast peace effort, 2003.
19060 Once we admit that there is room for newness--that there are vastly more
19061 conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes--we must confront the fact
19062 that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular
19063 justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrary
19064 small perturbations along the way could have made the world as we know it
19065 turn out very differently.
19068 Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be
19069 sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
19070 -- Robert Louis Stevenson
19072 All human beings should try to learn before they die
19073 what they are running from, and to, and why.
19076 The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the
19077 world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
19080 All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really
19081 happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all
19082 that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and
19083 the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places
19084 and how the weather was.
19085 -- Ernest Hemingway
19087 The true conquests, the only ones that leave no regret,
19088 are those that have been wrested from ignorance.
19089 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
19091 No love, no friendship can cross the path of our
19092 destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
19093 -- Francois Mauriac
19095 Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic
19096 wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
19097 -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
19099 A thick skin is a gift from God. -- Konrad Adenauer
19101 Far from idleness being the root of all evil,
19102 it is rather the only true good.
19103 -- Soren Kierkegaard
19105 It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
19106 -- Logan Pearsall Smith
19108 The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. -- Anais Nin
19110 Everything is practice. -- Pele
19112 However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in
19113 the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we
19114 imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of
19115 ourselves in their words.
19118 It is astonishing what you can do when you have
19119 a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance.
19120 -- Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
19122 The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
19123 -- G. K. Chesterton
19125 If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex? -- Art Hoppe
19127 For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes,
19128 new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.
19131 A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king,
19132 and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
19135 Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution. -- Karl Kraus
19137 Love demands infinitely less than friendship. -- George Jean Nathan
19139 People only see what they are prepared to see. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
19141 We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one
19142 dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are
19143 relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past,
19144 present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in
19145 the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
19148 I hate house work! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months
19149 later you have to start all over again.
19152 The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only
19153 a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and
19154 deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the
19155 man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
19158 If a man watches three football games in a row
19159 he should be declared legally dead.
19162 To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at. -- Claude Monet
19164 Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence,
19165 by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and
19166 rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life.
19167 Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and
19168 scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
19171 Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible
19172 wellspring of intellectual progress.
19173 -- Reinhart Koselleck
19175 Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing
19176 how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
19179 George Orwell, on why someone might write a book...
19181 1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered
19182 after death, to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood,
19183 etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong
19184 one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians,
19185 lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen-in short, with the whole top crust
19186 of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After
19187 the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition and live chiefly for
19188 others or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority
19189 of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the
19190 end, and writers belong to this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on
19191 the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested
19193 2. Esthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on
19194 the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact
19195 of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good
19196 story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not
19197 to be missed. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from
19198 esthetic considerations.
19199 3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true
19200 facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
19201 4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible
19202 sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other
19203 people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once
19204 again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art
19205 should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
19207 The only true exploration, the only real Fountain of Youth, will not be
19208 in visiting foreign lands, but in having other eyes, in looking at the
19209 universe through the eyes of others.
19212 They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
19215 To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it. -- Cicero
19217 Nobody ever died of laughter. -- Max Beerbohm
19219 A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for. -- W. C. Fields
19221 Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks
19222 only when driven to speech by something outside himself--like,
19223 for instance, he can't find any clean socks.
19226 Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all-time thing. You don't win
19227 once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them
19228 right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
19231 It is by logic that we prove but by intuition that we discover.
19234 Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win,
19235 by fearing to attempt.
19236 -- William Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure"
19238 Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom
19239 of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
19242 Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules.
19243 They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin
19244 that won't heal because there's not enough material.
19245 -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
19247 One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with
19248 gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is
19249 so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for
19250 the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
19253 Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute. -- Josh Billings
19255 One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before
19256 you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
19257 -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
19259 When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision,
19260 then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
19263 Fascism should more properly be called corporatism,
19264 since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
19265 -- Benito Mussolini
19267 Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. -- Ovid
19269 There is hardly anything in the world that some men cannot make a little
19270 bit worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price
19271 only are this man's lawful prey.
19274 The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey
19275 a kingdom and note the results in maps, but all the savants in the world
19276 could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.
19279 Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
19282 Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
19285 One important key to success is self-confidence.
19286 An important key to self-confidence is preparation.
19289 If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will
19290 change a past or future event, then you are residing on another
19291 planet with a different reality system.
19294 As people grow up, they change brands. -- Al Ries
19296 If there is just one beam of sunshine coming into a room,
19297 you can be sure that the cat is lazing in its heat.
19298 -- Stuart and Linda MacFarlane
19300 If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.
19303 If the human race wishes to have prolonged and indefinite period
19304 of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful
19305 and helpful way toward one another.
19306 -- Winston Churchill
19308 All charming people have something to conceal, usually
19309 their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
19312 Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break
19313 down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and
19314 at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday.
19315 -- Christopher Hitchens
19317 Try to be one of the people on whom nothing gets lost. -- Henry James
19319 If a man hasn't discovered something that
19320 he would die for, he isn't fit to live.
19321 -- Martin Luther King Jr.
19323 The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of
19324 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
19327 Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
19330 I am happy to engage in discussion with those who accept that technology and
19331 affluence are a net plus, but who worry about their troubling side effects.
19332 Spare me, however, the sensitive souls who deplore technological advance and
19333 economic growth over their cell phones on their way to the airport.
19336 There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish
19337 together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
19338 -- Sir Thomas Beecham
19340 The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
19341 -- Laurence J. Peter
19343 The universe is full of magical things patiently
19344 waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
19347 Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the
19348 usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and
19349 nobody thinks of complaining.
19352 My life needs editing. -- Mort Sahl
19354 Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. -- Emile Coue
19356 Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
19357 opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-
19358 seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
19359 -- Flannery O'Connor
19361 There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible
19362 woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.
19365 There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
19366 things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that
19367 he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.
19370 Adults are obsolete children. -- Dr. Seuss
19372 Barbie would also be tired of Microsoft's licensing bullsh*t.
19373 -- Maury Cesterino, Chief Software Architect, Mattel, Inc.
19375 When we drink, we get drunk. When we get drunk, we fall asleep. When we
19376 fall asleep, we commit no sin. When we commit no sin, we go to heaven.
19377 Sooooo, let's all get drunk and go to heaven!
19380 A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
19381 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
19383 Allowing a schizophrenic in a cowboy costume to represent himself in a
19384 death penalty case gives new meaning to the term "frontier justice."
19385 -- Jim Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service.
19387 Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves
19388 you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
19391 Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth
19392 and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the
19393 adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
19396 Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
19397 -- Martin Luther King
19399 Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. -- Anais Nin
19401 Freedom is the sure possession of those alone
19402 who have the courage to defend it.
19405 Psychoanalysis is that spiritual disease of
19406 which it considers itself to be the cure.
19409 Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and
19410 boring repetition--a teacher, it has been said, never says
19411 anything once--interrupted only occasionally by moments of
19412 always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that
19413 I don't think I learned a thing from my students, except that,
19414 as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the
19415 change in my pocket.
19418 All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history,
19419 novels, art would be ineffectual.
19420 -- Honore de Balzac
19422 We do not sit in such-and-such a way because a carpenter has built
19423 a chair in such-and-such a way; rather, the carpenter makes the chair
19424 as he does because someone wants to sit that way.
19427 No brilliance is required in law, just common sense
19428 and relatively clean fingernails.
19431 Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. -- Seneca
19433 True friends stab you in the front. -- Oscar Wilde
19435 Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice. -- Henry Ford
19437 Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life.
19438 The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for
19442 Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
19445 Life need not be easy provided only that it is not empty. -- Lise Meitner
19447 Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists.
19450 No more frisking as of old,
19451 Or chasing his shadow over the lawn,
19452 But a dignified old person, tickling
19453 His nose against twig or flower in the border,
19454 Until evening falls and bed-time's in order...
19455 My cat and I grow old together.
19458 Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken
19459 in too large quantities.
19462 The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and
19463 mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
19464 -- Thomas A. Edison
19466 Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative
19467 pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little
19468 falls into lazy habits of thinking.
19471 Engineering can be seen as a family of paths crossing a solution space--in
19472 this case a space defined by all the possible arrangements and combinations
19473 of geometry, time, and material properties that might satisfy the particular
19474 specifications of a design. Filtering a good design out of these possibilities
19475 by simple, direct calculation is impossible both because of the enormous number
19476 of variables and because there are always elements in the specifications--like
19477 aesthetics or ergonomics or compatibility with the corporate image--that can't
19478 be reduced to a number or folded into a common denominator. What humans do in
19479 these cases is: think up a completely wrong (but sincerely felt) approach to
19480 the problem, jump in, fail, and then do an autopsy. Each failure contains
19481 encrypted somewhere on its body directions for the next jump: "strengthen this
19482 part," "tie this down next time," "buy a better battery." Good engineering is
19483 not a matter of creativity or centering or grounding or inspiration or lateral
19484 thinking, as useful as those might be, but of decoding the clever, even witty,
19485 messages solution space carves on the corpses of the ideas in which you
19486 believed with all your heart, and then building the road to the next message.
19487 -- Fred Hapgood, from "Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and Technical
19490 The hardest part of gaining any new idea is
19491 sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.
19494 Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done
19495 it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my
19496 wall that runs counter-clockwise.
19499 What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
19500 -- Theodore Roethke
19502 A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity;
19503 an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
19504 -- Winston Churchill
19506 I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.
19509 At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being,
19510 only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a
19511 marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever
19512 be put together a second time.
19513 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
19515 Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the
19516 lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
19519 If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.
19520 The more things you do, the more you can do.
19523 The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore
19524 its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a
19525 basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and
19526 human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car,
19527 by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the
19528 remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
19531 I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.
19532 -- Eugene Delacroix
19534 History never looks like history when you are living through it.
19537 In a cat's eyes round as golden bells,
19538 The mad Spring's flame glows.
19539 On a cat's gently closed lips,
19540 The soft Spring's drowsiness lies.
19541 On a cat's sharp whiskers,
19542 The green Spring's life dances.
19545 People always talk to me about my drinking; they never ask me about my thirst.
19548 Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about.
19549 -- Philippe Shnoebelen
19551 We don't stop playing because we grow old;
19552 we grow old because we stop playing.
19553 -- George Bernard Shaw
19555 Competitions are for horse, not artist. -- Bela Bartok
19557 I feel that if a person has problems communicating
19558 the very least he can do is to shut up.
19561 It is, of course, totally pointless to call a cat when it is intent
19562 on the chase. They are deaf to the interruptive nonsense of humans.
19563 They are on cat business, totally serious and involved.
19564 -- John D. MacDonald
19566 Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
19567 -- Sir William Osler
19569 The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
19570 -- Robertson Davies
19572 Where do the words come from? The same mysterious place, I suspect,
19573 where notes of music go. They precede ideas, and are inseparable
19574 from them. For myself, I bow my head, touch wood, and utter a small
19575 prayer that the flow of them never cease.
19578 The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I
19579 could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.
19580 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at BrainyQuotes
19582 Only a monopolist could study a business and ruin it by giving away products.
19583 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at ThinkExist.com
19585 Try moving off NT easily. You can move from Solaris to HP/UX to AIX or DEC
19586 easily relative to moving off of NT, which is like a Roach Motel. Once you
19587 check in, you never check out.
19588 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at World of Quotes
19590 With Microsoft the first hit is always free--remember that all your life.
19591 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at CNet
19593 I am convinced that if General Motors could eliminate [Microsoft] Office from
19594 their entire company, they could get the 1999 cars out next year at half price.
19595 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at Anti-Microsoft Association Web site
19597 We've got bayonets fixed, and we'll go into any cave no matter how dark and
19598 dank it is. And in the air war [against Microsoft to win new developers],
19599 we'll go after any developer and not just let them turn over to the dark side.
19600 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at News.com
19602 Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system.
19603 I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.
19604 -- Scott McNealy, November 4, 1998, quoted at CNN.com
19606 Every time you turn on your new car, you're turning on 20 microprocessors.
19607 Every time you use an ATM, you're using a computer. Every time I use a
19608 settop box or game machine, I'm using a computer. The only computer you
19609 don't know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?
19610 -- Scott McNealy, quoted at Anti-Microsoft Association Web site
19612 Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hittin'. -- Yogi Berra
19614 "I've seen things like this before," he told the daily Il Messaggero.
19615 "Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods."
19616 -- Gabriele Amorth, one of the Catholic Church's exorcists, quoted
19617 in an article about Canneto di Caronia, a town where electronics
19620 Nature is an unlimited broadcasting station,
19621 through which God speaks to us every hour,
19622 if we only will tune in.
19623 -- George Washington Carver
19625 To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream;
19626 not only plan, but also believe.
19629 The first step to getting the things
19630 you want out of life is this:
19631 Decide what you want.
19634 A scientist will never show any kindness for
19635 a theory which he did not start himself.
19636 -- Mark Twain, in "A Tramp Abroad"
19639 Disappointments upon disappointments.
19641 This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.
19644 What is now proved was once imagined. -- William Blake
19646 We haven't had any tea for a week.
19647 The bottom is out of the universe.
19650 If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable
19651 of understanding truth and beauty.
19652 -- Japanese Proverb
19658 Telephone, n.: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the
19659 advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
19660 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
19662 I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers
19663 his enemies; for the hardest victory is the victory over self.
19666 Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him
19667 with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words or in good order.
19670 Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force
19671 that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.
19674 One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.
19675 -- G. K. Chesterton
19677 Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation
19678 of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform the
19679 calamity and misfortune into the path.
19680 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Path to Tranquility: Daily Wisdom",
19681 published by Snow Lion Publications
19683 In Buddhism, both learning and practice are extremely important, and they must
19684 go hand in hand. Without knowledge, just to rely on faith, faith, and more
19685 faith is good but not sufficient. So the intellectual part must definitely be
19686 present. At the same time, strictly intellectual development without faith and
19687 practice, is also of no use. It is necessary to combine knowledge born from
19688 study with sincere practice in our daily lives. These two must go together.
19689 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Answers: Discussions with Western
19690 Buddhists", published by Snow Lion Publications
19692 The nature of beings is ever enlightened,
19693 yet not realizing this, they wander endlessly in samsara.
19694 May intense compassion arise within me
19695 for sentient beings, whose suffering knows no bounds.
19697 In the moment of love, when the vibrant power of intense compassion
19698 is uncontained, the empty essence shines forth nakedly.
19699 May I never step off this supreme path of unity that never goes awry,
19700 and practice it at all times, day and night.
19701 -- "The Eighth Situpa on the Third Karmapa's Mahamudra Prayer", translated
19702 by Lama Sherab Dorje, published by Snow Lion Publications
19704 The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
19705 -- Following the Equator
19707 Love is metaphysical gravity. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
19709 Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it.
19710 Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
19711 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
19713 In accordance with the conditioning of desire, fear, disgust, and so forth--
19714 the conditioning of habitual tendencies that one has been accustomed to since
19715 beginningless time--mind itself appears as body, enjoyments, abode, and so
19716 forth. Yet, childish ordinary individuals do not comprehend that these
19717 [appearances] are the identity of their own minds. Conceiving of mind as being
19718 "here" and objects "over there," they hold the separation, the vast divide
19719 between the apprehended and apprehender, to be established in actuality. This
19720 is entirely imputation, or a deluded misapprehension of the way things are, as
19721 when not knowing that the dream elephant is personal experience, but instead
19722 apprehending it as an actual elephant in the external world.
19723 -- "Speech of Delight: Mipham's Commentary on Shantarakshita's Ornament
19724 of the Middle Way", translated by Thomas H. Doctor.
19726 Instead of prompting the appearance of delusions and/or hallucinations,
19727 many of the patients receiving Valium displayed a progressive development
19728 of dislikes and hates. The patients themselves deliberately used the term
19729 "hate". This hatefulness first involved non-significant figures in the
19730 patients' environment, progressed from there to the involvement of key
19731 figures such as aides, nurses and physicians, and went on to the involvement
19732 of important personal figures such as parents and spouses... This
19733 hatefulness was of a peculiar type. The patients were unhappy with it; they
19734 realized that it was unnatural and without basis, but were impotent to do
19735 anything about it. Many of them, exhibiting real distress, would inquire,
19736 "Why do I feel like this?"
19737 -- P.E. Feldman, Journal of Neuropsychiatry
19739 The greatest book is not the one whose messages engraves itself on the brain,
19740 but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to
19741 reader spreads the fire that is fed by various essences, until it becomes a
19742 great conflagration.
19745 The world is a looking glass and gives back
19746 to every man the reflection of his own face.
19747 -- William M. Thackeray
19749 Travel is only glamorous in retrospect. -- Paul Theroux
19751 Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which
19752 difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
19753 -- John Quincy Adams
19755 Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden
19757 I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works
19758 to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets
19759 anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
19762 You might find this discussion of attitudes threatening or insulting. No one
19763 wants to be told they're practicing incorrectly. We don't want to hear that
19764 we are uptight or repressed, that we are unskillful in dealing with our pain.
19765 We just want to continue doing what we are doing. But there's a Tibetan saying
19766 that the highest teaching is the one that reveals practice and any mistake you
19767 might be making, it will only result in what you most truly desire--progress in
19768 your spiritual development. Remember, I know of these mistakes because I've
19769 made them all myself. Practice involves a radical transformation of our being,
19770 and we have to learn to face and eventually to dissolve all the attitudes we
19771 have about everything, not only meditation. So check yourself out.
19772 -- Bruce Newman, in "A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism: Notes from a
19773 Practitioner's Journey"
19775 Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality. -- Steve Allen
19777 At this point, a vote for Bush is a character flaw. -- Janeane Garofalo
19779 It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make
19780 their experiments on journalists and politicians.
19783 Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
19784 -- Laurence J. Peter
19786 Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. -- Theodore Roosevelt
19788 I have taken all knowledge to be my province. -- Sir Francis Bacon
19790 Genius is childhood recaptured at will. -- Charles Baudelaire
19792 Generally speaking, whenever we perceive things, our perception is deluded, in
19793 that we project onto things a status of existence and a mode of being which is
19794 simply not there. We exaggerate things, and the way they then appear falsely
19795 to our minds gives rise to afflictive emotions. When we see our friends or
19796 enemies, for instance, we superimpose on them a quality of desirability or
19797 undesirability that is beyond the actual facts of the situation, and this
19798 superimposition or exaggeration sparks off fluctuating states of emotion in
19799 our mind. Towards our friends we feel strong attachment and desire, and
19800 towards our enemies powerful anger and hatred. So if we are serious about
19801 trying to purify our minds of these afflictive emotions, an understanding of
19802 emptiness becomes crucial.
19803 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
19804 Perfection", Snow Lion Publications
19806 If you examine the nature of your own mind, you will realize that the
19807 pollutants, such as afflictive emotions and thoughts rooted in a distorted
19808 way of relating to the world, are actually unstable. No matter how powerful
19809 an affliction, when you cultivate the antidote of true insight into the nature
19810 of reality, it will vanish because of the power of the antidote, which
19811 undermines its continuity. However, there is nothing that can undermine the
19812 basic mind itself; nothing that can actually interrupt the continuity of
19813 consciousness. The existence of the world of subjective experience and
19814 consciousness is a natural fact. There is consciousness. There is mind.
19815 There is no force that can bring about a cessation of your mental continuum.
19816 -- His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, in "Illuminating the Path to
19817 Enlightenment", published by Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive
19819 When we habituate our minds to being fearless, to being brave and open towards
19820 our emotions, fearlessness will also arise naturally. In order for this to
19821 happen we must train in applying antidotes to our thought patterns that are
19822 caught up in fear. In this way, we transcend fear first through a conceptual
19823 process, which later becomes nonconceptual, a natural fearlessness. In order
19824 to become fearless in this way, we need determination and the willingness to
19825 face our emotions. With that strong determination and courage, fearlessness
19826 will arise effortlessly.
19827 -- from Trainings in Compassion: Manuals on the Meditation of
19828 Avalokiteshvara, trans. by Tyler Dewar under the guidance of The
19829 Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
19831 The strongest element of growth lies in the human choice. -- George Eliot
19833 But again, I warn you my son: If you want to continue to be a devoted yogi,
19834 generally you should never cling to dreams. If you do, you will eventually
19835 expose yourself to the influence of the four maras. If your dreams are
19836 positive, do not have any expectations. If we are filled with hopes and
19837 expectations, even positive things can turn negative. If your dreams are
19838 negative, don't take them too seriously. Learn to see negative dreams as
19839 illusion, not real. Then, although a dream seems negative, because we realize
19840 that it isn't real, it becomes a positive thing that prepares us for further
19841 development and realization in the spiritual path. This is the practice of
19843 -- "The Life of Gampopa", by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, Snow Lion Publications
19845 In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where
19846 it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of
19847 rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy,
19848 of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political
19849 dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers
19850 and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party,
19851 but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid,
19852 home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform
19853 mechanically repeating the familiar phrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel,
19854 bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--
19855 one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being
19856 but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments
19857 when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank
19858 discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether
19859 fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance
19860 towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out
19861 of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were
19862 choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he
19863 is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of
19864 what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And
19865 this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate
19866 favorable to political conformity.
19867 -- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
19869 An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
19870 A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life
19871 when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
19874 Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart. -- Seneca
19876 I am a devilish fellow, who has mastered many arts. -- August Strindberg
19878 Every real thought on every real subject
19879 knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
19880 -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
19882 Come, lovely cat, and rest upon my heart,
19883 And let my gaze dive in the cold
19884 Live pools of thine enchanted eyes that dart
19885 Metallic rays of green and gold.
19886 -- Charles Baudelaire
19888 A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution. -- Hazel Nicholson
19890 As every cat owner knows,
19892 -- Ellen Perry Berkeley
19894 One of the most important practices is that of tolerance, patience. Tolerance
19895 can be learned only from an enemy; it cannot be learned from your guru. At
19896 these lectures, for instance, you cannot learn tolerance, except perhaps when
19897 you are bored! However, when you meet your enemy who is really going to hurt
19898 you, then, at that moment you can learn tolerance. Shantideva makes a
19899 beautiful argument; he says that one's enemy is actually a good spiritual
19900 guide because in dependence upon an enemy one can cultivate patience, and in
19901 dependence upon patience one accumulates great power of merit. Therefore, it
19902 is as if an enemy were purposefully getting angry in order to help you
19904 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
19905 Buddhist Path to Peace", Snow Lion Publications
19907 In the intermediate stages of practice, you must be like a farmer during the
19908 harvest. Once he has determined that it is time to reap his crop, he works
19909 at it continuously, no matter what anyone tells him. Just as a farmer works
19910 to make the most of the crop he has grown, we who now have opportunities and
19911 conditions which are so valuable to our practice, should use them
19912 immediately, understanding that there is no time to be wasted.
19913 -- "The Life of Gampopa", by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, Snow Lion Publications
19915 I'm growing old, I delight in the past. -- Henri Matisse
19917 Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation
19918 with us--that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
19921 Things equal out pretty well.
19922 Our dreams seldom come true,
19923 but then neither do our nightmares.
19926 Inner development comes step by step. You may think "Today my inner calmness,
19927 my mental peace is very small," but still, if you compare, if you look five,
19928 ten, or fifteen years back, and think, "What was my way of thinking then? How
19929 much inner peace did I have then and what is it today?", comparing it with what
19930 it was then, you can realize that there is some progress, there is some value.
19931 This is how you should compare--not with today's feeling and yesterday's
19932 feeling, or last week or last month, even not last year, but five years ago.
19933 Then you can realize what improvement has occurred internally. Progress comes
19934 by maintaining constant effort in daily practice.
19935 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Kindness, Clarity, and Insight", Snow Lion Pub.
19937 Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when
19938 I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before
19939 me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is
19940 what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor
19942 -- Alexander Hamilton
19944 Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the
19945 young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that
19946 it cares for its helpless members.
19949 It is important for us to have a stable and peaceful mind, for it is mostly
19950 through our mind that we experience suffering and problems. With diligence,
19951 we can establish our minds in peace by abandoning the afflictions that create
19952 obstacles. Meditation makes this possible because it establishes a steady
19953 mind. Among the many types of meditation, calm abiding (shamatha) and deep
19954 insight (vipashyana) are central to this process. In calm abiding, our mind
19955 is focused inwardly, which allows us to suppress the afflictions so that they
19956 do not actually manifest. There is a sense of distance between us and the
19957 afflictions. It is not possible, however, to eradicate them with calm abiding
19958 alone; deep insight is necessary to remove them at the root.
19959 -- "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art & Teachings of the 17th Karmapa
19960 Ogyen Trinley Dorje", by Michele Martin, Snow Lion Publications
19962 Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.
19965 If you persevere in this practice of recognizing the state of natural
19966 light, it will progressively become easier to repeat the lucid recognition
19967 that you are dreaming. There will arise a steady awareness within the dream,
19968 and you will know that you are dreaming. When you look in a mirror, you see
19969 a reflection. Regardless of whether it is beautiful or ugly, you know that
19970 it is a reflection. This is similar to knowing that a dream is a dream, to
19971 being lucid. Whether the dream is tragic or ecstatic, you are aware that it
19973 Awareness within the Dream State becomes a way to develop oneself and to
19974 break one's heavy conditioning. With this awareness, one can manipulate the
19975 dream material. For example, one can dream whatever one wishes, or one can
19976 pick up a desired theme. One can continue dreaming from where one left off
19977 on a previous occasion.
19978 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, in "Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light"
19980 Responsibility educates. -- Wendell Phillips
19982 What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid
19983 of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that
19984 which he thinks he already knows.
19987 There are two kinds of food--food for mental hunger and food for physical
19988 hunger. Thus a combination of these two--material progress and spiritual
19989 development is the most practical thing. I think that many Americans,
19990 particularly young Americans, realize that material progress alone is not
19991 the full answer for human life. Right now all of the Eastern nations are
19992 trying to copy Western technology. We Easterners such as Tibetans, like
19993 myself, look to Western technology feeling that once we develop material
19994 progress, our people can reach some sort of permanent happiness. But when
19995 I come to Europe or North America, I see that underneath the beautiful
19996 surface there is still unhappiness, mental unrest, and restlessness. This
19997 shows that material progress alone is not the full answer for human beings.
19998 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness", Snow Lion
20000 Nobody sees a flower--really--it is so small it takes time--we haven't
20001 time--and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
20002 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
20004 The eighth root downfall is to regard our physical bodies, or the skandhas or
20005 aggregates of our psycho-physical makeup, as impure and base. The reason why
20006 this is a root downfall is because Vajrayana sees everything as sacred. All
20007 appearances is a form of divinity, all sound is the sound of mantra, and all
20008 thought and awareness is the divine play of the transcending awareness, the
20009 Mahamudra experience. The potential for that sacredness exists within our
20010 present framework, so to speak, of the five skandhas. Acknowledging psycho-
20011 physical aggregates of an individual as the potential of the Buddhas of the
20012 five families, or the five elements, or the five feminine aspects, and so
20013 forth, is to recognize that, in tantra, the potential for the transformation
20014 exists within our present situation. To disparage that potential as something
20015 useless or impure or unwholesome is a root downfall, a basic contradiction,
20016 from the point of view of tantric practice.
20017 -- H.E. Kalu Rinpoche, in "Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism", Snow Lion Pub.
20019 Terrorists and totalitarians have always been two sides of one coin;
20020 a totalitarian out of office is a terrorist.
20023 Now that as humans we have met with spiritual teachings and have met a teacher,
20024 we should not be like a beggar doing nothing meaningful year after year, ending
20025 up empty-handed at death. I, an ordinary monk in the lineage of Buddha
20026 Shakyamuni, humbly urge you to make efforts in spiritual practice. Examine the
20027 nature of your mind and cultivate its development. Take into account your
20028 welfare in this and future existences, and develop competence in the methods
20029 that produce happiness here and hereafter. Our lives are impermanent and so
20030 are the holy teachings. We should cultivate our practice carefully.
20031 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Path to Enlightenment", Snow Lion
20034 Time makes more converts than reason. -- Tom Paine
20036 We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as
20037 we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better
20038 system, except possibly flipping a coin.
20041 To be dead is to stop believing in
20042 The masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.
20043 -- Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet
20045 The obvious is always least understood. -- Klemens von Metternich
20047 We are decent 99 percent of the time, when we could easily be vile.
20050 The whole world loves a maverick, but the whole world wants
20051 the maverick to achieve something nobler than simple rebellion.
20054 Insofar as the destructive effects of anger and hateful thoughts are
20055 concerned, one cannot get protection from wealth; even if one is a
20056 millionaire, one is subject to these destructive effects of anger and
20057 hatred. Nor can education guarantee that one will be protected from
20058 these effects. Similarly, the law cannot guarantee protection. Even
20059 nuclear weapons, no matter how sophisticated the defense system may be,
20060 cannot give one protection or defend one from these effects.
20061 The only factor that can give refuge or protection from the destructive
20062 effects of anger and hatred is the practice of tolerance and patience.
20063 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
20064 Buddhist Perspective", Snow Lion Publications
20066 Theoretically it may be comfortable to have compassion for "all sentient
20067 beings," but through our practice we realize that "all sentient beings" is
20068 a collection of individuals. When we actually try to generate compassion
20069 for each and every individual, it becomes much more challenging. But if we
20070 cannot work with one individual, then how can we work with all sentient
20071 beings? Therefore it is important for us to reflect more practically, to
20072 work with compassion for individuals and then extend that compassion further.
20073 -- "Trainings in Compassion: Manuals on the Meditation of Avalokiteshvara",
20074 translated by Tyler Dewar under the guidance of The Dzogchen Ponlop
20075 Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
20077 The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating
20078 the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
20079 -- Bertrand Russell
20081 I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
20084 The worst, the hardest, the most disagreeable thing that you may have
20085 to do may be the thing that counts most, because it is the hard discipline,
20086 and it alone, that makes possible the highest efficiency.
20089 I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
20090 I learn by going where I have to go.
20091 -- Theodore Roethke
20093 Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. -- Cherokee proverb
20095 Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world. -- T'ien Yiheng
20097 Women are like tea bags. They don't know how strong
20098 they are until they get into hot water.
20099 -- Eleanor Roosevelt
20101 There are two appropriate methods of mahamudra meditation to give rise to
20102 the primordial awareness of the dharmadhatu: looking while the mind is
20103 resting and looking while the mind is moving. The approach to the first
20104 method is the meditation of calm abiding. One lets one's mind rest until
20105 it abides calmly, and then with precision one looks at it. One looks for
20106 how it rests, for where it abides, and whoever or whatever it is that
20107 abides there. This is looking at the true nature of the mind while the
20109 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, from "Everyday Consciousness and
20110 Buddha-awakening", Snow Lion Publications
20112 It is better to debate a question without settling it
20113 than to settle a question without debating it.
20116 What is the purpose of the Dharma? Just like other spiritual traditions,
20117 Buddhadharma is an instrument for training the mind--something we use to try
20118 to work out the problems that we all experience; problems that originate
20119 mainly at the mental level. Negative emotional forces create mental unrest,
20120 such as unhappiness, fear, doubt, frustration and so forth; these negative
20121 mental states then cause us to engage in negative activities, which in turn
20122 bring us more problems and more suffering. Practicing Dharma is a way of
20123 working out these problems, be they long-term or immediate. In other words,
20124 Dharma protects us from unwanted suffering.
20125 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment", Snow Lion.
20127 Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the
20128 symbol of his liberty--his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when
20129 it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
20132 Everything in the world has a hidden meaning... Men, animals, trees, stars,
20133 they are all hieroglyphics. When you see them you do not understand them.
20134 You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years
20135 later that you understand.
20136 -- Nikos Kazantzakis, from "Zorba the Greek"
20138 One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things
20139 like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
20142 A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
20145 Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
20148 For a romantic relationship to survive, more than romantic love is needed.
20149 We need to love the other person as a human being and as a friend. The sexual
20150 attraction that feeds romantic love is an insufficient basis on which to
20151 establish a long-term relationship. Deeper care and affection, as well as
20152 responsibility and trust, must be cultivated.
20153 In addition, we do not fully understand ourselves and are a mystery to
20154 ourselves. Needless to say, other people are even more of a mystery to us.
20155 Therefore, we should never presuppose, with a bored attitude that craves
20156 excitement, that we know everything about our partner because we have been
20157 together so long. If we have the awareness of the other person being a
20158 mystery, we will continue to pay attention and be interested in him or her.
20159 Such interest is one key to a long-lasting relationship.
20160 -- Thubten Chodron, from "Buddhism for Beginners", Snow Lion Pub.
20162 Two cats can live as cheaply as one, and their owner has twice as much fun.
20165 Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the
20166 same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least
20167 twice as fast as that!
20170 Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its
20171 instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary
20172 for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living
20173 for the ordinary human being.
20176 Vision without action is a daydream;
20177 action without vision is a nightmare.
20178 -- Japanese proverb
20180 To satisfy a cat, a new state of being needs to be
20181 created--halfway between in and out.
20182 -- Stuart and Linda MacFarlane
20184 The Perfection of Zeal
20185 1. Thus, one who has patience should cultivate zeal, because Awakening is
20186 established with zeal, and there is no merit without zeal, just as there is no
20187 movement without wind.
20188 2. What is zeal? It is enthusiasm for virtue. What is said to be its
20189 antithesis? It is spiritual sloth, clinging to the reprehensible, apathy, and
20191 3. Spiritual sloth arises from indolence, indulging in pleasures, sleep,
20192 and craving for lounging around due to one's apathy toward the miseries of the
20193 cycle of existence.
20194 4. Scented out by the hunters, the mental afflictions, you have entered the
20195 snare of rebirth. Why do you not recognize even now that you are in the mouth
20197 -- Shantideva, in "A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life", trans. from the
20198 Sanskrit and Tibetan by Vesna A. Wallace and B. Alan Wallace, published by
20199 Snow Lion Publications
20201 I have a perfect horror of words that are not backed up by deeds.
20202 -- Theodore Roosevelt
20204 Sufferings arise from specific causes and conditions, which are collected by
20205 individual sentient beings. That being so, it is extremely important that
20206 individual sentient beings know what is to be practiced and what is to be
20207 given up--what brings suffering and what brings long-lasting happiness. We
20208 must show sentient beings the right path, which brings happiness and the wrong
20209 path, which brings suffering. Therefore, when we talk about benefiting other
20210 sentient beings, it is through showing them the path and helping them
20211 understand what is to be given up and what is to be practiced. This is how
20212 we can help other sentient beings.
20213 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Stages of Meditation", Snow Lion Publications
20215 We make our lives miserable by being miserable, so why not do exactly the
20216 opposite, and make our lives happy, joyful, and harmonious, by being happy,
20217 joyful, and harmonious? We create our own lives and yet we think that
20218 something else is doing it. All we have to do is change our mental
20219 reactions towards the opposite direction. And the way to do that is to
20220 meditate, otherwise we won't have the strength of mind to do it. A mind
20221 that can meditate is a mind that is one-pointed. And a mind that is one-
20222 pointed, the Buddha said, is like an ax that has been sharpened. It has a
20223 sharp edge that can cut through everything. If we want to remove stress
20224 and strain, and have a different quality of life, we have every opportunity.
20225 We need to strengthen our mind to the point where it will not suffer from
20226 the things which exist in the world.
20227 -- from "Buddhism Through American Women's Eyes", edited by Karma Lekshe
20228 Tsomo, published by Snow Lion Publications
20230 I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study
20231 mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and
20232 philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation,
20233 commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study
20234 painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
20237 There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more
20238 easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
20239 -- Benjamin Franklin
20241 Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk
20242 step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and
20243 patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
20246 Umpire's heaven is a place where he works third base every game.
20247 Home is where the heartache is.
20250 There exist no phenomena other than what arises from the mind.
20251 Other than the meditation that occurs, where is the one who is meditating?
20252 There exist no phenomena other than what arises from the mind.
20253 Other than the behavior that occurs, where is the one who is behaving?
20254 There exist no phenomena other than what arises from the mind.
20255 Other than the samaya vow that occurs, where is the one who is guarding it?
20256 There exist no phenomena other than what arises from the mind.
20257 Other than the fruition that occurs, where is the one who is realizing it?
20258 You should look at your own mind, observing it again and again.
20259 -- from "Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness", translation
20260 and commentary by John Myrdhin Reynolds, published by Snow Lion Pub.
20262 You must understand that I'm just as interested in someone I've
20263 known for ten minutes as in someone I've known for ten years.
20264 -- Alberto Giacometti
20266 Now in our day-to-day lives we know that the more stable, calm and contented
20267 our mind is, the more feelings and experiences of happiness we will derive
20268 from it. The more undisciplined, untrained, and negative our mind is, the
20269 more we suffer mentally, and physically as well. So we can see only too well
20270 that a disciplined and contented mind is the source of our happiness.
20271 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
20272 Perfection", published by Snow Lion Publications
20274 If we do not wish merely to know intellectually about the view of emptiness,
20275 but rather wish to experience it ourselves in our own continuum, we should
20276 build a firm foundation for this. Then, according to our mental ability we
20277 should hear and consider both the sutras and treatises which teach the profound
20278 view of emptiness as well as the good explanations of them by the experienced
20279 Tibetan scholars in their commentaries. Together with this, we should learn
20280 to make our own ways of generating experience of emptiness accord with the
20281 precepts of an experienced wise man.
20282 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Buddhism of Tibet", published by Snow Lion Pub.
20284 A great deal of our suffering comes from having too many thoughts. And, at
20285 the same time, the way we think is not sane. We are only concerned by our
20286 immediate satisfaction and forget to measure its long-term advantages and
20287 disadvantages, either for ourselves or for others. But such an attitude
20288 always goes against us in the end. There is no doubt that by changing our
20289 way of seeing things we could reduce our current difficulties and avoid
20291 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
20293 If, motivated by the attainment of fame and gain for this life and hoping to
20294 look good in the eyes of others, one's behavior appears to be temporarily
20295 beautiful and one appears to be diligent in moral conduct, hearing, and
20296 contemplation, then one should think, "What is the use of appearing good in the
20297 eyes of others when my practice does not counteract the afflictions? When my
20298 practice does counteract the afflictions then even if it is not beautiful,
20299 what have I got to lose?
20300 -- Ngorchen Konchog Lhundrub, from "Three Visions: Fundamental Teachings of
20301 the Sakya Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Pub.
20303 Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you,
20304 well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best
20305 preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.
20306 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
20308 If you can't describe what you are doing as a process,
20309 you don't know what you're doing.
20310 -- W. Edwards Deming
20312 Our Dharma practice is the best offering to make to our teachers. If we have
20313 material possessions, talents, and time, we can offer those. However, we don't
20314 neglect our practice, for that is what our teacher cares about most. When we
20315 follow the Dharma instructions we've received and keep whatever precepts we've
20316 taken, that pleases our teacher more than anything else.
20317 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Taming the Mind", Snow Lion Pub.
20319 If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then
20320 disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
20321 -- Principia Discordia
20323 When you are proclaiming peace with your lips,
20324 be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.
20325 -- St. Francis of Assisi
20327 Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
20328 -- Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It", 1934.
20330 It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie
20331 which is being systematically repeated. If something is in me which can be
20332 called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the
20333 world so far as our science can reveal it.
20334 -- Albert Einstein, in "Albert Einstein : The Human Side", from a 1954
20335 letter to an atheist.
20337 This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military
20338 system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation
20339 to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been
20340 given his big brain by mistake; a spinal cord was all he needed.
20341 -- Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It", 1934.
20343 I'm not a teacher, but an awakener. -- Robert Frost
20345 It is very important to understand the context of the Buddhist emphasis on
20346 recognizing that we are all in a state of suffering, otherwise there is a
20347 danger we could misunderstand the Buddhist outlook, and think that it involves
20348 rather morbid thinking, a basic pessimism and almost an obsessiveness about the
20349 reality of suffering. The reason why Buddha laid so much emphasis on
20350 developing insight into the nature of suffering is because there is an
20351 alternative--there is a way out, it is actually possible to free oneself from
20352 it. This is why it is so crucial to realize the nature of suffering, because
20353 the stronger and deeper your insight into suffering is, the stronger your
20354 aspiration to gain freedom from it becomes. So the Buddhist emphasis on the
20355 nature of suffering should be seen within this wider perspective, where there
20356 is an appreciation of the possibility of complete freedom from suffering. If
20357 we had no concept of liberation, then to spend so much time reflecting on
20358 suffering would be utterly pointless.
20359 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama's Book of Awakening", Snow Lion Pub.
20361 A cat is a demure animal; it will not come into the living room
20362 wagging its tail and knocking over lamps and tables.
20363 -- H. Monger Burdock
20365 There is no need for a piece of sculpture in a home that has a cat.
20368 Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the
20369 principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either
20370 that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or
20371 that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may
20372 cause. But this is shortsighted, no one truly benefits from causing harm to
20373 another sentient being. Whatever immediate advantage is gained at the expense
20374 of someone else is short-lived. In the long run causing others misery and
20375 infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear and
20376 suspicion within one-self. Such feelings undermine the peace of mind and
20377 contentment which are the marks of happiness.
20378 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness", Snow Lion
20380 When we're told that things are mere deceptive appearances, we shouldn't
20381 misinterpret it as license to act in any way we please. Of course, none of
20382 us would be so silly! Appearances are extremely powerful. You dream your
20383 house is on fire and you're surrounded by flames. You can't escape and feel
20384 terrified. You wake up soaked in sweat and screaming. What a relief! It was
20385 just a nightmare and none of it actually happened, but while it all seemed to
20386 be happening, you were in anguish.
20387 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas",
20388 published by Snow Lion Publications
20390 A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams.
20393 I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work. -- Mary Cassatt
20395 If one ever wishes to retain one's fantasies about the good sense
20396 of the people in the realm of literary taste, one does best never
20397 to consult the bestseller lists.
20400 The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
20402 Speaking of others' faults can also be a way to distract ourselves from
20403 acknowledging our own painful emotions. For example, if we feel hurt or
20404 rejected because a dear one hasn't called us in a long time, rather than
20405 feel the suffering nature of our attachment, we criticize our loved one
20406 for being unreliable and inconsiderate.
20407 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Taming the Mind", Snow Lion Publications
20409 A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.
20410 -- Benjamin Disraeli
20412 The things that we love tell us what we are. -- St. Thomas Aquinas
20414 Everything on this planet functions according to the law of nature. Particles
20415 come together, and on the basis of their co-operation everything around us, our
20416 whole environment, can develop and be sustained. Our own body too has the same
20417 structure. Different cells come together and work together in co-operation,
20418 and as a result, human life is sustained. In a human community the same law
20419 and principle of co-operation applies. Even for an aeroplane to fly or for a
20420 single machine to work, it can only do so by depending on many other factors,
20421 and with their co-operation. Without them it is impossible. Just so, to
20422 sustain everyday life in human society we need co-operation.
20423 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Dzogchen: Heart Essence of the Great Pefection"
20425 We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the byways and
20426 untrodden depths of the wilderness, and travel and explore
20427 and tell the world the glories of our journey.
20428 -- John Hope Franklin
20430 Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.
20433 Be happy. Talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in
20434 others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours.
20437 There are two ways to slide easily through life:
20438 to believe everything or to doubt everything;
20439 both ways save us from thinking.
20440 -- Alfred Korzybski
20442 We shall not cease from exploration. And at the end of our exploring will be
20443 to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.
20446 I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains
20447 be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate
20448 in greater pleasures.
20449 -- Michel de Montaigne
20451 A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only
20452 knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the
20453 knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret
20454 exist? Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us.
20457 The subjects that were dearest to the examiners were almost invariably those I
20458 fancied least. ... I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They
20459 always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed
20460 my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had
20461 only one result: I did not do well at examinations...
20462 -- Winston Churchill
20464 One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to
20465 commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money;
20466 we also feel we need to work.
20469 One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.
20472 The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. -- Muriel Rukeyser
20474 Chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost maniacal impulse
20475 to seek their pleasures amongst smoke and vapour, soot and flames, poisons and
20476 poverty, yet amongst all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I would
20477 rather die than change places with the King of Persia.
20478 -- Johann Joachim Becher
20480 Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society. -- Joan Ganz Cooney
20482 Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. -- Igor Stravinsky
20484 Purifying the unwholesome: In the past we have engaged in unwholesome physical,
20485 verbal, and mental actions. All these actions are of the past and cannot be
20486 touched; we cannot reach back and wipe them away. They have left detrimental
20487 imprints on our mind-stream that obstruct our spiritual practice and manifest
20488 as suffering when they come to full maturation, giving rise to misfortune and
20489 grief. However, these imprints can be affected, and even purified, by our
20490 present behavior. They are like seeds carried along in the current of our
20491 mind-stream. We cannot annihilate them without a trace, but we can burn them
20492 so that they have little or no potency to cause damaging results.
20493 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "The Seven-Point Mind Training", Snow Lion Pub.
20495 First it is important to recognize the human form as rare and precious. It is
20496 not enough just to obtain this precious human form which has great potential;
20497 rather, you should use that potential to its fullest extent by taking its
20498 essence. For example, if a person's ascent to high office is not followed by
20499 good work for the community and people, it is not very beneficial and
20500 worthwhile. If, on the basis of full use of the potential, one is able to
20501 accomplish great feats, that would truly be a great success. Therefore, it is
20502 important initially to recognize all the significance and great potential of
20503 this human existence.
20504 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "The Path to Bliss", Snow Lion Publications
20506 We haven't had any tea for a week.
20507 The bottom is out of the universe.
20510 Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that
20511 usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills
20512 conflicting in one man, Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
20513 -- Flannery O'Connor, in "Wise Blood", 1952
20515 We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect
20516 and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
20519 Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether
20520 a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or
20521 the other. It is usually both.
20524 A lie gets halfway around the world before
20525 the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
20526 -- Winston Churchill
20528 Like yourself, everyone else from their own side equally does not want
20529 suffering and equally wants happiness. For example, among ten ill people,
20530 each of them just wants happiness; from their side they are all ill, and
20531 they all want to be freed from their illness. Hence there is no possible
20532 reason for making a biased exception, treating a certain one better and
20533 neglecting the others. It is impossible to select one out for better
20534 treatment. Moreover, from your own viewpoint, all sentient beings, in
20535 terms of their connection with you over the course of lifetimes, have in
20536 the past helped you and in the future will help again. Thus, you also
20537 cannot find any reason from your own side to treat some better and others
20539 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
20540 Buddhist Path to Peace", Snow Lion Publications
20542 In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
20543 -- Raymond Chandler
20545 Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. -- George Santayana
20547 Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. -- Claude Bernard
20549 When we practice, initially, as a basis we control ourselves, stopping the
20550 bad actions which hurt others as much as we can. This is defensive. After
20551 that, when we develop certain qualifications, then as an active goal we
20552 should help others. In the first stage, sometimes we need isolation while
20553 pursuing our own inner development; however, after you have some confidence,
20554 some strength, you must remain with, contact, and serve society in any
20555 field--health, education, politics, or whatever.
20556 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Kindness, Clarity and Insight", Snow Lion Pub.
20558 Other paths that are aimed at "sudden awakening" lead one on an unmapped
20559 journey that may offer no clear indications of progress. In contrast, in this
20560 practice we have definite sign-posts along the way. Look at your mental
20561 distortions and see how they are doing. After practicing for a month, a year,
20562 six years, are the mental distortions somewhat diminished? Do wholesome
20563 qualities arise more readily, more frequently, more deeply? At the very root
20564 of the mental distortions, is the self-grasping attenuated? Is there less
20565 self-centeredness and greater humility? Is there more loving concern for the
20566 welfare of others? All of these are causes that lead either to well-being or
20568 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "The Seven-Point Mind Training", Snow Lion Pub.
20570 In the jungle of samsara arisings are ceaseless, there is never any let up in
20571 the interplay between past, present and future and in the turbulent interchange
20572 between inner thoughts and outer events. 'I', 'me' and 'mine' are tossed about
20573 like corks in the waves. There is no exit from this on the level of 'I'.
20574 There is no way to think yourself out of samsara. Even the thoughts that
20575 everything is empty, or is Padmasambhava, or pure from the very beginning do
20576 not help for no thought can unlock the door to awakening. The key is not
20577 shaped like a thing; it is not a thought, a feeling or a sensation. It's not
20578 something outer or inner. The key is your own nature, how you have been from
20579 the very beginning, simple, raw, naked, uncontrived, free of all constructs.
20580 -- Nuden Dorje, in "Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text", Snow Lion
20582 Great ideas originate in the muscles. -- Thomas A. Edison
20584 If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. -- Mark Twain
20586 Mathematics is a game played according to certain
20587 simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
20590 When you are poor enough, everything has some value. -- Barbara Ann Porte
20592 I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have
20593 been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and
20594 then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst
20595 the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
20598 In ancient times, a candidate for initiation into the Mysteries was led through
20599 a series of dark chambers, virtually a labyrinth, beset by terrifying sounds
20600 and ominous presences. And then in the adytum, the final chamber, there was a
20601 sudden illumination. The enthroned hierophant tells the candidate, "Behold the
20602 light, my child! It is your own being and nature." Just this epopteia, or
20603 sudden illumination, is the introduction to the Clear Light that is one's own
20604 original nature. The course of the initiation in the ancient Mystery Religions
20605 simulates the experience of death and rebirth and leads the candidate into what
20606 lies beyond, so that one no longer need fear death. This initiatory process
20607 may be compared to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
20608 -- John Myrdhin Reynolds, in "The Golden Letters", Snow Lion Pub.
20610 If only I had the theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.
20611 -- Bernhard Riemann
20613 Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent,
20614 literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
20617 But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot
20618 hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
20619 have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
20622 A memory is more atmospheric than accurate, more an evolving fiction than a
20623 sacred text. And thank heavens. If rude, shameful, or brutal memories
20624 can't be expunged, they can at least be diluted. So is nothing permanent
20625 and fixed in life? By definition life is a fickle noun, an event in
20626 progress. Still, we cling to philosophical railings, religious icons,
20627 pillars of belief. We forget on purpose that Earth is rolling at 1,000
20628 miles an hour, and, at the same time, falling elliptically around our sun,
20629 while the sun is swinging through the Milky Way, and the Milky Way migrating
20630 along with countless other galaxies in a universe about 13.7 billion years
20631 old. An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a
20632 mindglow behind like the tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better
20633 word, we call that scintillation memory.
20634 -- Diane Ackerman, in "An Alchemy Of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of
20637 Many people who approach the practice of Buddhism are willing to sacrifice one
20638 or two hours of their day in order to perform some ritual practice or engage in
20639 meditation. Time is relatively easy to give up, even though their life may be
20640 very busy. But, they are not willing to change anything of their personality--
20641 they are not willing to forgo anything of their negative character. With this
20642 type of approach to Buddhism, it hardly matters how much meditation we do, our
20643 practice remains merely a hobby or a sport. It does not touch our lives. In
20644 order actually to overcome our problems, we have to be willing to change--
20645 namely to change our personality. We need to renounce and rid ourselves of
20646 those negative aspects of it that are causing us so much trouble.
20647 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama & Alexander Berzin in "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
20650 Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into
20651 you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into
20652 you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
20655 Whoso does not see that genuine life is a battle
20656 and a march has poorly read his origin and his destiny.
20659 The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality
20660 one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.
20663 The last proceeding of reason, is to recognize that
20664 there is an infinity of things beyond it.
20667 Argument is the worst sort of conversation. -- Jonathan Swift
20669 No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.
20672 Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.
20673 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
20675 I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
20676 -- Winston Churchill
20678 The self that is grasped by ignorance should be refuted, but we should not
20679 refute the conventionally existent self. If we refute the self that is merely
20680 conventionally existent, that is like a seeing a person and saying, "Oh, I
20681 didn't see the person." Or we might look at another person and say, "All I
20682 see is the basis of designation of the person or the visual form of the body."
20683 This is no way to speak. It would be impossible to maintain any valid or
20684 justifiable use of language in this way. We would be negating the existence
20685 of a merely designated self, but we would not negate the self that is refuted
20686 by means of the wisdom that investigates the nature of emptiness. Once again,
20687 the self to be negated is the self which is grasped by ignorance.
20688 -- Gen. Lamrimpa, in "Realizing Emptiness: Madhyamaka Insight Meditation",
20689 translated by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
20691 In general, the countries of the East have had less material progress and thus
20692 have great suffering from poverty. In the West, though poverty is not severe,
20693 there is the suffering of worry and not knowing satisfaction. In both East and
20694 West, many persons spend their lives in jealousy and competition; some think
20695 only of money, and when they meet with conditions unfavourable to their wish
20696 develop a dislike or enmity for these unfavourable circumstances from the very
20697 orb of their heart. Within and between countries people are disturbed, not
20698 trusting and believing each other, having to spend their lives in continual
20699 lies and deceit. Since the most we can live is a hundred years, what point is
20700 there in spending our lives in jealousy, deceit, and competition?
20701 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Deity Yoga", translated and edited by Jeffrey
20702 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
20704 She was fascinated by baths. I suppose total immersion in water
20705 must have seemed to her a peculiar method of cleansing oneself.
20706 -- Elizabeth Peters
20708 The uncompromising self-examination of a Rembrandt self-portrait remains,
20709 almost four centuries on, far more 'shocking' than a museum installation
20713 Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives. -- Jonathan Swift
20715 Mere belief in a source of refuge is not firm; unless there is valid cognition,
20716 you are going only on the assertion that Buddhism is good. Refuge is not an
20717 act of partisanship but is based on analysing what scriptures are reasonable
20718 and what scriptures are not. In order for the mind to engage one-pointedly in
20719 practice, there must be reasoned conviction that only the Buddhist path is
20720 non-mistaken and capable of leading to the state of complete freedom from
20721 defects and possession of all auspicious attainments. One should engage in
20722 honest investigation, avoiding desire and hatred and seeking the teaching that
20723 sets forth the means for fulfilling the aims of trainees.
20724 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Tantra in Tibet", trans. & ed. by Jeffrey Hopkins
20726 A bad peace is even worse than war. -- Tacitus
20728 The way of fortune is like the milky way in the sky; which is a number of
20729 smaller stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together; so it is a number
20730 of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that
20731 make men fortunate.
20734 Ability will never catch up with the demand for it. -- Confucius
20736 There is more to life than increasing its speed. -- Mahatma Gandhi
20738 If cats could talk, they wouldn't. -- Nan Porter
20740 I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
20743 The teeth, hair and nails are not I, nor am I bone, blood, mucus, phlegm,
20745 Bodily oil is not I, nor is sweat, fat or the entrails either. The cavity
20746 of the entrails is not I, nor is excrement or urine.
20747 Flesh is not I, nor are the sinews, warmth nor air. The bodily cavities are
20748 not I, nor is any one of the six types of consciousness.
20749 If the self truly exists in the manner in which it appears, then it should be
20750 identifiable as one inspects the components of a person one by one. Following
20751 the above verses, no part of the body, including the four elements and space,
20752 nor the six types of consciousness can be identified as the self. This implies
20753 that the self that experiences joy and sorrow and that appears to the mind as
20754 if it existed independently does not exist at all. This is ascertained by
20755 engaging in such analysis.
20756 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Transcendent Wisdom", Snow Lion Publications
20758 Once, on behalf of his mother, Kyogom produced a thangka of the five buddha
20759 families. He asked the guru, Gampopa, to bless it quickly.
20760 Gampopa agreed, saying, "Burn this stick of incense and make a mandala
20762 He then transformed himself into the Buddha, and from his ushnisha there
20763 radiated a glorious light that dissolved into the thangka. The air resounded
20764 with the tinkling of bells and the drumbeat of the damaru, and the sky was
20765 filled with parasols, auspicious banners, and canopies. The sound of cymbals
20766 was heard, and a rain of flowers fell from the sky.
20767 When Kyogom saw this, the lama said, "This is the way to do a rapid
20769 -- Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, in "The Life of Gampopa", Snow Lion Pub.
20771 The absolute nature of the prohibition of torture and other forms of ill
20772 treatment means that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a
20773 state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any
20774 other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.
20775 -- Theo van Boven, UN official charged with monitoring incidents of torture
20777 No executive, legislative, administrative, or judicial measure authorizing
20778 recourse to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
20779 can be considered as lawful under international law.
20780 -- Theo van Boven, UN official charged with monitoring incidents of torture
20782 In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a
20783 long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians
20784 will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an
20785 unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time--literally
20786 --substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the
20787 first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally
20789 -- Peter F. Drucker
20791 Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food. -- Hippocrates
20793 One of the lessons of the Web is that if people have access to information,
20794 they will consume it, whether they are hungry or not.
20797 If cats seem distant and aloof, it is because this is not their native
20798 planet--they are here just to visit and dominate.
20801 History is the only laboratory we have in which to test
20802 the consequences of thought.
20805 In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out.
20806 It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.
20809 If we have only cultivated undistracted meditative concentration and lack the
20810 supreme knowledge that realizes how things actually are, it is impossible to
20811 see ultimate reality. On the other hand, if we have the correct view of
20812 understanding identitylessness but no meditative concentration in which the
20813 mind rests one-pointedly, our mind will be distracted by other objects, not be
20814 under control, and thus not be workable. Consequently, it will be impossible
20815 for the light of wisdom to shine clearly and realize ultimate reality. Another
20816 analogy for the need to combine calm abiding and superior insight as an
20817 inseparable unity is a sharp scalpel in the steady hand of an experienced
20818 surgeon. If the scalpel is blunt or the surgeon's hand shaky, the operation
20819 cannot be performed properly. In the same way, when the mind rests in a state
20820 that involves both stillness and a crisp wakefulness or awareness, it is like
20821 a steady hand that deftly operates on our objects of investigation with the
20822 sharp blade of superior insight.
20823 -- Karl Brunnhoelzl, in "The Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madyhamaka in the
20824 Kagyu Tradition, Snow Lion Publications
20826 Golf is the only sport where the ball doesn't move until you hit it.
20829 ... when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men
20830 of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact
20831 that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending
20832 any save the most elemental--men whose whole thinking is done in terms of
20833 emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.
20834 So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost.
20836 ... all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and
20837 mediocre--the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is
20840 The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is
20841 perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of
20842 the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the
20843 plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the
20844 White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
20845 -- H. L. Mencken (July 26, 1920, in the Baltimore Sun):
20847 The mastery of the turn is the story of how aviation became practical as a
20848 means of transportation. It is the story of how the world became small.
20849 -- William Langewiesche
20851 Flight's greatest gift is to let us look around. I mean a simple form of
20852 looking around, and one that requires little instruction--just gazing down at
20853 the ordinary scenery sliding by below. The best views are views of familiar
20854 things, like cities and farms and bottlenecked freeways. So set aside the
20855 beauty of sunsets, the majesty of mountains, the imprint of winds on golden
20856 prairies. The world beneath our wings has become a human artifact, our most
20857 spontaneous and complex creation. Tourists may not like to contemplate the
20858 evidence, with its hints of greed and self-destruction, but the fact remains
20859 that the old sterilized landscapes--like designated outlooks and pretty parks
20860 and sculpted gardens--have become obsolete, and that it is largely the airplane
20861 that has made them so. The aerial view is something entirely new. We need to
20862 admit that it flattens the world and mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and
20863 that it suppresses beauty. But it also strips the facades from our
20864 constructions, and by raising us above the constraints of the treeline and the
20865 highway it imposes a brutal honesty on our perceptions. It lets us see
20866 ourselves in context, as creatures struggling through life on the face of a
20867 planet, not separate from nature, but its most expressive agents. It lets us
20868 see that our struggles form patterns on the land, that these patterns repeat to
20869 an extent which before we had not known, and that there is a sense to them.
20870 -- William Langewiesche, "Inside The Sky: Meditation on Flight"
20872 A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool
20873 who knows what he is talking about.
20874 -- Miguel de Unamuno
20876 Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real. -- Jules Verne
20878 We have the bias of considering some people to be enemies and others to be
20879 friends. If this really were true such that an enemy always remained an enemy
20880 and a friend always remained a friend, then there might be a reason to hate
20881 certain people and love others. But, again, this is not the case. There is
20882 no certainty in relationships.
20883 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
20884 Buddhist Path to Peace", Snow Lion Publications
20886 Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. -- George Santayana
20888 It is said that the awareness of a buddha is completely even, like the ocean,
20889 taking in equally the joys and sorrows of all people, friends, loved ones,
20890 relatives, and those never met. This is the meaning of a statement made by so
20891 many of the world's great spiritual teachers, "Love your enemy." It doesn't
20892 mean love the person you hate. You can't do that. Love those who hate you.
20893 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point
20894 Mind-Training", Snow Lion Publications
20896 Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal
20897 does this--no dog exchanges bones with another.
20900 Art is not about thinking something up.
20901 It is the opposite--getting something down.
20904 Although we regard the realization of the selflessness of persons as something
20905 particularly exalted and therefore difficult to achieve, in fact, if you look
20906 directly at your mind and see its nature, you will realize this selflessness.
20907 This is not a matter of trying to convince yourself that there is no self in
20908 the mind. It is simply a matter of looking. And when you look, you will see
20909 that there is no mind, and that therefore there is no self that could be
20910 imputed on the basis of the mind.
20911 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, in "Pointing out the Dharmakaya", Snow Lion
20913 Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd have frozen to death.
20916 Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. -- Henry Fielding
20918 Material progress is for the sake of achieving that happiness and relieving
20919 that suffering which depends upon the body. But it is indeed difficult to
20920 remove all suffering by these external means and thereby achieve complete
20921 satisfaction. Hence there comes to be a great difference between seeking
20922 happiness in dependence upon external things and seeking it in dependence
20923 upon one's own internal spiritual development. Furthermore, even if the
20924 basic suffering is the same, there is a great difference in the way we
20925 experience it and in the mental discomfort that it creates, depending upon
20926 our attitude towards it. Hence our mental attitude is very important in
20927 how we spend our lives.
20928 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Kindness, Clarity and Insight", Snow Lion Pub.
20930 Love is a condition in which the happiness of another
20931 person is essential to your own.
20934 Looking at a cat, like looking at clouds or stars or the ocean, makes
20935 it difficult to believe there is nothing miraculous in this world.
20936 -- Leonard Michaels
20938 Waking in the night
20943 Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
20946 If you have love, deities and humans will love you and will naturally
20947 gravitate toward you. Moreover, the Conqueror defeated Mara's armies with the
20948 power of love, so love is the supreme protector, and so forth. Thus, although
20949 love is difficult to develop, you must strive to do so.
20950 The way to cultivate love is as follows. Just as you can develop compassion
20951 once you have repeatedly thought about how living beings are made miserable by
20952 suffering, develop love by thinking repeatedly about how living beings lack all
20953 happiness, both contaminated and uncontaminated. When you become familiar with
20954 this, you will naturally wish for beings to be happy. In addition, bring to
20955 mind various forms of happiness and then offer them to living beings.
20956 -- from "The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment",
20957 Volume 2, Snow Lion Publications
20959 There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found
20960 in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.
20963 You'll never need a lawn ornament if you have a cat in the yard.
20964 -- Katherine Palmer Peterson
20966 Karma has four main characteristics. The first is its increasing effect:
20967 goodness heralds further goodness and evil heralds further evil. Secondly,
20968 karma is definite: in the long run, goodness always produces joy and negativity
20969 always produces suffering. Thirdly, one never experiences a joy or sorrow that
20970 does not have an according karmic cause. And lastly, the karmic seeds that are
20971 placed on the mind at the time of an action will never lose their potency even
20972 in a hundred million lifetimes, but will lie dormant within the mind until one
20973 day the conditions that activate them appear.
20974 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Path to Enlightenment", Snow Lion
20976 The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat. -- Jules Reynard
20978 There are generally two kinds of buddhist meditation: stabilizing meditation
20979 and analytical meditation. The stabilizing type of meditation gets the brain
20980 very mellow. It is a soothing of the mind to a clear state of calm, like a
20981 still lake. Stabilization allows all thoughts to flow through the mind without
20982 attachment to any of them. But the analytical type of meditation uses the
20983 power of logic to examine what is bothering one. Through meditative analysis,
20984 problems are conquered by finding their root causes and by developing
20985 techniques for mitigating the effects of those causes on the mind. Analysis
20986 can focus on topics such as impermanence, suffering, the need for patience,
20988 These two phases of meditation are not practiced at different times of the
20989 day, but from instant to instant. At first, when one is a beginner, one must
20990 actively work to stabilize the mind and release all the distractions. But
20991 just when one starts to doze off because this process is so relaxing, one
20992 switches over to analytical meditation to keep the brain moving and to balance
20994 One has to pay careful attention to the state of one's mind to determine
20995 what is needed at a particular time. But this wakeful refocusing of the
20996 attention helps to develop mindfulness, which in turn helps develop
20997 understanding and concentration. Later on, the switch between analytical
20998 and stabilizing meditations will happen somewhat more automatically; if
20999 thoughts start swirling too fast, the meditative mind seeks stabilization. If
21000 things get too calm or placid, then analysis can bring the balance back to
21001 thinking and improving.
21002 Analysis is insufficient by itself, because it might be all about what's
21003 currently "wrong" or it might produce a billion approaches to improving the
21004 mind which cannot all be followed, but it would miss out on just enjoying our
21005 somewhat short existence. Complete realization of the enjoyability of
21006 sentience and sapience seems to come from stabilization, not analysis. And
21007 stabilization is not enough by itself either, because one sees the result
21008 of too much placidity in a person asleep in bed: they have a cow-like calm
21009 without any thoughts breaking the surface to cause future progress. The
21010 impetus behind the push towards enlightenment seems to come from analysis,
21011 because one cannot see why one would want to fully awake and aware unless
21012 one can logically compare that state with the current one. Thus analytical
21013 and stabilizing meditations are the dynamic duo of meditation, the laurel
21014 and the hardy, the R and the D, the anion and the cation, for without both
21015 the ultimate mental state is unattainable.
21018 The bad news: there is no key to the universe.
21019 The good news: it was never locked.
21020 -- Swami Beyondananda
21022 What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of
21023 frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly. That is the
21024 first law of nature.
21027 A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.
21028 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
21030 If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.
21031 -- Frederick the Great
21033 I know that many people have difficulty thinking of spirits in the way I
21034 describe them. There are many spirits described in Tibetan texts related to
21035 specific places in Tibet. I'm not sure, if we live in New York or Tokyo, that
21036 it's very helpful to try to connect to those spirits. When we are in Western
21037 cities, rather than thinking of spirits living in mountain passes or caves, we
21038 might find it easier to think that spirits travel the streets, creating anger
21039 and agitation in the drivers. When we experience aggressive driving, it is a
21040 good idea to breathe evenly and relax. Otherwise, we may find ourselves
21041 connected to traffic demons!
21042 -- "Healing with Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan
21043 Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen", published by Snow Lion Publications
21045 I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
21046 Let's start with typewriters.
21047 -- Frank Lloyd Wright
21049 As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school.
21052 In Tantra the term bodhicitta assumes a more specific connotation. The essence
21053 of enlightenment or "Buddha-nature," revealed in the sutras of the third
21054 turning of the wheel of Dharma, is equated to the subtle essence (thig le) of
21055 the human body, the coarse aspect of which is present in the seminal fluid and
21056 in the ovum. Thus in Tantra, bodhicitta is recognized as the seed of the
21057 manifestation of the infinite mandalas and deities who are all already
21058 contained in potentiality in the energy structure of the physical body itself,
21059 what is known as the "vajra body." However in spite of this underlying
21060 recognition as its base, tantric practice entails visualization and commitments
21061 of body voice, and mind to achieve the transformation of the energies of impure
21062 vision into the pure dimension of the mandala and of the deities.
21063 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu and Adriano Clemente, in "The Supreme Source: The
21064 Fundamental Tantra of the Dzogchen Semde Kunjed Gyalpo", Snow Lion Pub.
21066 Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books
21067 I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
21070 It is impossible to keep a straight face in
21071 the presence of one or more kittens.
21072 -- Cynthia E. Varnardo
21074 I always explain that violence is not the human way. I believe that,
21075 fundamentally, human nature is positive, gentle; therefore, the non-violent way
21076 is the human way. Also, whatever result we achieve through non-violence has no
21077 negative side effect. Through violence, even though we may get some kind of
21078 satisfaction, negative side effects are also incurred. Then, most importantly,
21079 whether we like it or not, we have to live side by side with the Chinese; thus,
21080 in the long future, generation to generation, in order to live happily,
21081 peacefully, it is extremely important, while we are carrying on the struggle,
21082 to accord with the principle of non-violence.
21083 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates discuss
21084 Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation", Snow Lion Pub.
21088 I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--
21089 that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have
21090 been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
21091 I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless
21092 to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent,
21093 can be anything but vicious.
21094 I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must
21095 necessarily make war upon liberty...
21096 I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence
21097 of witches, and deserves no more respect.
21098 I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
21099 I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what
21100 it is made of, and how it is run.
21101 I believe in the reality of progress.
21102 I--But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it
21103 is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be
21104 free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be
21108 The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small
21109 electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying
21110 even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is
21111 nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and
21112 the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds
21113 are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre--the man
21114 who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual
21116 The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is
21117 perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the
21118 people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the
21119 plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White
21120 House will be adorned by a downright moron.
21121 -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Bayard vs. Lionheart", Baltimore Evening Sun,
21124 The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of
21125 wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
21128 There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
21129 -- Sir Francis Bacon
21131 I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based
21132 on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.
21133 -- Benvenuto Cellini
21135 When we talk about patience or tolerance, we should understand that there are
21136 many degrees, starting from a simple tolerance, such as being able to bear a
21137 certain amount of heat and cold, progressing toward the highest level of
21138 patience, which is the type of patience and tolerance found in the great
21139 practitioners, the Bodhisattvas on the high levels of the Buddhist path.
21140 Since patience or tolerance comes from a certain ability to remain firm and
21141 steadfast, to not be overwhelmed by the adverse situations or conditions that
21142 one faces, one should not see tolerance or patience as a sign of weakness, but
21143 rather as a sign of strength coming from a deep ability to remain steadfast and
21144 firm. We can generally define patience or tolerance in these terms. We find
21145 that even in being able to tolerate a certain degree of physical hardship, like
21146 a hot or cold climate, our attitude makes a big difference.
21147 If we have the realization that tolerating immediate hardship can have long-
21148 term beneficial consequences, we are more likely to be able to tolerate
21149 everyday hardships. Similarly, in the case of those on the Bodhisattva levels
21150 of the path practicing high levels of tolerance and patience, intelligence also
21151 plays a very important role as a complementary factor.
21152 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
21153 Buddhist Perspective", Snow Lion Publications
21155 One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the
21156 background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
21157 -- Stephen Sondheim
21159 All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
21162 Completely pure desirous attachment expresses itself through Buddha Amitabha.
21163 A person guided by desire, attachment, or grasping becomes diffused and loses
21164 power over phenomena. Through completely purified desirous attachment,
21165 however, one is able to gain control over, and to independently coordinate,
21166 everything. This is because the entourage, possessions, merit, and so forth
21167 are controlled by the power of this Buddha. In this way Amitabha grants us the
21168 empowering enlightened activity and the empowering extraordinary achievements.
21169 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, in "Everyday Consciousness and
21170 Buddha-awakening", Snow Lion Pub.
21172 No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
21173 -- David McCollough
21175 If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and
21176 only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement
21177 would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the
21178 atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, if you wish to call it that) that all
21179 things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual
21180 motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but
21181 repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
21182 -- Richard P. Feynman
21184 The third aspect of the practice of generosity is giving the gift of the
21185 Dharma by making the teachings available. Through the Dharma, we can bring
21186 understanding into the lives of others and help them remove their patterns of
21187 ignorance. We do not have to be great scholars to practice generosity through
21188 the Dharma. We may know just one line of the Dharma, but if we know that one
21189 line clearly and correctly, we can genuinely express it to others and help
21190 them. If we know four lines of the teachings, through those four lines we can
21191 help to clear up someone's ignorance or lessen someone's problems and
21192 sufferings. What counts is not how much we know but how correctly we know it
21193 and how sincerely we use it to help others. We should not wear the mask of the
21194 Dharma, pretending we know a great deal and are doing great things, while
21195 hiding ugliness inside us.
21196 -- Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, in "Dharma Paths", Snow Lion Pub.
21198 One difference between the destructive, negative emotions on the one side and
21199 constructive, positive emotions on the other is that constructive, positive
21200 emotions have a strong grounding in valid experience and reasoning. In fact,
21201 the more we analyze these positive emotions, the more they are enhanced.
21202 Negative, afflictive emotions, by contrast, are usually quite superficial.
21203 They have no grounding in reason and often arise out of habit rather than
21204 reasoned thought processes.
21205 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment",
21206 Snow Lion Publications
21208 Whenever you travel on an airplane, the flight attendants demonstrate what to
21209 do in an emergency. They tell you to put the oxygen mask over your own nose
21210 before putting it over your child's nose. That's not because you should be
21211 selfish, but because if you pass out, you won't be able to help anyone at all.
21212 So you see, the essential point is that we must first subdue our own minds
21213 before we can effectively serve others.
21215 If you have failed to subdue your own mind, even if a thousand Buddhas surround
21216 you, they will be of no benefit. If you want to subdue your enemies, you must
21217 subdue your own mind. If you want to bring about world peace, subdue your
21218 mind. A subdued mind is the Lama. A subdued mind is the Dakini, the chosen
21219 deity, and the Buddha. A subdued mind is the pure land. You are already
21220 imbued with the Buddha-nature. This is your inherent nature. What actual
21221 benefit have you gotten from the essential nature of your mind?
21222 -- Karma Chagme, in "A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on
21223 the Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga", Snow Lion Publications
21225 From: non-verbal sys-admin
21226 To: support technician
21227 Subject: harriet crash
21229 harriet crashed this afternoon
21230 it is back online now
21231 looks like a bad drive in the array
21232 i have an ibm ticket opened
21233 hope to have it serviced sometime tomorrow
21235 the current state or the repair
21236 should not affect core team work in build
21240 From: support technician
21241 To: non-verbal sys-admin
21242 Subject: Re: harriet crash
21245 complete sentences, grammar
21248 I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little,
21249 they become its visible soul.
21252 I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite
21253 ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.
21256 Besides the first degree of eminence in science, a professor with us must be
21257 of sober and correct morals and habits, having the talent of communicating his
21258 knowledge with facility, and of an accommodating and peaceable temper. The
21259 latter is all important for the harmony of the institution.
21260 -- Thomas Jefferson
21262 Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities,
21263 of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.
21264 -- Queen Elizabeth II
21266 We do not see, or we forget, that the birds that are idly singing around us
21267 mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.
21270 Obstacles to our practice may be external, internal or secret. The external
21271 ones consist of natural disasters, harm inflicted by human and nonhuman
21272 beings, sicknesses and so forth. Internal obstacles are our own disturbed
21273 states of mind and emotions and all the obstructions to liberation and full
21274 knowledge of all phenomena. Secret obstacles are seemingly good
21275 circumstances, which distract the practitioner and make him or her forget
21276 about practice. For instance, one might gain a good reputation as a sincere
21277 practitioner and thereby attract followers and wealth, which in the end make
21278 one neglect one's practice.
21279 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "Eight Verses for Training the Mind",
21282 From Linus Benedict Torvalds Oct 5 1991, 8:53 am
21283 Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
21284 From: torva...@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
21285 Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
21286 Local: Fri, Oct 4 1991 10:41 pm
21287 Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
21289 Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
21290 their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
21291 to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
21292 finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
21293 nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
21296 As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a
21297 minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage
21298 where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want),
21299 and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is
21300 just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully
21301 run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
21303 Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
21304 (128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also
21305 contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
21306 (bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel
21307 source is provided, as no minix code has been used. Library sources are
21308 only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The
21309 system is able to compile "as-is" and has been known to work. Heh.
21310 Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the same place in
21313 ALERT! WARNING! NOTE! These sources still need minix-386 to be compiled
21315 (and gcc-1.40, possibly 1.37.1, haven't tested), and you need minix to
21316 set it up if you want to run it, so it is not yet a standalone system
21317 for those of you without minix. I'm working on it. You also need to be
21318 something of a hacker to set it up (?), so for those hoping for an
21319 alternative to minix-386, please ignore me. It is currently meant for
21320 hackers interested in operating systems and 386's with access to minix.
21322 The system needs an AT-compatible harddisk (IDE is fine) and EGA/VGA. If
21323 you are still interested, please ftp the README/RELNOTES, and/or mail me
21324 for additional info.
21326 I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
21327 out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
21328 minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing
21329 it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for
21330 their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and
21331 modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.
21333 I'm also interested in hearing from anybody who has written any of the
21334 utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
21335 distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
21336 from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
21337 right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
21338 will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
21339 a line if you are willing to let me use your code.
21343 PS. to PHIL NELSON! I'm unable to get through to you, and keep getting
21344 "forward error - strawberry unknown domain" or something.
21346 Question: How do things exist if they are empty of inherent existence?
21348 His Holiness: The doctrines of emptiness and selflessness do not imply the non-
21349 existence of things. Things do exist. When we say that all phenomena are void
21350 of self-existence, it does not mean that we are advocating non-existence, that
21351 we are repudiating that things exist. Then what is it we are negating? We are
21352 negating, or denying, that anything exists from its own side without depending
21353 on other things. Hence, it is because things depend for their existence upon
21354 other causes and conditions that they are said to lack independent self-
21356 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
21357 Snow Lion Publications
21359 You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
21360 But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
21363 Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things,
21364 in which smiles, and kindnesses, and small obligations, given habitually,
21365 are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort.
21366 -- Sir Humphrey Davy
21368 It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
21369 -- Federico Fellini
21371 When you engage in a project or an activity that helps other sentient beings,
21372 there is no question of a time limit. You must do it continuously. This is
21373 how you should train your mind. If you think you will achieve enlightenment or
21374 bodhichitta within a few days or months, and if you think that you will get
21375 enlightened after entering into a retreat for three years and three months, you
21376 are mistaken. When I hear the suggestion that you will attain Buddhahood if
21377 you go into retreat for three years and three months, sometimes I jokingly say
21378 that this is just like communist propaganda. I tell my Western friends that
21379 wanting to practice the most profound and the quickest path is a clear sign
21380 that you will achieve no result. How can you achieve the most profound and the
21381 vast in the shortest way? The story of the Buddha says that he achieved
21382 Buddhahood after three countless aeons. So harboring an expectation to achieve
21383 Buddhahood within a short time-like three years and three months-is a clear
21384 indication that you will make no real progress. We have to be practical.
21385 There is no use in fooling others with your incomplete knowledge.
21386 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Stages of Meditation", Snow Lion Publications
21388 Buddhist moral philosophy is strikingly pragmatic. Something is valuable
21389 insofar as it is relevant to people's lives and useful for achieving their
21390 happiness. If it will bring happiness for oneself and others, pursue it; if it
21391 will bring suffering, better to avoid it. There are no absolute dictates;
21392 ethical personal behavior is seen as simply the most practical way to cope with
21393 the difficulties of the human condition. Although guidelines and copious
21394 illustrations are given, nothing is absolute or definitive. The power and
21395 freedom to make decisions rests with the individual. There is no arbitrary or
21396 mysterious force controlling our lives; there is simply the law of cause and
21397 effect. Of course, decisions are dependent upon many factors. The choices we
21398 make are conditioned by circumstances, both outer and inner, but ultimately
21399 human beings have free will to decide. Individuals make decisions and
21400 experience the consequences of their decisions.
21401 -- from "Buddhism Through American Women's Eyes", edited by Karma Lekshe
21402 Tsomo, Snow Lion Pub.
21404 Chemistry stands at the pivot of science. On the one hand it deals with biology
21405 and provides explanations for the processes of life. On the other hand it
21406 mingles with physics and finds explanations for chemical phenomena in the
21407 fundamental processes and particles of the universe. Chemistry links the
21408 familiar with the fundamental.
21411 In a cat's eyes, all things belong to cats. -- English Proverb
21413 A university is what a college becomes when the faculty
21414 loses interest in students.
21417 Ye can lead a man up to the university, but ye can't make him think.
21418 -- Finley Peter Dunne
21420 The new electronic interdependence recreates the
21421 world in the image of a global village.
21422 -- Marshall McLuhan
21424 One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping.
21427 For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life. -- William Blake
21429 Love is a kind of warfare. -- Ovid
21431 Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what
21432 is excellent in others belong to us as well.
21433 -- Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, 1694
21435 From a Buddhist point of view, one might be able to distinguish different
21436 states of dreaming. Generally speaking, a dream is a dream, something you
21437 can't control. But for the highly advanced meditator, there could be
21438 possibilities for gaining certain insights through dreams.
21439 I know some Tibetans who lived in Tibet prior to the 1959 uprising. Before
21440 their escape from Tibet, they did not know about the natural trails and passes
21441 by which to get over the Himalayas into India. Some of these people I met had
21442 very clear dreams of these tracks and, years later, when they actually had to
21443 follow the actual trails, they found that they were already familiar with them
21444 because of the very clear dreams they had had previously.
21445 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
21446 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", ed. by Zara Houshmand,
21447 Robert B. Livingston and B. Alan Wallace, Snow Lion Publications
21449 I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things.
21450 It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull one book from the
21451 shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to
21452 another book, and that to successive others.
21453 -- Carolyn Wells (1862-1942), Mystery Writer
21455 It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life
21456 that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that
21457 goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
21460 Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity,
21461 we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second
21462 time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
21463 -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
21465 One method for disciples to develop bodhichitta entails recognizing all
21466 beings as having been their mothers in some previous life and focusing on
21467 their mothers' kindness. Similarly, guru-meditation requires focusing on
21468 their mentors' kindness.
21469 Many Westerners, however, have difficulty focusing on the kindness of their
21470 mothers. Unable to find the goodness and kindness in their mothers, most
21471 cannot find any goodness in themselves either. Although they may be desperate
21472 for love and kindness, their mental blocks often prevent them from recognizing
21473 and appreciating the kindness of others, for instance their spiritual mentors.
21474 No matter how much kindness they receive, it is never enough.
21475 One of the reasons for being unable to acknowledge our mothers' kindness
21476 may be that they fail to live up to our models of ideal parents. Similarly,
21477 when our spiritual mentors have shortcomings and do not live up to our models
21478 of ideal teachers, we may also have difficulty recognizing their kindness.
21479 Like children yearning for ideal love, we feel cheated if our mentors fail
21480 to meet our expectations.
21481 -- Alexander Berzin, in "Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a Healthy
21482 Relationship", Snow Lion Publications
21484 Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
21487 I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis
21488 and I don't deserve that either.
21491 I have come to believe over and over again that what is most
21492 important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at
21493 the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
21494 -- Audre Geraldine Lorde
21496 The word dharma in Sanskrit means "that which holds". All existents are
21497 dharmas, phenomena, in the sense that they hold or bear their own entity or
21498 character. Also, a religion is a dharma in the sense that it holds persons
21499 back or protects them from disasters. Here the term dharma refers to the
21500 latter definition. In rough terms, any elevated action of body, speech or
21501 mind is regarded as a dharma because through doing such an action one is
21502 protected or held back from all sorts of disasters. Practice of such
21503 actions is practice of dharma.
21504 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Buddhism of Tibet", Snow Lion Publications
21506 What will survive of us is love. -- Philip Larkin
21508 Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
21511 Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
21514 Optimism can make you look stupid but cynicism always makes you look cynical.
21517 An architect proves his skill by turning the defects of a site into advantages.
21518 -- Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini
21520 Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world
21521 being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is
21522 asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.
21525 What is my purpose in life, what is my responsibility? Whether I like it or
21526 not, I am on this planet, and it is far better to do something for humanity.
21527 So you see that compassion is the seed or basis. If we take care to foster
21528 compassion, we will see that it brings the other good human qualities. The
21529 topic of compassion is not at all religious business; it is very important to
21530 know that it is human business, that it is a question of human survival, that
21531 is not a question of human luxury. I might say that religion is a kind of
21532 luxury. If you have religion, that is good. But it is clear that even without
21533 religion we can manage. However, without these basic human qualities we cannot
21534 survive. It is a question of our own peace and mental stability.
21535 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An
21536 Anthology of Writings By and About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited
21537 by Sidney Piburn, published by Snow Lion Publications
21539 Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
21540 -- Benjamin Disraeli
21542 We often get angry when something we consider undesirable happens. But what
21543 use is this anger? If we can change the situation, then let's go ahead and do
21544 it. There's no need to be angry. It's very useful to think like this when
21545 confronted with social problems and injustice. They can be changed, so rather
21546 than be angry, it's wiser to work calmly to improve the society.
21547 On the other hand, if the situation can't be changed, anger is equally
21548 useless. Once our leg is broken, we can't unbreak it. All of the corruption
21549 in the world can't be solved in a year. Getting angry at something we can't
21550 alter makes us miserable. Worrying about or fearing something that hasn't
21551 happened immobilizes us. Shantideva said in A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way
21553 Why be unhappy about something If it can be remedied? And what is the
21554 use of being unhappy about something If it cannot be remedied?
21555 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Open Heart, Clear Mind", Snow Lion Publications
21557 From the Hacker's Lexicon:
21559 Heisenbug /hi:'zen-buhg/ from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in
21560 quantum physics n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one
21561 attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug,
21562 schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either
21563 fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the
21564 malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.
21566 Schroedinbug MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in
21567 quantum physics n. A design or implementation bug in a program which
21568 doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an
21569 unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the
21570 program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though this
21571 sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent
21572 schroedinbugs for years. Compare heisenbug, Bohr bug, mandelbug.
21574 Bohr bug /bohr buhg/ from quantum physics n. A repeatable bug; one that
21575 manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of
21576 conditions. Antonym of heisenbug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.
21578 Mandelbug /mon'del-buhg/ from the Mandelbrot set n. A bug whose
21579 underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior
21580 appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the
21581 speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug. See also
21584 If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in
21585 music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
21588 Nothing's impossible I have found,
21589 For when my chin is on the ground,
21590 I pick myself up, Dust myself off,
21591 Start all over again.
21594 You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.
21595 -- Colonial American Proverb
21597 The essence of dharma practice is to bring about a discipline within the mind,
21598 a state of mind free of hatred, lust and harmful intentions. Hence the entire
21599 message of the buddhadharma could be summed up in two succinct statements:
21600 "Help others," and "If you cannot help them, at least do not harm others."
21601 It is a grave error to think that apart from such a disciplining of the
21602 physical and mental faculties there is something else called "the practice of
21603 dharma." Various, and in some cases divergent, methods to achieve such an
21604 inner discipline have been taught in the scriptures by the Buddha.
21605 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", Snow Lion Publications
21607 It is not the strongest of the species that survive,
21608 nor the most intelligent,
21609 but the one most responsive to change.
21612 As progress is made in dream practice, dreams become clearer and more detailed,
21613 and a larger part of each dream is remembered. This is a result of bringing
21614 greater awareness into the dream state. Beyond this increased awareness in
21615 ordinary dreams is a second kind of dream called the dream of clarity, which
21616 arises when the mind and the prana are balanced and the dreamer has developed
21617 the capacity to remain in non-personal presence. Unlike the samsaric dream, in
21618 which the mind is swept here and there by karmic prana, in the dream of clarity
21619 the dreamer is stable. Though images and information arise, they are based
21620 less on personal karmic traces and instead present knowledge available directly
21621 from consciousness below the level of the conventional self.
21622 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, in "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep",
21623 published by Snow Lion Publications
21625 In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
21628 Be careful when reading health books--you might die of a misprint.
21631 The practice of pure perception is effective when it is practiced a lot. In
21632 pure perception, look beyond the surface and imagine that other people are none
21633 other than expressions of buddha-mind. We can choose to focus on positive
21634 attributes. What we attend to becomes our reality and if we attend to the
21635 buddhas in situations, in things, in other people it is the buddhas we engage
21636 with and the reality of the buddhas that becomes our reality.
21637 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "Buddhism with an Attitude: Tibetan Seven-Point
21638 Mind-Training", Snow Lion Publications
21640 Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it
21641 is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.
21644 The path to genuine co-operation is again through sincere compassion and love.
21645 Sometimes we misunderstand compassion as being nothing more than a feeling of
21646 pity. Compassion is much, much more. It embraces not only a feeling of
21647 closeness, but also a sense of responsibility. When you develop compassion, it
21648 will help you enormously to generate inner strength and self-confidence, and to
21649 reduce your feelings of fear and insecurity. So compassion and love, embodied
21650 in an attitude of altruism, are qualities that are of tremendous importance for
21651 the individual, as well as for society and the community at large.
21652 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
21653 Perfection", published by Snow Lion Publications
21655 The value of transmission is not only that of introducing the state of
21656 knowledge, but lies also in its function of bringing about the maturing of the
21657 transmission, right up until one reaches realization. For this reason the
21658 relationship that links master and disciple is a very close one. The master,
21659 in Dzogchen, is not just like a friend who helps and collaborates with the
21660 disciple; rather the master is himself or herself the path. This is because
21661 the practice of contemplation develops through the unification of the state of
21662 the disciple with that of the master. The master is extremely important, too,
21663 at the Sutra and the Tantra levels of teaching, in the former because he or she
21664 is the holder of Buddha's teachings, and in the latter because he or she is the
21665 source of all the manifestations of transformation.
21666 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, in "Dzogchen: The Self-perfected State",
21667 published by Snow Lion Publications
21669 Setting the Appropriate Motivation
21670 It is very important before receiving any Dharma teaching to set a proper
21671 motivation, or reaffirm and enhance that motivation if we already basically
21672 have it. This is important not only for those who are listening to a spiritual
21673 discourse, but also for the person delivering it. If a discourse or
21674 explanation is given with an attitude of pride, competitiveness or jealousy, it
21675 will not do as a Dharma teaching. A Buddhist teaching must be given with the
21676 sincere wish to benefit all beings by means of it.
21677 Likewise, the listeners to a Buddhist teaching must have a proper
21678 motivation, always thinking, "What new point can I learn from this that will
21679 help me be of more benefit to others?" If we sit here with the notion to learn
21680 something about mahamudra so that we can make a display of ourselves and
21681 proudly talk to others about mahamudra so that they will consider us an
21682 erudite, spiritual person, we have a completely wrong motivation.
21683 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra",
21684 published by Snow Lion Publications
21686 There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity
21687 latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the
21688 smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she
21689 is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
21690 -- Giordano Bruno, "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast", (1582)
21692 Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer
21693 is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able
21694 to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor
21695 could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any
21696 equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a
21698 -- Giordano Bruno, "De Monade"
21700 Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made
21701 manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single
21702 earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of
21706 The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs
21707 of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented
21708 lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald--and Paul
21709 Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass.
21712 The Tibetan word that is usually translated as "blessing" or "inspiration" can
21713 more literally be translated as "to transform into magnificence." We are
21714 asking the Buddhas to transform our minds into magnificence. How that happens
21715 isn't by the Buddha going in and pulling some switches inside our mind.
21716 Because our mind is conditioned and changing, the mental energy of the Buddha's
21717 realizations can affect our energy, so to speak. Conditioned phenomena affect
21718 each other, so the force of Tara's realizations can positively affect our mind.
21719 -- Thubten Chodron, in "How to Free Your Mind", Snow Lion Publications
21721 A botnet is comparable to compulsory military service for windows boxes.
21724 The greatest strength is gentleness. -- Iroquois proverb
21726 Whether or not we actually achieve the realisation of bodhicitta and to what
21727 level or depth we gain such a realisation depends upon the force of our
21728 experience of great compassion. This great compassion, which aspires to free
21729 all sentient beings from suffering, is not confined to the level of mere
21730 aspiration. It has a dimension of far greater power, which is the sense of
21731 commitment or responsibility to personally bring about this objective of
21732 fulfilling others' welfare. In order to cultivate this powerful great
21733 compassion, we need to train our mind separately in two other factors. One is
21734 to cultivate a sense of empathy with or closeness to all sentient beings, for
21735 whose sake we wish to work so that they become free from suffering. The other
21736 factor is to cultivate a deeper insight into the nature of the suffering from
21737 which we wish others to be relieved.
21738 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Lighting the Way", Snow Lion Publications
21740 Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external
21741 signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in
21742 taming the mind. When the mind becomes the practices, one is a practitioner
21743 of religion, and when the mind does not become the practices one is not.
21744 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Deity Yoga", Snow Lion Pub.
21746 Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy
21748 To go outside, and there perchance to stay
21749 Or to remain within: that is the question:
21750 Whether 'tis better for a cat to suffer
21751 The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
21752 That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,
21753 Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
21754 And so by dozing melt the solid hours
21755 That clog the clock's bright gears with sullen time
21756 And stall the dinner bell.
21757 To sit, to stare Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
21758 A wish to venture forth without delay,
21759 Then when the portal's opened up, to stand
21760 As if transfixed by doubt.
21761 To prowl; to sleep;
21762 To choose not knowing when we may once more
21763 Our readmittance gain: aye, there's the hairball;
21764 For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
21765 Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
21766 And going out and coming in were made
21767 As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
21768 What cat would bear the household's petty plagues,
21769 The cook's well-practiced kicks, the butler's broom,
21770 The infant's careless pokes, the tickled ears,
21771 The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
21772 That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
21773 He might his exodus or entrance make
21774 With a mere mitten?
21775 Who would spaniels fear,
21776 Or strays trespassing from a neighbor's yard,
21777 But that the dread of our unheeded cries
21778 And scratches at a barricaded door
21779 No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
21780 And makes us rather bear our humans' faults
21781 Than run away to unguessed miseries?
21782 Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
21783 And thus the bristling hair of resolution
21784 Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
21785 And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
21786 We pause upon the threshold of decision.
21789 It is not good to begin many different works, saying "This looks good; that
21790 looks good", touching this, touching that, and not succeeding in any of them.
21791 If you do not generate great desires but aim at what is fitting, you can
21792 actualise the corresponding potencies and become an expert in that. With
21793 success, the power or imprint of that practice is generated.
21794 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Tantra in Tibet", Snow Lion Pub.
21796 Through the skillful methods of tantra, meditators are able to cultivate
21797 pleasure in a way that actually aids in spiritual progress. Afflicted
21798 grasping and desires based on mistaken ideas are the problem, not happiness
21799 and pleasure. If the pursuit of happiness and pleasure can be separated
21800 from afflictive emotions, then it can be incorporated into the path and
21801 will even become a powerful aid to the attainment of enlightenment.
21802 -- John Powers, in "Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", Snow Lion Pub.
21805 What kind of refuge does Buddhism offer? How are Buddhists and non-Buddhists
21806 differentiated? From the viewpoint of refuge, a Buddhist is someone who
21807 accepts Buddha, his doctrine, and the spiritual community as the final refuge.
21808 From the viewpoint of philosophy, a Buddhist is someone who asserts the four
21809 views that guarantee a doctrine as being Buddhist. With respect to the three
21810 refuges, called the Three Jewels, it is said that the Buddha is the teacher of
21811 refuge but that the actual refuge is the Dharma, the doctrine. Buddha himself
21812 said, "I teach the path of liberation. Liberation itself depends upon you."
21813 From the same perspective, Buddha said, "You are your own master." The
21814 spiritual community are those who assist one in achieving refuge.
21815 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama at Harvard", Snow Lion
21818 Bodhisattvas are motivated by universal compassion, and they seek the ultimate
21819 goal of buddhahood in order to be of service to others. They embark on this
21820 path with the generation of the mind of enlightenment, which Geshe Rabten
21821 states is "the wish for Supreme Enlightenment for the sake of others. The sign
21822 of the true Bodhicitta is the constant readiness to undergo any sacrifice for
21823 the happines of all beings." Unlike ordinary beings, who think of their own
21824 advantage, bodhisattvas consider how best to benefit others.
21825 -- John Powers, in "Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", Snow Lion Publications
21827 Why are there fierce protectors? Peaceful deities such as Tara have a certain
21828 energy that calms and gladdens our mind. But sometimes our mind is so
21829 belligerent and stuck that we need the kind of energy that goes "Pow!" to wake
21830 us up or to pull us out of unproductive behavior. For this reason, the
21831 Buddhas' wisdom and compassion appear in the form of these wrathful deities to
21832 demonstrate clean-clear wisdom and compassion that act directly. This active
21833 wisdom doesn't vacillate and pamper us. This wisdom doesn't say, "Well,
21834 maybe," or, "Poor you. You deserve to be treated well, not like that horrible
21835 person treated you." Instead, it's forceful: "Cut it out! Stop those false
21836 expectations and preconceptions right now!" Sometimes we need that strong,
21837 wise energy to be in our face to wake us up to the fact that our afflictions
21838 and old patterns of thought and behavior are making us miserable.
21839 -- Thubten Chodron, in "How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator"
21841 I never joined the army because at ease was never that easy to me. Seemed
21842 rather uptight still. I don't relax by parting my legs slightly and putting
21843 my hands behind my back. That does not equal ease. At ease was not being
21844 in the military. I am at ease, bro, because I am not in the military.
21847 The human essence of good sense finds no room with anger. Anger, jealousy,
21848 impatience, and hatred are the real troublemakers; with them problems cannot
21849 be solved. Though one may have temporary success, ultimately one's hatred or
21850 anger will create further difficulties. With anger, all actions are swift.
21851 When we face problems with compassion, sincerely and with good motivation, it
21852 may take longer, but ultimately the solution is better, for there is far less
21853 chance of creating a new problem through the temporary "solution" of the
21855 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "Kindness, Clarity and Insight", Snow Lion Pub.
21857 Killing and eating meat are interrelated, so do we have to give up eating
21858 animal products? I myself once tried to give it up, but health problems arose
21859 and two years later my doctors advised me to again use meat in my diet. If
21860 there are people who can give up eating meat, we can only rejoice in their
21861 noble efforts. In any case, at least we should try to lessen our intake of
21862 meat and not eat it anywhere where it is in scarce supply and our consumption
21863 of it would cause added slaughter.
21864 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "The Path to Enlightenment", Snow Lion Publications
21866 The mind is beyond expression, thought and conceptualization, because it is
21867 empty. Yet, there is phenomena and appearance. The objects that you cling to
21868 in this waking reality are dreamlike, but if you do not inquire into the nature
21869 of this dream, you remain attracted as though there were really something here.
21870 Upon examination, you find that these objects have no true existence at all and
21871 are just like space. A practitioner who understands that phenomena lack
21872 inherent existence and resemble space should then examine himself or herself to
21873 discover whether he or she possesses an individual self. Then it will be
21874 discovered that there is no truly existing examiner either.
21875 -- Gyatrul Rinpoche, from "The Generation Stage in Buddhist Tantra",
21876 published by Snow Lion Publications
21878 Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
21881 In discursive meditations it is imperative that one's growing disenchantment
21882 with mundane existence is complemented with growing confidence in the real
21883 possibility of true freedom and lasting joy that transcends the vicissitudes
21884 of conditioned existence. Without this faith and the yearning for such
21885 liberation, the meditations may easily result in profound depression, in which
21886 everything seems hollow, unreal, and futile. Thus instead of polarizing one's
21887 desires towards the single-pointed pursuit of nirvana, one is reduced to a
21888 debilitating kind of spiritual sloth.
21889 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "Balancing the Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist Approach
21890 to Refining Attention", Snow Lion Publications
21892 I believe that in human actions, the prime mover is motivation. On the spot,
21893 it is important to tackle the symptoms of problems, but in the long run, it is
21894 necessary to look at the motivation and whether there is possibility to change
21895 it. For the long run, this is crucial. As long as the negative motivation is
21896 not changed, then although there might be certain rules and methods to stop
21897 counterproductive actions, human beings have the ability through various ways
21898 to express their negative feeling. Thus, for the long run, we need to look at
21899 our motivation and try to change it. This means that we must try to cultivate
21900 the right kind of motivation and try to reduce the negative motivation.
21901 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss
21902 Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation", edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
21903 published by Snow Lion Publications
21905 When we talk of karma or action, it entails action committed by an agent, in
21906 this case, oneself, in the past. So what type of future will come about, to a
21907 large extent, lies within one's own hands and can be determined by the kind of
21908 initiatives that one takes now. Not only that, but karma should not be
21909 understood in terms of passive, static kind of force, but rather in terms of
21910 active process. This indicates that there is an important role for the
21911 individual agent to play in determining the course of the karmic process.
21912 Consider, for instance, a simple act like fulfilling our need for food. In
21913 order to achieve that simple goal one must take action on one's own behalf: one
21914 needs to look for food, to prepare it, to eat it. This shows that even a
21915 simple act, even a simple goal is achieved through action.
21916 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
21917 Buddhist Perspective", Snow Lion Publications
21919 Nothing is easier than to bring others down to our level, particularly in
21920 cultures where it is taken as a sign of keen intelligence to view every person
21921 and situation as a challenge to "name the ten things wrong with this picture."
21922 The presence of Guru Rinpoche in so many forms in our world makes us question
21923 life in a way pre-1959 persons rarely had to. Life isn't the same after
21924 meeting the Dalai Lama or Kyentse Rinpoche and others. We can't erase them
21925 from our minds, as inconvenient as these open doors to enlightenment might be.
21926 We had other plans; we didn't ask to see so vividly another totally different
21928 The question, "How can I integrate this into my daily life?" doesn't plumb
21929 the depth of the inquiry. I have translated for lamas in North America,
21930 Europe, and Asia, and have found this to be the typical North American
21931 question. I think the best answer is, "You can't; don't even try." But I
21932 have to wonder about the question itself. What do you do when an event or an
21933 encounter changes your life? If you won a 10,000,000 dollar jackpot, if a
21934 dear friend dies, or if you fall deeply in love, do you ask, "How can I
21935 integrate this into my daily life?" Some events change us, are earth-
21936 shattering, and are not meant to be integrated into what can sometimes feel
21937 like a rat race existence. Meeting Guru Rinpoche is one such event.
21938 -- Ngawang Zangpo, in "Guru Rinpoche: His Life and Times", Snow Lion Pub.
21940 Now in terms of the actual practice, when one is immersed in the contemplation
21941 of the clear light, since all dualistic appearances vanish, it becomes
21942 impossible to distinguish the object from the consciousness perceiving it.
21943 They seem to become as if they were one, like water mixed with water. Of
21944 course, strictly speaking, there are two entities, subject and object, but
21945 within the experience of the clear light this duality is lost.
21946 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
21947 published by Snow Lion Publications
21949 Guardians of the teachings
21950 There are eight principal classes of Guardians each with many subdivisions.
21951 Some are highly realized beings, others not realized at all. Every place--
21952 every continent, country, city, mountain, river, lake or forest--has its
21953 particular dominant energy, or Guardian, as have every year, hour and even
21954 minute: these are not highly evolved energies. The various teachings all have
21955 energies which have special relationships with them: these are more realized
21956 Guardians. These energies are iconographically portrayed as they were
21957 perceived when they manifested to masters who had contact with them, and their
21958 awesome power is represented by their terrifyingly ferocious forms, their many
21959 arms and heads, and their ornaments of the charnel ground. As with all the
21960 figures in tantric iconography, it is not correct to interpret the figures of
21961 the guardians as merely symbolic, as some Western writers have been tempted to
21962 do. Though the iconographic forms have been shaped by the perceptions and
21963 culture of those who saw the original manifestation and by the development of
21964 tradition, actual beings are represented.
21965 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra
21966 and Dzogchen, Teachings of Chogyal Namkhai Norbu", compiled and edited by
21967 John Shane, published by Snow Lion Publications
21969 5. When others out of jealousy treat me unreasonably, with abuse, slander, and
21970 so on, I will learn to take all loss and offer the victory to them. When any
21971 type of deserved or undeserved slander, prompted by jealousy, and so forth,
21972 and unpleasant verbal abuse [comes to one], do not lose patience. Keep a
21973 peaceful mind. Further, when problems arise, do not say "It is his fault,
21974 not mine!" Accept the blame, as did Geshe Lang ri thang pa. [Reflect:]
21975 "Whoever created this mess, it includes me! I have [a hand in it] also."
21976 The reason for this is that we must endeavor toward generosity and the various
21977 modes of ethical behavior, for the sake of purifying our many misdeeds and
21978 completing the accumulations [of merit and wisdom].
21979 Therefore, when one shows kindness to slanderers, even if one does not
21980 deserve the abuse and slander, it is said to be necessary for purifying our
21981 misdeeds when problems arise. Taking all blame on ourselves prevents our evil
21982 karma from arising.
21983 Geshe Lang ri thang pa speaks of a person from the Valley of Phan who
21984 sometimes gave a little butter cake to the Lamas, and at other times slandered
21985 them for no reason. The Lamas regarded him with great kindness. This
21986 cleansed their misdeeds and helped their accumulation of the two collections.
21987 They claimed that his slanderous talk was great. Shantideva's
21988 bodhisattvacaryavatara says:
21989 Therefore, since patience can be generated
21990 In dependence upon a very hate filled mind
21991 And because it is the cause of patience,
21992 Make offerings to it as if it was the most excellent doctrine!
21993 More correct even than this statement is that ethics and patience lead to
21994 great merit, and to the end of misdeeds such as anger. Therefore it is said
21995 that the hardest practice is patience. [Learn] the patience that is keeping
21996 still no matter what happens.
21999 I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
22000 -- Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
22002 All sentient beings are exactly the same in that every one desires happiness
22003 and seeks to avoid misery. We are not isolated entities disconnected from
22004 each other. The happiness and suffering of other beings affect us. This
22005 mutual relation is obvious. Sentient beings have been kind and have benefited
22006 us directly and indirectly throughout beginningless time. These beings are
22007 intrinsically the same as us in their pursuit of happiness and effort to avoid
22008 suffering. Thus, it is essentially logical for us to train in cultivating an
22009 impartial attitude wishing for the happiness of all beings.
22010 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", Snow Lion Pub.
22012 Our exaggerated sense of self and our compulsion to find happiness for this
22013 larger-than-life self we have fabricated cause us to ignore, neglect and harm
22014 others. Of course, it is our right to love and take care of ourselves, but
22015 not at the expense of others. While "As long as I'm alright" is our motto,
22016 we have no hesitation in acting with total disregard for others.
22017 We may find this description of self-concern altogether too crass to apply
22018 to us. "I'm not like that," we object, but though we may not consciously
22019 think in this way, when self-concern is operating, our behavior shows a cold
22020 indifference to others. Conflicts between partners, parents and children and
22021 with other family members, conflicts between students and teachers and on a
22022 larger scale within and between countries have their source in personal and
22023 collective self-concern.
22024 Buddhas and Bodhisattvas see clearly that our neglect of others, our self-
22025 preoccupation and our disregard for the connection between actions and their
22026 effects are responsible for all our miseries.
22027 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path: An
22028 Oral Teaching", translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by
22029 Snow Lion Publications
22031 Ordinarily, it is difficult to remember one's past life. Such recollections
22032 seem to be more vivid when the child is very young, such as two or three, and
22033 in some cases even younger. ...When the present body is fully formed, the
22034 ability to recall past life seems to diminish.
22035 The mental associations with this life become increasingly dominant. There
22036 is a close relationship during the first few years of one's life with the
22037 continuum of consciousness from the previous life. But as experiences of this
22038 life become more developed and elaborate, they dominate.
22039 It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind,
22040 enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection
22041 tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state.
22042 Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one
22043 gradually recalls them in the waking state.
22044 -- H.H Dalai Lama, in "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with
22045 The Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", Edited by Zara Houshmand,
22046 Robert B. Livingston and B. Alan Wallace, Snow Lion Publications
22048 Relaxation involves a kind of awareness which reverses the normal tendency
22049 that we have. Because, as we have seen, this ordinary sense of self that we
22050 have lacks inherent self existence, it has to keep constructing itself and
22051 that requires a particular kind of effort. The ego's root feeling is that if
22052 I do not hold myself together there will be a falling apart into something
22053 chaotic and difficult. So there is anxiety, an energetic anxiety which is
22054 located in the body, in the whole energetic system of the body and
22055 interpersonal turbulence reminds us again and again "If I don't keep it
22056 together, I will get in trouble." The belief in reincarnation indicates that
22057 for many lifetimes we have been caught up in this anxiety, this nervous
22058 contraction which is holding our ordinary grasping sense of self in place.
22059 -- from "Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text of Nuden Dorje entitled
22060 'The Mirror of Clear Meaning,'" commentary by James Low, Snow Lion Pub.
22062 Buddhas are always striving for the welfare of beings migrating in cyclic
22063 existence. In every hour and minute they create limitless forms of welfare
22064 for beings throughout billions of emanations of their body, speech and mind.
22065 For instance, in this aeon--an aeon being a period of an extremely great
22066 number of years--they will appear in the aspect of one thousand supreme
22067 Emanation Bodies (Nirmanakaya) as Buddhas, and each will have his own new
22069 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Buddhism of Tibet", Snow Lion Publications
22072 The Buddhist teachings differentiate between flash insights (nyam, nyams),
22073 and stable realizations (togpa, rtogs-pa). A flash insight does not make a
22074 significant change in one's life, but may lead in that direction. A stable
22075 realization, on the other hand, whether it be partial or complete, actually
22076 produces a noticeable improvement that lasts. The distinction we are drawing
22077 here between Dharma instructors and spiritual mentors derives from this
22078 difference. Dharma instructors may have either insight or realization,
22079 whereas spiritual mentors need to have some level of stable realization.
22080 -- Alexander Berzin, in "Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a
22081 Healthy Relationship, published by Snow Lion Publications
22083 Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.
22084 -- Edward Shepherd Mead
22086 If you can't do what you want, do what you can. -- Lois McMaster Bujold
22088 Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.
22089 -- Meridel le Sueur
22091 It is not the man who has too little,
22092 but the man who craves more, that is poor.
22095 Drive-in banks were established so most of the
22096 cars today could see their real owners.
22097 -- E. Joseph Crossman
22099 I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch. -- Gilda Radner
22101 It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish.
22104 You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that
22105 make you want to live to be a hundred.
22108 No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.
22111 Do not look where you fell but where you slipped.
22113 There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
22116 Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.
22117 -- Elizabeth Barret Browning
22119 Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
22120 -- Robert Louis Stevenson
22122 We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from
22123 artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.
22124 -- Alfred E. Newman, Mad Magazine
22126 The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
22129 You are what you are--and not what people think you are. -- O.W. Polen
22131 Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
22134 From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.
22137 I touch the future. I teach. -- Christa McAuliffe
22139 Curiosity is one of the permanent and
22140 certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.
22143 People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. -- W. Somerset Maugham
22145 Money is like muck, not good except it be spread. -- Sir Francis Bacon
22147 The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting
22148 otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
22151 We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
22152 -- Wernher von Braun
22154 The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
22155 write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
22158 Wealth is the possession of whatever gives us happiness,
22159 contentment or a sense of significance.
22162 To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. -- Oscar Wilde
22164 I bought some batteries, but they weren't included. -- Steven Wright
22166 The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
22169 People who work sitting down get paid
22170 more than people who work standing up.
22173 It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -- Sir Edmund Hillary
22175 What we should ask of ourselves is growth, not perfection. -- Pat Boone
22177 Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand. -- Unknown
22179 The purpose of life is to fight maturity. -- Dick Wertheimer
22181 Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with. -- Bob Wells
22183 A good mind possesses a kingdom. -- Lucius Anaaeus Seneca
22185 I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the
22186 position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has
22187 overcome while trying to succeed.
22188 -- Booker T. Washington
22190 An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart
22191 he would have been not to have taken it.
22192 -- Laurence J. Peter
22194 I have not lost my mind--it's backed up on disk somewhere. -- Unknown
22196 Wise men talk because they have something to say;
22197 fools, because they have to say something.
22200 Don't waste a thousand dollars' worth of emotion over a 5-cent triviality.
22203 Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them. -- Suzanne Necker
22205 Some people are born on third base and go
22206 through life thinking they have hit a triple.
22209 I can't understand why people are scared of new ideas.
22210 I'm frightened of the old ones.
22213 It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
22216 A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. -- Samuel Goldwyn
22218 When we practice, initially, as a basis we control ourselves, stopping the bad
22219 actions which hurt others as much as we can. This is defensive. After that,
22220 when we develop certain qualifications, then as an active goal we should help
22221 others. In the first stage, sometimes we need isolation while pursuing our
22222 own inner development; however, after you have some confidence, some strength,
22223 you must remain with, contact, and serve society in any field--health,
22224 education, politics, or whatever.
22226 There are people who call themselves religious-minded, trying to show this by
22227 dressing in a peculiar manner, maintaining a peculiar way of life, and
22228 isolating themselves from the rest of society. That is wrong. A scripture of
22229 mind-purification (mind-training) says, "Transform your inner viewpoint, but
22230 leave your external appearance as it is." This is important. Because the
22231 very purpose of practicing the Great Vehicle is service for others, you should
22232 not isolate yourselves from society. In order to serve, in order to help, you
22233 must remain in society.
22234 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness",
22235 Snow Lion Publications
22237 The indivisible nature of mind is said to possess a "mobile quality." This
22238 mobile quality is described as currents of energy which flow through the
22239 channels of various parts of the body, presiding over physical as well as
22240 mental functions, and pass through the nostrils as breathing. Such currents
22241 of energy, called "winds" (rlung, vayu), serve as the bridge between body and
22243 The winds are a blend of two types of energy, one associated with
22244 emotionality, called karmic or conditioned wind (las kyi rlung), and the other
22245 related to the original state of the individual, called pristine awareness
22246 wind (ye shes kyi rlung). Distinguished in terms of the three principles,
22247 darkness (tamas), mobility (rajas), and buoyancy (sattva), winds are of three
22248 types: wind of Rahu, solar wind, and lunar wind. Moreover, the winds are
22249 differentiated as the five root winds (rtsa ba'i rlung), the natures of the
22250 five elements, and five branch winds (yan lag gi rlung), produced through the
22251 five elemental transformations. The winds of the five elements, or five
22252 mandalas, flow back and forth through the right and left nostrils in the order
22253 of generation of the elements and of birth (first space, then wind, fire,
22254 water, earth) and in the order of dissolution of the elements and of death
22255 (first earth, then water, and so on), respectively. In one day, they are
22256 exhaled and inhaled 21,600 times, divided between the two nostrils, a time
22257 corresponding to eight periods or watches (thun). The outward movement of
22258 these energy currents as the breath diminishes the strength of the wind
22259 associated with pristine awareness. Therefore, when outward movement
22260 increases, there occur signs of death. If the winds are held inside,
22261 pristine awareness wind is strengthened. Hence, many extraordinary powers
22262 such as longevity are gained through breath control techniques for "holding
22263 the winds" in the central channel.
22264 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, in "The Treasury of Knowledge, Book Six,
22265 Part Four: Systems of Buddhist Tantra, The Indestructible Way of
22268 When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
22271 ...you should have the deep conviction that cessation of the sufferings and
22272 the delusions is possible, and also that it is possible within your mind.
22273 True cessation is a state where you have destroyed the delusions at their root
22274 so that there remains no potential for their re-emergence. Such a cessation
22275 can be realized only through the true paths that penetrate into the nature of
22277 When you develop this conviction, you will also be able to develop faith in
22278 a being who has really mastered cessation, who is the Buddha--a person who has
22279 fully accomplished the realization of the dharma. If you contemplate along
22280 such lines, you will be able to develop a very deep faith and conviction in
22281 Buddha Shakyamuni and see him as an incomparable master.
22282 What distinguishes Buddhist practitioners from others is the factor of
22283 taking refuge. But merely seeking a refuge out of the fear of suffering is
22284 not unique to Buddhists; non-Buddhists could also have such a motivation. The
22285 unique practice of refuge that Buddhists should have is that of taking refuge
22286 in the Buddha out of a deep conviction in his exceptional qualities and
22287 realizations. If you think in such terms you will be able to understand Lama
22288 Tsongkhapa's profound praise of Buddha Shakyamuni: "Those who are far from his
22289 doctrine always reinforce the illusion of self-existence that they have within
22290 themselves, whereas those who follow his guidance will be able to free
22291 themselves from such confusions."
22292 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Path to Bliss", Snow Lion Publications
22294 ...they say that the initial realization of the nature of the mind is the
22295 first breakthrough. It's a very important point in all Buddhist schools. At
22296 that moment, you cease to be an ordinary person. You become in Buddhist
22297 parlance an arya, a noble one. It doesn't mean you are finished. It doesn't
22298 mean you are a high level bodhisattva. We can fall back from this. But
22299 still, this is a big breakthrough. We now understand what is true and what is
22300 not true. We don't have to take it all on faith any more. It is a direct
22301 non-dual experience. The point is that it is very easy. It's not difficult,
22302 and it's not something that can only be attained after years and years of
22304 Our main obstacle is the fact that we don't know how to relax our minds
22305 enough to be open to this experience. In the back of our minds we keep
22306 thinking this is something so difficult and so advanced. For this reason we
22307 don't recognize what is in front of our face. This is why a teacher can be
22308 extraordinarily helpful. A teacher living within that realization is able--
22309 if the mind of the disciple is completely open--to transmit his or her
22310 experience. The problem here is that we have too many hopes and fears; it
22311 creates a barrier. It is very hard to be open. You can't just will it.
22312 -- Ani Tenzin Palmo, in "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on
22313 Practical Buddhism"
22315 The Level of Initial Capacity
22317 All the essential spiritual practices related primarily to the achievement of
22318 rebirth in the higher realms belong to what Atisha calls the 'small capacity'.
22321 Know that those who by whatever means
22322 Seek for themselves no more
22323 Than the pleasures of cyclic existence
22324 Are persons of the least capacity.
22325 [Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment]
22327 ...the principal means for attaining birth in the higher realms is the ethical
22328 discipline of refraining from the ten negative actions of body, speech and
22329 mind. These comprise three actions of the body--killing, stealing and sexual
22330 misconduct; four verbal actions--lying, divisive speech, harsh speech and
22331 frivolous speech; and three mental actions--covetousness, ill-will and
22332 harbouring wrong views. To live an ethically sound life, it helps to remind
22333 ourselves of what are known as the four reflections, namely the preciousness
22334 of human life; the inevitability of our death and the uncertainty of the time
22335 of death; the infallibility of the law of cause and effect and the workings of
22336 karma; and understanding the nature of suffering. Concerning the first
22337 reflection, some Tibetan masters have said that when we contemplate the
22338 preciousness of this human existence, we should literally cultivate the
22339 determination to make our human life something precious in itself, rather than
22340 allowing it to be wasted or to become a cause of future suffering.
22342 Contemplating these four reflections gives us the courage to engage earnestly
22343 in the practice of the Dharma in order to free ourselves from the possibility
22344 of rebirth in the lower realms. This involves a process of training our mind,
22345 not just at the mental level but also at the level of our emotions and
22346 actions. Living an ethical life is not a case of adhering to a set of
22347 regulations imposed on us from outside, such as the laws of a country. Rather
22348 it involves voluntarily embracing a discipline on the basis of a clear
22349 recognition of its value. In essence, living a true ethical life is living a
22350 life of self-discipline. When the Buddha said that 'we are our own master, we
22351 are our own enemy', he was telling us that our destiny lies in our own hands.
22353 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Lighting the Way", Snow Lion Publications
22355 In his autobiography Freedom in Exile, His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of
22356 his attachment as a child to the monastery's Master of the Kitchen,
22357 commenting, "I sometimes think that the act of bringing food is one of the
22358 basic roots of all relationships." And the connection between giving food and
22359 understanding the interrelationship of all life is recognized also in stories
22360 about the belated discovery of an enlightened master who lived humbly as a
22361 monastery cook; or the stories of a great lama who gathers his disciples to
22362 test their progress, only to discover that the most highly realized of all is
22363 the cook, who has neither meditated nor studied, but who simply served the
22365 May you have long life,
22366 may the house be filled with grain,
22367 and may you have the luck
22368 to make use of this abundance.
22369 -- Tibetan drinking song
22371 -- Tsering Wangmo and Zara Houshmand, in "The Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbook"
22373 The Level of Middling Capacity
22375 In the following verse Atisha describes the characteristics of spiritual
22376 trainees of the middling capacity.
22379 Those who seek peace for themselves alone,
22380 Turning away from worldly pleasures
22381 And avoiding destructive actions
22382 Are said to be of middling capacity.
22383 -- Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment
22385 The phrase "destructive actions" refers to the afflictions that, together with
22386 karma, constitute the origin of suffering. This is why practitioners at the
22387 level of middling capacity concentrate on the spiritual practices that are
22388 primarily aimed at the elimination of the afflictions. Broadly speaking,
22389 these practices fall into two categories. One is training the mind to
22390 cultivate the genuine desire to gain freedom from cyclic existence, which is
22391 often referred to as the cultivation of renunciation. The other is
22392 cultivating the path to bring about the fulfillment of that wish for
22393 renunciation. In order to train one's mind in this way, one needs to reflect
22394 upon the defects of cyclic existence and to develop an understanding of the
22395 causation chain of karma and the afflictions. Through these reflections one
22396 cultivates the wish to gain freedom and then embarks upon the path to bring
22397 about that freedom.
22398 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Lighting the Way", Snow Lion Publications
22400 Number of Recitations
22401 The sixth section of the yoga of speech concerns measuring the accumulation
22402 of mantra recitations. How do you know when you have recited enough of a
22403 particular mantra? Generally speaking, you should count a mantra until you
22404 achieve some common spiritual power and ideally until you achieve the supreme
22405 spiritual attainment. Wouldn't that be the best way?
22406 After all, if you are really hungry, don't you eat until you are satisfied?
22407 Similarly, if you plan a trip to San Francisco, you want to travel until you
22408 arrive at your destination. You would not travel halfway and be satisfied
22409 with that, would you? In the same way, when you recite a mantra, you have a
22410 specific goal in mind: to gain the supreme spiritual attainment--buddhahood.
22411 Wouldn't it be wise to keep on reciting the mantra until you have achieved
22412 your goal, or at least until you achieve some perceptible improvement?
22413 -- Gyatrul Rinpoche, in "The Generation Stage in Buddhist Tantra", published
22414 by Snow Lion Publications
22416 The Level of Great Capacity
22418 Atisha continues his discussion on the three capacities by turning his
22419 attention to spiritual trainees at the highest level.
22422 Those who, through their personal suffering,
22423 Truly want to end completely
22424 All the suffering of others
22425 Are persons of supreme capacity.
22426 -- Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment
22428 Practitioners at this level use their deep understanding of the nature of
22429 suffering, derived from reflection on their personal experience, to recognise
22430 the fundamental equality of oneself and others insofar as the desire to
22431 overcome suffering is concerned. This then leads to the arising of a
22432 spontaneous wish to free all sentient beings from their suffering, a wish
22433 which becomes the powerful impetus for engaging in spiritual practices aimed
22434 at bringing about this altruistic objective.
22436 The most important practice in relation to this altruistic goal is the
22437 generation of bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration to attain buddhahood for
22438 the benefit of all beings.
22439 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in Lighting the Way, Snow Lion Publications
22441 The Meaning of Empowerment
22442 As for empowerment in general, what does the term wang, or empowerment,
22443 signify? To begin with, our fundamental nature--what we term "the buddha
22444 nature", or tathagatagarbha, the very nature of our mind, is inherently
22445 present within us as a natural attribute. This mind of ours, the subject at
22446 hand, has been going on throughout beginningless time, and so has the more
22447 subtle nature of that mind. On the basis of the continuity of that subtle
22448 nature of our mind rests the capacity we have to attain enlightenment. This
22449 potential is what we call "the seed of buddhahood", "buddha nature", "the
22450 fundamental nature", or tathagatagarbha. We all have this buddha nature, each
22451 and every one of us. For example, this beautiful statue of Lord Buddha here,
22452 in the presence of which we are now sitting, is a representation that honours
22453 someone who attained buddhahood. He awakened into that state of enlightenment
22454 because his nature was the buddha nature. Ours is as well, and just as the
22455 Buddha attained enlightenment in the past, so in the future we can become
22457 In any case, there dwells within us all this potential which allows us to
22458 awaken into buddhahood and attain omniscience. The empowerment process draws
22459 that potential out, and allows it to express itself more fully. When an
22460 empowerment is conferred on you, it is the nature of your mind--the buddha
22461 nature--that provides a basis upon which the empowerment can ripen you.
22462 Through the empowerment, you are empowered into the essence of the buddhas of
22463 the five families. In particular, you are "ripened" within that particular
22464 family through which it is your personal predisposition to attain buddhahood.
22465 So, with these auspicious circumstances established in your mindstream,
22466 and when you reflect on what is taking place and maintain the various
22467 visualizations, the conditions are right for the essence of the empowerment to
22468 awaken within you, as a state of wisdom which is blissful yet empty--a very
22469 special state that is the inseparability of basic space and awareness. As you
22470 focus your devotion in this way, it allows this special quality of mind, this
22471 new capability, as it were, to awaken.
22472 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
22473 Perfection", published by Snow Lion Publications
22475 Value Our Good Circumstances
22476 We often focus on a few circumstances in our life that aren't going well
22477 instead of all those that are. Although we all have problems, when we over-
22478 emphasize their importance, we easily begin thinking that we are incapable and
22479 worthless. Such self-hatred immobilizes us and prevents us from developing
22480 our good qualities and sharing them with others.
22481 When we look at the broad picture, however, we can see many positive things
22482 in our life. We can rejoice that we are alive and appreciate whatever degree
22483 of good health we have. We also have food (often too much!), shelter,
22484 clothing, medicine, friends, relatives, and a myriad of good circumstances.
22485 Many of the people reading this book live in peaceful places, not in war-torn
22486 areas. Many have jobs they like, and family and friends they appreciate. We
22487 shouldn't take these for granted. Most importantly, from a spiritual
22488 viewpoint, we have access to an authentic path, qualified teachers to guide
22489 us, and kind companions who encourage us. We have genuine spiritual
22490 aspirations and the time to cultivate these. Thinking about these good
22491 conditions one by one, we will be filled with joy, and any sense of being
22492 incapable and hopeless will vanish.
22493 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Working with Anger", Snow Lion Publications
22495 15. This fresh state of present awareness, unspoiled
22497 This fresh state of present awareness (da lta'i shes pa)
22498 Unspoiled by dualistic thoughts,
22499 Effortlessly sustained in the natural state,
22500 Is Buddha Kuntu Zangpo's wisdom mind.
22502 Do not hope or fear for good or bad outcomes.
22503 Regardless of what formulation of thought occurs,
22504 they arise and are liberated simultaneously;
22505 Their essential nature is empty awareness.
22506 Reach that unmoving, unassailable state.
22508 I, Jnana, spoke these words immediately In response to
22509 Zangmo's supplication. May this be virtuous!
22510 -- from "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart Advice" translated and
22511 introduced by Ron Garry, published by Snow Lion
22513 Concern for others to be happy and compassion wishing them to be free from
22514 suffering are needed not only as the basis for a bodhichitta motivation for
22515 mahamudra* practice, but also for keeping that practice on course to its
22516 intended goal. When we have changed our focus in life from the contents of
22517 our experience to the process of experience, there is great danger of becoming
22518 fixated on mind itself. This is because the direct experience of mind itself
22519 is totally blissful--in a calm and serene sense--and entails extraordinary
22520 clarity and starkness. Concern for others is one of the strongest forces that
22521 brings us back down to earth after having been up in the clouds. Although all
22522 appearances exist as a function of mind, other beings do not exist merely in
22523 our head. Their suffering is real and it hurts them just as much as ours
22525 Furthermore, to be concerned about someone does not mean to be frantically
22526 worried about this person. If we are fixated on our child's problems at
22527 school, for example, we lose sight that whatever appearance of the problems
22528 our mind gives rise to is a function of mind. Believing the appearance to be
22529 the solid reality "out there," we again feel hopeless to do anything and thus
22530 become extremely anxious and tense. We worry to the point of becoming sick
22531 and we over-react toward our child, which does not help. If we focus instead
22532 on the process of mind that gives rise to our perception of the problem as if
22533 it existed as some horrible monster "out there," we do not eliminate our
22534 concern for our child, only our worry. This allows us to take whatever clear
22535 and calm action is necessary to alleviate the problem. Thus not only is
22536 compassion necessary for successful practice of mahamudra, but mahamudra
22537 realization is necessary for successful practice of compassion.
22538 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra",
22539 published by Snow Lion Publications
22540 * "Mahamudra" is a Sanskrit word meaning "great seal" and refers to the
22541 nature of all phenomena. Mahamudra also refers to sophisticated Buddhist
22542 systems of meditation and practice to realize this great sealing nature.
22544 Better to be deprived of food for three days, than tea for one.
22547 45. This fresh present knowing, unbound
22549 This fresh present knowing,
22550 Unbound by the intellect that clings to meditation,
22551 Is naked unobstructed non-meditation.
22553 And settle in the state of naturalness.
22554 This is the meaning of realization of meditation.
22556 When thoughts move, let them.
22557 Movement arises and is liberated without a trace.
22558 When there is no movement, don't search for it.
22559 This is empty luminosity, naked empty awareness.
22560 Tantric practice without suppression or
22561 cultivation of thoughts
22562 Brings the accomplishment of the destruction
22565 There is nothing more to add to this.
22566 Madman Dudjom said this:
22567 Let it remain like this in your heart.
22568 -- from "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart Advice", translated and
22569 introduced by Ron Garry, published by Snow Lion Publications
22571 ...karma refers not only to our actions but, more importantly, to the
22572 motivation or intention behind them. The acts themselves are not the primary
22573 cause of our suffering; rather, it arises from the world of our intentions or,
22574 in other words, from our thoughts and emotions. These afflictive states of
22575 mind underlie our negative karma and are therefore the source of our
22578 Obviously, these afflictions won't go away simply by saying prayers or
22579 wishing them away; they can only be eliminated by cultivating their
22580 corresponding remedies or antidotes. To understand how this process of
22581 applying the antidote works we can observe our physical world. For instance,
22582 we can contrast heat and cold: if we are suffering from the effects of too
22583 cold a temperature, then we increase the thermometer on our heater or air-
22584 conditioning unit and adjust it to our comfort. Thus, even in the physical
22585 world we can see instances where opposing forces counter each other.
22587 ...From our own personal experience we recognise that anger and hostility
22588 disturb our peace of mind and, more importantly, that they have the potential
22589 to harm others. Conversely, we recognise that positive emotions like
22590 compassion and loving kindness can engender in us a deep sense of peace and
22591 serenity, beneficial results that we can extend to others as well. This
22592 appreciation of their great value naturally leads to a desire to cultivate
22593 these positive emotions. It is through this gradual process that the
22594 antidotes work in decreasing and eventually eliminating their opposing forces
22595 in the mental realm, the realm of our thoughts and emotions.
22596 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Lighting the Way", published by Snow Lion
22598 Starting Dzogchen Practice
22599 When we start to practice, in order to grasp the normal mind, our first
22600 practice consists in engaging our mind. For example, if we have a problem of
22601 some kind, we may go to a movie to distract ourselves from our problem.
22602 Likewise when we start to practice, we try to calm down our problem-creating
22603 mind in order to be able to observe the nature of thought. The observation of
22604 the arising, abiding, and dissolving of thought in the empty state of the mind
22605 is an essential practice in Dzogchen in order to discover that moving thoughts
22606 are of the same nature as the thoughtless state of the mind. Since we are not
22607 accustomed to meditation, it seems very difficult, and every slight sound or
22608 movement, outside or inside the mind itself, becomes a major distraction
22609 interfering with our ability to continue to practice. In order to overcome
22610 this problem, we engage the mind in a practice so that it is not so easily
22611 distracted, by focusing attention so that the movement of the mind caused by
22612 thought or sense perception does not have the power to divert our
22613 concentration. This first stage, of grasping the mind, is concentration
22614 practice, described in detail in the Bonpo 'Ati' system.
22615 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, in "Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of
22616 Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet", Snow Lion Publications
22618 Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic
22619 religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and
22620 theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a
22621 religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and
22622 spiritual, as a meaningful unity
22623 -- Albert Einstein in "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen
22624 Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1954
22626 Techniques for Improvement
22627 All of us have attained a human life; we are, in a sense, incomparable among
22628 the various types of sentient beings, as we are able to think about many
22629 topics with a subtler mind and are endowed with vaster capabilities. Dogs,
22630 birds, and so forth do communicate, but only humans can settle and ascertain
22631 deep topics on the basis of words; it is obvious that there are no other
22632 sentient beings capable of as many thoughts and techniques. Nowadays, humans
22633 are engaging in many activities that were not even objects of thought a
22634 century or two ago. The metaphors of the poets of the past, such as "the
22635 wonderful house of the moon", are becoming actualities.
22636 ...People have made great effort right up to this century, thinking to
22637 become free from suffering, but we cannot point to even one person in the
22638 world, no matter how rich he or she is, who has no worry--except for those
22639 who have the inner happiness of renouncing the material way of life. Without
22640 internal renunciation it is difficult to achieve happiness and comfort.
22641 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins from "Deity Yoga",
22642 published by Snow Lion Publications
22644 Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. -- Confucius
22646 Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake,
22647 zucchini bread and pumpkin pie.
22648 -- Jim Davis (Garfield)
22650 A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions
22651 than anything else in the world.
22652 -- Edmond de Concourt
22654 Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. -- Jimi Hendrix
22656 There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
22657 -- Hamlet (by William Shakespeare)
22659 People who have what they want are fond of telling people
22660 who haven't what they want that they really don't want it.
22663 There are only two ways of telling the complete
22664 truth--anonymously and posthumously.
22667 The easiest way for your children to learn
22668 about money is for you not to have any.
22669 -- Katharine Whitehorn
22671 If you look good and dress well, you don't need a purpose in life.
22674 Do not go where the path may lead, go instead
22675 where there is no path and leave a trail.
22676 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
22678 The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
22681 I have a simple philosophy.
22684 Scratch where it itches.
22685 -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
22687 Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
22688 -- John Archibald Wheeler
22690 You know that children are growing up when they start
22691 asking questions that have answers.
22694 The average man, who does not know what to do with his life,
22695 wants another one which will last forever.
22698 Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is
22699 a broken winged bird that canot fly.
22702 Spare no expense to save money on this one. -- Samuel Goldwyn
22704 It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
22705 People are either charming or tedious.
22708 If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute
22709 powerlessness make you pure?
22712 Parents were invented to make children happy
22713 by giving them something to ignore.
22716 Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
22717 -- Jules de Gaultier
22719 I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse.
22720 I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
22723 If you find it in your heart to care for
22724 somebody else, you will have succeeded.
22727 Time is an illusion.
22728 Lunchtime doubly so.
22732 A person whom we know well enough to borrow from,
22733 but not well enough to lend to.
22734 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
22736 The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
22737 -- Eleanor Roosevelt
22739 Eighty percent of success is showing up. -- Woody Allen
22741 Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. -- Don Marquis
22743 The only reason some people get lost in thought
22744 is because it's unfamiliar territory.
22747 A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has
22748 a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
22751 Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. -- Steven Wright
22753 Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. -- Oscar Wilde
22755 It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
22756 -- William Shakespeare
22758 If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong. -- Mo Udall
22760 I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money. -- Pablo Picasso
22762 The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
22765 Lack of money is no obstacle.
22766 Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
22769 Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
22770 -- Marcus Valerias Martialis
22772 Great minds discuss ideas;
22773 average minds discuss events;
22774 small minds discuss people.
22775 -- Eleanor Roosevelt
22777 I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there. -- Herb Caen
22779 When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"
22782 Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. -- Mahatma Gandhi
22784 I'm living so far beyond my income that we may
22785 almost be said to be living apart.
22788 I try to avoid looking forward or backward,
22789 and try to keep looking upward.
22790 -- Charlotte Bronte
22792 My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me. -- Henry Ford
22794 Without democracy, religion becomes extreme.
22795 With religion, democracy becomes more spiritual.
22796 -- Mohammad Khatami, president of Iran
22798 For fast acting relief, try slowing down. -- Lily Tomlin
22800 A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
22803 Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and
22804 I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.
22807 Whatever you are, be a good one. -- Abraham Lincoln
22809 Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
22812 Never spend your money before you have it. -- Thomas Jefferson
22814 Confusion is always the most honest response. -- Marty Indik
22816 Doing nothing is very hard to do... you never know when you're finished.
22819 Free advice is worth the price. -- Robert Half
22821 A person who trusts no one can't be trusted. -- Jerome Blattner
22823 There is nobody so irritating as somebody with
22824 less intelligence and more sense than we have.
22827 He that plants trees loves others besides himself. -- Dr. Thomas Fuller
22829 To find something you can enjoy is far better
22830 than finding something you can possess.
22833 An intellectual is a man who takes more words than
22834 necessary to tell more than he knows.
22835 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
22837 Not everything that can be counted counts, and not
22838 everything that counts can be counted.
22841 Brain, n.: an apparatus with which we think we think.
22842 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911
22844 There is always some madness in love.
22845 But there is always some reason in madness.
22846 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
22848 We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
22849 -- Martin Luther King Jr.
22851 Good resolutions are simply checks that men
22852 draw on a bank where they have no account.
22855 The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in mueseums.
22858 Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy.
22861 Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. -- Thomas Jones
22863 It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis.
22864 -- Margaret Bonnano
22866 Yesterday is history.
22867 Tomorrow is a mystery.
22869 That's why it's called the present.
22872 Money is in abundance, where are you? -- Reverend Ike
22874 Santa Claus had the right idea. Visit everyone once a year.
22877 Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
22880 You cannot fix what you will not face. -- James Baldwin
22882 There are too many people, and too few human beings. -- Robert Zend
22884 Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
22887 A good listener is usually thinking about something else. -- Kin Hubbard
22889 If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't
22890 know what a millionaire looked like.
22893 Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
22894 -- George Bernard Shaw
22896 Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money. -- Arthur Miller
22898 Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off
22899 their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
22902 If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
22905 If computers get too organized, we can organize
22906 them into a committee--that will do them in.
22907 -- Bradley's Bromide
22909 It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
22912 If we stand tall it is because we stand
22913 on the backs of those who came before us.
22916 The trouble with jogging is that, by the time you realize
22917 you're not in shape for it, it's too far to walk back.
22918 -- Franklin P. Jones
22920 I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
22923 By the time we've made it, we've had it. -- Malcolm Forbes
22925 It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
22926 -- W. Somerset Maugham
22928 It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
22929 -- Henry David Thoreau
22931 Accomplishing the impossible means only that
22932 the boss will add it to your regular duties.
22935 Government big enough to supply everything you need
22936 is big enough to take everything you have...
22937 The course of history shows that as a government grows,
22939 -- Thomas Jefferson
22941 Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except
22942 the things in the world that just don't add up.
22945 Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
22948 The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
22949 -- Flora Whittemore
22951 When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
22952 -- Marquis de la Grange
22954 If more of us valued food and cheer and song
22955 above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
22958 While I was in Malaysia, I saw a T-shirt depicting a surfboard aloft huge
22959 waves. Sitting on the surfboard was a figure meditating cross-legged. The
22960 slogan read, "Riding the waves of life, be mindful, be happy." That's it.
22961 Awareness. Being present. Knowing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as
22962 emotions. It's just like riding a surfboard. You gradually develop the
22963 poise to cruise along on the roughest seas until, no longer immersed in
22964 the waves, you are riding on top of them. Of course you have to start
22965 with small waves until you get your balance. Then the higher the wave, the
22966 better! Likewise, when we begin to train in awareness, it is better if we
22967 have an atmosphere which is nonthreatening and peaceful. That's why people
22968 go on retreat. That's also a reason why people set aside regular sitting
22969 periods. But once we learn how to be balanced, we become like a surfer who
22970 finds that the bigger the wave, the greater the fun.
22971 -- Ani Tenzin Palmo, in "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on
22972 Practical Buddhism", Snow Lion Publications
22974 The word "mantra" means "mind-protection". It protects the mind from ordinary
22975 appearances and conceptions. "Mind" here refers to all six consciousnesses--
22976 eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mental consciousnesses--which are to be
22977 freed, or protected, from the ordinary world. There are two factors in mantra
22978 training, pride in oneself as a deity and vivid appearance of that deity.
22979 Divine pride protects one from the pride of being ordinary, and divine vivid
22980 appearance protects one from ordinary appearances. Whatever appears to the
22981 senses is viewed as the sport of a deity; for instance, whatever forms are
22982 seen are viewed as the emanations of a deity and whatever sounds are heard are
22983 viewed as the mantras of a deity. One is thereby protected from ordinary
22984 appearances, and through this transformation of attitude, the pride of being a
22985 deity emerges. Such protection of mind together with its attendant pledges
22986 and vows is called the practice of mantra.
22987 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins in "Tantra in Tibet",
22988 published by Snow Lion Publications
22990 There is nothing new under the sun, but there are
22991 lots of old things we don't know.
22994 Win hearts, and you have all men's hands and purses. -- William Cecil Burleigh
22996 Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world.
22997 Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
23000 He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder. -- M. C. Escher
23002 Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn,
23003 whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
23006 Training in compassion has the capacity to be both profound and vast--both
23007 absolute and relative. Compassion has the quality of being approachable and
23008 at the same time ungraspable. It manifests both the quality of shunyata,
23009 emptiness, or egolessness, as well as the qualities of kindness and joyfulness.
23010 Therefore, from the Mahayana point of view, compassion is the most important
23011 practice we could ever engage in. It can lead us to the full realization of
23012 enlightenment without any need for other practices.
23013 -- from "Trainings in Compassion: Manuals on the Meditation of
23014 Avalokiteshvara", translated by Tyler Dewar under the guidance of The
23015 Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
23017 Question: If the root of all suffering is attachment, are the desire to have a
23018 family and the desire for liberation from suffering contradictory?
23020 Answer: I think that a distinction should be made between desires that are due
23021 to ignorance and desires that are reasoned. In Tibetan, a difference can be
23022 made between "wish" and "desire"; for instance a Bodhisattva is reborn through
23023 his or her own wishes, not out of desire. Similarly, it is suitable to aspire
23024 toward liberation. Also, persons, such as Foe Destroyers, who have completely
23025 overcome all of the afflictive emotions, have thoughts such as, "Such and such
23026 is good; I need it." Merely such thoughts are not afflictive consciousnesses.
23027 Similarly, if we consider the desire for a family, there are persons practicing
23028 the Bodhisattva path who have families; also, in the scriptures of discipline,
23029 Buddha himself set forth vows for lay persons and vows for monks. Hence, there
23030 is no general prohibition of the wish to have a family.
23031 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
23032 Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
23033 Snow Lion Publications
23035 In general, most non-Buddhist religions meditate on the deity as being outside
23036 the physical body. In these cases the deity takes the form of a refuge, or of
23037 a protector or messenger. Thus do they meditate, and of course this is fine.
23038 In the Buddhist tradition, however, the deity is not meditated on as being
23039 outside of the physical body. One meditates on the deity as being one's own
23040 essence expressing itself through oneself arising as the deity. One therefore
23041 thinks, "I am the deity," and with this conviction one meditates. Why is it
23042 justifiable to meditate in this manner? ...our own mind is in essence exactly
23043 the same as the mind of a Buddha. In the philosophical treatises this is
23044 sometimes referred to as "sugatagarbha" or "buddha-nature".
23045 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, in "Everyday Consciousness and Buddha-
23046 Awakening", translated and edited by Susanne Schefczyk, published by
23047 Snow Lion Publications
23049 If things did in fact exist the way they appear--if things did exist so
23050 concretely--then when one looked into and investigated them, this inherent
23051 existence should become even clearer, more obvious. However, when you seek
23052 for the object designated, you cannot find it under analysis.
23053 ...[That] which gives rise to the appearance of I is mind and body, but when
23054 you divide this into mind and body and look for the I, you cannot find it.
23055 Also the whole, body, is designated in dependence upon the collection of parts
23056 of the body; if you divide this into its parts and look for the body, you
23057 cannot find it either. Even the most subtle particles in the body have sides
23058 and hence parts. Were there something partless, it might be independent, but
23059 there is nothing that is partless. Rather, everything exists in dependence on
23060 its parts... There is no whole which is separate from its parts.
23061 ...No matter what the phenomenon is, internal or external, whether it be
23062 one's own body or any other type of phenomenon, when we search to discover
23063 what this phenomenon is that is designated, we cannot find anything that is it.
23064 ...However, these things appear to us as if they do exist objectively and in
23065 their own right, and thus there is a difference between the way things appear
23066 to our minds and the way they actually exist... Since phenomena appear to us
23067 in a way that is different from what we discover when analysing, this proves
23068 that their concrete appearance is due to a fault of our minds.
23069 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, translated and
23070 edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, from "Kindness,
23071 Clarity, and Insight" published by Snow Lion Publications
23073 The Buddhist notion of diligence is to delight in positive deeds. Its
23074 opposite, called "le lo" in Tibetan, has three aspects. Le lo is usually
23075 translated as "laziness," though only its first aspect refers to laziness as
23076 we usually understand it. The first aspect is not doing something because of
23077 indolence, even though we know that it is good and ought to be done. The
23078 second aspect is faintheartedness. This comes about when we underestimate our
23079 qualities and abilities, thinking, "I'm so incompetent and weak. It would be
23080 good to do that, but I could never accomplish it." Not having the confidence
23081 of thinking, "I can do it," we end up doing nothing. The third aspect refers
23082 to being very busy and seeming diligent, but wasting time and energy on
23083 meaningless activities that will not accomplish anything in the long run.
23084 When we do many things for no real purpose, we fail to focus on what is truly
23085 worthwhile and our path has no clear direction. When we refrain from these
23086 three aspects of laziness, we are diligent.
23087 -- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, in "Daring Steps Toward Fearlessness: The Three
23088 Vehicles of Buddhism", edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs,
23089 published by Snow Lion Publications
23091 All events and incidents in life are so intimately linked with the fate of
23092 others that a single person on his or her own cannot even begin to act. Many
23093 ordinary human activities, both positive and negative, cannot even be
23094 conceived of apart from the existence of other people. Even the committing of
23095 harmful actions depends on the existence of others. Because of others, we
23096 have the opportunity to earn money if that is what we desire in life.
23097 Similarly, in reliance upon the existence of others it becomes possible for
23098 the media to create fame or disrepute for someone. On your own you cannot
23099 create any fame or disrepute no matter how loud you might shout. The closest
23100 you can get is to create an echo of your own voice.
23101 Thus interdependence is a fundamental law of nature. Not only higher forms
23102 of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without
23103 any religion, law, or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an
23104 innate recognition of their interconnectedness. The most subtle level of
23105 material phenomena is also governed by interdependence. All phenomena, from
23106 the planet we inhabit to the oceans, clouds, forests, and flowers that
23107 surround us, arise in dependence upon subtle patterns of energy. Without
23108 their proper interaction, they dissolve and decay.
23109 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in "The Compassionate Life"
23111 Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels
23112 ...a buddha is someone who has attained full enlightenment through the
23113 cultivation of compassion and the wisdom of no-self, the absence of self-
23114 existence. From our discussion we also saw how the Dharma jewel is to be
23115 understood as the path by which we can gradually accomplish the same result as
23116 the fully awakened Buddha. Likewise, the Sangha jewel is the community of
23117 sincere practitioners who have directly realised emptiness, the ultimate
23119 For those of us who consider ourselves to be practising Buddhists, it is
23120 crucial to have this kind of deeper understanding of the Three Jewels when we
23121 go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
23122 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Lighting the Way", published by Snow Lion
23124 Being Mindful of Impermanence
23126 Loved ones who have long kept company will part.
23127 Wealth created with difficulty will be left behind.
23128 Consciousness, the guest, will leave the guest house of the body.
23129 Let go of this life--
23130 This is the practice of Bodhisattvas.
23132 Although we have this human life with freedom and richness, which is so
23133 valuable and difficult to get, it cannot last forever. This is because it is
23134 not permanent and is subject to decay moment by moment. This life will
23135 eventually become non-existent because our body and mind will separate.
23136 Although death meditation involves reflecting on the moment by moment changing
23137 nature of our life, it principally entails recognizing that one day it will
23138 come to a complete stop and our mind will leave our body behind. Therefore,
23139 we must take the essence from this life each day and try to fulfill a great
23140 Dharma purpose because we will not have this opportunity for long.
23141 -- from "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage: An Explanation of
23142 'The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas' ", by Geshe Jampa Tegchok,
23143 edited by Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
23145 What do we mean when we speak of a truly compassionate kindness? Compassion
23146 is essentially concern for others' welfare--their happiness and their
23147 suffering. Others wish to avoid misery as much as we do. So a compassionate
23148 person feels concerned when others are miserable and develops a positive
23149 intention to free them from it. As ordinary beings, our feeling of closeness
23150 to our friends and relatives is little more than an expression of clinging
23151 desire. It needs to be tempered, not enhanced. It is important not to
23152 confuse attachment and compassion.... A compassionate thought is motivated by
23153 a wish to help release beings from their misery.
23154 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Stages of Meditation", translated by Venerable
23155 Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and Jeremy Russell,
23156 published by Snow Lion Publications
23158 Tantric yogis succeed in their cultivation of wisdom more quickly than do
23159 practitioners of the Perfection Vehicle because the tantric yogi, employing
23160 deity yoga, can achieve a mind that is a union of calm abiding and special
23161 insight--a mind of alert one-pointedness that realizes emptiness--in far
23162 less time than the period of countless great aeons required for those who
23163 practice sutra paths alone. Tantric yogis use deity yoga to enhance
23164 meditation on emptiness; their use of deity yoga brings them more quickly to
23165 an initial direct cognition of emptiness by enhancing their ability to combine
23166 meditative stability with analysis.... Also, in Highest Yoga Tantra,
23167 powerful, subtle consciousnesses that realize emptiness are manifested,
23168 whereby the obstructions to liberation and omniscience are quickly overcome.
23169 -- Daniel Cozort, in "Highest Yoga Tantra", Snow Lion Publications
23171 Howard C. Cutler, MD:
23172 Is happiness a reasonable goal for most of us? Is it really possible?
23175 Yes. I believe that happiness can be achieved through training the mind.
23176 When I say "training the mind," in this context I'm not referring to "mind"
23177 merely as one's cognitive ability or intellect. Rather, I'm using the term
23178 in the sense of the Tibetan word Sem, which has a much broader meaning,
23179 closer to "psyche" or "spirit"; it includes intellect and feeling, heart
23180 and mind. By bringing about a certain inner discipline, we can undergo a
23181 transformation of our attitude, our entire outlook and approach to living.
23182 When we speak of this inner discipline, it can of course involve many things,
23183 many methods. But generally speaking, one begins by identifying those factors
23184 which lead to happiness and those factors which lead to suffering. Having
23185 done this, one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead
23186 to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness. That is the way.
23187 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, MD, in "The Art of Happiness:
23188 A Handbook for Living", published by Snow Lion Publications
23190 It can be difficult to accept others and to accept ourselves. "I should be
23191 better. I should be something different. I should have more." All of this
23192 is conception; it's all mental fabrication. It's just the mind churning up
23193 "shoulds," "ought tos," and "supposed tos." All this is conceptual rubbish,
23194 and yet we believe it. Part of the solution is to recognize that these
23195 thoughts are conceptual rubbish and not reality; this gives us the mental
23196 space not to believe them. When we stop believing them, it becomes much
23197 easier to accept what we are at any given moment, knowing we will change in
23198 the next moment. We'll be able to accept what others are in one moment,
23199 knowing that they will be different in the next moment. This is good stuff
23200 for everyday practice; it's very practical.
23201 -- Thubten Chodron, in "How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator",
23202 published by Snow Lion Publications
23204 The nature of samsaric evolution is not such that death is followed by
23205 nothingness, nor that humans are always reborn as humans and insects as
23206 insects. On the contrary, we all carry within us the karmic potencies of all
23207 realms of cyclic existence. Many beings transmigrate from higher to lower
23208 realms, others from lower to higher. The selection of a place of rebirth is
23209 not directly in our own hands but is conditioned by our karma and delusions.
23210 They who possess spiritual understanding can control their destiny at the time
23211 of death, but for ordinary beings the process is very much an automatic chain
23212 reaction of karmic seeds and habitual psychic response patterns....
23213 Our repeated experience of frustration, dissatisfaction and misery does not
23214 have external conditions as its root cause. The problem is mainly our lack of
23215 spiritual development. As a result of this handicap, the mind is controlled
23216 principally by afflicted emotions and illusions. Attachment, aversion and
23217 ignorance rather than a free spirit, love and wisdom are the guiding forces.
23218 Recognizing this simple truth is the beginning of the spiritual path.
23219 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, edited and translated by Glenn H. Mullin, in
23220 "The Path to Enlightenment", published by Snow Lion Publications
23222 If persons who have attained calm abiding keep their minds in calm abiding,
23223 not only does the force of their meditative stabilization remain but their
23224 other good qualities increase and do not degenerate. Similarly, persons who
23225 have achieved special insight have clear perception not only with respect to
23226 the object of observation on which they have been meditating but also with
23227 respect to any other object to which they turn their minds. Persons who
23228 cultivate calm abiding but not special insight will gain the factor of
23229 stability but not that of an intense clarity; they will not be able to
23230 manifest any antidote to the afflictive emotions. One must achieve an
23231 intensity of clarity in order for anything to serve as an antidote to
23232 ignorance, and to achieve that clarity one must cultivate special insight.
23233 -- Geshe Gedun Lodro, in "Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving
23234 Spiritual Transformation through Meditation", translated and edited
23235 by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Anne C. Klein and Leah Zahler,
23236 published by Snow Lion Publications
23238 If you haven't found something strange during the day,
23239 it hasn't been much of a day.
23242 Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
23245 It is hypocrisy to say that all religions are the same. Different religions
23246 have different views and fundamental differences. But it does not matter, as
23247 all religions are meant to help in bringing about a better world with better
23248 and happier human beings. On this level, I think that through different
23249 philosophical explanations and approaches, all religions have the same goal
23250 and the same potential. Take the concept[s] of the creator and self-creation
23251 for instance. There are big differences between the two, but I feel they have
23252 the same purpose. To some people, the concept of the creator is very powerful
23253 in inspiring the development of self-discipline, becoming a good person with a
23254 sense of love, forgiveness and devotion to the ultimate truth--the Creator or
23256 The other concept is self-creation: if one wants to be good, then it is one's
23257 own responsibility to be so. Without one's own efforts one cannot expect
23258 something good to come about. One's future is entirely dependent on oneself:
23259 it is self-created. This concept is very powerful in encouraging an
23260 individual to be a good and honest person. So you see, the two are different
23261 approaches but have the same goal.
23262 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Live in a Better Way: Reflections on Truth, Love
23263 and Happiness", compiled and edited by Renuka Singh, published by Snow
23266 The wise perceive that all things--persons and phenomena--arise in reliance
23267 upon their own causes and conditions, and that based on this process we impute
23268 mental labels upon things. The phenomena themselves have no true or inherent
23269 existence from their own side. They have no self-nature whatsoever.
23270 Were persons or phenomena to have a self-presence, there would be no need
23271 for them to rely upon causes and conditions. Therefore one can be certain
23272 that even the smallest speck of matter has no true, inherent existence from
23274 Although all things lack even the smallest speck of true existence,
23275 nonetheless conventionally the laws of causes and conditions operate through
23276 them, and conventionally all the phenomena in samsara and nirvana seem to
23277 exist, arising in the same manner as do illusions, dreams and a reflected
23279 -- Glenn H. Mullin, in "The Six Yogas of Naropa: Tsongkhapa's commentary
23280 entitled 'A Book of Three Inspirations: A Treatise on the Stages of
23281 Training in the Profound Path of Naro's Six Dharmas' commonly referred
23282 to as 'The Three Inspirations' ", published by Snow Lion Publications
23284 | George of the Bungle |
23286 And finally, new rule: America must recall the president. That's what this
23287 country needs. A good old-fashioned, California-style, recall election!
23288 Complete with Gary Coleman, porno actresses and action film stars. And just
23289 like Schwarzenegger's predecessor here in California, George Bush is now so
23290 unpopular he must defend his job against... Russell Crowe. Because at this
23291 point I want a leader who will throw a phone at somebody. In fact, let's have
23292 only phone throwers--Naomi Campbell can be the vice-president!
23294 Now I kid, but seriously Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you
23295 anymore. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't
23296 start another war because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck,
23297 the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor
23298 people. Yeah, listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit card's
23299 maxed out, and no one's speaking to you: mission accomplished. Now it's time
23300 to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did
23301 with your military service. And the oil company. And the baseball team.
23302 It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy
23305 Now I know what you're saying; you're saying that there's so many other
23306 things that you as President could involve yourself in... Please don't. I
23307 know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela... and
23308 eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the
23309 church... and Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.
23311 But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern
23312 like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised you haven't
23313 given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert
23314 Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis
23315 to rising water and snakes. On your watch, we've lost almost all of our
23316 allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the
23317 Pentagon, and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky!
23319 I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much
23320 worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to
23321 you... and what he is saying is: "Take a hint."
23323 -- Bill Maher on Real Time, October 2005
23325 We have the ability and the responsibility to choose to direct our actions
23326 on a virtuous path.
23327 When we weigh a particular act, to determine whether it is moral or
23328 spiritual, our criterion should be the quality of our motivation. When someone
23329 deliberately makes a resolution not to steal, if he or she is simply motivated
23330 by the fear of getting caught and being punished by the law, it is doubtful
23331 whether engaging in that resolution is a moral act, since moral considerations
23332 have not dictated his or her choice.
23333 In another instance, the resolution not to steal may be motivated by fear of
23334 public opinion: "What would my friends and neighbors think? All would scorn
23335 me. I would become an outcast." Though the act of making a resolution may be
23336 positive, whether it is a moral act is again doubtful.
23337 Now, the same resolution may be taken with the thought "If I steal, I am
23338 acting against the divine law of God." Someone else may think, "Stealing is
23339 nonvirtuous; it causes others to suffer." When such considerations motivate
23340 one, the resolution is moral or ethical; it is also spiritual. In the
23341 practice of Buddha's doctrine, if your underlying consideration in avoiding a
23342 nonvirtuous act is that it would thwart your attainment of a state
23343 transcending sorrow, such restraint is a moral act.
23344 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday
23345 Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland
23347 A conventional enemy may harm us, but patience and a refusal to retaliate
23348 can bring us benefit both in this life and in the future. However, tolerance
23349 towards [our own] hostile disturbing emotions and attempts at peaceful
23350 coexistence with them will never bring us any reward. They will do us nothing
23351 but harm if we don't take steps to drive them out. No conventional enemy can
23352 do us such harm. The most an ordinary enemy can do is to defeat us for a
23353 short space of time or destroy us in this life, but the disturbing emotions
23354 will insure our misery for many lifetimes to come.
23356 All other foes that I appease and wait upon
23357 Will show me favors, give me every aid,
23358 But should I serve my dark defiled emotions,
23359 They will only harm me, draw me down to grief.
23360 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "Eight Verses for Training the Mind: An Oral
23361 Teaching", translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion
23364 There is a story about a princess who had a small eye problem that she felt
23365 was really bad. Being the king's daughter, she was rather spoiled and kept
23366 crying all the time. When the doctors wanted to apply medicine, she would
23367 invariably refuse any medical treatment and kept touching the sore spot on her
23368 eye. In this way it became worse and worse, until finally the king proclaimed
23369 a large reward for whoever could cure his daughter. After some time, a man
23370 arrived who claimed to be a famous physician, but actually was not even a
23372 He declared that he could definitely cure the princess and was admitted to
23373 her chamber. After he had examined her, he exclaimed, "Oh, I'm so sorry!"
23374 "What is it?" the princess inquired. The doctor said, "There is nothing much
23375 wrong with your eye, but there is something else that is really serious." The
23376 princess was alarmed and asked, "What on earth is so serious?" He hesitated
23377 and said, "It is really bad. I shouldn't tell you about it." No matter how
23378 much she insisted, he refused to tell her, saying that he could not speak
23379 without the king's permission.
23380 When the king arrived, the doctor was still reluctant to reveal his findings.
23381 Finally the king commanded, "Tell us what is wrong. Whatever it is, you have
23382 to tell us!" At last the doctor said, "Well, the eye will get better within a
23383 few days--that is no problem. The big problem is that the princess will grow
23384 a tail, which will become at least nine fathoms long. It may start growing
23385 very soon. If she can detect the first moment it appears, I might be able to
23386 prevent it from growing." At this news everyone was deeply concerned. And the
23387 princess, what did she do? She stayed in bed, day and night, directing all
23388 her attention to detecting when the tail might appear. Thus, after a few
23389 days, her eye got well.
23390 This shows how we usually react. We focus on our little problem and it
23391 becomes the center around which everything else revolves. So far, we have
23392 done this repeatedly, life after life. We think, "My wishes, my interests, my
23393 likes and dislikes come first!" As long as we function on this basis, we will
23394 remain unchanged. Driven by impulses of desire and rejection, we will travel
23395 the roads of samsara without finding a way out. As long as attachment and
23396 aversion are our sources of living and drive us onward, we cannot rest.
23397 -- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, in "Daring Steps toward Fearlessness: The Three
23398 Vehicles of Buddhism", edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, published
23399 by Snow Lion Publications
23401 buddha mind listens
23402 sound waves crashing over head
23405 time god shits in hand
23406 catapults distraction dung
23407 unstained mind abides
23409 Dr. Cutler: "... one of the reasons I brought up the topic of challenge at
23410 work," I said to the Dalai Lama, "is because it relates to a concept that
23411 seems to come up frequently these days in psychological literature, the
23412 concept of flow.* This concept is increasingly mentioned in articles on human
23413 happiness, and this state can commonly occur at work... while engaged in
23414 activity, there's a feeling of effortlessness, a sense of total control over
23415 what one is doing.... Although flow can occur in any activity, some
23416 investigators have found that Americans experience more flow at work than they
23417 do in their leisure time."
23419 The Dalai Lama: "You really like this flow, Howard!" the Dalai Lama exclaimed
23420 with an amused chuckle. "... no matter how nice that state may be, I don't
23421 think it is the most important source of satisfaction, fulfillment, or
23422 happiness.... For one thing, you can't be in that state at all times.... So
23423 through this flow, even if you get some temporary kind of happiness, it will
23424 not be an ongoing thing. I think this flow state is not reliable or
23425 sustainable, and I think it's much more important to develop other sources of
23426 satisfaction through one's work that are brought about by training one's mind,
23427 shaping one's outlook and attitude, integrating basic human values in the
23428 workplace. For example, dealing with one's destructive emotions while at
23429 work, reducing anger, jealousy, greed, and so on, and practicing relating to
23430 others with kindness, compassion, tolerance, these are much more important and
23431 stable sources of satisfaction than simply trying to create flow as much as
23434 Dr. Cutler: "...To the Dalai Lama, true happiness is associated with a sense
23435 of meaning, and arises on the basis of deliberately cultivating certain
23436 attitudes and outlooks. True happiness may take longer to generate, and
23437 requires some effort, but it is this lasting happiness that can sustain us
23438 even under the most trying conditions of everyday life."
23440 * flow is defined here as [people] being so completely absorbed in their work
23441 that they lose track of time.
23443 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., in "The Art of
23446 Dzogchen could be defined as a way to relax completely. This can be clearly
23447 understood from the terms used to denote the state of contemplation, such as
23448 "leave it just as it is" (cog bzhag), "cutting loose one's tension" (khregs
23449 chod), "beyond effort" (rtsol bral), and so on. Some scholars have classified
23450 Dzogchen as a "direct path," comparing it to teachings such as Zen, where this
23451 expression is often used. In Dzogchen texts, however, the phrases "direct
23452 path" and "nongradual path" (cig car) are never used, because the concept of a
23453 "direct path" implies necessarily that there must be, on the one hand, a place
23454 from which one departs, and on the other, a place where one arrives. But in
23455 Dzogchen there is a single principle of the state of knowledge, and if one
23456 possesses this state one discovers that right from the beginning one is
23457 already there where one wants to arrive. For this reason the state is said to
23458 be "self-perfected" (lhun grub).
23459 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, in "Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State", edited by
23460 Adriano Clemente, translated from the Italian by John Shane, published by
23461 Snow Lion Publications
23463 Since the situation in which we live is much changed but the attitude of
23464 people who are in that situation is at variance with the times, this is one of
23465 the causes of unnecessary pain, unnecessary problems. Therefore, education is
23466 needed to communicate that the concept of violence is counterproductive, that
23467 it is not a realistic way to solve problems, and that compromise is the only
23468 realistic way to solve problems. Right from the beginning, we have to make
23469 this reality clear to a child's mind--the new generation. In this way, the
23470 whole attitude towards oneself, towards the world, towards others, can become
23471 more healthy. I usually call this "inner disarmament." Without inner
23472 disarmament, it is very difficult to achieve genuine, lasting world peace.
23473 ...Through inner disarmament we can develop a healthy mental attitude, which
23474 also is very beneficial for physical health. With peace of mind, a calm mind,
23475 your body elements become more balanced. Constant worry, constant fear,
23476 agitation of mind, are very bad for health. Therefore, peace of mind not only
23477 brings tranquility in our mind but also has good effects on our body.
23478 With inner disarmament, now we need external disarmament. As I mentioned
23479 earlier, according to today's reality, there no longer is room for war, for
23480 destruction. From a compassionate viewpoint, destruction, killing others, and
23481 discriminating even against one's enemy are counterproductive. Today's enemy,
23482 if you treat them well, may become a good friend even the next day.
23483 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama in "The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss
23484 Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation", edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
23485 published by Snow Lion Publications
23487 What we do for ourselves dies with us.
23488 What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
23491 Q: Where does hatred come from?
23493 A: That is a question which requires long hours of discussion. From the
23494 Buddhist viewpoint, the simple answer is that it is beginningless. As a
23495 further explanation, Buddhists believe that there are many different levels of
23496 consciousness. The most subtle consciousness is what we consider the basis of
23497 the previous life, this life and future lives. This subtle consciousness is
23498 a transient phenomenon which comes about as a consequence of causes and
23499 conditions. Buddhists have concluded that consciousness itself cannot be
23500 produced by matter. Therefore, the only alternative is to accept the
23501 continuation of consciousness. So that is the basis of the theory of rebirth.
23503 Where there is consciousness, ignorance and hatred also arise naturally.
23504 These negative emotions, as well as the positive emotions, occur right from
23505 beginningless time. All these are a part of our mind. However, these
23506 negative emotions actually are based on ignorance, which has no valid
23507 foundation. None of the negative emotions, no matter how powerful, have a
23508 solid foundation. On the other hand, the positive emotions, such as
23509 compassion or wisdom, have a solid basis: there is a kind of grounding and
23510 rootedness in reason and understanding, which is not the case with afflictive
23511 emotions like anger and hatred.
23513 The basic nature of the subtle consciousness itself is something neutral. So
23514 it is possible to purify or eliminate all of these negative emotions. That
23515 basic nature we call Buddha-nature. Hatred and negative emotions are
23516 beginningless; they have no beginning, but there is an end. Consciousness
23517 itself has no beginning and no end; of this we are certain.
23519 -- H.H. 14th Dalai Lama, in "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
23520 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by
23521 Snow Lion Publications
23523 When the sun is freed from clouds, the sun becomes clear and bright.
23524 Similarly, when obstructions to omniscience are abandoned, wisdom becomes
23526 How does wisdom that is like the sun in a sky free from clouds dawn? It
23527 is described as yogic direct perception. Between ordinary beings--those born
23528 in dependence upon their individual karma--and yogins, here we are considering
23529 yogins. Their wisdom is not speculation from an inferential point of view, as
23530 is the case with ordinary beings. Neither is it pensive and lacking in
23531 clarity. Rather, it sees directly, for which reason it is called yogic direct
23532 perception. When we ordinary beings think about a thing, there is something
23533 in the way, obstruction, due to which we do not see clearly and directly.
23534 When those obstructions--the afflictive obstructions and the obstructions to
23535 omniscience--have been dispelled, then knowledge arises as yogic direct
23537 When yogic direct perception arises, how does it see? It sees phenomena
23538 in a conventional context and it also sees reality in an ultimate context. In
23539 the conventional context, wisdom sees the shapes, colors, and defining
23540 characteristics of whatever things exist in worldly realms, individually and
23541 without mixing them, just as they are. This wisdom knows the varieties of
23542 phenomena. Similarly, in the context of reality, wisdom sees the meaning of
23543 emptiness directly; this wisdom knows the mode of all phenomena. In
23544 dependence upon release from the afflictive obstruction and the obstruction to
23545 omniscience, the wisdoms knowing the modes and the varieties actually arise.
23546 Someone in whom those two wisdoms are present is a buddha.
23548 -- Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, in "Essential Practice: Lectures on
23549 Kamalashila's 'Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School' ",
23550 translated by Jules B. Levinson, published by Snow Lion Publications
23552 Sometimes people mistakenly look on vows and pledges as if these were a
23553 type of punishment, but this is not at all the case. For example, just as
23554 we follow certain methods of eating and drinking to improve our health and
23555 certainly not to punish ourselves, so the rules the Shakymuni Buddha
23556 formulated are for controlling counter-productive ill-deeds and ultimately for
23557 overcoming afflictive emotions, because these are self-ruinous. Thus, to
23558 relieve oneself from suffering, one controls the motivations and deeds
23559 producing suffering for one's own sake. Realizing from his own experience
23560 that suffering stems from one's own afflictive emotions as well as actions
23561 contaminated with them, he sets forth styles of behavior to reduce the problem
23562 for our own profit, certainly not to give us a hard time. Hence, these rules
23563 are for the sake of controlling sources of harm.
23564 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba, and Jeffrey Hopkins, in "Yoga Tantra:
23565 Paths to Magical Feats, published by Snow Lion Publications
23567 Giving with an open heart brings us joy and directly benefits others. Goods
23568 are then shared more equitably within our society and among nations, soothing
23569 the ill-feeling of social inequity and promoting world peace. Sharing is a
23570 source of our continued existence as a species. As His Holiness the Dalai
23571 Lama says, it is not survival of the fittest, but survival of those who
23572 cooperate the most, that makes a species prosper. None of us exists
23573 independently; we have to depend on others simply to stay alive. Thus,
23574 helping others and sharing wealth benefits both self and others. Generosity
23575 makes us happy now, enables our species to continue to prosper, and creates
23576 positive karma that brings us prosperity in the future. In addition, it is an
23577 essential trait of an enlightened being. Who ever heard of a stingy Buddha?
23578 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, in "How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator",
23579 published by Snow Lion Publications
23581 I have made the point in the past that it is not necessary to consider
23582 someone one's guru from the very outset simply because one has heard the
23583 explanation of the Buddha's teachings from that person. At first, it is much
23584 better if one does not have that kind of attitude toward them, simply
23585 regarding them as a Dharma-friend. One gets teachings, and time goes by.
23586 Then, when one feels that one knows that person quite well, and can take them
23587 as one's guru without any danger of transgressing the commitments that
23588 accompany such a relationship, when one has that kind of confidence, then one
23589 can go ahead and take him or her as one's guru. The Lord Buddha himself made
23590 it quite clear in both the Vinaya sutras and in the Mahayana scriptures, and
23591 even in the Tantrayana, in a very detailed fashion, what the qualities of a
23592 teacher should be. This is why I often criticize the Tibetan attitude of
23593 seeing whatever the guru does as good, of respecting everything that the guru
23594 does right from the start without the initial period of examination. Of
23595 course, if the guru is really qualified, then to have such an attitude is
23597 Take the cases of Naropa and Marpa, for example. Sometimes it appears as
23598 though some of the things Tilopa asked of Naropa, or Naropa of Marpa, were
23599 unreasonable. Deep down, however, these requests had great meaning. Because
23600 of their great faith in their gurus, Naropa and Marpa did as instructed.
23601 Despite the fact that they appeared to be unreasonable, because the teachers
23602 were qualified, their actions had some meaning. In such situations, it is
23603 necessary that from the disciple's side all of the actions of the teacher be
23604 respected. But this cannot be compared to the case of ordinary people.
23605 Broadly speaking, I feel that the Buddha gave us complete freedom of choice to
23606 thoroughly examine the person who is to be our guru. This is very important.
23607 Unless one is definite, one should not take them as a guru. This preliminary
23608 examination is a kind of precautionary measure.
23609 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists", edited
23610 by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
23612 13. Transforming suffering into the path
23613 Even if someone tries to cut off your head
23614 When you haven't done the slightest thing wrong,
23615 Out of compassion take all his misdeeds
23617 This is the practice of Bodhisattvas.
23618 -- from "The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas"
23619 by Gyelsay Togme Sangpo
23620 Although we have done nothing to deserve it, someone may attack us, beat
23621 us, or perpetrate other forms of violence on us. Certainly it is tempting to
23622 get angry in such a situation, but our anger will do no good. In fact, this
23623 person is creating the cause for his own unfortunate rebirth by attacking us,
23624 and the karma he creates is even heavier if we hold any of the three sets of
23625 vows: pratimoksha, Bodhisattva, or tantric. Thus, we cultivate compassion,
23626 and wish to take the person's karma and resultant suffering on ourselves. For
23627 example, if a crazy person attacks a person who is sane, the latter will not
23628 only not fight back but try to help, by giving him medicine and wanting him to
23629 get well. The sane person sees that the crazy person does not know what he is
23630 doing. He is out of control.
23631 Similarly, when someone harms us, we should recognize that he too is out
23632 of control and is being led by his three poisonous attitudes. Similarly, we
23633 can remember that we are experiencing the ripening result of harmful actions
23634 we did in past lives, so why blame the other person? In addition, that person
23635 is causing our negative karma to be exhausted now, rather than later when the
23636 result could be much more difficult to bear. In this way, we will not be
23637 angry or retaliate, but will pray for and try to help the other. In "The
23638 Eight Verses of Thought Transformation," it says, "Whenever I meet a person of
23639 bad nature who is overwhelmed by negative energy and intense suffering, I will
23640 hold such a rare one dear, as if I had found a precious treasure." People like
23641 this suffer greatly because they think only of themselves, not of others, and
23642 thus they are worthy of compassion, the wish that they be free from suffering
23644 Being patient when harmed by others does not mean that we take no action
23645 to prevent harm from occurring. Rather, patience frees our mind from the fog
23646 of anger and gives us the clarity and kindness to respond to a situation in a
23647 helpful way. Free of anger, we look for ways to resolve conflict other than
23649 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, in "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage:
23650 An Explanation of 'The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas' ", edited
23651 by Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
23653 Some people run a race to see who is the fastest.
23654 I run a race to see who has the most guts.
23655 -- Steve Prefontaine
23657 Shantideva expresses tremendous courage, which transcends all boundaries
23658 of space and time, in a verse of his "Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life"
23659 (Bodhicaryavatara). He writes:
23660 As long as space endures,
23661 As long as sentient beings remain,
23662 Until then, may I too remain
23663 And dispel the miseries of the world.
23664 When the altruistic intention is supported by insight into emptiness, and
23665 particularly by the direct realization of emptiness, one is said to have
23666 attained the two dimensions of bodhichitta which are known as conventional and
23667 ultimate bodhichitta. With both these practices of compassion and wisdom, the
23668 practitioner has within his or her hands the complete method for attaining the
23669 highest spiritual goal. Such a person is truly great and worthy of
23671 If one is able to cultivate these spiritual qualities within oneself then,
23672 as Chandrakirti writes very poetically in his Entry to the Middle Way
23673 (Madhyamakavatara), with one wing of altruistic intention and another wing of
23674 insight into emptiness, one can traverse the whole of space and soar beyond
23675 the state of existence to the shores of fully enlightened buddhahood.
23676 ...make an effort to contemplate, study and meditate, but without any
23677 shortsighted expectations. You should have the same attitude as Shantideva --
23678 that as long as space exists you will remain to dispel suffering in the world.
23679 When you have that kind of determination and courage to develop your capacity,
23680 then a hundred years, an aeon, a million years are nothing to you.
23681 Furthermore, you will not consider that the different human problems we have
23682 here and there are in any way insurmountable. Such an attitude and vision
23683 bring some kind of real inner strength.
23684 -- H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama, in "Transforming the Mind: Teachings on
23685 Generating Compassion", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, edited by
23686 Dominique Side and Geshe Thupten Jinpa.
23688 The Tantric Way of Purifying One's Views
23689 The second important attitude is the Tantric way of purifying one's views,
23690 which means to transform one's ordinary and dualistic views and conceptions
23691 into a higher spiritual vision.
23692 For instance, you transform the place where teachings are received from an
23693 ordinary classroom into a complete and perfected mandala of the deities. You
23694 view the teacher as a pure form of Shen Lha Okar, the Buddha of Compassion, by
23695 mentally transforming him from an ordinary person into an enlightened one who
23696 has manifested in a human body to guide all sentient beings. You transform
23697 your companions and classmates from ordinary beings into deities and
23698 goddesses, and believe that they all have love, compassion, and care for all
23700 The purpose of transforming your views into pure visions toward these
23701 objects is to realize the extraordinary nature of this experience. This gives
23702 you a special reason to receive blessings and powers from the teacher (lama),
23703 the enlightened ones (Sangye), the deities (yidam), and the female
23704 manifestations of the enlightened ones (khadro), in order to develop your
23705 wisdom and stability. This is the essence of the practice of purifying one's
23706 view according to the Tantric ways.
23707 -- Latri Khenpo and Geshe Nyima Dakpa Rinpoche, in "Opening the Door to
23708 Bon", published by Snow Lion Publications
23710 MENSA: My Ego Never Stops Aching
23712 ...more people are driven insane through religious hysteria
23713 than by drinking alcohol.
23716 Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will
23717 satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.
23720 Desire is the source of endless problems. The more desires we have, the more
23721 we have to plan and work hard to realize them. Some time ago a businessman
23722 told me that the more he developed his company, the more he felt like making
23723 it even bigger. And the more he tried to make it bigger, the more he found he
23724 had to lie and fight mercilessly against his competitors. He had come to
23725 realize that wanting more and more made no sense, and that he only had to
23726 reduce the size of his business for competition to become less fierce so he
23727 would be able to carry out his work honestly. I found his testimony very
23729 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "365 Dalai Lama: Daily Advice from the Heart",
23730 edited by Matthieu Ricard, translated by Christian Bruyat and Dominique
23733 I--What Is a Treasure?
23734 According to the Nyingma School, the Treasures are most often comprised of
23735 spiritual instructions concealed by enlightened beings for the purpose of
23736 discovery at a later predestined time when their message will invigorate the
23737 Buddhist teaching and deepen spiritual understanding. Central to this process
23738 is the figure of the Treasure revealer (gter ston)--the person who acts as a
23739 medium for the re-emergence of this inspired material into the human world.
23740 Accordingly, beginning in the eleventh century and continuing into the
23741 present, the Nyingma School identifies a large number of Treasure revealers
23742 and grants authoritative status to their discoveries.
23743 The idea that religious truth lies concealed within the world of phenomena
23744 awaiting discovery by spiritually gifted people is by no means a concept
23745 exclusive to the Nyingma School or Tibetan Buddhism as a whole. Throughout
23746 Buddhist literature there are numerous descriptions of teachings being
23747 inherently present in the phenomenal world ready to be perceived by
23748 individuals possessing inspired levels of consciousness and, accordingly,
23749 spiritual revelations have surfaced on numerous occasions throughout the
23750 course of Buddhist history.
23751 -- Andreas Doctor, in "Tibetan Treasure Literature: Revelation, Tradition,
23752 and Accomplishment in Visionary Buddhism", Snow Lion Publications
23754 Patricia Churchland: But do you think that there is something, I am not sure
23755 what to call it--a kind of awareness that can exist independently of the
23756 brain? For example, something that survives death?
23758 Dalai Lama: Generally speaking, awareness, in the sense of our familiar, day-
23759 to-day mental processes, does not exist apart from or independent of the
23760 brain, according to the Buddhist view. But Buddhism holds that the cause of
23761 this awareness is to be found in a preceding continuum of awareness, and that
23762 is why one speaks of a stream of awareness from one life to another. Whence
23763 does this awareness arise initially? It must arise fundamentally not from a
23764 physical base but from a preceding continuum of awareness.
23766 The continuum of awareness that conjoins with the fetus does not depend upon
23767 the brain. There are some documented cases of advanced practitioners whose
23768 bodies, after death, escape what happens to everyone else and do not decompose
23769 for some time--for two or three weeks or even longer. The awareness that
23770 finally leaves their body is a primordial awareness that is not dependent upon
23771 the body. There have been many accounts in the past of advanced practitioners
23772 remaining in meditation in this subtle state of consciousness when they died,
23773 and decomposition of their body was postponed although the body remained at
23775 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
23776 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara
23777 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston and B. Alan Wallace, Snow Lion
23780 The real source of my suffering is self-centeredness: my car, my possession,
23781 my well-being. Without the self-centeredness, the suffering would not arise.
23782 What would happen instead? It is important to imagine this fully and to focus
23783 on examples of your own. Think of some misfortune that makes you want to lash
23784 out, that gives rise to anger or misery. Then imagine how you might respond
23785 without suffering. Recognize that we need not experience the misery, let
23786 alone the anger, resentment, and hostility. The choice is ours.
23788 Let's continue with the previous example. You see that there is a dent in the
23789 car. What needs to be done? Get the other driver's license number, notify
23790 the police, contact the insurance agency, deal with all the details. Simply
23791 do it and accept it. Accept it gladly as a way to strengthen your mind
23792 further, to develop patience and the armor of forbearance. There is no way to
23793 become a Buddha and remain a vulnerable wimp. Patience does not suddenly
23794 appear as a bonus after full enlightenment. Part of the whole process of
23795 awakening is to develop greater forbearance and equanimity in adversity.
23796 Santideva, in the sixth chapter of his Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life,
23797 eloquently points out that there is no way to develop patience without
23798 encountering adversity, and patience is indispensable for our own growth on
23799 the path to awakening.
23800 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
23801 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
23803 In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous. -- Aristotle
23805 Now the kilt was only for day-to-day wear. In battle, we donned a full-length
23806 ball gown covered in sequins. The idea was to blind your opponent with luxury.
23807 -- Groundskeeper Willie
23809 Dayata (Om) Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Swaha.
23811 A mantra is that which protects the mind. Through this mantra, which is the
23812 perfection of wisdom itself, we can overcome the demon of ignorance that
23813 possesses us and find unsurpassable happiness. It protects the minds of those
23814 who practice it from all fears and describes how to make the transition from
23815 worldly existence to the supreme state beyond sorrow. It is a mantra of great
23816 knowledge because it saves us from the poison of ignorance and its imprints.
23817 It is an unsurpassable mantra because it frees us from suffering and its
23818 causes as no other path of insight can. The incomparable is the state beyond
23819 suffering. Since it helps us to attain that state, it is comparable to the
23820 incomparable. It totally pacifies suffering because it rids us of all the
23821 troubles of the world and their causes. The world here refers to ordinary
23822 beings like us. Our troubles are many but foremost are birth, aging,
23823 sickness, and death. This mantra does not deceive us and it is true because
23824 wisdom sees things as they actually are without any error or deception. It is
23825 therefore transcendent.
23826 -- from "The Heart Sutra: An Oral Teaching by Geshe Sonam Rinchen",
23827 translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
23829 I am interested not in converting other people to Buddhism but in how we
23830 Buddhists can contribute to human society, according to our own ideas. I
23831 believe that other religious faiths also think in a similar way, seeking to
23832 contribute to the common aim....
23834 Just as Buddha showed an example of contentment, tolerance, and serving others
23835 without selfish motivation, so did Jesus Christ. Almost all of the great
23836 teachers lived a saintly life--not luxuriously like kings or emperors but as
23837 simple human beings. Their inner strength was tremendous, limitless, but the
23838 external appearance was of contentment with a simple way of life.
23840 ...the motivation of all religious practice is similar--love, sincerity,
23841 honesty. The way of life of practically all religious persons is contentment.
23842 The teachings of tolerance, love, and compassion are the same. A basic goal
23843 is the benefit of humankind--each type of system seeking in its own unique
23844 ways to improve human beings. If we put too much emphasis on our own
23845 philosophy, religion, or theory, are too attached to it, and try to impose it
23846 on other people, it makes trouble. Basically all the great teachers, such as
23847 Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed, founded their new teachings with a
23848 motivation of helping their fellow humans. They did not mean to gain anything
23849 for themselves nor to create more trouble or unrest in the world.
23851 Most important is that we respect each other and learn from each other those
23852 things that will enrich our own practice. Ever if all the systems are
23853 separate, since they each have the same goal, the study of each other is
23855 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness", compiled
23856 and edited by Sidney Piburn, published by Snow Lion Publications
23858 Our teacher, Sakyamuni Buddha, is one among the thousand Buddhas of this
23859 aeon. These Buddhas were not Buddhas from the beginning, but were once
23860 sentient beings like ourselves. How they came to be Buddhas is this.
23861 Of body and mind, mind is predominant, for body and speech are under the
23862 influence of the mind. Afflictions such as desire do not contaminate the
23863 nature of the mind, for the nature of the mind is pure, uncontaminated by any
23864 taint. Afflictions are peripheral factors of a mind, and through gradually
23865 transforming all types of defects, such as these afflictions, the adventitious
23866 taints can be completely removed. This state of complete purification is
23867 Buddhahood; therefore, Buddhists do not assert that there is any Buddha who
23868 has been enlightened from the beginning.
23869 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Buddhism of Tibet: The Dalai Lama",
23870 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion
23873 ...everbody thinks that compassion is important, and everyone has
23874 compassion. True enough, but the Buddha gave uncommon quintessential
23875 instructions when he taught the methods for cultivating compassion, and the
23876 differences are extraordinarily important.
23877 Generally, everyone feels compassion, but the compassion is flawed. In
23878 what way? We measure it out. For instance, some feel compassion for human
23879 beings but not for animals and other types of sentient beings. Others feel
23880 compassion for animals and some other types of sentient beings but not for
23881 humans. Others, who feel compassion for human beings, feel compassion for the
23882 human beings of their own country but not for the human beings of other
23883 countries. Then, some feel compassion for their friends but not for anyone
23884 else. Thus, it seems that we draw a line somewhere. We feel compassion for
23885 those on one side of the line but not for those on the other side of the line.
23886 We feel compassion for one group but not for another. That is where our
23887 compassion is flawed. What did the Buddha say about that? It is not
23888 necessary to draw that line. Nor is it suitable. Everyone wants compassion,
23889 and we can extend our compassion to everyone.
23890 -- Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, in "Lectures on Kamalashila's 'Stages of
23891 Meditation in the Middle Way School' ", translated by Jules B. Levinson,
23892 published by Snow Lion Publications
23894 4. Seven-Limbed Practice
23896 The seven parts of the practice are encompassed by two practices--the
23897 purification of negativities and the enhancing of the store of merit. When
23898 you engage in the practice, it is very important to understand that each and
23899 every one of the seven limbs has its individual purpose and significance, and
23900 only with such knowledge can you engage properly in the practice. The seven
23901 limbs are: prostration, offering, confession, rejoicing, requesting to turn
23902 the wheel of the dharma, entreating not to enter into nirvana, and dedication
23904 ...For the practice of confession, which is the third of the seven limbs,
23905 it is very important to have the factor of regret; without this factor there
23906 is no possibility of purifying the negativities.... The great yogi Milarepa
23907 said: "When I examined whether or not confession could purify the
23908 negativities, I found that it is regret that cleanses them." In order to
23909 generate regret, it is important to see the destructive nature of negative
23910 actions and also to understand the law of causality.
23911 Based on a disciplined mind, we experience happiness; based on an
23912 undisciplined, untamed mind, we undergo suffering. We should think that if we
23913 are not able to make any progress from our present state of mind, which always
23914 indulges in negative thoughts, there is not much hope for us. So, if we are
23915 able to think in such terms, we will be able to really see the destructive
23916 nature of negative actions, and also that the store of negative actions that
23917 we have is inexhaustible, like a rich person's bank balance. Without the
23918 recognition of the destructive nature of the negative forces, we will never be
23919 able to develop the deep factor of regret from the depth of our hearts.
23920 If we do not engage in a proper practice of dharma, it seems that we may
23921 expend all our store of merit in mundane pleasures. It is very important to
23922 have this faculty of regret in our practice of purification and confession.
23923 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), in "The Path to Bliss: A Practical
23924 Guide to Stages of Meditation", translated by Geshe Thubten Jinpa,
23925 edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
23927 9. Glorious Lama (excerpt)
23929 ...Those with faith have a refuge.
23930 Those with compassion have an altruistic attitude.
23931 Those with incisive knowledge have realization.
23932 Those with respect and devotion have blessings.
23934 Those with shame avoid carelessness.
23935 Those who avoid carelessness have a guarded mind.
23936 Those who have a guarded mind have vows and samaya.
23937 Those who have vows and samaya have spiritual attainments.
23939 Calm and self-control are signs of listening to the Dharma;
23940 Few passions, signs of meditation;
23941 Harmony with everyone is the sign of a practitioner;
23942 Your mind at ease, the sign of accomplishment.
23944 The root of phenomena is your own mind.
23945 If you tame your mind, you are a practitioner.
23946 If you are a practitioner, your mind is tamed.
23947 When your mind is tamed, that is liberation.
23948 -- Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje, in "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart
23949 Advice", translated by Ron Garry, published by Snow Lion Publications
23951 The Special Features of Dzogchen
23953 In the early translation school of the Nyingma, a system of nine yanas is
23954 taught. Three of these--the paths of the Sravaka, pratyekabuddha, and
23955 bodhisattva--constitute the sutra tradition, while the tantric tradition
23956 consists of six levels--the three outer tantras and the three inner tantras.
23957 The tradition of Dzogchen, or Atiyoga, is considered to be the pinnacle of
23958 these nine yanas. The other, lower, yanas are said to be philosophical
23959 systems that depend on ordinary consciousness, and so the path is based on
23960 that ordinary consciousness. Here the distinction being made is between
23961 ordinary mind--sem--and pure awareness--rigpa. The ninth yana, the most
23962 majestic, is beyond ordinary consciousness, for its path is based on rigpa,
23963 not on the ordinary mind.
23964 Throughout beginningless time, there has always been present, within us
23965 all, a pure awareness--that in-dwelling rigpa which in Atiyoga is evoked in
23966 all its nakedness, and which constitutes the practice.
23967 ...The ground for all the phenomena of samsara and nirvana is the
23968 fundamental innate mind of clear light, and these phenomena are its radiance
23969 or display. While we are following the path, in order for all the impure
23970 aspects of our experience to be purified on the basis of that rigpa--or, you
23971 can say, that fundamental innate mind of clear light--there is no other means
23972 apart from that fundamental and innate state itself, which is therefore the
23973 very essence of the path. Finally, when the fruition is made fully evident,
23974 it is just this fundamental innate mind of clear light itself, free from
23975 obscuration, that constitutes the attainment of fruition.
23976 ...Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of
23977 rigpa's pure awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true
23978 nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts... arise
23979 within the expanse of rigpa and that is where they dissolve. On this point,
23980 Dodrupchen Jikme Tenpe Nyima says that all objects of knowledge are permeated
23981 by clear light, just as a sesame seed is permeated by its oil. Therefore,
23982 even while the coarser states of the six consciousnesses are functioning,
23983 their subtle aspect--that of clear light--can be directly introduced by means
23984 of those states themselves, through blessings and through pith instructions.
23985 Here lies the extraordinary and profound implication of the Dzogchen
23986 teachings. When you are basing your path on the fundamental innate mind of
23987 clear light, you will employ skilful means to block the coarse and subtle
23988 states of energy and mind, as a result of which the state of clear light
23989 becomes evident, and on this you base your path. But in Dzogchen, even while
23990 the six consciousnesses are fully functioning, by means of those very states
23991 you can be directly introduced to their subtle aspect of clear light in your
23992 immediate experience, and you then meditate by focusing one-pointedly on that
23993 aspect. As you meditate in this way, resting in this non-conceptual state,
23994 gradually your experience of clear light becomes increasingly profound, while
23995 coarser thoughts and concepts dwindle away.
23996 The most difficult task is to differentiate between ordinary mind and
23997 rigpa. It is easy enough to talk about it. You can say, for example, that
23998 rigpa has never been confused, while ordinary mind has fallen under the
23999 influence of concepts and is mired in confusion. But to be introduced to the
24000 direct experience of the essence of rigpa is far from being easy. And so
24001 Dodrupchen says that although your arrogance might be such that you assume you
24002 are meditating on the ultimate meaning of rigpa, there is a danger that "you
24003 could end up meditating on the clear, empty qualities of your ordinary mind,
24004 which even non-Buddhist practitioners are capable of doing." He is warning us
24006 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
24007 Perfection", translated by Geshe Thubten Jinpa and Richard Barron
24008 (Chokyi Nyima), edited by Patrick Gaffney, pub. by Snow Lion Publications
24010 Patience is like a beautiful ornament. When you become a person with
24011 great patience, it brings a certain element of charm to your life. You are
24012 loved by others, and you give no problems to your friends. You bring an
24013 element of joy, happiness, and calmness to other people's lives--your friends,
24014 your family, and the community. You do not have to ask to be accepted;
24015 everyone longs for your presence. Everyone looks up to you and respects you,
24016 not because you have worked for that or expected it, not because you were
24017 competing for their favor, but simply because of the nature of patience. You
24018 are respected and trusted, and you acquire dignity with the practice of
24019 patience. When you are honored, it is with sincerity, and it is something you
24021 ...Just hearing about patience does not mean you are experiencing it now
24022 or will easily develop it. To lay the ground for training the mind, you must
24023 first tame the mind. To tame the mind, it is extremely important to do the
24024 basic shamata [tranquility meditation, calm abiding] practice, which develops
24025 calmness and tranquility. Then you can add the practice of patience,
24026 understanding the benefits of patience and reminding yourself to take
24027 advantage of the available antidotes.
24028 -- Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, in "Dharma Paths", translated by Ngodup
24029 Burkhar and Chojor Radha, edited by Laura M. Roth, published by Snow Lion
24032 No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of
24033 policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
24036 We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
24037 -- Winston Churchill
24039 If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good
24040 education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave
24041 to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content
24042 itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children,
24043 and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay
24047 First, God created idiots.
24048 That was just for practice.
24049 Then He created school boards.
24052 Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course,
24053 we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in
24054 training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution,
24055 they are totally unfit.
24058 There are two types of education...
24059 One should teach us how to make a living,
24060 And the other how to live.
24063 We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or
24064 fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and
24065 do not know a thing.
24066 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
24068 The Sanskrit word for compassion, karuna, has the implication of "that
24069 which blocks or prevents bliss." In general, when we develop compassion, we
24070 develop very strongly the attitude that cannot bear the suffering of other
24071 beings. We wish for it to end and for them to become free. Although we do
24072 not actually experience others' suffering at that time, the strength of the
24073 attitude that cannot bear their suffering causes our mind also to become
24074 unhappy. This is the general sense in which compassion blocks bliss....
24075 Only the power of a union of method and wisdom--namely the union of
24076 compassion, as a greatly blissful awareness, and the discriminating awareness
24077 of voidness--allows us to attain the total release of supreme nirvana, namely
24079 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra", with
24080 Alexander Berzin, published by Snow Lion Publications
24082 There is a tradition of reciting prayers of request to the spiritual
24083 teachers of the lineage at the beginning of each study session, starting with
24084 the Buddha Shakyamuni and ending with our own personal teachers. What do we
24085 request? As we chant each verse, we take to mind the inspiring qualities of
24086 the great masters mentioned in it and ask them to bless us to develop
24087 compassion, wisdom and power similar to their own. Blessings are experienced
24088 in the form of a transformation which affects our body, speech and mind. Our
24089 mind becomes more serviceable and flexible, our way of speaking and acting
24090 more constructive. We become more open to the message of how to bring about
24091 inner transformation that has been handed down through this long line of
24092 spiritual teachers.
24093 Our teachers pass on the instructions they have received from their own
24094 teachers, the knowledge they have culled from their reading and everything
24095 they have understood and experienced as a result of their personal practice,
24096 without holding anything back. They are motivated by compassion and their
24097 deep wish to help us. To communicate it to us they choose whatever means are
24098 most effective--sometimes stern, sometimes gentle. This process must take
24099 place in an atmosphere of mutual trust, something very rare in relationships
24100 today. In the past the relationship between students and teachers was even
24101 closer and more trusting than that between siblings--and in Tibet brothers and
24102 sisters generally enjoyed a close and loving bond. Today this is a dying
24103 tradition, yet a good relationship between student and teacher is vital even
24104 for the communication of secular knowledge, let alone where spiritual wisdom
24106 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment: An
24107 Oral Teaching", translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow
24110 We have happiness of mind and freedom from anxiety to just the degree that
24111 our minds are tamed.... Once we want happiness and do not want suffering, we
24112 should engage in the means to achieve happiness and eliminate suffering.
24113 Practice is based on reasoning, not force; it is up to oneself.
24114 The time for engaging in these techniques is now. Some feel, "I did not
24115 succeed in this lifetime; I will ask a lama for help in my future life." To
24116 think that we will practise in the future is only a hope. It is foolish to
24117 feel that the next life will be as suitable as this. No matter how bad our
24118 condition is now, since we have a human brain, we can think; since we have a
24119 mouth, we can recite mantra. No matter how old one may be, there is time for
24120 practice. However, when we die and are reborn, we are unable even to recite
24121 om mani padme hum. Thus, it is important to make all effort possible at this
24122 time when we have obtained the precious physical life-support of a human.
24123 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins, in "Deity Yoga: In Action and
24124 Performance Tantra by Tsong-ka-pa", published by Snow Lion Publications
24126 How would we feel if one of our children was overpowered by a serious disease
24127 and did some terrible things without knowing what he or she was doing? We
24128 should try to view someone dear who suddenly hurts us in the same light. If
24129 we can see that person is out of control and sick with negative emotions, we
24130 will not feel so much hatred and disgust. There may be resentment, and we may
24131 not be able to love that person more than before, but almost automatically
24132 there will be a certain sympathy that will lessen or end our hatred and allow
24134 -- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, in "Daring Steps Toward Fearlessness: The Three
24135 Vehicles of Buddhism", edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, published
24136 by Snow Lion Publications
24138 Compassion is a theme the Dalai Lama returns to over and over again. I
24139 also know he has meditated on compassion every morning without fail for the
24140 past half century. In an interview, I asked the Dalai Lama to give me his
24141 take on compassion. Lhakdor [his translator], as usual, was by his side.
24142 "Compassion is something like a sense of caring, a sense of concern for
24143 others' difficulties and pain," the Dalai Lama said. "Not only family and
24144 friends, but all other people. Enemies also. Now, if we really analyze our
24145 feelings, one thing becomes clear. If we think only of ourselves, forget
24146 about other people, then our minds occupy a very small area. Inside that
24147 small area, even a tiny problem appears very big. But the moment you develop
24148 a sense of concern for others, you realize that, just like ourselves, they
24149 also want happiness; they also want satisfaction. When you have this sense of
24150 concern, your mind automatically widens. At this point, your own problems,
24151 even big problems, will not be so significant. The result? Big increase in
24152 peace of mind. So, if you think only of yourself, only your own happiness,
24153 the result is actually less happiness. You get more anxiety, more fear."
24154 "I was thirty-two years old when I developed a strong experience of
24155 compassion," he told me.... "Often when I reflect on the meaning and benefits
24156 of altruistic mind, tears came." Lhakdor translated: "...When he meditated on
24157 compassion, he would sometimes be filled with joy and appreciation. And there
24158 is a strong sense of concern for others accompanied by a feeling of
24159 sadness.... And when His Holiness reflected on certain profound explanations
24160 on emptiness, this would also trigger a strong emotion."
24161 "I think that strong conviction or strong emotions actually give more
24162 inner strength," the Dalai Lama explained. "So when I face some problems or
24163 criticism, for example, criticism from the Chinese, of course, little
24164 irritation sometimes..." "But then he'll have this feeling of compassion for
24165 them," Lhakdor translated. "He'll regret they're not making positive
24166 connection with him. But his sentiment is, although there is this negativity,
24167 may it also give positive fruit."
24168 "Now, the understanding of emptiness helps a lot toward developing
24169 compassion. There's no doubt it reinforces compassion," the Dalai Lama said.
24170 Lhakdor elaborated: "Emptiness allows us to have an understanding about
24171 ultimate reality. It helps us to appreciate the wisdom of interdependence--a
24172 fundamental law of nature. We gain an appreciation that we are all basically
24173 related. It is because of this interrelatedness that we are able to empathize
24174 with the suffering of others. With empathy, compassion flows naturally. We
24175 develop genuine sympathy for others' suffering and the will to help remove
24176 their pain. Emptiness thus strengthens positive emotions like compassion."
24177 Emptiness and compassion. Wisdom and method. These are the twin pillars
24178 of the Dalai Lama's practice--everything we need to know about spiritual
24179 practice. Both qualities are needed; they strengthen each other. Once we
24180 realize we are all interconnected, it is difficut not to feel some of
24181 compassion for the problems of our fellow human beings. And once we come by
24182 a feeling of compassion, we start to get a glimpse of the timeless truth of
24183 interdependence, of emptiness.
24184 The Dalai Lama looked thoughtful. After some time, he turned to me, "I
24185 think one thing I'm quite sure," he said. "I can tell you, the twin practice
24186 of emptiness and compassion is... effective." Then he lapsed into Tibetan
24187 again. Lhakdor translated. "His Holiness can say with conviction: if you
24188 meditate on emptiness and compassion, so long as you make the effort, then His
24189 Holiness is sure that, day in and day out, you will get tangible benefit.
24190 Your whole attitude will change." "....These things about compassion are
24191 something living--according to my own experience," the Dalai Lama went on. "I
24192 tell some of my experiences to other people, share some of my feelings, then
24193 other people understand: there is something real, something living."
24194 -- from "The Wisdom of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys by"
24195 His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan, published by Snow Lion
24198 ...it is difficult to recognize an authentic teacher, because these
24199 qualities are internal. We can not depend upon external factors, but external
24200 factors are what we see. It is very difficult to see the inner qualities of
24201 another person. A businessman might be friendlier to us than our best friend,
24202 while his unseen motivation is merely to make a sale. Likewise, if a
24203 "teacher" acts in a very kind and loving manner towards us it does not
24204 necessarily mean that he is compassionate and selfless, because we cannot see
24205 his motivation. We also cannot determine a teacher's qualifications based
24206 upon her fame, or whether she has thousands of students. So the seeker is
24207 left with this paradox.
24208 There is no simple solution, but there are things we can do. First, it is
24209 important that we familiarize ourselves with the characteristics* discussed by
24210 Kongtrul Rinpoche. Second, we must maintain awareness of our own motivation
24211 during the process of finding a teacher. Am I seeking a teacher in order to
24212 attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, or am I seeking
24213 to fulfill my need to acquire the prestige associated with a famous teacher,
24214 or am I merely attracted to a lama's beautiful retreat land or the social
24215 scene of a hip sangha, and so on.
24216 These motivations need to be acknowledged if we are to recognize an
24217 authentic wisdom teacher, because the teacher you find is related to your
24218 karma, and your karma is intimately connected to your motivation.
24219 Fortunately, there are methods that help us purify our motivation and create
24220 the proper conditions for finding a wisdom teacher, such as bringing our
24221 awareness to our motivations as much as possible, doing daily meditation
24222 practice, and praying to the Triple Gem [Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha] that we
24223 will meet and recognize an authentic wisdom teacher.
24224 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye, in "The Teacher-Student Relationship: A
24225 Translation of 'The Explanation of the Master and Student Relationship,
24226 How to Follow the Master, and How to Teach and Listen to the Dharma' ",
24227 translated and introduced by Ron Garry, published by Snow Lion Pub.
24229 * "Whatever lama is followed must definitely have these qualities: He holds a
24230 pure lineage since he has not contradicted the commitments and prohibitions of
24231 the three vows.... He should be very learned... clear about the sutras,
24232 tantras, and shastras. His mind-stream should be so saturated with compassion
24233 that he loves all the limitless sentient beings as his only child. He should
24234 be expert in the outer tripitakas and on the inner level he should be expert
24235 in the ritual of the four classes of tantras of the secret mantra. He should
24236 have manifested the outstanding noble qualities of abandomnent and realization
24237 in his mind-stream by having relied upon practicing the meaning of this. He
24238 gathers fortunate disciples by the four ways of attracting: generosity,
24239 pleasant speech, his conduct should benefit others, and he should act in
24240 accord with the dharma."
24243 ...when we talk about the notion of self in Buddhism, it is important to bear
24244 in mind that there are different degrees or types. There are some types of
24245 sense of self which are not only to be cultivated but also to be reinforced
24246 and enhanced. For instance, in order to have a strong determination to seek
24247 Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings, one needs a very strong
24248 sense of confidence, which is based upon a sense of commitment and courage.
24249 This requires a strong sense of self. Unless one has that identity or sense
24250 of self, one will not be able to develop the confidence and courage to
24251 strongly seek this aim. In addition, the doctrine of Buddha-nature gives us a
24252 lot of encouragement and confidence because we realize that there is this
24253 potential within us which will allow us to attain the perfection that we are
24254 seeking. However, there are different types of sense of self which are rooted
24255 in a belief in a permanent, solid, indivisible entity called "self" or "I."
24256 There is the belief that there is something very concrete or objective about
24257 this entity. This is a false notion of self which must be overcome.
24258 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience
24259 from a Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa,
24260 published by Snow Lion Publications
24262 ...by respecting and serving your teachers you exhaust karma whose effects you
24263 would otherwise experience in the miserable realms. Your action of serving
24264 the teacher expends these miserable effects and replaces them with only slight
24265 harm to your body and mind in this lifetime, either in actuality or in dreams.
24266 In addition, the benefits of respecting and serving your teachers are
24267 tremendous, such as a collection of virtue which surpasses even the roots of
24268 virtue that you derive from making offerings to limitless buddhas, and so
24269 forth. As the Sutra of Ksitigarbha says:
24270 "Those whom the teachers care for will purify the karma that would
24271 otherwise cause them to wander through the miserable realms for ten million
24272 limitless eons. They purify this karma with harm to their bodies and minds in
24273 this lifetime. This harm includes sickness such as an infectious disease with
24274 fever and calamities such as famine. They may purify their karma by merely
24275 undergoing something as little as a dream or a scolding. They produce more
24276 roots of virtue in one morning than those who give gifts to, worship, or
24277 observe precepts from limitless tens of millions of buddhas. Those who
24278 respect and serve their gurus are endowed with unimaginable good qualities."
24279 -- Tsong-kha-pa, in "The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to
24280 Enlightenment: Lam Rim Chen Mo", translated by the Lamrim Chenmo
24281 Translation Committee under editorial guidance of Joshua Cutler and Guy
24282 Newland, foreword by Robert A.F. Thurman, Snow Lion Publications
24284 ...if we remain clinging to this life even for one day, we are misusing
24285 our time. In this way, we can waste months and years on end. Because we
24286 don't know when our lives will finish, we should remain mindful and well
24287 prepared. Then, even if we die tonight, we will do so without regret. If we
24288 die tonight, the purpose of being well prepared is borne out; if we don't die
24289 tonight, there is no harm in being well prepared, because it will still
24291 But when we leave the world of humans, we do so without a protector or
24292 supporter and the total responsibility falls on us. We only have our own
24293 intelligence to rely on at that time, so we must expend our own effort in
24294 order to protect ourselves. As the Buddha said, "I have shown you the path to
24295 liberation; know that liberation depends on you." We must put strenuous effort
24296 into gaining freedom from the lower migrations, liberation from samsara,
24297 freedom from conventional existence and solitary salvation.
24298 The body is compared to a guest house; it is a place to stay for just a
24299 short time and not permanently. At present, the guest of consciousness is
24300 staying in the guest house of the body, like renting a place to stay. When
24301 the day comes for consciousness to leave, the guest house of the body must be
24302 left behind. Not being attached to friends, the body, wealth and possessions
24303 is the practice of the Bodhisattvas.
24304 -- His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, in "The Heart of Compassion: A Practical
24305 Approach to a Meaningful Life"
24307 ...the Transcendent Conqueror presented the two truths with respect to all
24308 inner and outer things, like sprouts and everything else. Genuine truth is
24309 described as being simply the authentic object of the noble ones' original
24310 wisdom that sees what is authentic and true; there is no identity actually
24311 established there for conceptual mind to find. Relative truth is the false
24312 object seen from the perspective of the conceptual mind whose eye of wisdom is
24313 completely covered by the cataract of ignorance, as is the case with ordinary
24314 beings. It is therefore posited as being this conceptual mind. The object
24315 perceived does not exist in the way that this mind perceives it to be.
24316 Thus, the Teacher explained that every thing found holds two natures
24317 within: a genuine nature and a relative one. From among these two, the object
24318 of the noble ones' authentic vision is the precise nature of reality, genuine
24319 truth, and the object of false seeing is relative truth.
24320 -- Chandrakirti, in "The Moon of Wisdom: Chapter Six of Chandrakirti's
24321 'Entering the Middle Way' with Commentary from the Eighth Karmapa Mikyo
24322 Dorje's 'Chariot of the Dagpo Kagyu Siddhas', translated by Ari Goldfield,
24323 Jules Levinson, Jim Scott and Birgit Scott under guidance of Khenpo
24324 Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
24326 ...we find Agastya, born to a family of Brahmans so illustrious as to be
24327 called "an ornament of the earth," living as an ascetic on the island of Kara
24328 in the Indian Ocean.... "On what accomplishment have you set your hopes?"
24329 Indra asked Agastya the Bodhisattva. "What is the object of your wishes that
24330 has led you to leave your sorrowful friends and relatives, desert a household
24331 and possessions that had been your happiness, and enter this way of life that
24332 destroys all pleasures?"
24333 The Bodhisattva replied according to the Dharma, in a way that immediately
24334 laid Indra's anxiety to rest. "Repeated births tend to great sorrow," he
24335 said. "So do the calamities of old age, sickness and death. All are just a
24336 disturbance to the mind. My vow is to save all sentient beings from these
24338 Relieved, Indra immediately offered, in return for such candid truth, the
24339 fulfillment of any desire Agastya might name. "May the fire of covetousness
24340 that burns insatiably even after obtaining a beloved wife, children, power and
24341 riches never enter my heart," Agastya said. "Excellent, excellent," applauded
24342 Indra and urged Agastya to request the fulfillment of still another desire.
24343 "May the fire of hatred burn far from me," Agastya said. Pleased by this
24344 game, in which Agastya so ingeniously taught the Dharma while appearing to
24345 request the fulfillment of his desires, Indra urged him to go on. But this
24346 time he was startled to hear Agastya's words. "May I never hear, see, speak
24347 to, nor endure the annoyance and pain of staying with a fool," Agastya said.
24348 "What do you mean?" Indra asked. "Those in distress deserve sympathy; the
24349 root of distress is foolishness. How can you claim to be compassionate when
24350 you abhor the very presence of those most due sympathy?"
24351 Then Agastya reasoned in this way, to prove to Indra that one should
24352 associate not with the foolish but with men of wisdom. "A fool cannot be
24353 cured even by medical treatment," he said. "Habituated to wrong conduct
24354 because of a deficiency in moral education, he urges his neighbors to follow
24355 his impetuous way, inflamed by self-conceit and the affectation of wisdom.
24356 When reprimanded, he becomes angry. There is no help for him." "How true,"
24357 Indra said. "Let me hear more jewellike, well spoken sentences."
24358 "May I see, hear, live with and converse with a wise man," Agastya said,
24359 "for these reasons: because the wise man, walking the path of virtue, draws
24360 others along with him, and is never roused to impatience by harsh words spoken
24361 for his own good." Again Indra was delighted.
24362 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries by His Holiness the
24363 Dalai Lama XIV on the Jatakamala Garland of Birth Stories", translated by
24366 (2) What one has to abandon: how to get rid of arrogance by means of an
24368 "I'm not beyond my karma, the deeds I've done;
24369 I'll still fall ill, age, die, and leave my friends."
24370 Think like this again and yet again
24371 And with this remedy avoid all arrogance.
24372 "I will be sick, I will grow old, I will die, I will be separated from those
24373 I love, my relations and so forth. In such manner, the fully ripened effect
24374 of my actions will come to me and to no one else, and I am therefore not above
24375 depending on what I did in former lives." To think like this again and again
24376 is the antidote to such things as arrogance: make every effort not to become
24377 arrogant by meditating on this antidote.
24378 -- "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend: with Commentary by Kangyur Rinpoche
24379 by Nagarjuna", translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, published
24380 by Snow Lion Publications
24382 For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.
24383 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
24385 Inwardly, we defend against death by the very structure of our ego. Our ego
24386 claims to have the ability to provide us with happiness based on its belief in
24387 its own permanent existence. On the one hand, to believe in ego results in
24388 denying death. On the other, to accept death is to question the very nature
24389 of ego as a permanent, on-going structure and to confront very strong defense
24390 mechanisms. As a result, we have strong resistance to contemplating death.
24391 This resistance is also the same resistance that comes up when we meditate.
24392 Please recognize it for what it is and move on.
24393 -- Bruce Newman, in "A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism: Notes from a
24394 Practitioner's Journey", published by Snow Lion Publications
24396 Question: Could you please say something on the three kinds of suffering?
24398 His Holiness: One kind of suffering is like a headache or like yesterday's
24399 flu: discomfort in the nose, watery eyes, and so forth. In short, it includes
24400 all of those kinds of gross physical and mental sufferings that in ordinary
24401 parlance we usually call "suffering." This is the first category.
24403 Then the second category is as follows. When we feel hungry and begin to take
24404 food, at first we feel very happy. We take one mouthful, then two, three,
24405 four, five... eventually, though it is the same person, the same food, and
24406 the same time period, we begin to find the food objectionable and reject it.
24407 This is what is meant by the "suffering of change." Practically every worldly
24408 happiness and pleasure is in this second category. Compared to other forms of
24409 suffering, at the beginning these more subtle forms of suffering seem
24410 pleasurable; they seem to afford us some happiness, but this is not true or
24411 lasting happiness, for the more we become acquainted with them, the more
24412 involved we become with them, the more suffering and trouble they bring us.
24413 That is the second category.
24415 Now as for the third category, I think it is fair to say that it is one's own
24416 body. Roughly speaking, this is what it is. It is the body which is the
24417 fruit of afflictions, a body originally created by afflictions. Because the
24418 body is created by such causes, it is of the very nature of suffering. It
24419 comes to act as the basis of suffering. This, then, is the third category.
24420 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
24421 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
24423 One point I should make here is that some people, especially those who see
24424 themselves as very realistic and practical, are sometimes too realistic and
24425 obsessed with practicality. They may think, "The idea of wishing for the
24426 happiness of all beings, of wanting what is best for every single one, is
24427 unrealistic and too idealistic. Such an unrealistic idea cannot contribute in
24428 any way to transforming the mind or to attaining some kind of mental
24429 discipline, because it is completely unachievable."
24430 ...They feel there is simply no point in thinking about all beings since
24431 there is an infinite number of them. They may conceivably be able to feel
24432 some kind of connection with some fellow human beings on this planet, but they
24433 feel that the infinite number of beings throughout the universe has nothing to
24434 do with their own experience as individuals.
24435 ...What is important here, however, is to grasp the impact of cultivating
24436 such altruistic sentiments. The point is to try to develop the scope of our
24437 empathy in such a way that we can extend it to any form of life with the
24438 capacity to feel pain and experience happiness. It is a matter of recognizing
24439 living organisms as sentient, and therefore subject to pain and capable of
24441 ...Such a universal sentiment of compassion is very powerful, and there is
24442 no need to be able to identify, in specific terms, with every single living
24443 being in order for it to be effective.
24444 ...Given patience and time, it is within our power to develop this kind of
24445 universal compassion.
24446 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in "The Compassionate Life",
24447 edited by David Kittelstrom, sponsored by Richard Gere and the Gere
24451 Different body postures open or compress particular energetic channels and
24452 influence the flow of subtle energy. We use this understanding to aid
24453 specific processes in the practice. The Tibetan tradition considers the
24454 negative emotions to be more closely associated with the primary channel on
24455 the right side of the body in men and on the left in women. When a man sleeps
24456 on his right side, the channel that carries mostly negative prana is forced a
24457 little closed and the left channel opens. Also the lung, the physical organ,
24458 on that side is a bit compressed so the opposite lung is a little more
24459 responsible for the breath. You are probably already familiar with effects
24460 from lying on your side: when you lie on your right side you find it easier to
24461 breathe through your left nostril. For men, we consider this position
24462 beneficial to the movement of the positive wisdom prana through the left
24463 channel. Women benefit from the reverse, opening the wisdom channel that is
24464 on their right side by sleeping on their left. This affects dreams in a
24465 positive fashion and makes the dream practice easier. Opening the flow of the
24466 wisdom prana is a provisional expedient, as ultimately we want the balanced
24467 prana to move into the central channel.
24468 Furthermore, by paying attention to posture, awareness is kept more stable
24469 during sleep. Where I come from, most people sleep on a three-foot by six-
24470 foot Tibetan carpet. If one moves too much, one falls out of bed. But that
24471 does not usually happen, because when one sleeps on something small, the
24472 position of the body is held in the sleeping mind throughout the night....
24473 Here, in the big beds of the West, the sleeper can rotate like the hands of a
24474 clock and not fall, but holding the position anyway will help maintain
24476 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, in "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep",
24477 edited by Mark Dahlby, published by Snow Lion Publications
24479 The term emptiness does not carry here any connotation of void or of absolute
24480 nothingness. It should be understood as the naturally open and serene state
24481 of the mind. Thus, to affirm the emptiness of phenomena does not in any way
24482 mean that they do not exist in the way that the horn of a hare or skyflowers
24483 do not exist. Instead, emptiness refers to the insight that, at the ultimate
24484 level, both interior phenomena--sensations, perceptions and the "I"--and
24485 exterior phenomena--all the appearances of the phenomenal world--have no real
24486 existence, although they do appear in different forms. The Heart Sutra
24487 summarizes this as follows:
24488 Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,
24489 Emptiness is not other than form,
24490 Form is not other than emptiness.
24491 -- Jerome Edou in "Machig Labdron and the Foundations of Chod", published
24492 by Snow Lion Publications
24494 Nonviolence does not mean that we remain indifferent to a problem. On the
24495 contrary, it is important to be fully engaged. However, we must behave in a
24496 way that does not benefit us alone. We must not harm the interests of others.
24497 Nonviolence therefore is not merely the absence of violence. It involves a
24498 sense of compassion and caring. It is almost a manifestation of compassion.
24499 I strongly believe that we must promote such a concept of nonviolence at the
24500 level of the family as well as at the national and international levels. Each
24501 individual has the ability to contribute to such compassionate nonviolence.
24502 How should we go about this? We can start with ourselves. We must try to
24503 develop greater perspective, looking at situations from all angles. Usually
24504 when we face problems, we look at them from our own point of view. We even
24505 sometimes deliberately ignore other aspects of a situation. This often leads
24506 to negative consequences. However, it is very important for us to have a
24507 broader perspective.
24508 We must come to realize that others are also part of our society. We can
24509 think of our society as a body, with arms and legs as parts of it. Of course,
24510 the arm is different from the leg; however, if something happens to the foot,
24511 the hand should reach down to help. Similarly, when something is wrong within
24512 our society, we must help.
24513 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday
24514 Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Khyongla Rato and
24517 According to Highest Yoga Tantra, some persons attain Buddhahood in one
24518 lifetime, and because these persons are not born with a body adorned with the
24519 major and minor marks they must achieve such a body through the practice of
24521 Meditation on oneself as undifferentiable from a deity is the special
24522 cause... for attaining Buddhahood. If one meditated only on emptiness and
24523 did not cultivate any method--either that of the Perfection or that of the
24524 Mantra Vehicle--one would fall to the fruit of a Hinayana Foe Destroyer. In
24525 order to attain the definite goodness of the highest achievement, Buddhahood,
24526 deity yoga is needed. Also, ...one must view one's body clearly as a divine
24527 body and train in the pride of being a deity. Without deity yoga the Mantra
24528 path is impossible; deity yoga is the essence of Mantra.
24529 -- H.H. Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, in "Tantra in Tibet",
24530 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Snow Lion Publications
24532 Often we see other sentient beings as hassles: "This mosquito is
24533 disturbing me. Those politicians are corrupt. Why can't my colleagues do
24534 their work correctly?" and so on. But when we see sentient beings as being
24535 more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel, our perspective completely
24536 changes. For example, when we look at a fly buzzing around, we train
24537 ourselves to think, "My enlightenment depends on that fly." This isn't
24538 fanciful thinking because, in fact, our enlightenment does depend on that fly.
24539 If that fly isn't included in our bodhicitta, then we don't have bodhicitta,
24540 and we won't receive the wonderful results of generating bodhicitta--the
24541 tremendous purification and creation of positive potential.
24542 Imagine training your mind so that when you look at every single living
24543 being, you think, "My enlightenment depends on that being. The drunk who just
24544 got on the bus--my enlightenment depends on him. The soldier in Iraq--my
24545 enlightenment depends on him. My brothers and sisters, the teller at the
24546 bank, the janitor at my workplace, the president of the United States, the
24547 suicide bombers in the Middle East, the slug in my garden, my eighth-grade
24548 boyfriend, the babysitter when I was a kid--my enlightenment depends on each
24549 of them." All sentient beings are actually that precious to us.
24550 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, in "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The
24551 Yoga Method of Chenrezig", published by Snow Lion Publications
24553 We think of ourselves as being the child of specific parents, as belonging
24554 to a certain gender and race, as a citizen of a specific nation, and as a
24555 member of a caste, class and community within that country, etc. Our
24556 identification with these transient reference points, be they racial,
24557 linguistic, cultural, conceptual, or gender-specific, can become lifelong love
24558 affairs, hate affairs, or guilt affairs. What Guru Rinpoche's birth
24559 symbolizes for me is the fact that, from the first moment, he recognized the
24560 unborn and undying nature of his mind, primordially pure awareness. He
24561 identified with that, rather than with his body, wherever it may have come
24562 from, be it a womb, a lotus, a stork, or a cabbage patch. Whatever physical,
24563 linguistic, or conceptual worlds he adopted, he wore as ephemeral ornaments on
24564 the infinite expanse of timeless awareness.
24565 ...Guru Rinpoche was not an individual who followed a spiritual path until
24566 illumination. He was an enlightened being who appeared in different guises
24567 entirely as a manifestation to help others, including the guise of an
24568 individual who followed the spiritual path.
24569 -- Ngawang Zangpo, in "Guru Rinpoche: His Life and Times", published by
24570 Snow Lion Publications
24572 ...if a person is experiencing some kind of mental dysfunction, it is
24573 frequently understood that the mind itself has become too withdrawn in upon
24574 itself, and that there is a corresponding physiological process involving the
24575 energies themselves, which are closely associated with consciousness, also
24576 entering into a dysfunctional state.
24577 So, in the Buddhist view, it can happen, for example, that one's mind will
24578 become depressed because of some environmental event. As a result of the mind
24579 becoming depressed, there is a chemical, maybe an electrochemical,
24580 transformation in the brain that has now occurred. The mental dysfunction
24581 will then be aggravated. When that happens, there is a further chemical
24582 response, which then avalanches upon itself.
24583 ...on occasion, without any special external event taking place, there can
24584 simply be a dysfunction or disruption in the balance of the elements within
24585 the body. In that event, the internal circumstances are the dominant,
24587 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
24588 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism," edited by Zara
24589 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston and B. Alan Wallace, published by
24590 Snow Lion Publications
24592 We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.
24595 You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
24597 Enlightenment is not only... devoid of various types of contaminations,
24598 pollutions, suffering, and afflictive emotions... but is also free from
24599 various dualistic appearances. When you achieve such a state, you are
24600 unfettered from all elaborations in the form of subject-object duality and
24601 appearances of conventionality.
24602 You are free not because the subject-object duality or conventional
24603 appearances are objects of elimination in the sense that they are negative
24604 emotions. Rather, you are free because these elaborations cease to exist when
24605 you reach the state of enlightenment. In such a state, the mind of
24606 enlightenment or omniscience is such that it is totally merged with emptiness.
24607 To such a mind, no elaborations exist.
24608 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Many Ways to Nirvana: Reflections and
24609 Advice on Right Living", edited by Renuka Singh
24612 When we meditate, things from the past come up, and we have to work with
24613 them. We may remember times when we treated others horribly--hurting their
24614 feelings, deceiving them, repaying their kindness with spite, manipulating
24615 them, cheating them. While regret for these actions is appropriate and
24616 necessary to purify these karmas, we often fall into guilt and shame instead.
24617 Guilt and shame are obstacles to overcome on the path, because they keep us
24618 trapped in our self-centered melodrama entitled "How Bad I Am." Regret, on the
24619 other hand, realizes that we erred, leads us to purify, and motivates us to
24620 refrain from acting like that in the future.
24621 How do we counteract guilt and shame? One way is to recognize that the
24622 person who did that action no longer exists. You are different now. Is the
24623 person who did that action five years ago the same person you are now? If she
24624 were exactly the same person, you would still be doing the same action. The
24625 present "you" exists in a continuum from that person, but is not exactly the
24626 same as her. Look back at the person you were with compassion. You can
24627 understand the suffering and confusion she was experiencing that made her act
24629 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga
24630 Method of Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by
24631 Snow Lion Publications
24633 Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted,
24634 the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the
24635 voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil
24639 If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever
24640 that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered
24641 on a ten-foot chain.
24642 -- Adlai E. Stevenson
24644 Our relationship with our practice must be based on reason and common sense.
24645 The principal subject to be learned is the nature of the two levels of reality
24646 [conventional and ultimate], the stages of which can be approached through a
24647 combination of hearing, contemplation and meditation. It is very important
24648 always to remember contemplation, which is the analysis and investigation of
24649 the teachings through the use of reason. The two truths are speaking about
24650 reality, not some intellectual fabrication. To investigate the teaching
24651 critically is fully encouraged in the same way that medical students are
24652 encouraged to apply their theories to real life and thus to witness their
24653 validity.... Time may flow on, but the essential nature of the deeper
24654 problems and mysteries that human beings encounter in the course of their
24655 lives remains the same. Contemplation of the teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni
24656 is merely contemplation of certain facets of reality, and it will cause to
24657 unfold within us a deeper understanding of ourselves, our minds, and the
24658 nature of our sense of being. As the teachings are merely pointing out key
24659 facts of life, facts that, if realized, cause one to evolve in wholesome
24660 directions, a critical investigation of them will only inspire trainees with
24661 confidence. Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any
24662 need to look back with confusion and doubt.
24663 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, in "The Path to Enlightenment", published by
24664 Snow Lion Publications
24666 b. Keeping bounteousness in mind
24668 Possessions are ephemeral and essenceless
24669 Know this and give them generously to monks,
24670 To brahmins, to the poor, and to your friends:
24671 Beyond there is no greater friend than gift.
24673 Having realized that possessions such as food are inconstant and fluctuate,
24674 that in changing and transforming they are devoid of essence, in order to make
24675 them meaningful try to use them properly, giving to those with good qualities
24676 (monks and brahmins), to those who suffer (the poor, the sick, and so forth),
24677 to those who help you (friends) and to those you venerate (spiritual teachers
24678 and parents). Even beyond the world there is no friend more sublime, more
24679 beneficial, than giving, because it gives rise directly and indirectly to
24680 ripened effects that are inexhaustible.
24682 -- Nagarjuna, "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend: with Commentary by Kangyur
24683 Rinpoche", translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, published by
24684 Snow Lion Publications
24686 A goloptious full-up pot, too,
24687 And I don't know where it's got to,
24688 No, I don't know where it's gone--
24690 -- A.A. Milne, "In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump"
24692 With a determination to accomplish
24693 The highest welfare for all sentient beings
24694 Who surpass even a wish-granting jewel
24695 I will learn to hold them supremely dear.
24697 Never mind neglecting other sentient beings, you should take them as a
24698 treasure through which temporary and final aims can be achieved and should
24699 cherish them one-pointedly. Others should be considered more dear, more
24700 important than yourself. Initially, it is in dependence upon sentient
24701 beings--others--that you generate the altruistic aspiration to highest
24702 enlightenment. In the middle, it is in relation to sentient beings that you
24703 increase this good mind higher and higher and practice the deeds of the path
24704 in order to achieve enlightenment. Finally, in the end, it is for the sake of
24705 sentient beings that you achieve Buddhahood. Since sentient beings are the
24706 aim and basis of all of this marvelous development, they are more important
24707 than even a wish-granting jewel, and should always be treated with respect,
24708 kindness, and love.
24710 You might think, "My mind is so full of the afflictive emotions. How
24711 could I possibly do this?" However, the mind does what it is used to. What
24712 we are not used to, we find difficult, but with familiarity, previously
24713 difficult things become easy. Thus Shantideva's Engaging in the Bodhisattva
24716 "There is nothing which, with time, you cannot get used to."
24718 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness,
24719 Clarity, and Insight," edited and translated by Jeffrey Hopkins,
24720 co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion Publications
24722 Eventually, through the power of stabilizing meditation in which the
24723 mind is set one-pointedly on its object of observation, an initial mental
24724 pliancy--a serviceability of mind--is generated. As a sign that mental
24725 pliancy is about to be generated, a tingly sensation is felt at the top of the
24726 head. This pleasant feeling is compared to that of a warm hand placed on top
24727 of the head after it has been shaved. When mental pliancy has been generated,
24728 a favorable wind, or energy, circulates in the body, engendering physical
24729 pliancy. Through this wind, or air, pervading the entire body, the
24730 unserviceability of the body such that it cannot be directed to virtuous
24731 activities in accordance with your wishes is removed. The generation of
24732 physical pliancy, in turn, engenders a bliss of physical pliancy, a sense of
24733 comfort throughout the body due to the power of meditative stabilization.
24734 The bliss of physical pliancy induces a bliss of mental pliancy, making
24735 the mind blissful. At first, this joyous mental bliss is a little too
24736 buoyant, but then gradually it becomes more steady; at this point, one attains
24737 an unfluctuating pliancy. This marks attainment of a fully qualified
24738 meditative stabilization of calm abiding.
24739 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, in "Yoga
24740 Tantra: Paths to Magical Feats", published by Snow Lion Publications
24742 The more we generate an attitude of contentment in our lives, the happier
24743 we will be and the more open we will be to engage in genuine Dharma practice.
24744 Letting go of the eight worldly concerns brings mental peace right now.
24745 The defining characteristic of a thought or action being Dharma is whether
24746 or not we're attached to the happiness of this life. The eight worldly
24747 concerns are completely involved with attachment to the happiness of this
24748 life. How can we practice genuine Dharma when our self-centered mind is
24749 fixated on getting our own way and making everyone and everything around us
24750 suit our preferences and needs?
24751 That doesn't mean the happiness of this life is bad or wrong. The Buddha
24752 did not say that we should suffer in this life so that we'll get our reward in
24753 heaven. The objects we're attached to and have aversion for aren't the
24754 problem; there's nothing wrong with experiencing pleasure and happiness.
24755 Those aren't the issue. Rather, attachment to pleasant feelings and to the
24756 people, objects, and situations that cause them, and aversion to unpleasant
24757 ones--it is these emotions that create trouble. They make us unhappy and
24758 propel us to harm others in order to get what we want. The troublemakers of
24759 attachment and hostility are what we want to abandon, not people and things.
24760 There is nothing wrong with being happy. But when we're attached to it, we
24761 actually create more unhappiness for ourselves.
24762 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator",
24763 published by Snow Lion Publications
24765 When engaging in hearing, it is important to mix the mind, to familiarize the
24766 mind, with what is being heard. The study of religion is not like learning
24767 about history. It must be mixed with your mental continuum; your mind should
24768 be suffused with it. A sutra says that the practices are like a mirror; your
24769 actions of body, speech, and mind are like a face to be seen in the mirror;
24770 and through the practices you should recognize faults and gradually get rid of
24771 them. As it is said in the oral transmission, "If there is enough space
24772 between yourself and the practices for someone else to walk through, then you
24773 are not implementing them properly."
24774 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, in "Kindness,
24775 Clarity, and Insight", edited and translated by Jeffrey Hopkins,
24776 co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion Publications
24778 Question: What is the relationship of the mind and afflictive emotions?
24780 DL: The very entity of the mind, its nature of mere luminosity and knowing, is
24781 not polluted by defilements; they do not abide in the entity of the mind.
24782 Even when we generate afflictive emotions, the very entity or nature of the
24783 mind is still mere luminosity and knowing, and because of this we are able to
24784 remove the afflictive emotions. If you agitate the water in a pond, it
24785 becomes cloudy with mud; yet the very nature of the water itself is not dirty.
24786 When you allow it to become still again, the mud will settle, leaving the
24787 water pure. How are defilements removed? They are not removed by outside
24788 action, nor by leaving them as they are; they are removed by the power of
24789 antidotes, meditative antidotes.
24790 -- The Dalai Lama, "A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
24791 About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, published
24792 by Snow Lion Publications
24794 Every single sentient being wishes to be happy and free of suffering. By
24795 no means does Buddhism say this is wrong; rather, this is where we start from.
24796 The very root of this yearning for happiness, this yearning to be free of
24797 suffering, is the fundamental expression of the buddha-nature. If for the
24798 time being we turn our gaze away from the myriad ways that we can stray from
24799 the agenda--trying to find happiness by buying a more luxurious car, or a
24800 bigger house, or getting a better job--and just come back to the primary
24801 desire of wishing to be happy, we find at the very source of our yearning for
24802 happiness the buddha-nature wanting to realize itself. It's like a seed that
24803 wants to spring into the sunlight. Sometimes it gets terribly contorted, when
24804 we want to injure somebody else for the sake of our own happiness, but the
24805 fundamental yearning is something to be embraced.
24806 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "The Four Immeasurables: Cultivating a Boundless
24807 Heart", edited by Zara Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
24809 No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it
24810 by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
24811 -- George S. Patton
24813 When you meditate with concentration, there are three particular
24814 experiences that arise: bliss, clarity, and nonthought. Sometimes you feel
24815 great joy, sometimes your mind is very clear, and sometimes there is complete
24816 equanimity. To experience these you do not need to meditate for a long time,
24817 although for a beginner these experiences will not last long because of the
24818 limited ability of a beginner's meditation.
24819 The experience of meditative bliss is greater than ordinary worldly
24820 happiness. Sometimes when you are meditating, a feeling of blissfulness
24821 suddenly arises from the subtle state of your mind and pervades your entire
24822 body. This bliss is healthy and brings out your inner qualities. Some people
24823 use drugs to induce blissfulness and visions, but drugs are external supports
24824 that cannot bring lasting happiness. The bliss experienced in meditation can
24825 last for many days, according to your ability to meditate. When you
24826 experience this kind of bliss, on the outside you might look very poor, but
24827 inside you remain very joyful.
24828 The second main experience in meditation is clarity. Sometimes while
24829 meditating you can suddenly feel that your mind is very clear and bright.
24830 Even if you are meditating in the dark, you do not feel heavy or tired.
24831 Sometimes your body feels very light and your mind is very clear, and many
24832 kinds of reflections appear. Clarity brings great wisdom and the ability to
24833 read other people's minds, as well as to see your own past and future lives.
24834 The third main experience is nonthought, or a state of equanimity without
24835 distractions. Beginners can also experience this. Nonthought is more settled
24836 than the experiences of bliss and clarity. If you have thoughts, they
24837 suddenly dissolve and you can remain continuously in meditation. As your
24838 ability to meditate develops, your mind becomes more and more settled, so that
24839 you can meditate for one hour or one week or one month without being
24840 distracted by thoughts. You simply remain in the natural state for as long as
24842 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal, in "Opening to Our
24843 Primordial Nature", edited by Ann Helm and Michael White, published by
24844 Snow Lion Publications
24846 ...when you probe deeply you will find that no matter how high an
24847 existence a realm may be, even though it may be the highest state of
24848 existence, as long as it is in this cycle of existence the beings there are in
24849 the nature of sufferings, because they have the sufferings of pervasive
24850 conditioning and are therefore under the influence or command of contaminated
24851 actions and delusions. As long as one is not able to be free from such an
24852 influence, there is no place for permanent peace or happiness.
24853 Generally, the experiences that you normally regard as pleasurable and
24854 happy, such as having the physical comfort of good facilities and so forth, if
24855 they are examined at a deeper level, will be revealed to be changeable and
24856 therefore in the nature of suffering. They provide you with temporary
24857 satisfaction; because of that temporary satisfaction you regard them as
24858 experiences of happiness. But if you keep on pursuing them, they will again
24859 lead to the experience of suffering. Most of these pleasurable experiences
24860 are not really happiness in the true sense of the word, but only appear as
24861 pleasure and happiness in comparison to the obvious sufferings that you have.
24862 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, in "Path to Bliss: A Practical Guide
24863 to Stages of Meditation", translated by Geshe Thubten Jinpa, edited by
24864 Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
24866 Once the conventional nature of the mind has been identified, then,
24867 through analysing its nature, finally we will gradually be able to identify
24868 the ultimate nature of the mind. If that is done, there is great progress
24869 unlike anything else.
24870 At the beginning we should meditate for half an hour. When we rise from
24871 the session and various good and bad objects appear, benefit and harm are
24872 manifestly experienced. Therefore, we should develop as much as we can the
24873 realisation that these phenomena do not exist objectively and are mere
24874 dependent-arisings of appearances, like illusions [in that they only seem to
24875 be inherently existent]. We should meditate in this way in four formal
24876 sessions: at sunrise, in the morning, afternoon, and evening.
24877 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
24878 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
24880 Bodhichitta is the one practice we cannot do without. Even if we have been
24881 given the precious oral instructions on realizing the nature of mind, they
24882 will not be the sufficient cause for realization if we have not learned to
24883 generate Bodhichitta. The great Dzogchen yogi Patrul Rinpoche said,
24884 If we have only one thing, the precious Bodhichitta is enough.
24885 If we have nothing else, we must have the method of the precious
24887 We should learn to develop Bodhichitta in a twofold way: through our
24888 aspirations and through our actions. Aspiration Bodhichitta is our initial
24889 wish that all sentient beings be liberated from the vast ocean of samsara's
24890 suffering. Action Bodhichitta requires that we first generate aspiration
24891 Bodhichitta, and practice the Six Paramitas as the method to establish the two
24892 benefits of 1) attaining Buddhahood oneself to 2) be of ultimate benefit to
24893 others. The way to practice aspiration and action Bodhichitta was taught by
24894 the omniscient Patrul Rinpoche, who said,
24895 The instructions for aspiration [Bodhichitta] are to practice the
24896 Four Immeasurables;
24897 The instructions for action [Bodhichitta] are to practice the Paramitas.
24898 -- Anyen Rinpoche, "The Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta", translated by
24899 Allison Graboski, published by Snow Lion Publications
24901 What are the techniques for heightening or lowering the mind? To heighten
24902 the mind, you think about something that enlivens it, but not an object that
24903 would generate desire. For instance, you could reflect on the value of
24904 developing the meditative stabilization of calm abiding or on the value of
24905 having attained a life as a human or on the value of having human
24906 intelligence. Through such reflection, your mind will gain courage, thereby
24907 causing its mode of apprehension to become heightened.
24908 If, despite such a technique, laxity is not cleared away, it is better to
24909 end the session and go to a place that is bright or that is high with a vast
24910 view where you can see a great distance. Or, expose yourself to fresh air, or
24911 throw cold water on your face. Then, return to the session.
24912 When the mind becomes too heightened and thus scattered, what will lower
24913 its mode of apprehension? As a technique to withdraw the mind inside, you
24914 should reflect on a topic that sobers the mind, such as the suffering of
24915 cyclic existence, or think "In the past I have been ruined by distraction, and
24916 again now I will be ruined by distraction. If I do not take care now, it will
24917 not be good." This will lower the mode of apprehension of the mind.
24918 Since this is the case, a person who is cultivating calm abiding needs to
24919 be in a state where such reflections will move the mind immediately.
24920 Therefore, prior to working at achieving calm abiding, it is necessary to have
24921 become convinced about many topics--such as those involved in the four
24922 establishments in mindfulness--through a considerable amount of analysis. In
24923 an actual session of cultivating calm abiding one is performing stabilizing
24924 meditation, not analytical meditation, but if one has engaged in considerable
24925 analysis of these topics previously, the force of the previous reflection
24926 remains with the mind and can be recalled. Thus, when you switch to such
24927 topics in order either to elevate or lower the mind, the mind will be
24928 immediately affected. In this way, if ascertainment has been generated
24929 previously, then reflecting on the value of meditative stabilization or the
24930 value of a human lifetime will immediately heighten the mind, and reflection
24931 on sobering topics such as the nature of the body or the ugliness of objects
24932 of desire will immediately lower its mode of apprehension.
24933 ...recognize when laxity and excitement arise and know the techniques for
24935 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
24936 Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
24937 published by Snow Lion Publications
24939 How is it that mistaken mind overwhelms the unmistaken mind, unmistaken
24940 reality? To give an example, during the day when the sun is shining one does
24941 not see any stars and thus one would think that there are no stars at all,
24942 that they just plain do not exist. Just so, afflictive emotions shine so
24943 brightly and are so powerful that it is as if unmistaken reality, unmistaken
24944 mind, does not exist at all. When you seek out this unmistaken mind from
24945 within, you come to understand that there is an unmistaken mind--a reality of
24946 the mind--that does not die, that does not scurry after pleasure and pain.
24947 This mind that does not follow after pleasure and pain has a mode of being
24948 that is emptiness--but not an emptiness in the sense of an empty house or an
24949 empty vessel; rather, it is endowed with the inconceivable self-effulgence of
24950 unmistaken reality, of pristine wisdom.
24951 When you search for this that is beyond mistaken mind, mistaken mind just
24952 stops; gradually like dawn there comes to be a time when pristine wisdom
24953 manifests a little. With the beginning of dawn there is not just darkness but
24954 some light, and so it is when the self-effulgence, the self-color, the self-
24955 nature of the pristine wisdom shows itself a little; one generates a suspicion
24956 that there is wisdom beyond mistaken mind. As Aryadeva says, "When you
24957 generate doubt thinking that there might be such a reality, cyclic existence
24958 is torn to tatters." How does cyclic existence come to be torn to tatters, or
24959 wrecked, made into a mess by doubt? For instance, if a table is wrecked,
24960 broken up, it cannot perform the function of a table; just so, when the self-
24961 effulgence of unmistaken pristine wisdom begins to dawn with this state of
24962 doubt, cyclic existence is wrecked and torn to tatters.
24963 -- Mi-pam-gya-tso, in "Fundamental Mind: The Nyingma View of the Great
24964 Completeness", practical commentary by Khetsun Sangpo Rinbochay,
24965 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion
24968 The Jewel in the Crown Sutra states, "Donning the armor of loving-
24969 kindness, while abiding in the state of great compassion, practice
24970 meditative stabilization that actualizes the emptiness possessing
24971 the best of all qualities. What is the emptiness possessing the
24972 best of all qualities? It is that which is not divorced from
24973 generosity, ethics, patience, effort, meditative stabilization,
24974 wisdom, or skillful means." Bodhisattvas must rely on virtuous
24975 practices like generosity as means to thoroughly ripen all sentient
24976 beings and in order to perfect the place, body, and manifold retinue.
24977 -- from "Stages of Meditation" by Kamalashila
24979 ...Note that practice of generosity and the other perfections is essential.
24980 This is because the fully enlightened state of Buddhahood is produced by the
24981 realization of favorable causes and conditions. There is no causeless
24982 production and nothing is produced by contrary causes. A Bodhisattva has many
24983 wonderful advantages to help enhance the welfare of sentient beings; every
24984 virtue performed by such a noble being is very powerful and effective.
24985 Therefore, Bodhisattvas earnestly engage in the practice of the method aspects
24986 of the path, including the six perfections, in order to swiftly actualize the
24987 state of Buddhahood.
24988 -- The Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", translated by Venerable Geshe
24989 Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and Jeremy Russell,
24990 published by Snow Lion Publications
24992 Of the three kayas, the Dharmakaya is linked to our mind, Sambhogakaya to
24993 our speech, or communicative principle, and the Nirmanakaya to our ordinary
24995 The process of the three blendings in brief is as follows.
24996 We experience the clear light of the waking state naturally during cIimax,
24997 and it can also be induced with yogic methods. Moreover, we naturally
24998 experience it at the moment of going to sleep, and at the moment of death.
24999 The principle here is that this clear light mind as experienced in each of the
25000 three occasions (waking, sleep and death) is the highest experience of our
25001 consciousness, and in it we dwell in a mental state of blissful, formless non-
25002 duality similar to that of the Dharmakaya wisdom of a buddha. Thus when we
25003 experience the clear light mind in any of these three occasions we should
25004 blend it with the Dharmakaya.
25005 The first movement from this clear light mind is likened to the
25006 Sambhogakaya experience. In the waking state this occurs in our meditation
25007 when we fall out of the clear light that is induced with yogic techniques and
25008 the conceptual mind is aroused. In sleep it occurs after the clear light of
25009 the moment of entering sleep passes and we begin to dream. At death it occurs
25010 when the clear light flash at the moment of death passes and we leave our body
25011 and enter the bardo realm.
25012 A buddha's Sambhogakaya is only visible to an arya, or saint, and not to
25013 an ordinary being; in the same way our thoughts, dreams, and bardo visions are
25014 not visible to ordinary beings but nonetheless are experiences of form. These
25015 subtle form experiences are to be linked to the natural realization of the
25016 illusory, blissful, and perfect nature of being; they are to be seen as an
25017 illusory theater made manifest for the benefit of the world. In other words,
25018 they are to be blended with the Sambhogakaya. This is the second set of three
25020 The third blending is that of blending rebirth with the Nirmanakaya.
25021 Rebirth from the bardo of the waking state occurs every time that we arise
25022 from a meditation session and once more go about our ordinary life; rebirth
25023 from the bardo of the sleep / dream state occurs when we wake up and once more
25024 enter the work-a-day world; and rebirth from the bardo of becoming, or death
25025 bardo, occurs when we complete the unwinding process of the afterlife state
25026 and once again are ready to enter into a new body.
25027 The basic principle underlying these three blendings is that what occurs
25028 to us at the time of death also occurs to us in miniature form at the time of
25029 going to sleep and can be induced in the waking state by means of the inner
25031 -- "Readings on the Six Yogas of Naropa," translated, edited and introduced
25032 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
25034 If you want to tell people the truth,
25036 otherwise they'll kill you.
25039 In the beginning there was nothing.
25040 God said, "Let there be light!"
25041 And there was light.
25042 There was still nothing,
25043 but you could see it a whole lot better.
25046 Now, as [in the past], the concept of a transcendent god as creator has a
25047 powerful and inspiring impact on the lives of those who believe in it. The
25048 sense that their entire destiny lies in the hands of an all-powerful,
25049 omniscient and compassionate being leads them to try to understand the
25050 workings and key message of this transcendent being. Then, when they come to
25051 realise that this transcendent being embodies love and infinite compassion,
25052 they try to cultivate love and compassion towards their fellow beings as the
25053 qualities through which to express love for their creator. They also gain
25054 confidence and inspiration through a sense of intimacy or connectedness to
25055 this loving, transcendent being.
25056 Although, metaphysically speaking, Buddhists reject any notion of a
25057 transcendent creator or god, some individual Buddhists do relate to certain
25058 higher beings, such as the goddess Tara, as an independent and real being with
25059 power over their destiny. For these practitioners Tara is their sole refuge,
25060 their greatest object of veneration and their trusted guardian and protector.
25061 What this suggests is that the inclination to seek refuge in an external
25062 source is something deeply natural for us as human beings.
25063 But it is also clear that for other people the metaphysical concept of a
25064 transcendent being is unacceptable. Questions form in their minds, such as:
25065 who created the creator--in other words--where does the transcendent being
25066 come from? And how can we posit a true beginning? People with this type of
25067 mental disposition look elsewhere for explanations.
25068 -- The Dalai Lama, in "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
25069 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
25071 Due to misunderstanding each other's needs and concerns, miscommunication
25072 occurs on the international level as well [as the personal level]. In all
25073 these situations--personal and international--freeing ourselves from our
25074 narrow understanding of a situation by seeing it from the other's viewpoint is
25075 an effective remedy for anger. We can ask ourselves, "If I had grown up in
25076 that person's family, society, time in history, and cultural conditions, what
25077 would my needs and concerns be in this situation?"
25078 When we look at the situation from the other person's viewpoint, sometimes
25079 we see that she perceives it differently than we thought she did. Other
25080 times, we realize that we have little idea of how a situation appears to
25081 another person or what her needs and concerns are. Therefore, we need to ask
25082 her; and when she responds, we need to listen, without interrupting. It is
25083 all too easy, when someone explains her view to us, to correct her or tell her
25084 that she should not feel the way she does. This only inflames the other
25085 person, and convinces her, with good reason, that we don't understand.
25086 Rather, we need to listen from our heart to what she says. After she has
25087 fully expressed herself, we can share our perspectives, and generally, a
25088 productive discussion will ensue.
25089 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Working with Anger", published by Snow Lion
25092 ...it is extremely important to look inward and try to promote the right
25093 kind of attitude, which is based on awareness of reality. A sense of caring
25094 for others is crucial. And it is actually the best way of caring for oneself.
25095 ...the moment you think of others, this automatically opens our inner door--
25096 you can communicate with other people easily, without any difficulties. The
25097 moment you think just of yourself and disregard others, then because of your
25098 own attitude, you also get the feeling that other people also have a similar
25099 attitude toward you. That brings suspicion, fear. Result? You yourself lose
25100 inner calmness. Therefore, I usually say that although a certain kind of
25101 selfishness is basically right--self and the happiness of that self are our
25102 original right, and we have every right to overcome suffering--but selfishness
25103 that leads to no hesitation to harm another, to exploit another, that kind of
25104 selfishness is blind. Therefore, I sometimes jokingly describe it this way:
25105 if we are going to be selfish, we should be wisely selfish rather than
25107 I feel that the moment you adopt a sense of caring for others, that brings
25108 inner strength. Inner strength brings us inner tranquility, more self-
25109 confidence. Through these attitudes, even though your surroundings may not be
25110 friendly or may not be positive, still you can sustain peace of mind.
25111 -- "The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss Human Rights,
25112 Conflict and Reconciliation", by the Dalai Lama and other Nobel
25113 Laureates, edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion
25115 If we do not uncover [our] problems--and I saw this in myself--we risk
25116 placing a veneer of spirituality over deeply buried emotional wounds from
25117 childhood that do not simply go away.
25118 ...When this happens there is greater potential for our spirituality to
25119 become simply another expression of our personal pathology. We can falsify
25120 the qualities valued in the path without realizing it. Renunciation can
25121 become another level of denial and avoidance; compassion can become a sickly
25122 sentimentality that has no substance to it. Our desire to help others can
25123 come from "compulsive caring," or a compulsion to sacrifice ourselves because
25124 we feel worthless. The Buddhist idea of emptiness can likewise be falsified
25125 by the desire to disappear psychologically and merge or lose ego boundaries.
25126 Lack of identity, formless vagueness, and absence of boundaries do not
25127 exemplify the Buddhist idea of emptiness. My own version of this
25128 misconception was to try to live an ideal of the pure and pious only to find
25129 it was a form of repression I could not ultimately sustain.
25130 At the heart of Buddhist practice is the search for a solution to our
25131 fundamental wounds. Healing the emotional damage we often carry within is
25132 truly the object of this practice. If we wish to resolve these problems, we
25133 need to be open and honest about their reality within us. Only when we do
25134 will any spiritual practice address what we need. The aim of Buddhist
25135 practice is not a spiritual transcendence that dissociates from our suffering.
25136 Nor is it the search for salvation in some form of external divine being that
25137 we hope will save us in our distress. As one of my teachers, Lama Thubten
25138 Yeshe, once said, "Buddhism is very practical; you just have to recognize that
25139 your mind is the cause of suffering. If you change your mind, you can find
25140 liberation." This message is very simple but by no means easy to follow. In
25141 order to do so, however, we must begin to recognize where we are
25142 psychologically wounded.
25143 -- Rob Preece, in "The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of
25144 Individuation in Buddhist Life", published by Snow Lion Publications
25147 In the Dzogchen teachings, a teacher explains methods that you can apply
25148 for discovering that state. When you say that you are practicing or following
25149 Dzogchen teachings, it doesn't mean that you are reciting some prayers or
25150 mantras, or doing some visualization. It means that, following a teacher and
25151 using methods, you discover that state. When you have discovered that state,
25152 then you still need many kinds of methods for realizing it. Discovering the
25153 state of your real nature and realizing it are completely different things.
25154 Many people have the idea that when they have had some experience or
25155 discovery, they are enlightened; however, this discovery does not mean they
25156 are enlightened. The state of enlightenment means you have direct knowledge
25157 of what the state of rigpa is, and you are not just learning through
25158 intellectual study. When you follow a teaching in an intellectual way, you
25159 have many ideas at first--thinking, judging, and making analysis. You can
25160 follow or reject these ideas; but when you have many problems, you discover
25161 that perhaps this is not real knowledge. It is like following something
25162 blindly because you haven't had any direct experience. Direct introduction
25163 and discovering our real nature mean we have direct experience through our
25164 senses, and that through these experiences we discover our real nature.
25165 For example, if I show you an object, you can look at it and know its form
25166 and color. Now if I ask you to forget about it, you can't. If I ask you to
25167 change your idea about that object, you can't. Why? Because seeing that
25168 object is your direct experience. Discovering your real nature is similar to
25170 When you are studying in an intellectual way, you are following another
25171 person's idea. For example, you can believe your teacher today, but maybe
25172 what your teacher says will not be true for you tomorrow. You can always
25173 change your ideas. You have this problem because you have not discovered your
25174 state. This is the weak point of intellectual study.
25175 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "Dzogchen Teachings", edited by Jim Valby and
25176 Adriano Clemente, published by Snow Lion Publications
25178 Howard Cutler: "Have there been situations in your life that you've
25180 Dalai Lama: "Oh, yes. Now for instance there was one older monk who lived
25181 as a hermit. He used to come to see me to receive teachings, although I think
25182 he was actually more accomplished than I and came to me as a sort of
25183 formality. Anyway, he came to me one day and asked me about doing a certain
25184 high-level esoteric practice. I remarked in a casual way that this would be a
25185 difficult practice and perhaps would be better undertaken by someone who was
25186 younger, that traditionally it was a practice that should be started in one's
25187 midteens. I later found out that the monk had killed himself in order to be
25188 reborn in a younger body to more effectively undertake the practice..."
25189 Surprised by this story, I remarked, "Oh, that's terrible! That must have
25190 been hard on you when you heard..." The Dalai Lama nodded sadly. "How did
25191 you deal with that feeling of regret? How did you eventually get rid of it?"
25192 The Dalai Lama silently considered for quite a while before replying, "I
25193 didn't get rid of it. It's still there. But even though that feeling of
25194 regret is still there, it isn't associated with a feeling of heaviness or a
25195 quality of pulling me back. It would not be helpful to anyone if I let that
25196 feeling of regret weigh me down, be simply a source of discouragement and
25197 depression with no purpose, or interfere with going on with my life to the
25198 best of my ability."
25199 At that moment, in a very visceral way, I was struck once again by the
25200 very real possibility of a human being's fully facing life's tragedies and
25201 responding emotionally, even with deep regret, but without indulging in
25202 excessive guilt or self-contempt. The possibility of a human being's wholly
25203 accepting herself or himself, complete with limitations, foibles, and lapses
25204 of judgment. The possibility of recognizing a bad situation for what it is
25205 and responding emotionally, but without overresponding. The Dalai Lama
25206 sincerely felt regret over the incident he described but carried his regret
25207 with dignity and grace. And while carrying this regret, he has not allowed it
25208 to weigh him down, choosing instead to move ahead and focus on helping others
25209 to the best of his ability.
25210 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., in "The Art of
25211 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
25213 Train yourself in three hard disciplines.
25214 These are the difficult practices of mindfulness, of expulsion and of
25215 'interrupting the flow.'
25216 As for the first of these, the difficult practice of mindfulness, it is
25217 necessary to recognize afflictive emotions as soon as they arise and it is
25218 hard, at first, to remain sufficiently aware to be able to do this. However,
25219 when negative emotions arise, we should identify them as anger, desire or
25220 stupidity. Even when emotions have been recognized, it is not easy to drive
25221 them out with the antidote. If, for instance, an uncontrollably strong
25222 emotion comes over us, so that we feel helplessly in its power, we should
25223 nevertheless confront it and question it. Where are its weapons? Where are
25224 its muscles? Where is its great army and its political strength? We will see
25225 that emotions are just insubstantial thoughts, by nature empty: they come from
25226 nowhere, they go nowhere, they remain nowhere. When we are able to repel our
25227 defiled emotions, there comes the difficult practice of 'interrupting the
25228 flow.' This means that, on the basis of the antidote described, defiled
25229 emotions are eliminated just like a bird flying through the air: no trace is
25230 left behind. These are practices in which we should really strive.
25231 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, in "Enlightened Courage: An Explanation of the
25232 Seven-Point Mind Training", translated by The Padmakara Translation
25233 Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
25235 Howard Cutler: "...am I right in assuming that you would consider solitary
25236 meditation to be a productive activity? Would you consider to be productive
25237 our example of a monk who is a hermit, who has little contact with anybody
25238 else and spends his or her life just in meditation, trying to achieve
25240 Dalai Lama: "Not necessarily. From my viewpoint, there can be both
25241 productive meditation and unproductive meditation."
25242 HC: "What's the difference?"
25243 DL: "[Some] practitioners and other kinds of meditators practice different
25244 techniques, some with closed eyes, sometimes open eyes, but the very nature of
25245 that meditation is to become thoughtless, in a state free of thoughts. But in
25246 a way, this is a kind of retreat, like they are running away from trouble.
25247 When they actually face trouble, carry on their daily life and face some real
25248 life problems, nothing has changed. Their attitudes and reactions remain the
25249 same. So that kind of meditation is just avoiding the problem, like going on
25250 a picnic, or taking a painkiller. It's not actually solving the problem.
25251 Some people may spend many years doing these practices, but their actual
25252 progress is zero. That's not productive meditation. Genuine progress occurs
25253 when the individual not only sees some results in achieving higher levels of
25254 meditative states but also when their meditation has at least some influence
25255 on how they interact with others, some impact from that meditation in their
25256 daily life--more patience, less irritation, more compassion. That's
25257 productive meditation. Something that can bring benefit to others in some
25259 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
25262 As human beings, we are all the same. So there is no need to build some
25263 kind of artificial barrier between us. At least my own experience is that if
25264 you have this kind of attitude, there is no barrier. Whatever I feel, I can
25265 express; I can call you "my old friend". There is nothing to hide, and no
25266 need to say things in a way that is not straightforward. So this gives me a
25267 kind of space in my mind, with the result that I do not have to be suspicious
25268 of others all the time. And this really gives me inner satisfaction, and
25270 So I call this feeling a "genuine realization of the oneness of the whole
25271 of humanity". We are all members of one human family. I think that this
25272 understanding is very important, especially now that the world is becoming
25273 smaller and smaller. In ancient times, even in a small village, people were
25274 able to exist more or less independently. There was not so much need for
25275 others' co-operation. These days, the economic structure has completely
25276 changed.... We are heavily dependent on one another, and also as a result of
25277 mass communication, the barriers of the past are greatly reduced. Today,
25278 because of the complexity of interdependence, every crisis on this planet is
25279 essentially related with every other, like a chain reaction. Consequently it
25280 is worthwhile taking every crisis as a global one. Here barriers such as
25281 "this nation" or "that nation", "this continent", or "that continent" are
25282 simply obstacles. Therefore today, for the future of the human race, it is
25283 more important than ever before that we develop a genuine sense of brotherhood
25284 and sisterhood. I usually call this a sense of "universal responsibility".
25285 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the
25286 Great Perfection", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron
25287 (Chokyi Nyima), edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion
25290 ...several great Kagyu and Sakya masters... have expressed the stages [of
25291 sutra and tantra paths] in terms of the tradition known as "parting ourselves
25292 from the four forms of clinging."
25293 First we part from clinging to this life. Instead of total involvement
25294 with affairs of this life, we involve ourselves with future lives. We
25295 accomplish this by thinking about our precious human life with all its
25296 freedoms and endowments for spiritual growth, how we lose it because of death
25297 and impermanence, and then the karmic laws of behavioral cause and effect that
25298 shape our future lives. Next we part from clinging to future lives and
25299 involve ourselves, instead, in the quest for liberation. By thinking about
25300 all the suffering of uncontrollably recurring rebirth, or samsara, we generate
25301 sincere renunciation of it--the strong determination to be free and attain the
25302 total liberation that is nirvana.
25303 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, in "The Gelug/Kagyu
25304 Tradition of Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
25307 When we say that we have knowledge, or that we have discovered our real
25308 nature and we are in this nature, that means that we are "being the mirror."
25309 You see, "being the mirror" or "looking in the mirror" are two completely
25310 different things. If we "are the mirror," then we have no concept of
25312 If a reflection manifests in the mirror, why is it manifesting? There are
25313 two reasons. One is because the mirror has the capacity to manifest infinite
25314 reflections. This is the mirror's quality. If there is an object in front of
25315 the mirror, whose capacity it is to reflect, naturally a reflection will
25316 appear in the mirror. Furthermore, the mirror has no idea of checking or
25317 accepting the object it is reflecting. The mirror doesn't need any program
25318 for that. This is what is called its qualification, or infinite potentiality.
25319 In the same way, when we have infinite potentiality, but we are ignorant
25320 of our real nature, then we always conceive that "I am here" and "the object
25321 is there," "I am looking and seeing an object," and so on. We do not discover
25322 that we are like a mirror, and if we never discover this, then of course there
25323 is no way that we can function like the mirror. When you discover that you
25324 are like the mirror, then there is a possibility that you will be the mirror.
25325 When you are the mirror, then you have no problems with reflections--they
25326 can be big, small, nice, ugly, any kind. For you, the reflections are only a
25327 manifestation of your quality, which is like that of a mirror. When you have
25328 no problems with reflections, then you understand self-liberation. You are
25329 not changing or transforming something. You are only being in your real
25331 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, from "Dzogchen Teachings", edited by Jim Valby
25332 and Adriano Clemente, published by Snow Lion Publications
25334 It is important to recognize the difference between an enlightened
25335 experience and the state of enlightenment. To penetrate the veil is to see
25336 the nature of reality for the first time. This enlightened experience in the
25337 Zen tradition might be called a satori. This is a powerful shift of insight
25338 that shakes our reality. No longer can we live with the delusion we may have
25339 once held. Our solidly held concepts about reality begin to crumble. Samsara
25340 shakes, as Lama Yeshe once put it. This experience may not be comfortable.
25341 To come so close to this existential threshold challenges our secure sense of
25342 identity and can be frightening. Indeed, as a Tibetan lama once said, this
25343 fear is a sign that we are close to the edge. We are beginning to recognize
25344 the lack of substance of our ego-identity. Our "wisdom eye" has opened to a
25345 new truth--an ultimate truth, as opposed to relative truth.
25346 When we penetrate the veil, however, the work is not yet done. We may
25347 have had an enlightened experience, but there is further to travel. As Gen
25348 Jhampa Wangdu once said while I was in retreat, it is not difficult to
25349 experience emptiness; the problem is holding it. For this insight to have its
25350 full effect, the mind needs to be able to sustain awareness for prolonged
25351 periods of time. Tibetan teachers will sometimes say we may hit the nail, but
25352 only with a quality of focused attention can we repeatedly do so. With the
25353 development of tranquil abiding, the veil can be cleared completely in the way
25354 the red ring of fire created by the incense burn[ing] slowly expands and
25355 consumes the entire film of tissue paper. The mind is gradually cleansed of
25356 the emotional turmoil and confusion that is generated by the misconceptions we
25357 have about reality.
25358 -- Rob Preece, in "The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of
25359 Individuation in Buddhist Life", published by Snow Lion Publications
25361 ...if we see others in trouble, although we cannot immediately take their
25362 suffering upon ourselves, we should make the wish to be able to relieve them
25363 from their misfortunes. Prayers like this will bear fruit eventually. Again,
25364 if others have very strong afflictive emotions, we should think, "May all
25365 their emotions be concentrated in me." With fervent conviction, we should
25366 persist in thinking like this until we have some sign or feeling that we have
25367 been able to take upon ourselves the suffering and emotions of others. This
25368 might take the form of an increase in our own emotions or of the actual
25369 experience of the suffering and pain of others.
25370 This is how to bring hardships onto the path in order to free ourselves
25371 from hopes and fears--hopes, for instance, that we will not get ill, or fears
25372 that we might do so. They will thus be pacified in the equal taste of
25373 happiness and suffering. Eventually, through the power of Bodhichitta, we
25374 will reach the point where we are free even from the hope of accomplishing
25375 Bodhichitta and the fear of not doing so. Therefore we should have love for
25376 our enemies and try as much as possible to avoid getting angry with them, or
25377 harbouring any negative thoughts towards them. We should also try as much as
25378 possible to overcome our biased attachment to family and relatives. If you
25379 bind a crooked tree to a large wooden stake, it will eventually grow straight.
25380 Up to now, our minds have always been crooked, thinking how we might trick and
25381 mislead people, but this [Bodhichitta] practice, as Geshe Langri Tangpa said,
25382 will make our minds straight and true.
25383 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Enlightened Courage: An Explanation of the
25384 Seven Point Mind Training", translated by the Padmakara Translation
25385 Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
25387 Q: ...what is the nature of the mindstream that reincarnates from lifetime to
25390 A: ...If one understands the term "soul" as a continuum of individuality from
25391 moment to moment, from lifetime to lifetime, then one can say that Buddhism
25392 also accepts a concept of soul; there is a kind of continuum of consciousness.
25393 From that point of view, the debate on whether or not there is a soul becomes
25394 strictly semantic. However, in the Buddhist doctrine of selflessness, or "no
25395 soul" theory, the understanding is that there is no eternal, unchanging,
25396 abiding, permanent self called "soul." That is what is being denied in
25399 Buddhism does not deny the continuum of consciousness. Because of this, we
25400 find some Tibetan scholars, such as the Sakya master Rendawa, who accept that
25401 there is such a thing as self or soul, the "kangsak ki dak" (Tib. gang zag gi
25402 bdag). However, the same word, the "kangsak ki dak," the self, or person, or
25403 personal self, or identity, is at the same time denied by many other scholars.
25405 We find diverse opinions, even among Buddhist scholars, as to what exactly the
25406 nature of self is, what exactly that thing or entity is that continues from
25407 one moment to the next moment, from one lifetime to the next lifetime. Some
25408 try to locate it within the aggregates, the composite of body and mind. Some
25409 explain it in terms of a designation based on the body and mind composite, and
25410 so on.... One of the divisions of [the "Mind-Only"] school maintains there is
25411 a special continuum of consciousness called alayavijnana which is the
25412 fundamental consciousness.
25413 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist
25414 Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow Lion
25417 In the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path Je Tsongkhapa says that
25418 when we are training ourselves in any of the perfections, for instance in
25419 generosity, we should make sure that we practice all the other five
25420 perfections--in this case ethical discipline, patience, enthusiastic effort,
25421 concentration, and wisdom--and the six excellent factors. When we perform a
25422 generous action, ethical discipline will be included if we take care to
25423 refrain from doing anything unethical at the same time. In certain
25424 situations, for instance, we may be tempted to speak harshly or
25425 condescendingly as we give.
25426 Generosity gives rise to abundance, and by insuring that our practice is
25427 complete, we create the right environment to use these resources
25428 constructively. Sometimes when we give, people respond ungratefully. If we
25429 can resist getting upset, we are practicing patience. Giving not out of a
25430 sense of obligation or reluctantly nor with a wish to outdo others but with
25431 joy is the practice of enthusiastic effort. Directing our full attention to
25432 an act of generosity is concentration. Discerning and understanding what is
25433 appropriate to give and what is not, and remembering that the giver, the act
25434 of generosity, and the recipient are all interdependent and empty of inherent
25435 existence are the practice of wisdom. Including these different factors in
25436 our actions will bring many excellent results such as a good body and mind,
25437 the resources we need, a pleasant appearance, supportive companions, the
25438 ability to complete what we undertake, and the focus not to be distracted by
25439 the disturbing emotions and so forth. This is how to insure that we will
25440 enjoy many conducive conditions in a future human life. On the other hand,
25441 our miserliness or impatience now could make us face many difficult
25442 circumstances in the future.
25443 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "How Karma Works: The Twelve Links of Dependent
25444 Arising", translated by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
25446 Shakyamuni Buddha, even when he was a trainee on the path, was solely
25447 concerned in both thought and action with others' welfare. Whenever he found
25448 an opportunity to work for others, no matter what difficulties he faced, he
25449 was never discouraged. He never hated obstacles and hardships encountered on
25450 the way. Instead, the difficult situations facilitated his being more
25451 courageous and determined to accomplish others' welfare. Just because he was
25452 so determined to work for others in the past, even as a trainee on the path,
25453 it is needless to say how much more it is so with him now as a completely
25454 enlightened person.
25455 As the saying goes, "A past life story of a teacher is an enlightening
25456 practice for posterity."
25457 -- "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries of His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV on
25458 the Jatakamala Garland of Birth Stories," translated by Tenzin Dorjee,
25459 edited by Dexter Roberts
25461 When you get tired, it is appropriate to repeat mantra. However, for a
25462 beginner the main part of the meditation revolves around the six deities*,
25463 which should be cultivated carefully and leisurely. This is because clear
25464 appearance of oneself as a deity must be achieved for the sake of amassing the
25465 two collections of merit and wisdom, achieving firm meditative stabilisation,
25466 and transforming all physical and verbal actions into powerful aids for
25467 others' welfare. Hence, before repeating mantra, the yoga of non-dual
25468 profundity (realisation of emptiness) and manifestation (appearance as a
25469 deity) should be sustained, developing clarity in observing the divine form
25470 and in ascertaining its lack of inherent existence. When, having done this
25471 one-pointedly, you become tired, then for the sake of resting begin repeating
25472 mantra. ...Tsong-ka-pa also says that in the approximation phase meditation
25473 is chief, mantra repetition is secondary.
25474 * ultimate, sound, letter, form, seal, and sign
25475 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Deity Yoga In
25476 Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow Lion Publications
25478 There isn't a single one of us who has never felt hostile and angry, so we
25479 know about the effects of anger. Does it make us feel better or worse? It
25480 stirs us up, makes us miserable and destroys our tranquillity. It is quite
25481 easy to recognize anger as a foe and to see how it harms us because its
25482 destructiveness is apparent. But we find it much harder and are also
25483 reluctant to acknowledge the harm done by attachment because it is a foe
25484 masquerading as a friend. When desire or attachment first arises, it feels
25485 quite pleasurable but eventually it lands us in trouble. It wants to possess
25486 what it has fabricated and we reach out for something which, in fact, does not
25487 exist. Failure to get what we want frustrates us and anger quickly follows.
25488 The third of the poisons, confusion or ignorance, simply stimulates desire and
25489 anger and lies at the root of all the disturbing emotions.
25490 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "Eight Verses for Training the Mind", translated
25491 and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
25493 The Sevenfold Cause-and-Effect Method
25494 If we have been reborn time after time, it is evident that we have needed
25495 many mothers to give birth to us. ...the first cause bringing about
25496 bodhicitta is the recognition that all beings have been our mother.
25497 The love and kindness shown us by our mother in this life would be
25498 difficult to repay. She endured many sleepless nights to care for us when we
25499 were helpless infants. She fed us and would have willingly sacrificed
25500 everything, including her own life, to spare ours. As we contemplate her
25501 example of devoted love, we should consider that each and every being
25502 throughout existence has treated us this way. Each dog, cat, fish, fly, and
25503 human being has at some point in the beginningless past been our mother and
25504 shown us overwhelming love and kindness. Such a thought should bring about
25505 our appreciation. This is the second cause of bodhicitta.
25506 As we envision the present condition of all these beings, we begin to
25507 develop the desire to help them change their lot. This is the third cause,
25508 and out of it comes the fourth, a feeling of love cherishing all beings. This
25509 is an attraction toward all beings, similar to what a child feels upon seeing
25510 his or her mother. This leads us to compassion, which is the fifth cause of
25511 bodhicitta. Compassion is a wish to separate these suffering beings, our
25512 mothers of the past, from their miserable situation. At this point we also
25513 experience loving-kindness, a wish that all beings find happiness. As we
25514 progress through these stages of responsibility, we go from wishing that all
25515 sentient beings find happiness and freedom from suffering to personally
25516 assuming responsibility for helping them enter this state beyond misery. This
25517 is the final cause. As we scrutinize how best to help others, we are drawn to
25518 achieving the fully enlightened and omniscient state of Buddhahood.
25519 -- The Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life",
25520 edited by Nicholas Vreeland
25522 Among the seven branches [qualities of Buddhahood]--complete enjoyment,
25523 union, great bliss, non-inherent existence, compassion, uninterrupted
25524 continuity, and non-cessation--three are found only in tantra--complete
25525 enjoyment, union, and great bliss--and the other four are common to both
25526 sutra and tantra, although non-inherent existence can also be put in the group
25527 specific to tantra when it is considered as the object ascertained by a bliss
25528 consciousness.... In Yoga Tantras the bliss arising from holding hands or
25529 embracing is used in the path; in Performance Tantras, from laughing; and in
25530 Action Tantras, from looking. The four tantras are similar in that they all
25531 use desire for the attributes of the desire realm on the path.
25532 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
25533 published by Snow Lion Publications
25535 How then does the mistaken idea, that things exist from their own side,
25536 operate? Whatever appears to the mind appears as if it existed truly from its
25537 own side. ...Now if the object existed as it appears to you, then, when you
25538 searched for it, you could actually find a real [object]. So, we must ask
25539 ourselves whether or not this object, when searched for, is to be found or
25540 not. If the object is not found when it is searched for, we must conclude
25541 that it does not exist from its own side, that when the label is applied to
25542 its basis, it is not so labeled because the basis somehow bears within it
25543 something which is the object. At this point, one must conclude that the
25544 object does not exist as it appears to, but then, one may wonder whether it
25546 Things, however, are not utterly non-existent. They do exist nominally.
25547 So things do exist, but they do not exist from the side of the basis of the
25548 label. And hence, though they do exist, because they do not exist within the
25549 object itself, they must exist only as they are labeled by the subject (the
25550 conceptual mind, for example). There is no other way for the object to exist
25551 apart from the way it is posited by conceptual thought. This is then what we
25552 mean when we say that all phenomena are merely labeled by conceptual thought.
25553 However, things do not appear to us as if they were mere conceptually labeled
25554 entities. Instead, they appear as if they existed from their own side.
25555 Therefore, it is a mistake to think that things exist as they appear.
25556 -- The Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists", edited
25557 by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
25559 Meditation is hard work, but it is also the most rewarding thing we can do
25560 with our time. As we begin to see the mechanisms we previously took for
25561 granted and start to understand them, the knots inside our minds begin to
25562 loosen. We feel a tremendous sense of freedom, space and release inside us.
25563 As we begin to understand our warped thinking patterns and our neuroses, we
25564 see them directly. We begin to develop compassion for ourselves, for our pain
25565 and confusion. Now that we start to look with clarity, we can see the pain
25566 and confusion in the eyes of other people, and we naturally develop compassion
25567 for them. It doesn't matter how outwardly successful people may appear, we
25568 can see their pain when we look into their eyes. It is very rare to come
25569 across people whose eyes are truly sparkling with joy.
25570 -- Tenzin Palmo, "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical
25571 Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Publications
25573 ...recognizing that we have certain obligations, and recognizing at the
25574 same time that spiritual practice is the core of a meaningful life, what do we
25575 do? There really is an answer. It is not easy, but it is tremendously
25576 fruitful, and it keeps on opening and opening further: transform those actions
25577 that are already obligations by applying Dharma to them.
25578 Take eating, for instance. We have to do it two or three times a day, but
25579 we don't have to wolf down the food. There is no one who cannot sit and pause
25580 first for thirty seconds. Even fast-food is worth the thirty seconds it takes
25581 to recognize the immense number of beings who have provided us with this food.
25582 Pausing like this ties us into the community of life, at least on planet
25583 earth, as we recognize that we are indebted to others. We have received, and
25584 as we take the food, let us do it with the aspiration, "May this be returned.
25585 May I use my abilities to the fullest to serve those who have served me." And
25586 that includes everyone, directly or indirectly. The service may occur on a
25587 very mundane level, but insofar as we mature spiritually, our responsibility
25588 increases according to our abilities. Not because someone tells us, "Now you
25589 have to do this," but simply as we gain insight into the nature and sources of
25590 suffering and of contentment, then we have something all the more valuable to
25592 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
25593 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
25595 The Paramita of Meditative Concentration
25596 It is said in the Teachings that without taking up the Paramita of
25597 Meditative Concentration, it would be impossible to realize the nature of
25598 mind. We should think of meditative concentration as the practice that brings
25599 stability to our minds, and creates the good conditions to practice unfocused
25600 meditation--in other words, resting in the uncontrived natural state.
25601 If we make a quick examination of our own mind, we can see the reason this
25602 kind of stability is so crucial. Although physics has observed light to be
25603 the fastest traveling phenomenon known to man, actually the speed at which our
25604 minds travel is even faster. We can circle the globe in a matter of seconds,
25605 and our minds generate doubts, emotions, and conceptual thoughts at a speed
25606 that defies that of all other phenomena. Because we lack basic mental
25607 stability, conceptual thoughts arise endlessly. So, if our goal is to realize
25608 the nature of mind, we first have to learn to still our minds, and free
25609 ourselves from distraction. The method for quieting the mind is called
25610 "meditative concentration." Once we have gained some initial mind stability,
25611 it is even more important that we continue our training so that this stability
25612 will increase. Without such stability, it is impossible for us to
25613 successfully learn to abide in the uncontrived view.
25614 -- Anyen Rinpoche, "The Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta", translated
25615 by Allison Graboski, published by Snow Lion Publications
25617 5. Your present naked awareness
25621 Your present, naked awareness--
25622 Unspoiled by thoughts of past, present, or future,
25623 Not fettered by mind grasping to so-called "meditation"
25624 Nor falling into a pervasive blankness of so-called "non-meditation"--
25625 The natural state nakedly sustained,
25626 Is the practice of Great Perfection.
25628 Regardless of what thoughts arise during that practice,
25629 To reject negative ones or foster positive ones is unnecessary.
25630 Mere recognition liberates them in their own ground.
25631 Take this liberation upon arising as the path's key point.
25633 Destroy whatever meditative experiences arise, and relax.
25634 A tantric practitioner without fixation is deeply content.
25635 You've reached your goal of contentment right now.
25636 What is the use of numerous enumerations of Buddha's teachings
25637 When you discover Buddha Kuntu Zangpo within yourself?
25638 Keep the meaning of these words close to your heart.
25639 -- Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje, "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart
25640 Advice", translated by Ron Garry, a Tsadra Foundation Series book
25641 published by Snow Lion Publications
25643 The Buddhist view is that in the external world there are some elements
25644 that are material, and some that are nonmaterial. And the fundamental
25645 substance, the stuff from which the material universe arises, is known as
25646 space particles. A portion of space is quantized, to use a modern term; it is
25647 particulate, not continuous. Before the formation of the physical universe as
25648 we know it, there was only space, but it was quantized. And it was from the
25649 quanta, or particles, in space that the other elements arose. This accounts
25650 for the physical universe.
25651 But what brought about that process? How did it happen? It is believed
25652 that there existed other conditions, or other influences, which were
25653 nonmaterial, and these were of the nature of awareness. The actions of
25654 sentient beings in the preceding universe somehow modify, or influence, the
25655 formation of the natural universe.
25656 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
25657 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara
25658 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by
25659 Snow Lion Publications
25661 ...meditation on emptiness begins with gaining a sense of the inherent
25662 existence of which phenomena are empty, for without understanding what is
25663 negated, you cannot understand its absence, emptiness.
25664 ...Through carefully watching how you conceive your self, or "I," to be
25665 inherently established, you will determine that the "I" appears to be self-
25666 instituting without depending on the collection of the mental and physical
25667 aggregates, which are its basis of designation, or without depending on any of
25668 them individually, even though the "I" appears with those aggregates. Proper
25669 identification of this appearance is the first essential toward realizing
25670 selflessness--ascertaining the object of negation.
25671 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba, and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra:
25672 Paths to Magical Feats", published by Snow Lion Publications
25674 At the moment the world's spiritual traditions have greatly degenerated.
25675 It is very important in such times that the practitioners themselves make
25676 especially strong efforts to gain realization. To permit the lineages of
25677 transmission to disappear is to allow the world to plunge into darkness. The
25678 great Vasubandhu wrote, "Buddha, who is like the eye of the world, is no
25679 longer to be seen. His great successors, who realized the most profound
25680 teachings, also have passed away. Who equals them?" It might be asked, who
25681 is there today to equal the master Vasubandhu? Who practices as well as did
25682 Milarepa? Such people are rare. We should remember that everything but
25683 Dharma is useless at death, and instead of wasting our lives on meaningless
25684 activities, we should blend our mindstreams with the teachings and with
25685 practice. Doing so benefits us as individuals and benefits the world by
25686 strengthening its spiritual basis.
25687 Each of us has to be able to feel the pride that we ourselves can reach
25688 perfection, we ourselves can attain enlightenment. When even one person
25689 indulges in spiritual practice, it gives encouragement to the guardian spirits
25690 of the land, and to the celestial deities who have sworn to uphold goodness.
25691 These forces then have the ability to release waves of beneficial effects upon
25692 humanity. Thus our practice has many direct and indirect benefits. ...If we
25693 practice the teachings and live the ways of Dharma, all the natural forces of
25694 goodness will be behind us.
25695 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
25696 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
25698 Karmic potentials give rise to a broad array of impulses that affect our
25699 lives. Collective karmic potentials from previous actions of a huge number of
25700 beings--including ourselves--give rise, for example, to the impulse for a
25701 universe to evolve with specific environments and life forms into which we and
25702 these beings subsequently take rebirth. These collective potentials also give
25703 rise to the impulses that drive the physical and biological laws that govern
25704 that universe--ranging from the weather patterns of its planets to the life-
25705 cycle habits of each species on them. They also account for the impulses
25706 behind the instinctive daily behavior characteristic of each life form.
25707 -- Alexander Berzin, "Taking the Kalachakra Initiation", published by Snow
25710 Once the body, channels, and wind are balanced, the next step is to keep
25711 your mind in the natural state through meditation. By simply maintaining the
25712 mind as it is, without adding or subtracting anything, one will reach the
25713 inner nature, which is unchanging and indestructible.
25714 The instructions for this type of meditation are very simple. One begins
25715 by sitting with good posture on a cushion, because it is important to stay
25716 straight. Then, one simply maintains the natural clarity of the mind, without
25717 analyzing one's experiences or being disturbed by thoughts. In the dzogchen
25718 style of meditation, there is actually nothing to do except relax in the
25719 mind's nature of clarity and emptiness. Inner awareness is different than
25720 external awareness; it is called clear-light emptiness. It is helpful to use
25721 the sky as an analogy for the true nature of the mind--when you let your mind
25722 mingle with the open space of the sky, you do not need any particular focus.
25723 Simply maintain the mind naturally, without discrimination or judgments, and
25724 experience its nature as being spacious as the sky.
25725 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche,
25726 "Opening the Door to Our Primordial Nature", Snow Lion Publications
25728 Three things in human life are important.
25729 The first is to be kind.
25730 The second is to be kind.
25731 And the third is to be kind.
25734 Question: A person, particularly in the West, must have the foundation of
25735 humility, honesty and an ethical way of life. Once one has this foundation,
25736 what else does Your Holiness suggest that one cultivate in one's life, if
25737 there is the foundation of virtue, ethics and humility?
25738 DL: The next thing to be cultivated is mental stabilization. Ethics is a
25739 method to control oneself--it is a defensive action. Our actual enemy, you
25740 see, is within ourselves. The afflicted emotions (pride, anger, jealousy) are
25741 our real enemies. These are the real trouble makers, and they are to be found
25742 within ourselves. The actual practice of religion consists of fighting
25743 against these inner enemies.
25744 As in any war, first we must have a defensive action, and in our spiritual
25745 fight against the negative emotions, ethics is our defense. Knowing that at
25746 first one is not fully prepared for offensive action, we first resort to
25747 defensive action and that means ethics. But once one has prepared one's
25748 defenses, and has become somewhat accustomed to ethics, then one must launch
25749 one's offensive. Here our main weapon is wisdom. This weapon of wisdom is
25750 like a bullet, or maybe even a rocket, and the rocket launcher is mental
25751 stabilization or calm abiding. In brief, once you have a basis in morality or
25752 ethics, the next step is to train in mental stabilization and eventually in
25754 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology
25755 of Writings", compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, Forword by Sen.
25756 Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
25758 4. The power of abandonment. In this practice what is being abandoned is
25759 self-grasping. We are reminded again that since beginningless time beyond all
25760 imagination, self-grasping has lain at the very core of all mental distortions
25761 and afflictions. It has brought us to unfavorable rebirths and is responsible
25762 for all the undesirable circumstances that we encounter. It is self-
25763 centeredness that obstructs realization and prevents us from deriving the full
25764 benefit from our spiritual practice. Recognize when self-grasping manifests
25765 in daily life. It is important to notice it especially at times of passion,
25766 when we are aroused or irritated, and try not to succumb to it for even a
25768 To be free of self-centeredness continuously for a whole year may be
25769 difficult, but [rejecting it for] a moment is easy. ...the more of these
25770 moments we can saturate with the cherishing of others, the more we are molding
25771 ourselves into the bodhisattvas that we will become.
25772 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
25773 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
25775 As a friend, my request and wish is that... you try to promote a sense of
25776 brotherhood and sisterhood. We must promote compassion and love; this is our
25777 real duty. Government has too much business to have time for these things.
25778 As private persons we have more time to think along these lines--how to make a
25779 contribution to human society by promoting the development of compassion and a
25780 real sense of community.
25781 ...If someone who easily gets angry tries to control his or her anger, in
25782 time it can be controlled. The same is true for a selfish person; first that
25783 person must realize the faults of a selfish motivation and the benefit in
25784 being less selfish. Having realized this, one trains in it, trying to control
25785 the bad side and develop the good. As time goes by, such practice can be
25786 effective. This is the only alternative.
25787 Without love, human society is in a very difficult state; without love,
25788 in the future we will face tremendous problems. Love is the center of human
25790 -- His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness, Clarity & Insight", published by
25791 Snow Lion Publications
25793 Love and Attachment
25795 People often wonder how to reconcile the Buddha's teachings on non-attachment
25796 with those on love. How can we love others without being attached to them?
25797 Non-attachment is a balanced state of mind in which we cease overestimating
25798 others' qualities. By having a more accurate view of others, our unrealistic
25799 expectations fall away, as does our clinging. This leaves us open to loving
25800 others for who they are, instead of for what they do for us. Our hearts can
25801 open to care for everyone impartially, wishing everyone to be happy simply
25802 because he or she is a living being. The feeling of warmth that was
25803 previously reserved for a select few can now be expanded to a great number
25805 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion
25808 According to some scientists, emotion is not necessarily negative. Emotion
25809 is a very strong feeling. While some emotions are destructive, others are
25810 constructive. In a meeting with scientists, we concluded that there are
25811 emotions even in the Buddha's mind. There is a strong sense of caring and
25812 compassion and also the realization of emptiness. In the beginning, there is
25813 just a vague feeling of emptiness. At that level, there is no emotion, but
25814 once you become more familiar with it, then that feeling increases. At a
25815 certain level, the realization of emptiness also becomes a kind of emotion.
25816 Therefore, in the practice of developing wisdom and loving-kindness
25817 / compassion, you strengthen these inner qualities and then reach a state
25818 where you have an upsurge of feeling called emotion. We can clearly see
25819 this link between intellect and emotions. Thus, the brain and heart can go
25820 side by side. I think this is the Buddhist approach.
25821 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Many Ways to Nirvana: Reflections and
25822 Advice on Right Living", edited by Renuka Singh
25824 Both mindfulness and discriminative alertness are needed in responding to
25825 sensory input of the three types--attractive, unattractive and neutral.
25826 Once again, in this tradition mindfulness does not mean simply to witness.
25827 It is a more discriminative kind of thing. You are asking yourself, "What
25828 is my response?" and then actively responding by applying the antidotes to
25829 attachment and hostility. The word mindfulness is a little bit different in
25830 different contexts. Here, Mindfulness refers to the mental faculty of being
25831 able to maintain continuity of awareness of an object. Vigilance is concerned
25832 with the quality of mind, watching to see, for example, if the mind is veering
25833 off to other objects.
25834 -- Gen Lamrimpa (Ven. Jampal Tenzin, "Calming the Mind: Tibetan Buddhist
25835 Teachings on Cultivating Meditative Quiescence", translated by B. Alan
25836 Wallace, edited by Hart Sprager, published by Snow Lion Publications
25838 When we say that the ignorant mind is perverse or wrong, we are talking
25839 about the way it misconceives reality. Now the pertinent questions are: What
25840 is reality? How is this mind mistaken about reality? And in what way does
25841 the mind wrongly apprehend reality? Reality or emptiness of true existence is
25842 something that can be established logically. There are sound, or perfect,
25843 reasons to prove the emptiness of inherent existence, and we can gain
25844 conviction in these reasons. On the other hand, there is no logical way to
25845 prove true existence. True existence is what appears to an ordinary,
25846 untrained consciousness. But when it comes under logical scrutiny, true
25847 existence cannot be found. Even in our everyday life we often find
25848 contradictions between the way certain things appear and their actual mode of
25849 existence; that is, the way things actually exist is different from the way
25850 they appear to exist.
25851 ...Our perception of impermanent things like mountain ranges and houses
25852 does not conform to their actual mode of existence. Some of these things have
25853 existed for many centuries, even thousands of years. And our minds perceive
25854 them in just that way--as lasting and permanent, impervious to momentary
25855 change. Yet when we examine these objects on an atomic level, they
25856 disintegrate every moment; they undergo momentary change. Science also
25857 describes a similar pattern of change. These objects appear solid, stable,
25858 and lasting, but in their true nature, they constantly change, not keeping
25859 still even for a moment.
25860 -- The Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", translated by Geshe Lobsang
25861 Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and Jeremy Russell, published by
25862 Snow Lion Publications
25864 If there is someone who always harms us, and we discover that this person
25865 lives in our own house, we think, "This is too much!" Once we figure out
25866 that he is causing all our hardships, we kick him out; we do not see it as a
25867 laughing matter at all. Here, it is worse: we have been wandering in the six
25868 realms of cyclic existence since beginningless time, undergoing great pain and
25869 confusion. What is the main cause of all this? Self-centeredness and its
25870 basis, self-grasping ignorance. These two are right inside us, in our own
25871 mindstream. How can we continue to tolerate that? It is just too much! We
25872 definitely must evict these sources of harm. When we know the antidotes to
25873 them, we will use them, just as we would go to any length to evict a
25874 troublemaker from our home. With strong determination, we will find out what
25875 harms self-centeredness and self-grasping and then go ahead and destroy them.
25876 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage: An
25877 Explanation of the Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", edited by
25878 Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
25880 No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of
25881 policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
25884 There are many types of meditative stabilisation, but let us explain calm
25885 abiding (samatha) here. The nature of calm abiding is the one-pointed abiding
25886 on any object without distraction of a mind conjoined with a bliss of physical
25887 and mental pliancy. If it is supplemented with taking refuge, it is a
25888 Buddhist practice; and if it is supplemented with an aspiration to highest
25889 enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, it is a Mahayana practice.
25890 Its merits are that, if one has achieved calm abiding, one's mind and body are
25891 pervaded by joy and bliss; one can--through the power of its mental and
25892 physical pliancy--set the mind on any virtuous object one chooses; and many
25893 special qualities such as clairvoyance and emanations are attained.
25894 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
25895 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
25898 Apart from the perfection of wisdom,
25899 All virtuous practices such as
25900 The perfection of giving are described
25901 As skillful means by the Victorious Ones.
25903 The first five perfections--giving, ethical discipline, patience, enthusiastic
25904 effort and concentration--as well as meditation on impermanence, on the
25905 connection between actions and their effects and the cultivation of
25906 compassion, love and the altruistic intention are all skillful means. In fact
25907 all positive practices which do not constitute the cultivation of wisdom fall
25908 into the category of skillful means.
25911 Whoever, under the influence of familiarity
25912 With skillful means, cultivates wisdom
25913 Will quickly attain enlightenment--
25914 Not just by meditating on selflessness.
25916 When stability in practices which develop skillful means has been gained, the
25917 Bodhisattva meditates on the selflessness of persons and other phenomena and
25918 thereby overcomes clinging to their true existence. This leads swiftly to
25919 enlightenment. If we confine our efforts only to understanding reality, our
25920 understanding lacks the power to destroy all the obstructions that prevent
25921 omniscience and we may remain locked in a state of solitary peace.
25922 Cultivation of skillful means prevents this and adds such power to our
25923 understanding of reality that, like a blazing fire, it consumes all
25926 -- "Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment", commentary by Geshe Sonam
25927 Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion
25930 As I grow to understand life less and less,
25931 I learn to love it more and more.
25934 The environment where you are doing the meditation should be properly cleaned.
25935 While cleaning, you should cultivate the motivation that since you are engaged
25936 in the task of accumulating great stores of merit by inviting the hosts of
25937 buddhas and bodhisattvas to this environment, it is important to have a clean
25938 place. You should see that all the external dirt and dust around you is
25939 basically a manifestation of the faults and stains within your own mind. You
25940 should see that the most important aim is to purge these stains and faults
25941 from within your mind. Therefore, as you cleanse the environment, think that
25942 you are also purifying your mind. Develop the very strong thought that by
25943 cleaning this place you are inviting the host of buddhas and bodhisattvas who
25944 are the most supreme merit field, and that you will subsequently engage in a
25945 path that will enable you to purge your mind of the stains of delusions.
25946 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, "Path to Bliss: A Practical Guide to
25947 Stages of Meditation", translated by Geshe Thubten Jinpa, edited by
25948 Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
25950 The entire environment we perceive around us arises, in part, in
25951 dependence upon our sense faculties. The environment we experience does not
25952 truly exist "out there." Sight is dependent upon visual faculties, hearing
25953 is dependent upon auditory faculties, and tactile sensations depend on nerve
25954 endings. Psychologically, all that we experience is dependent upon ourselves.
25955 We do not experience anything purely objectively. The arising and perceiving
25956 of experience is co-emergent between ourselves and the world around us. Yet,
25957 the deep belief persists that the world really exists "out there" now and eons
25958 before we were born.
25959 The Buddhist hypothesis extends beyond the psychological. The Buddhist
25960 hypothesis is this: that which is perceived arises in dependence upon the
25961 perception of it. Things are empty of independent, inherent existence. What
25962 appears to exist "out there" is empty of objective existence from its own
25963 side. This does not mean that nothing exists apart from our perceptions.
25964 Rather, it means that by probing the nature of existence of anything we
25965 experience perceptually or conceptually, we find that nothing exists by its
25966 own independent nature. Another way of phrasing this is that appearance
25967 extends all the way down to the root and there is nothing beyond the
25968 appearances. Appearances extend down to quarks; nothing is there purely
25969 objectively and nothing is there purely subjectively. This is the Buddhist
25971 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Seven-Point Mind-
25972 Training" , edited by Lynn Quirolo, published by Snow Lion Publications
25974 I consider it very important for religion to have an influence on
25975 politicians. Politicians need religion much more than pious people who have
25976 withdrawn from the world need it. There is a constant increase in the
25977 scandals in politics and business that can be traced back to the lack of self-
25978 discipline on the part of the responsible parties. In India, the minister-
25979 president of West Bengal once said to me with what he considered a humble
25980 attitude that he was a politician and not a religious person. I responded to
25981 him: politicians need religion more than anyone else.
25982 When hermits in solitude are bad persons, the result is that they harm
25983 themselves alone and no one else. But when such influential people as
25984 politicians are full of bad intentions, they can bring misfortune to many.
25985 This is why religion, as continuous work on our inner maturity, is important
25986 for political rulers.
25987 A politician must have moral principles. I am convinced of this. Seen in
25988 this light, politics and religion belong together. In the United States,
25989 church and state may be separate, but when the president takes office, he
25990 makes a vow in the name of God with his hand on the Bible. This means that
25991 God should be the witness that the president will conscientiously fulfill his
25993 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama with Felizitas Von Schonborn, "Path of Wisdom,
25994 Path of Peace: A Personal Conversation", Foreword by Wei Jingsheng
25996 ...many people, critical of Dzogchen, question why we need to practice at all
25997 if, as according to Dzogchen, the primordial state is already the enlightened
25998 state. If our true nature is already Buddhahood, what is the need to
25999 cultivate enlightenment? We cannot side-step these criticisms since,
26000 according to Dzogchen, Buddhahood is indeed our natural state; we do not
26001 create it, but simply discover it through our meditation. But if we simply
26002 agree with our critics, this would mean there is no need to practice. These
26003 are important things to think about. We must answer that although the natural
26004 state of the mind is primordially pure, there are two ways of being pure.
26005 Defilements, or obscurations, are not in the nature of the mind (sems nyid)
26006 but in the moving mind (sems), so they can be purified. It is as in the
26007 Tibetan story of the old beggar woman who slept on a pillow of gold every
26008 night: she was rich, but since she did not appreciate the value of gold, she
26009 thought she was poor. In the same way, the primordial purity of our mind is
26010 of no use to us if we are not aware of it and do not integrate it with our
26011 moving mind. If we realize our innate purity but only integrate with it from
26012 time to time, we are not totally realized. Being in total integration all the
26013 time is final realization. But many people prefer thinking and speaking about
26014 integration to actualizing it.
26015 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of
26016 Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet", Foreword by H.H. the
26017 Dalai Lama, edited by Andrew Lukianowicz, published by Snow Lion
26020 External disarmament is very, very important. Already, there is some
26021 movement. My dream is that one day the whole world will be demilitarized, but
26022 we cannot achieve this overnight. Also, we cannot achieve it without a
26023 proper, systematic plan; however, it is important to make the target clear.
26024 Even though it may take one hundred years, or fifty years, that doesn't
26025 matter. Establish a clear idea or clear target; then try to achieve it step
26026 by step. As a first step, we have already started with the elimination of
26027 antipersonnel mines and biological weapons. Also, we are already reducing
26028 nuclear weapons; eventually, there should be a total ban on nuclear weapons.
26029 This is now foreseeable; the idea of its possibility is approaching. These
26030 are great, hopeful signs.
26031 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates
26032 Discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation", edited by Jeffrey
26033 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
26035 Bare awareness is not easy to develop and maintain because of the mind's
26036 disposition to be constantly preoccupied by thoughts. We easily lose
26037 attention because our mind is so busy. When we do, our emotional life can
26038 creep up on us and take us over. Without mindfulness, the capacity to
26039 maintain attention, disidentification is very difficult, and bare awareness
26040 even more so. Through meditation it is possible to cultivate a quiet,
26041 unintrusive awareness that greatly strengthens our capacity to remain with our
26042 feelings. We simply allow their presence without judging them, or needing to
26043 make them different.
26044 The early stage of meditation focuses attention and cultivates
26045 mindfulness. Mindfulness is our capacity to watch and remain conscious as
26046 emotions, feelings, and thoughts arise. We may begin in meditation by
26047 observing the breath and gradually quietening the mind from the constant
26048 discursive chatter that interrupts our attention. In time a quality of bare
26049 awareness is established free from the conceptual confusion that discriminates
26050 and evaluates what arises and parcels it up in conceptual boxes of good or
26051 bad. Furthermore, this quiet awareness does not become pulled into the
26052 contents of mental activity and drown in their confusion.
26053 -- Rob Preece, "The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra", Foreword by Stephen
26054 Batchelor, published by Snow Lion Publications
26056 In the realm of matter, one and the same object can serve as a cause of
26057 happiness for some living beings, and a cause of suffering for others.
26058 Certain plants, for example, function as medicine for some creatures, but for
26059 other species they can be poisonous. From the point of view of the object
26060 itself there is no difference, but because of the physical constitution and
26061 the material state of the particular living being, that single self-same
26062 object can affect them in different ways. Then, in the sphere of our own
26063 experiences, the same holds true. A certain individual may appear to some as
26064 very friendly, kind and gentle, and so gives them feelings of happiness and
26065 pleasure. Yet to others that same person can appear harmful and wicked, and
26066 so cause them discomfort and unhappiness.
26067 What this kind of example points to is that, although external matter
26068 may act as a cause for our experience of pain and pleasure, the principal
26069 cause that determines whether we experience happiness or suffering lies
26070 within. This is the reason why, when Buddha identified the origin of
26071 suffering, he pointed within and not outside, because he knew that the
26072 principal causes of our suffering are our own negative emotions and the
26073 actions they drive us to do.
26074 -- H.H. The Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
26075 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron,
26076 Foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published
26077 by Snow Lion Publications
26079 When you have many excuses not to do your work, ask yourself what guarantee
26080 you have of another chance to do what needs to be done. Time lost is lost for
26081 good. No matter how much you promise to improve, no matter what good
26082 intentions you have for making it up, the time is gone for good. Feeling
26083 sorry about the situation will not bring it back. You can never buy back that
26084 precious piece of time. You may think, "Well, that piece of time has passed,
26085 but I still have a long stretch of time left." No, you do not! What guarantee
26086 is there that you will have another piece of time like this one? Wake up and
26087 stop the excuses; they never made sense before and do not make sense now.
26088 Laziness and procrastination have never worked in a sound and helpful way. It
26089 is only sound and helpful to get things moving.
26090 -- Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, "Dharma Paths", translated by Ngodup Burkhar
26091 and Chojor Radha, edited by Laura M. Roth, published by Snow Lion
26094 Any sense of conceit or self-importance gets in the way of cultivating the
26095 genuine altruistic intention, and the most effective remedy against this is
26096 the cultivation of humility.
26097 I can tell you a more recent story to illustrate this point. The great
26098 nineteenth-century Tibetan Dzokchen meditator Dza Patrul Rinpoche always
26099 maintained a demeanour of true humility. At one time, when he was giving a
26100 series of teachings to a large crowd of students, he experienced a forceful
26101 yearning for solitude. So one day he quietly left his residence and
26102 disappeared, dressed like an ordinary pilgrim and carrying a walking staff and
26103 very little else. When he reached a nomadic camp he sought shelter for a few
26104 days with one of the families. While he was staying with them, his hostess
26105 asked him to read some texts and, since he looked just like an ordinary
26106 pilgrim, in return for his food and lodging she asked him to help with the
26107 household chores, which included the disposal of the contents of her chamber
26109 One day, while he was away from the camp attending to this task, some of
26110 his well-dressed monk students came looking for him. When his hostess heard
26111 their description of him, she suddenly realised this was the same person she
26112 had asked to throw away the contents of her chamber pot. (It is said she was
26113 so embarrassed that she just ran away!) Such was the humility of this great
26114 teacher, who had many thousands of students.
26115 ...great practitioners of the altruistic intention also possess a
26116 tremendous courage grounded in real inner strength.... This combination of a
26117 total lack of conceit yet possessing great depth of courage is what is
26118 required in a true practitioner of bodhicitta, the altruistic mind of
26120 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
26121 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
26123 Rejoicing in the actions of others is the major antidote to jealousy. When
26124 we admire the virtuous deeds of ourselves and of others, a great increase of
26125 merit is created. Jealousy is very harmful, and must be destroyed by
26126 rejoicing. If we rejoice in the virtue of someone whose understanding is less
26127 than our own, we gain greater merit than that person. If we rejoice in the
26128 merit of someone with understanding equal to ours, we gain equal merit. If we
26129 rejoice in the realization or virtue of someone more highly realized than we
26130 are, we accumulate some fraction of the merit that they do. We must rejoice
26131 in virtue because we have taken bodhisattva vows. If other beings practice
26132 well it helps us; therefore we should rejoice in their positive actions. This
26133 is the easiest way to accumulate merit with little hardship. With consistent
26134 effort the practice of rejoicing becomes very powerful and is greatly praised
26136 -- Kyabje Zong Rinpoche, "Chod on the Ganden Tradition: the Oral
26137 Instructions of Kyabje Zong Rinpoche", edited by David Molk, published
26138 by Snow Lion Publications
26140 If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint,"
26141 then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
26142 -- Vincent Van Gogh
26144 ...there are various factors that contribute to attaining that level of
26145 joy and happiness which we conventionally also recognize as sources of
26146 happiness, such as good physical health, ...the wealth that we accumulate,
26147 ...and a circle of friends we trust and with whom we can relate emotionally.
26148 Now all of these are, in reality, sources of happiness, but in order for
26149 one to be able to fully utilize them with the goal of enjoying a happy and
26150 fulfilled life, one's state of mind is crucial. If one harbors hateful
26151 thoughts within, or strong or intense anger somewhere deep down, then it ruins
26152 one's health, so it destroys one of the factors. Even if one has wonderful
26153 possessions, when one is in an intense moment of anger or hatred, one feels
26154 like throwing them--breaking them or throwing them away. So there is no
26155 guarantee that wealth alone can give one the joy or fulfillment that one
26156 seeks. Similarly, when one is in an intense state of anger or hatred, even
26157 a very close friend appears somehow "frosty," cold and distant, or quite
26159 What this indicates is that our state of mind is crucial in determining
26160 whether or not we gain joy and happiness. So leaving aside the perspective of
26161 Dharma practice, even in worldly terms, in terms of our enjoying a happy day-
26162 to-day existence, the greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater
26163 our peace of mind, and the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful
26165 -- The Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist
26166 Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow
26169 Question: Is there a buildup of awareness that happens by the practice of
26170 recognizing or looking for your own basic nature so that, over time, it
26171 dispels the fear of these emotions?
26173 Rinpoche: Yes, awareness is developed through the discipline of meditation.
26174 Beginning with shamatha meditation, we develop lots of awareness and
26175 mindfulness on the path. Then, in Mahamudra and Dzogchen, we emphasize a
26176 different aspect of mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness and awareness
26177 come from the discipline of meditation, which continues in our everyday
26178 life. Therefore, formal sitting practice is very important for us. For
26179 that reason, many teachers tell us to sit at least 10-15 minutes every day.
26180 That helps us to generate this continuity of awareness in our everyday life.
26181 There is no easy solution for manifesting awareness or mindfulness in our
26182 everyday life without some discipline in practice. The only problem is
26183 that when a student hears a teacher say that they must sit every day,
26184 that's the time students usually begin to change their guru!
26186 -- Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of
26187 Samantabhadra", published by Snow Lion Publications
26189 We ordinary individuals share the characteristic of having our attempts to
26190 gain happiness thwarted by our own destructive self-centeredness. It is
26191 unsuitable to keep holding onto the self-centered attitude while ignoring
26192 others. If two friends find themselves floundering in a muddy swamp they
26193 should not ridicule each other, but combine their energies to get out. Both
26194 ourselves and others are in the same position of wanting happiness and not
26195 wanting suffering, but we are entangled in a web of ignorance that prevents us
26196 from achieving those goals. Far from regarding it as an "every man for
26197 himself" situation, we should meditate upon the equality of self and others
26198 and the need to be helpful to other beings.
26199 -- Ven. Lobsang Gyatso, "Bodhicitta: Cultivating the Compassionate Mind of
26200 Enlightenment", translated by Ven. Sherab Gyatso, published by Snow Lion
26203 Dalai Lama: "In the traditional [Tibetan] society, most people automatically
26204 did the types of work their families did--nomads, farmers, merchants, and so
26205 on. But some people still engaged in work that was not in keeping with the
26206 principle of nonharm, because there are butchers, metal smiths who make
26207 swords, and so on. But these kinds of work were also generally hereditary."
26209 Howard Cutler: "Speaking of work and the implementation of the concept of
26210 nonharm, ...you mentioned that there was a rule in Tibet that any new
26211 invention had to guarantee that it was beneficial or at least not harmful for
26212 at least seven generations."
26214 DL: "...there do seem to be certain practices and policies that successive
26215 Tibetan governments adopted in Tibet that reflect putting into practice
26216 certain Buddhist ideals, such as the Buddhist principle of respecting the
26217 natural world, particularly the animal world. For example, all the
26218 communities living near the Yamdrok Lake used to rely heavily on fishing in
26219 the past. Recently I heard about a policy that was adopted during the Fifth
26220 Dalai Lama's time where they were discouraged from fishing, and in order to
26221 compensate them, some other communities would band together and provide them
26222 an equivalent value in grain, so that they would be compensated against their
26223 loss. Similarly, in the area near Mount Kailash, around Lake Manasarovar
26224 during a particular season, a lot of waterfowl migrate there. They lay their
26225 eggs on the shores and apparently there was a government policy that during
26226 the egg-laying season, they would appoint people to watch over the eggs to
26227 make sure they were safe. Of course, there might be individuals who in
26228 addition to taking the salary probably ate some of the eggs as well. These
26229 things happen. But overall there is this kind of attitude of nonharm. "So,
26230 even though in Tibet, people didn't always follow the principle of nonharm in
26231 their work ...this principle was still deeply ingrained in the people. "In
26232 general, I think this could be applied in the West. Although not everybody
26233 has options about the work that they do, at least I think it is good to give
26234 serious thought to the kind of work one does, and the impact it has on others.
26235 I think it is best to choose work that does not cause harm to others, that
26236 does not exploit or deceive others, either directly or indirectly. I think
26237 that's the best way."
26238 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art
26239 of Happiness at Work"
26241 If we are feeling very nervous all the time, the first step toward doing
26242 something to remedy the situation is to take ourselves and the quality of our
26243 life seriously. Suppose we are walking down the street and we step on a bug
26244 and partially crush but have not actually killed it. If we continue walking
26245 and ignore the bug's experience of its leg being crushed or severed, we do so
26246 because we do not take the insect and its life seriously. We have no respect
26247 for it. If we treat ourselves no better than we do a bug and ignore our
26248 innermost pains and anguish, that is most unfortunate.
26249 Taking ourselves seriously means actually looking at how we are
26250 experiencing our life and, if there is something unsatisfactory about it,
26251 admitting it to ourselves. Our tension and stress do not go away by denying
26252 them or avoiding taking an honest look. And admitting that something is amiss
26253 is not the same as complaining about it and feeling sorry for ourselves. Nor
26254 does it imply that something is fundamentally wrong with us and we are guilty
26255 of being a bad person because we are nervous. Being objective, not
26256 melodramatic, and remaining non-judgmental are essential for any healing,
26258 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu
26259 Tradition of Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
26261 Wouldn't life be boring without attachment?
26263 No. In fact it's attachment that makes us restless and prevents us from
26264 enjoying things. For example, suppose we're attached to chocolate cake. Even
26265 while we're eating it, we're not tasting it and enjoying it completely. We're
26266 usually either criticizing ourselves for eating something fattening, comparing
26267 the taste of this chocolate cake to other cakes we've eaten in the past, or
26268 planning how to get another piece. In any case, we're not really experiencing
26269 the chocolate cake in the present.
26270 On the other hand, without attachment, we can think clearly about whether
26271 we want to eat the cake, and if we decide to, we can eat it peacefully,
26272 tasting and enjoying every bite without craving for more or being dissatisfied
26273 because it isn't as good as we expected. As we diminish our attachment, life
26274 becomes more interesting because we're able to open up to what's happening in
26276 -- Thubten Chodron, "Buddhism for Beginners", published by Snow Lion
26279 My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses.
26280 Drinks right out of the bottle.
26283 We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident,
26284 bits of a star gone wrong.
26285 -- Sir Arthur Eddington
26287 Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. -- Milton Friedman
26289 I have the worst memory ever so no matter who comes up to me--
26290 they're just, like, "I can't believe you don't remember me!"
26291 I'm like, "Oh Dad I'm sorry!"
26294 Question: When a practitioner of the Great Vehicle vows not to enter into
26295 nirvana until all beings are liberated, how is it possible to fulfill this
26298 Answer: Three modes of generating an altruistic intention to become
26299 enlightened are described--like a king, like a boatman, and like a shepherd.
26300 In the first, that like a king, one first seeks to attain a high state after
26301 which help can be given to others. In the second, like a boatman, one seeks
26302 to cross the river of suffering together with others. In the third, like a
26303 shepherd, one seeks to relieve the flock of suffering beings from pain first,
26304 oneself following afterward. These are indications of the style of the
26305 altruistic motivation for becoming enlightened; in actual fact, there is no
26306 way that a Bodhisattva either would want to or could delay achieving full
26307 enlightenment. As much as the motivation to help others increases, so much
26308 closer does one approach Buddhahood.
26309 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard",
26310 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion
26313 A bodhisattva is someone who says from the depth of his or her heart, "I
26314 want to be liberated and find ways to overcome all the problems of the world.
26315 I want to help all my fellow beings to do likewise. I long to attain the
26316 highest state of everlasting peace and happiness, in which all suffering has
26317 ceased, and I want to do so for myself and for all sentient beings."
26318 According to the Buddha's teaching, anyone who makes this firm and heartfelt
26319 commitment is a bodhisattva. We become bodhisattvas from the moment we have
26320 this vast and open heart, called bodhichitta, the mind bent on bringing
26321 lasting happiness to all sentient beings.
26322 Buddhist literature defines three types of bodhisattvas: the kinglike
26323 bodhisattva, the captainlike bodhisattva, and the shepherdlike bodhisattva. A
26324 kinglike bodhisattva is like a good king who first wants everything luxurious
26325 for himself, like a big palace, a large entourage, a beautiful queen, and so
26326 on. But once his happiness has been achieved, he also wants to help and
26327 support his subjects as much as possible. Accordingly, a kinglike bodhisattva
26328 has the motivation, "First, I want to free myself from samsara and attain
26329 perfect enlightenment. As soon as I have reached buddhahood, I will help all
26330 other sentient beings to become buddhas as well."
26331 A captainlike bodhisattva would say, "I would like to become a buddha, and
26332 I will take all other sentient beings along with me so that we reach
26333 enlightenment together." This is just as the captain of a ship crosses the
26334 sea, he takes his passengers with him, and they reach the far shore
26336 A shepherdlike bodhisattva is inspired by thinking, "I want to help all
26337 sentient beings to reach enlightenment and see the truth. Only when this is
26338 achieved and samsara is emptied will I become a buddha myself." In actual
26339 fact it may not happen this way, but anyone who has this motivation is called
26340 a "shepherdlike bodhisattva." In the old days, sheep were not kept in fenced
26341 pastures, and the shepherds had to bring them down from the mountains to
26342 protect them from wolves. They would follow behind the sheep, guiding them
26343 into their pen and lock them in. A shepherd would take care of his sheep
26344 first, and only then would he go home and eat.
26345 The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara developed this shepherdlike motivation and
26346 is therefore considered to be the most courageous and compassionate of beings.
26347 He vowed, "I will not attain complete enlightenment until I have led all
26348 sentient beings to liberation without leaving a single one behind."
26349 -- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, "Daring Steps Toward Fearlessness: The Three
26350 Vehicles of Buddhism", edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs,
26351 published by Snow Lion Publications
26353 The practice of compassion begins at home. We have our parents, our
26354 children, and our brothers and sisters, who perhaps irritate us the most, and
26355 we begin our practice of loving-kindness and compassion with them. Then
26356 gradually we extend our compassion out into our greater community, our
26357 country, neighbouring countries, the world, and finally to all sentient beings
26358 equally without exception.
26359 Extending compassion in this way makes it evident that it is not very easy
26360 to instantly have compassion for "all sentient beings." Theoretically it may
26361 be comfortable to have compassion for "all sentient beings," but through our
26362 practice we realize that "all sentient beings" is a collection of individuals.
26363 When we actually try to generate compassion for each and every individual, it
26364 becomes much more challenging. But if we cannot work with one individual,
26365 then how can we work with all sentient beings? Therefore it is important for
26366 us to reflect more practically, to work with compassion for individuals and
26367 then extend that compassion further.
26368 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Trainings in Compassion", translated by the
26369 Padmakara Translation Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
26371 It wouldn't be bad if you didn't have statues, but it has become indispensable
26372 to have Buddhist texts which deal with the structured path to train our mind.
26373 If you have Buddhist texts, read them for yourselves and to friends who visit.
26374 That way you can help others to understand Buddhist ideas. For instance, it
26375 is interesting to read Milarepa's life story and songs. We find in them many
26376 enlightening lessons. Buddha's image alone will not purify us of karmic
26377 obscuration.... It is very important to study the scriptures. They are not
26378 to be just stacked up on the altar. They must be cultivated in our mind.
26379 ...[we] take great interest in having the symbolic representations of Buddha's
26380 body, speech and mind. I feel it is more important to acquire and read
26381 scriptures, the symbolic representations of his speech. You can pay homage to
26382 them, you can make offerings to them; above all, you should study them.
26383 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries by H.H. the Dalai
26384 Lama XIV on the Jatakamala", translated by Tenzin Dorjee, edited by
26385 Dexter Roberts, Snow Lion Publications
26387 From the Buddhist point of view, being in a depressed state, in a state of
26388 discouragement, is seen as a kind of extreme that can clearly be an obstacle
26389 to taking the steps necessary to accomplish one's goals. A state of self-
26390 hatred is even far more extreme than simply being discouraged, and this can be
26391 very, very dangerous. For those engaged in Buddhist practice, the antidote to
26392 self-hatred would be to reflect upon the fact that all beings, including
26393 oneself, have Buddha Nature--the seed or potential for perfection, full
26394 Enlightenment--no matter how weak or poor or deprived one's present situation
26395 may be. So those people involved in Buddhist practice who suffer from self-
26396 hatred or self-loathing should avoid contemplating the suffering nature of
26397 existence or the underlying unsatisfactory nature of existence, and instead
26398 they should concentrate more on the positive aspects of one's existence, such
26399 as appreciating the tremendous potential that lies within oneself as a human
26400 being. And by reflecting upon these opportunities and potentials, they will
26401 be able to increase their sense of worth and confidence in themselves.
26402 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
26403 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
26405 An instruction that matches examples and their meanings to show how the
26406 absolute nature permeates everything. (*SG)
26408 These various examples give a general idea of the absolute nature. (*DK)
26410 ...there are four examples and their meanings. Take the example of a
26411 Sugata's body: whichever way one looks at it, it is beautiful. (*Z)
26413 Similarly, everything a realized being does, since it is permeated with the
26414 realization of the unborn nature, is bliss, for he does not have ordinary
26415 attachment and aversion. (*Z & SG)
26417 Whether one looks at a Sugata's face or any other part of his body, one never
26418 feels one has looked enough. It is an example of ultimate beauty. Similarly,
26419 those for whom everything is backed by the realization of the unborn nature no
26420 longer have ordinary attachment and aversion, and such persons can therefore
26421 act like enlightened beings: whatever they do is bliss. Since they have fully
26422 realized the absolute nature, there is no question of telling them, "This is
26423 the right thing to do; that is something you should not do." They have no
26424 concepts or limits, so they can act as they wish. Everything they do will be
26425 nothing but bliss. (DK)
26428 Z: Zurchungpa's root text
26429 DK: Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche's commentary
26430 SG: Shechen Gyaltsap's notes
26432 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Zurchungpa's Testament: A Commentary on
26433 Zurchung Sherab Trakpa's Eighty Chapters of Personal Advice", translated
26434 by the Padmakara Translation Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
26436 Unless someone like you cares a whole lot,
26437 nothing is going to get better. It's not.
26438 -- The Lorax, Doctor Seuss
26440 We do what we must, and call it by the best names. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
26442 These days an income is something you can't live without--or within.
26445 Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize
26446 until you have tried to make it precise.
26447 -- Bertrand Russell
26449 The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
26450 -- Flannery O'Connor
26452 The initial period of deity yoga is called prior approximation because one is
26453 accustoming to a deity through becoming closer and closer to its state,
26454 whereupon the deity grants the feat, either directly or in the sense of
26455 bestowing a capacity to the mind. Actually effecting the achievement of feats
26456 is done by way of carrying out prescribed burnt offerings or repetition of
26457 mantra, etc., after the approximation has been completed. These feats are
26458 then used for the welfare of others in the third stage, which involves
26459 activities of (1) pacification such as overcoming plague or relieving others
26460 of demons, (2) increase of lifespan, intelligence, wealth, and so forth, (3)
26461 control of resources, persons harmful to others' welfare, etc., and (4)
26462 ferocity, such as expelling or confusing harmful beings.
26463 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Deity Yoga
26464 in Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow Lion Publications
26466 The bodhisattva, as the personification of individuation, discovers a unique
26467 capacity to awaken his or her potential to work for the welfare of others in
26468 whichever way most suits his or her individual disposition. When I consider
26469 my own teachers, one thing I particularly value is their capacity to be
26470 authentically themselves. They each have their unique personality and quality
26471 that is a genuine expression of their individuality. There is no
26472 contradiction between our Western need to be individuals and the Buddhist
26473 path. Buddhism does not demand that we become clones of some ideal. Rather,
26474 it asks us to respond to who we are and awaken our full potential, expressing
26475 it within our particular individual capacity. My Tibetan teachers have
26476 supremely individualistic personalities, something I love and value deeply.
26477 They respond to me as an individual with my own personality, which they would
26478 never ask me to relinquish. The fact that they were each on their own unique
26479 journey within the Buddhist path was, for me, a sublime example of the
26480 bodhisattva as an individuated person who has truly responded to the inner
26482 -- Rob Preece, "The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of Individuation
26483 in Buddhist Life", published by Snow Lion Publications
26485 The view is to believe in and understand the buddha nature, the essence of all
26486 the buddhas. If one knows the buddha nature, then that is to know the
26487 unchanging essence which is free from any limitation, the original primordial
26488 nature of the mind as it is. This is not like a light bulb that suddenly
26489 comes on or something that is newly acquired. It is the nature as it has
26490 always been and always will be: primordially perfect. To recognize the buddha
26491 nature is the view. To fail to recognize the buddha nature is to deviate into
26492 confusion. If you recognize your buddha nature, this is the same as having an
26493 audience with all the buddhas. You will meet face to face with all your root
26495 -- Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche, "Meditation, Transformation, and Dream Yoga",
26496 translated by B. Alan Wallace and Sangye Khandro, published by Snow Lion
26499 ...when we ask, what is the substantial cause of the material universe way
26500 back in the early history of the universe, we trace it back to the space
26501 particles which transform into the elements of this manifest universe. And
26502 then we can ask whether those space particles have an ultimate beginning. The
26503 answer is no. They are beginningless. Where other philosophical systems
26504 maintain that the original cause was God, Buddha suggested the alternative
26505 that there aren't any ultimate causes. The world is beginningless. Then the
26506 question would be: Why is it beginningless? And the answer is, it is just
26507 nature. There is no reason. Matter is just matter.
26508 Now we have a problem: What accounts for the evolution of the universe as
26509 we know it? What accounts for the loose particles in space forming into the
26510 universe that is apparent to us? Why did it go through orderly processes of
26511 change? Buddhists would say there is a condition which makes it possible, and
26512 we speak of that condition as the awareness of sentient beings.
26513 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with
26514 the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara Houshmand,
26515 Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion
26518 Q: Certain associates can say things to me that spark an aggressive reaction.
26519 Why is it so easy to spark this feeling of negativity if there is not an
26520 accumulation of energy behind it?
26522 A: This is because of your pattern of clinging to the idea that you should
26523 have all the good things, and nothing that bothers you should ever happen, as
26524 I explained earlier. This is wishful thinking, because the nature of the
26525 world is not like that at all. The ego game you have planned is itself the
26526 explanation for how easily your anger is sparked. Because you have planned
26527 such a delicate, impossible game, and there are many things that can happen,
26528 anything that jeopardizes the plan of your ego upsets you. It is not an
26529 accumulation of energy but the pattern of clinging that is at fault.
26531 -- Venerable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, "Dharma Paths", translated by Ngodup
26532 Burkhar and Chojor Radha, edited by Laura M. Roth, published by Snow
26535 Suppose... you try to convert someone from another religion to the
26536 Buddhist religion, and you argue with them trying to convince them of the
26537 inferiority of their position. And suppose you do not succeed, suppose they
26538 do not become Buddhist. On the one hand, you have failed in your task, and on
26539 the other hand, you may have weakened the trust they have in their own
26540 religion, so that they may come to doubt their own faith. What have you
26541 accomplished by all this? It is of no use. When we come into contact with
26542 the followers of different religions, we should not argue. Instead, we should
26543 advise them to follow their own beliefs as sincerely and as truthfully as
26544 possible. For if they do so, they will no doubt reap certain benefits. Of
26545 this there is no doubt. Even in the immediate future, they will be able to
26546 achieve more happiness and more satisfaction.
26547 ...When I meet the followers of different religions, I always praise them,
26548 for it is enough, it is sufficient, that they are following the moral
26549 teachings that are emphasized in every religion. It is enough, as I mentioned
26550 earlier, that they are trying to become better human beings. This in itself
26551 is very good and worthy of praise.
26552 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
26553 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
26555 Only a Buddha has extinguished all faults and gained all attainments.
26556 Therefore, one should mentally go for refuge to a Buddha, praise him with
26557 speech, and respect him physically. One should enter the teaching of such a
26559 A Buddha's abandonment of defects is of three types: good, complete, and
26560 irreversible. Good abandonment involves overcoming obstructions through their
26561 antidotes, not just through withdrawing from those activities. Complete
26562 abandonment is not trifling, forsaking only some afflictions or just the
26563 manifest afflictions, but forsaking all obstructions. Irreversible
26564 abandonment overcomes the seeds of afflictions and other obstructions in such
26565 a way that defects will never arise again, even when conditions favourable to
26567 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
26568 published by Snow Lion Publications
26570 In commenting on the first instruction spoken by Manjushri, we considered the
26571 question of attachment to this lifetime and the faults that come from this
26572 attachment. However, the question of attachment goes deeper. It is not just
26573 a matter of giving up attachment to this life's rewards but of losing our
26574 taste and affinity for the whole of worldly existence. This is why it is
26575 necessary to contemplate and meditate upon the faults of conditioned
26576 existence. Otherwise, we may imagine that samsara possesses any manner of
26577 attractive qualities. Pondering the shortcomings of samsara should bring
26578 forth in us a tangible sense of disgust, as we are confronted with our own
26579 misguided pursuit of worldly ends.
26580 -- Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, "Parting from the Four Attachments: Jetsun
26581 Drakpa Gyaltsen's Song of Experience on Mind Training and the View",
26582 commentary translated by Thubten Choedak, Root Text and Lineage Prayer
26583 translated by H.H. Sakya Trizin and Jay Goldberg, compiled and edited
26584 by John Deweese, published by Snow Lion Publications
26586 Another problem we face today is the gap between rich and poor. In this
26587 great country of America, your forefathers established the concepts of
26588 democracy, freedom, liberty, equality, and equal opportunity for every
26589 citizen. These are provided for by your wonderful Constitution. However, the
26590 number of billionaires in this country is increasing while the poor remain
26591 poor, in some cases getting even poorer. This is very unfortunate. On the
26592 global level as well, we see rich nations and poor ones. This is also very
26593 unfortunate. It is not just morally wrong, but practically it is a source of
26594 unrest and trouble that will eventually find its way to our door.
26595 ...one of my elder brothers, who is no longer alive, would tell me of his
26596 experiences living in America. He lived a humble life and told me of the
26597 troubles, the fears, the killings, theft, and rape that people endured. These
26598 are, I think, the result of economic inequality in society. It is only
26599 natural that difficulties arise if we must fight day by day in order to
26600 survive while another human being, equal to us, is effortlessly living a
26601 luxurious life. This is an unhealthy situation; as a result, even the
26602 wealthy--the billionaires and millionaires--remain in constant anxiety. I
26603 therefore think that this huge gap between rich and poor is very unfortunate.
26604 ...So, for those of you who are poor, those who come from difficult
26605 situations, I strongly urge you to work hard, with self-confidence, to make
26606 use of your opportunities. The richer people should be more caring toward the
26607 poorer ones, and the poor should make every effort, with self-confidence.
26608 -- The Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life",
26609 edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Khyongla Rato and Richard Gere
26612 Tibetans say that once upon a time all the yaks that live in Tibet were
26613 living in India as water buffalo. It was very, very hot in India so some of
26614 them decided if they were to keep walking to the north they would get to a
26615 place that would be nice and cool. So they climbed up in the mountains, and
26616 as they were climbing their hair started to grow. Because of this the water
26617 buffalo in India often turn their head and look out expectantly and they are
26618 waiting for their brothers who have wandered off. In a similar way at one
26619 time all the buffalo of samsara and nirvana were living together and one day
26620 some of them wandered off and came into samsara. They keep looking around to
26621 see who else is there and where the other half is, because the basic quality
26622 of our ordinary sense of self is that it is very lonely. Something is missing
26623 in our lives and we don't quite know what it is, but we keep looking and
26624 looking to find this missing part. We can look for it in terms of
26625 possessions, we can look for it in terms of the form of our body, trying to
26626 change it through dieting or hair style or whatever. You can look in terms of
26627 friends. Anything. And this keeps us very, very busy. Sometimes the
26628 busyness can be very exhausting, but when we stop then we feel lonely. So we
26629 get busy again. Dharma is very helpful here if you want distraction because
26630 there are many kinds of ways to be busy in the dharma. You can focus on
26631 having lots of dharma possessions. You can focus on learning the text by
26632 heart, on the mantras and mudras, on serving the tsog, on doing meditations.
26633 There is always something to be busy with.
26634 In Tibet many, many people practiced dharma but not so many seem to get
26635 enlightened. There are many kinds of dharma and if we practice in a way that
26636 doesn't focus on the essential point but on secondary and tertiary levels it
26637 is easy to get lost. It is really important, given that we have limited time,
26638 to focus on what is essential. Many people when they get a plate of food will
26639 eat the things they don't like so much first and leave the special thing to
26640 the end. But when when we apply this to life we can make a big mistake. The
26641 time for deep practice is now. You can learn all about Padmasambhava and what
26642 his clothes mean and what his hair style means but if you don't know the
26643 nature of your own mind then knowledge about Padmasambhava is just some more
26645 -- "Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text of Nuden Dorje entitled
26646 'The Mirror of Clear Meaning' ", with commentary by James Low, published
26647 by Snow Lion Publications
26649 Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic
26650 realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers,
26651 philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists,
26652 along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.
26655 What is undistracted calm abiding? It is meditative absorption free of the
26656 six types of distraction. What are these six?
26658 (1) Inherent distraction refers to the eye consciousness and the other
26659 four collections of consciousness. Because they are naturally directed
26660 outward, they [cause one to] emerge from meditative absorption.
26661 (2) External distraction refers to a mental consciousness that reaches out
26662 towards or engages objects.
26663 (3) Internal distraction concerns dullness and agitation, as well as
26664 savoring one's meditative absorption.
26665 (4) The distraction of marks occurs when, trusting in meditative
26666 absorption, one apprehends marks of it and becomes attached.
26667 (5) Distraction brought about by negative tendencies is when directing the
26668 mind involves the apprehending of an ego. This is said to refer to the mental
26669 act of pridefully believing oneself to be superior to others, or [simply any
26670 mental act] that involves apprehending an "I".
26671 (6) The distraction of directing the mind occurs when one is caught up in
26672 the mindset of, and directs the mind in the style of, the Lesser Vehicle.
26674 The undistracted calm abiding that is determined by the elimination of
26675 those six is the unique calm abiding of the Great Vehicle. This is a state of
26676 one-pointed inner rest, a flawless calm abiding. In it, there is no
26677 apprehension of marks, as is the case when inner absorption alone is believed
26678 to bring liberation. Neither does it involve the ego apprehension that occurs
26679 in the concentrations of non-Buddhists. Further, one does not direct the mind
26680 as one would when cultivating the supports for the inferior paths [to
26681 liberation]. This is how the wise should understand the calm abiding of the
26683 -- "Middle Beyond Extremes: Maitreya's 'Madhyantavibhaga' with commentaries
26684 by Khenpo Shenga and Ju Mipham", translated by the Dharmachakra
26685 Translation Committee, published by Snow Lion Publications
26687 Calm abiding is predominantly stabilizing meditation, in which the mind is
26688 kept on a single object, rather than analytical meditation, in which a topic
26689 such as impermanence or emptiness is analyzed with reasoning. The purpose of
26690 developing calm abiding is that, since a mind that is scattered to external
26691 objects is relatively powerless, the mind needs to be concentrated in order to
26692 become powerful. If you do not have concentration in which the mind is
26693 unfluctuatingly stable and clear, the faculty of wisdom cannot know its
26694 object, just as it is, in all its subtleties. Therefore, it is necessary to
26695 have a highly focused mind.
26696 ...In order to set the mind steadily on an object of observation, it is
26697 necessary initially to use an object of observation suited to counteracting
26698 your own predominant afflictive emotion, since its force remains with your
26699 mind now and can easily interrupt any attempt to concentrate the mind.
26700 Therefore, Buddha described many types of objects for purifying behavior:
26701 + For someone whose predominant afflictive emotion is desire, ugliness is
26702 a helpful object of meditation. Here, "ugliness" does not necessarily refer
26703 to distorted forms; the very nature of our body--composed of blood, flesh,
26704 bone, and so forth--might seem superficially to be very beautiful with a good
26705 color, solid and yet soft to touch, but when it is investigated, you see that
26706 its essence is quite different--substances like bone, blood, urine, feces,
26708 + For someone who has predominantly engaged in hatred, the object of
26709 meditation is love.
26710 + For someone who was predominantly sunk in obscuration, the meditation is
26711 on the twelve links of the dependent-arising of cyclic existence because
26712 contemplating its complexity promotes intelligence.
26713 + For someone whose predominant afflictive emotion is pride, the
26714 meditation could be on the divisions of the constituents because, when
26715 meditating on the many divisions, you get to the point where you realize that
26716 there are many things you do not know, thereby lessening an inflated sense of
26718 + Those dominated by conceptuality can observe the exhalation and
26719 inhalation of the breath because, by tying the mind to the breath,
26720 discursiveness diminishes.
26721 A particularly helpful object for all personality types is a Buddha body,
26722 since concentration on a Buddha's body causes your mind to mix with virtuous
26723 qualities. No matter what the object is, this is not a case of meditating
26724 within, looking at an external object with your eyes, but of causing an image
26725 of it to appear to the mental consciousness.
26726 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
26727 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published
26728 by Snow Lion Publications
26730 ...an understanding of the doctrine of emptiness is fundamental to tantric
26731 practice. Every sadhana begins with, is structured around, and ends with
26732 meditation upon emptiness. To practice Vajrayana without the wisdom of
26733 emptiness can be very dangerous. For example, a main tantric technique is the
26734 cultivation of a subtle divine pride, a confidence that one is an enlightened
26735 tantric deity, the Lord of the Mandala. One's mind is the Wisdom Body of a
26736 Buddha, one's speech is the Beatific Body, one's form is the Perfect Emanation
26737 Body, and the world and its inhabitants are seen as a mandala inhabited by the
26738 various forms of tantric deities. Thus we have to utterly change our sense of
26739 "I." To do so involves the subject of emptiness. To practice the yoga of
26740 divine pride without an understanding of emptiness will not only be useless,
26741 but could lead to identity problems and other undesirable psychological
26742 effects. Therefore it is said that although the Vajrayana is a quick path
26743 when correctly practiced on the proper spiritual basis, it is dangerous for
26744 the spiritually immature. This type of danger area is one of the reasons why
26745 the Vajrayana must be practiced under the supervision of a qualified vajra
26747 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
26748 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
26750 Self-discipline brings us into relationship with one of the six
26751 perfections of the bodhisattva, that of enthusiastic perseverance, which
26752 implies the willingness to engage in a process with effort and enthusiasm over
26753 a prolonged period. No material or spiritual qualities are gained without
26754 some degree of effort. Perseverance enables the practitioner to carry on and
26755 trust in the process, even when it feels hopeless. It makes it possible to
26756 face difficulties and obstacles in the path with confidence and courage,
26757 rather than giving up because it feels too hard. Self-discipline helps us
26758 remain in the vessel and not run away.
26759 My Tibetan retreat guide described the maintenance of self-discipline over
26760 time like keeping a pot heating on a stove. If we continually remove it from
26761 the heat the pot never boils. Similarly he felt that when someone enters into
26762 the discipline of retreat, it should be maintained as rigorously as possible.
26763 In doing so the alchemical vessel will be maintained, and the "cooking" can
26764 take place. Transformation only occurs when the vessel is maintained in this
26766 -- Rob Preece, "The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra", foreword by Stephen
26767 Batchelor, published by Snow Lion Publications
26769 Installation programs are where programming
26770 and the IT department meet... and fight.
26773 Compassion without attachment is possible. Therefore, we need to clarify the
26774 distinctions between compassion and attachment. True compassion is not just
26775 an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Because of
26776 this firm foundation, a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not
26777 change even if they behave negatively. Genuine compassion is based not on our
26778 own projections and expectations, but rather on the needs of the other:
26779 irrespective of whether another person is a close friend or an enemy, as long
26780 as that person wishes for peace and happiness and wishes to overcome
26781 suffering, then on that basis we develop genuine concern for their problem.
26782 This is genuine compassion. For a Buddhist practitioner, the goal is to
26783 develop this genuine compassion, this genuine wish for the well-being of
26784 another, in fact for every living being throughout the universe.
26785 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "The Compassionate Life"
26787 Buddha traveled and taught widely for some forty-five years after his
26788 enlightenment, and his audiences were diverse. Even though India at the time
26789 was a highly literate society, nothing of what he said was written down during
26790 his lifetime. Instead, various individuals were entrusted with memorizing the
26791 gist of each discourse. The work of transcribing his words took place only
26792 with the passage of generations.
26793 Tibetans believe that this reluctance on the part of the Buddha and his
26794 immediate followers to commit the enlightenment teachings to paper, and
26795 instead to preserve them as oral traditions, was a purposeful strategy gauged
26796 to maintain the maximum fluidity and living power of the enlightenment
26797 experience. It only became necessary to write things down when the darkness
26798 of the changing times threatened the very survival of the legacy. An oral
26799 tradition becomes lost to history should its holders pass away without first
26800 passing on their lineages.
26801 This intended fluidity, and the according safeguard against the
26802 establishment of an "enlightenment dogma" is perhaps best demonstrated by a
26803 verse that the Buddha himself said shortly before his death:
26804 Do not accept any of my words on faith,
26805 Believing them just because I said them.
26806 Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns,
26807 And critically examines his product for authenticity.
26808 Only accept what passes the test
26809 By proving useful and beneficial in your life.
26810 This simple statement empowered future generations of Buddhist teachers to
26811 accept and reject at will anything said by Buddha himself as well by his early
26812 disciples. If something that was said by them did not pass the test of
26813 personal analysis, one could simply discard it as being limited in application
26814 to particular times, people, or situations, and therefore as only contextually
26816 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lamas on Tantra", translated, edited and
26817 introduced by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
26819 Many places have been totally changed through the use of police force and
26820 the power of guns--the Soviet Union, China, Burma, the Philippines, many
26821 communist countries, countries in Africa and South America. But eventually,
26822 you see, the power of guns and the power of the will of ordinary human beings
26823 will change places. I am always telling people that our century is very
26824 important historically for the planet. There is a big competition between
26825 world peace and world war, between the force of mind and the force of
26826 materialism, between democracy and totalitarianism. And now within this
26827 century, the force of peace is gaining the upper hand. Still, of course, the
26828 material force is very strong, but there is a kind of dissatisfaction about
26829 materialism and a realization or feeling that something is missing.
26830 ...entering the twenty-first century, I think the basic concerns are human
26831 values and the value of truth. These things have more value, more weight now.
26832 -- "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
26833 About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, Foreword by
26834 Sen. Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
26836 An inexpressible, self-arisen expanse
26837 Without the names "samsara" and "nirvana."
26839 Here, "self-arisen" means the primordial state. It is not something we
26840 can fully express with words or concepts. It's beyond words or concepts. The
26841 nature of all is not biased; it is not restricted to one or another. The
26842 nature of all exists in one identical state. That ground, that nature, does
26843 not have any name such as samsara or nirvana. That is the foundation, that is
26844 the ground. It is beyond samsara and nirvana. Not knowing the ground means
26845 wandering in samsara. If you recognize this ground, if you truly experience
26846 this ground, buddhahood is attained. That is the fruition. That is the
26847 result of our practice and our path.
26848 ...The ground, that fundamental state of simplicity, is the origin of all
26849 elaborations. This pure basic state is like a simple artist's canvas. We
26850 paint different images on this canvas. We can paint the image of a buddha,
26851 and it becomes very pure, beautiful, and inspiring to look at. We can also
26852 paint a devil on the same canvas, which can create our fundamental suffering,
26853 our basic pain. However, the basis of both is the same simple state of canvas
26854 that is completely pure and totally free from the images we project on it. It
26855 is totally free, whether that image is a buddha or a devil. That is the
26857 -- The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of
26858 Samantabhadra", published by Snow Lion Publications
26860 Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
26861 -- Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
26863 Setting a Specific Intention for Our Practice
26864 We should think about how we can make the best use of our practice so that
26865 we get the most out of it in the short time we have in this life. We do not
26866 have the leisure of wasting our time here by delaying the benefits of our
26867 practice. We have to use these situations as effectively as we can.
26868 Before you begin any practice, first think very carefully about your
26869 motivation. When we are engaged in the threefold process of study,
26870 contemplation and meditation, we should be very specific, very clear about why
26871 we are doing it. We should remind ourselves, "I am doing this to transcend my
26872 negative emotions and my ego-clinging." This is a general example of a
26873 specific intention. However, to be more precise, we need to consider the
26874 unique make-up of our own individual kleshas [intense states of suffering, and
26875 ignorance]. Once we have identified our strongest emotion, then we can focus
26876 on the practices that will alleviate it. We begin with whichever emotion is
26877 strongest for us and then we move on to the next strongest, followed by the
26879 It is important for us to prioritize our practice in this way. We have
26880 to keep our intention very clear in all three phases--in our study, in our
26881 contemplation and in our meditation. During shamatha or other practices, when
26882 thoughts come up, we recall that our purpose is to overcome our disturbing
26883 emotions and kleshas. We have to have a sense of willpower or determination
26884 in our minds. In order for the remedy to work, we must tell ourselves, "Yes,
26885 I am going to transcend this anger. I am going to work with it." Otherwise,
26886 if we do not have a clear idea, if we simply sit there with an indefinite or
26887 vague intention, then the effect also will be vague. We may have sat for one
26888 hour and although that time will not have been wasted, because it was not
26889 directed in an intentional way, the experience will not be so sharp, to the
26890 point or effective.
26891 -- Dzogchen Ponlop, "Mind Beyond Death", published by Snow Lion
26894 ...particularly in Buddhism while we practice we must use the brain as
26895 well as the heart. On the ethical side, we must practice the quality of a
26896 good and warm heart; also, since Buddhism is very much involved in reasoning
26897 and logic--the wisdom side--intelligence is important. Thus, a combination of
26898 mind and heart is needed. Without knowledge, without fully utilized
26899 intelligence, you cannot reach the depths of the Buddhist doctrine; it is
26900 difficult to achieve concrete or fully qualified wisdom. There may be
26901 exceptions, but this is the general rule.
26902 It is necessary to have a combination of hearing, thinking, and
26903 meditating. The Kadampa teacher Dromton ('brom ston pa, 1004-1064) said,
26904 "When I engage in hearing, I also make effort at thinking and meditating.
26905 When I engage in thinking, I also search out more hearing and engage in
26906 meditation. And when I meditate, I don't give up hearing and don't give up
26907 thinking." He said, "I am a balanced Kadampa," meaning that he maintained a
26908 balance of hearing, thinking, and meditating.
26909 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness, Clarity,
26910 and Insight", edited and translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by
26911 Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion Publications
26913 If through listening to this explanation of the Seven Point Mind Training we
26914 come to recognise how important Bodhichitta is, this will be an infallible
26915 cause of our enlightenment. Of all the eighty four thousand different
26916 sections of the doctrine, the precious Bodhichitta is the very essence. By
26917 hearing the words of such a teaching, it is impossible even for demons, whose
26918 nature it is to kill and to do harm, not to have positive thoughts! Kham, a
26919 region in East Tibet, was haunted in the past by many ghosts and evil spirits,
26920 and this was one of the reasons why Patrul Rinpoche used to explain the
26921 Bodhicharyavatara continually to his disciples. Before long, there were no
26922 more ghosts--or at least, no one came to any more harm. Such is the hidden
26923 power of Bodhichitta!
26924 --Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Enlightened Courage: An Explanation of the Seven
26925 Point Mind Training", translated by the Padmakara Translation Group,
26926 published by Snow Lion Publications
26928 Sometimes we face certain situations where, although we have done
26929 something good for others, we may not be able to reap the consequences within
26930 this lifetime. When we are talking about the law of causality, we are not
26931 limiting its operation to the confines of this life alone, but rather are
26932 taking into account both this lifetime and the future. Occasionally people
26933 who do not have a proper knowledge of karmic law say that such and such a
26934 person is very kind and religious and so forth, but he always has problems,
26935 whereas so and so is very deceptive and negative, frequently indulging in
26936 negative actions, but always seems very successful. Such people may think
26937 that there is no karmic law at all. There are others who go to the other
26938 extreme and become superstitious, thinking that when someone experiences
26939 illness, it is all due to harmful spirits.... It is also possible for very
26940 negative people to experience their positive karma ripening immaturely due to
26941 the very strong force of negative actions, and thus to exhaust the potentials
26942 of their virtuous actions. They experience a relative success in this life,
26943 while others who are very serious practitioners, as a result of the force of
26944 their practices, bring upon this lifetime the consequences of karmic actions
26945 which might have otherwise thrown them into rebirth in lower realms of
26946 existence in the future. As a result, they experience more problems and
26947 illnesses in this life.
26948 Just resolving not to indulge in a negative action is not enough. It
26949 should be accompanied by the understanding that it is for your own benefit and
26950 sake that you must live with awareness of the law of karma: if you have
26951 accumulated the causes, you will have to face the consequences; if you desire
26952 a particular effect, you can work to produce its causes; and if you do not
26953 desire a certain consequence, you can avoid engaging in actions that will
26954 bring it about. You should reflect upon the law of causality as follows: that
26955 there is a definite relation between causes and effects; that actions not
26956 committed will never produce an effect; and that once committed, actions will
26957 never lose their potentiality simply through the passage of time. So, if you
26958 wish to enjoy desirable fruits, you should work for the accumulation of the
26959 appropriate causes, and if you want to avoid undesirable consequences, you
26960 should not accumulate their causes.... [Karma] is a natural law like any
26962 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, "Path to Bliss: A Practical Guide to
26963 Stages of Meditation", translated by Geshe Thubten Jinpa, edited by
26964 Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
26966 Generally speaking, there are two forms of meditation on emptiness. One
26967 is the space-like meditation on emptiness, which is characterised by the total
26968 absence or negation of inherent existence. The other is called the illusion-
26969 like meditation on emptiness. The space-like meditation must come first,
26970 because without the realisation of the total absence of inherent existence,
26971 the illusion-like perception or understanding will not occur.
26972 For the illusion-like understanding of all phenomena to occur, there needs
26973 to be a composite of both the perception or appearance and the negation, so
26974 that when we perceive the world and engage with it we can view all things and
26975 events as resembling illusions. We will recognise that although things appear
26976 to us, they are devoid of objective, independent, intrinsic existence. This
26977 is how the illusion-like understanding arises. The author of the "Eight
26978 Verses for Training the Mind" indicates the experiential result when he
26979 writes: "May I, recognising all things as illusion, devoid of clinging, be
26980 released from bondage."
26981 When we speak of cultivating the illusion-like understanding of the nature
26982 of reality, we need to bear in mind the different interpretations of the term
26983 'illusion-like'.... For example, the Buddhist realist schools explain the
26984 nature of reality to be illusion-like in the sense that, although we tend to
26985 perceive things as having permanence, in reality they are changing moment by
26986 moment and it is this that gives them an illusion-like character.
26987 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
26988 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
26990 Actually, we are all part of the community of humanity. If humanity is
26991 happy, has a successful life, a happy future, automatically, I will benefit.
26992 If humanity suffers, I too will suffer. Humanity is like one body, and we are
26993 part of that body. Once you realize this, once you cultivate this kind of
26994 attitude, you can bring about a change in your way of thinking. A sense of
26995 caring, commitment, discipline, oneness with humanity--these are very relevant
26996 in today's world. I call this secular ethics, and this is the first level to
26997 counter negative emotions.
26998 The second level in this connection is taught by all major religious
26999 traditions, whether Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu. They all carry
27000 the message of love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment, and
27001 discipline. These are countermeasures for negative emotions. When anger is
27002 about to surface, when hatred is about to flare up, think of tolerance. It is
27003 important to stop any mental dissatisfaction when we feel it because it leads
27004 to anger and hatred.
27005 Patience is the countermeasure for mental dissatisfaction. Greed and its
27006 self-centeredness bring unhappiness, and also destruction of the environment,
27007 exploitation of others, and increases the gap between the rich and the poor.
27008 The countermeasure is contentment. So practicing contentment is useful in our
27010 ...All religious traditions talk about methods of compassion and
27011 forgiveness. If we accept religion, we should take the religious methods
27012 seriously and sincerely and use them in our daily lives. Then, a meaningful
27014 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Many Ways to Nirvana: Reflections and
27015 Advice on Right Living", edited by Renuka Singh
27017 Actually, if we look around, people whom we don't like and people who harm
27018 us are in the minority. Let's say we're at work, at a social gathering, or at
27019 a Dharma center with thirty people. How many of them do we really dislike?
27020 We may have problems with a few people here and there, but we manage to stay
27021 in a room together, don't we? It's not like we despise them and they hate us.
27022 The number of people we can't stand in this world is actually very small.
27023 These people are rare. To practice patience we need the people that we don't
27024 like. We can't practice patience with our friends or with people who are kind
27025 to us. Finding people that we don't like or who threaten us is not so easy.
27026 So, when we finally find them, they are a precious treasure! They are rare to
27027 find. When we meet them, we can think, "Fantastic, I get to practice patience
27029 They say that high-level bodhisattvas pray to meet disgusting,
27030 uncooperative people because they want to practice patience. Of course, when
27031 you really want to meet obnoxious people, they don't show up! Why don't they
27032 turn up for high-level bodhisattvas? Because high-level bodhisattvas don't
27033 have any anger. We could be sitting in a room with many people whom we
27034 consider unbearable, but high-level bodhisattvas don't see them that way at
27035 all. To them, these people appear lovable. Bodhisattvas have such a hard
27036 time finding detestable people, whereas we come across them so easily! So,
27037 when we find people whom we don't like, feel threatened by, or find
27038 despicable, we should recognize that there aren't so many of them around.
27039 Therefore, we should cherish them and take the opportunity to practice
27040 patience with them.
27041 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga
27042 Method of Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by
27043 Snow Lion Publications
27045 Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
27048 ...to have greater self-awareness or understanding means to have a better
27049 grasp of reality. Now, the opposite of reality is to project onto yourself
27050 qualities that are not there, ascribe to yourself characteristics in contrast
27051 to what is actually the case. For example, when you have a distorted view of
27052 yourself, such as through excessive pride or arrogance, because of these
27053 states of mind, you have an exaggerated sense of your qualities and personal
27054 abilities. Your view of your own abilities goes far beyond your actual
27055 abilities. On the other hand, when you have low self-esteem, then you
27056 underestimate your actual qualities and abilities. You belittle yourself, you
27057 put yourself down. This leads to a complete loss of faith in yourself. So
27058 excess--both in terms of exaggeration and devaluation--are equally
27059 destructive. lt is by addressing these obstacles and by constantly examining
27060 your personal character, qualities, and abilities, that you can learn to have
27061 greater self-understanding. This is the way to become more self-aware.
27062 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
27065 Phowa is a practice which should be done repeatedly, all through our lives so
27066 that we can do it naturally and purposefully at the time of death. I have
27067 heard a story about a Tibetan who was dying and his family called the lama to
27068 be with him. The lama sat beside him and told him to think only of his root
27069 guru and forget everything else. He said, "I can't recall my guru, I can only
27070 think of a sizzling sausage being warmed in the ashes of a fire." The lama was
27071 very skillful: "That is excellent!" he said. "Dewachen, the paradise of the
27072 Amitaba Buddha, is full of sausages; they grow on every tree. You only have
27073 to open your mouth and you will have all the sausages you want. The color of
27074 Amitaba is like the embers of a fire, so think of him and you will go to his
27075 realm." It is said that the man went straight to the pure land of Dewachen.
27076 -- Ringu Tulku, "Mind Training", edited by B.M. Shaughnessy, published
27077 by Snow Lion Publications
27079 "Yogis should at all times avoid fish, meat, and so forth,
27080 should eat with moderation, and avoid foods that are not
27081 conducive to health." --Kamalashila
27083 Meditators need to be physically healthy. Therefore, proper diet is
27084 essential. On the other hand, their minds should be clear and strong and this
27085 will also contribute to physical health. For these reasons, it is recommended
27086 that they give up eating fish, meat, garlic, onions, etc. Appropriate food
27087 should be eaten in moderation, for indigestion can cause havoc with
27088 meditation. What's more, those who overeat can hardly stay awake.
27089 ...If a vegetarian diet does not result in protein deficiency, it is a
27090 wholesome way of living. Even if you cannot be a strict vegetarian, at least
27091 moderating the amount of meat you eat is beneficial. Within the southern
27092 schools of Buddhism eating meat is not strictly prohibited, but the meat of
27093 certain animals, such as those that are not cloven-hoofed or those that have
27094 been slaughtered specifically for your consumption, is forbidden. This means
27095 that meat bought casually in the market is acceptable.... However, certain
27096 scriptures... strictly prohibit eating meat at all times, whereas other
27097 scriptures... seem to permit it.
27098 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", root text by Kamalashila,
27099 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
27100 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
27102 It would be wrong to say, as some do, that if we don't recite prayers while
27103 being aware of their meaning and merely repeat the words mindlessly, it has no
27104 benefit whatsoever--like prayer flags flapping in the wind. However, there
27105 are indeed differences in the level of benefits and blessings derived from
27106 prayers according to the way we recite them. Therefore, keeping this in mind,
27107 at the beginning of the practice, generate bodhicitta. During the main
27108 practice, some will use an object of concentration and some will practice
27109 without an object of concentration; each person should do what is best
27110 according to their level. At the end, one should dedicate the merit in a way
27111 that is pure from the three conceptual spheres to the best of one's ability.
27112 The most important and essential thing in making [prayer] meaningful is to
27113 depend on those three stages of practice--generation of bodhicitta, the main
27114 practice and dedication of merit. All must do the complete three stages of
27116 -- Chatral Rinpoche, "Compassionate Action", edited, introduced, and
27117 annotated by Zach Larson, published by Snow Lion Publications
27119 "When the thought of the internal
27120 And the external as 'I' and 'mine'
27121 Has perished, grasping ceases
27122 And through that cessation birth ceases.
27124 When actions and afflictions cease, there is liberation;
27125 They arise from false conceptions, these arise
27126 From the elaborations [of false views on inherent
27127 Existence]; elaborations cease in emptiness."
27130 Inherent existence has never been validly known to exist; therefore, it is
27131 impossible for there to be any phenomenon that exists through its own power.
27132 Since it is experienced that mere dependent-arisings, which are in fact empty
27133 of inherent existence, do cause all forms of help and harm, these are
27134 established as existent. Thus, mere dependent-arisings do exist. Therefore,
27135 all phenomena exist in the manner of appearing as varieties of dependent-
27136 arisings. They appear this way without passing beyond the sphere or condition
27137 of having just this nature of being utterly non-inherently existent.
27138 Therefore, all phenomena have two entities: one entity that is its superficial
27139 mode of appearance and one entity that is its deep mode of being. These two
27140 are called respectively conventional truths and ultimate truths.
27141 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
27142 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
27144 The cloistered environment stands in stark contrast to the uncontrolled
27145 environment of everyday active life in the modern world. When I was a
27146 graduate student living in a family housing unit at Stanford University, I
27147 meditated early in the morning. At about 7:00 outside our window, a group of
27148 little girls would begin shrieking and driving their plastic tractors and
27149 tricycles across the bricks. I was meditating and these girls were disturbing
27150 my peace. I got to feeling pretty sorry for myself so I phoned my lama,
27151 Gyatrul Rinpoche, and asked for advice. He gave me a one-liner, "Just view
27152 it." This was not just Rinpoche's way of telling me to quit whining, but a
27153 reminder of the more encompassing teaching to embrace obstacles in practice.
27154 And carry on. We can't always control our environment, but we can embrace it,
27155 the good, the bad, and the loud, and integrate it into Dharma practice.
27156 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point
27157 Mind-Training", edited by Lynn Quirolo, published by Snow Lion Pub.
27159 He who throws mud only loses ground. -- Fat Albert (Bill Cosby)
27161 Grow old along with me!
27162 The best is yet to be.
27165 It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out;
27166 it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
27169 If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic,
27170 we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One
27171 might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the
27172 mathematics of probability.
27175 I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died. --Richard Diran
27177 Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history
27178 that man can never learn anything from history.
27179 -- George Bernard Shaw
27181 America believes in education: the average professor earns more
27182 money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
27185 We are more ready to try the untried
27186 when what we do is inconsequential.
27187 Hence the fact that many inventions
27188 had their birth as toys.
27191 Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion,
27192 for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
27193 -- Bertrand Russell
27195 Man is most nearly himself when he achieves
27196 the seriousness of a child at play.
27199 If we have been reborn time after time, it is evident that we have needed
27200 many mothers to give birth to us.... the first cause bringing about
27201 bodhicitta is the recognition that all beings have been our mother.
27202 The love and kindness shown us by our mother in this life would be
27203 difficult to repay. She endured many sleepless nights to care for us when we
27204 were helpless infants. She fed us and would have willingly sacrificed
27205 everything, including her own life, to spare ours. As we contemplate her
27206 example of devoted love, we should consider that each and every being
27207 throughout existence has treated us this way. Each dog, cat, fish, fly, and
27208 human being has at some point in the beginningless past been our mother and
27209 shown us overwhelming love and kindness. Such a thought should bring about
27211 ...if all other sentient beings who have been kind to us since
27212 beginningless time are suffering, how can we devote ourselves to pursuing
27213 merely our own happiness? To seek our own happiness in spite of the suffering
27214 others are experiencing is tragically unfortunate. Therefore, it is clear
27215 that we must try to free all sentient beings from suffering.
27216 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday
27217 Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Khyongla Rato and
27220 3.2.4 The way in which experiences dawn through practicing [Mahamudra]
27222 In beginners, this is similar to water [gushing down] a gorge.
27223 In between, it is the gentle flow of the river Ganga.
27224 Finally, all waters meet like a mother and her child. -- Tilopa
27226 The meditative equipoise of beginners entails intense movement of
27227 thoughts, similar to water gushing down a narrow gorge. The reason for this
27228 is as follows. Though there is some slight resting in equipoise, thoughts
27229 proliferate. Right at that point, through the remedy of alertness and by
27230 considering that you like resting in meditative concentration and dislike not
27231 resting in it, you rest in meditative equipoise again. Through such an
27232 approach, your mind becomes somewhat uplifted.
27233 The meditative equipoise of those who have attained a little bit more
27234 stability than that and are of middling faculties is similar to the gentle
27235 flow of the river Ganga. The reason is as follows. Even if some thoughts
27236 come up, a little here and there, their own face is immediately recognized, so
27237 that the movement of thoughts does not run wild. Without various notions that
27238 chase after these [subtle thoughts] or any physical and mental effort, all
27239 thoughts that come up will dawn slowly. There is also no need to make great
27240 effort in [applying] their remedies. Rather, these happen naturally or of
27242 Finally, in the meditative equipoise of those with highest faculties,
27243 neither thoughts to be relinquished arise nor is there any need to newly
27244 create some remedial wisdom, because there is nothing to be relinquished.
27245 Since existence and peace have become one taste, mother and child luminosity
27246 blend, or, expanse and wisdom have become indifferentiable. Once the
27247 tributary waters and the ocean have become one taste, like a mother and her
27248 child meeting, they cannot be disturbed.
27249 -- The Fifth Shamarpa Goncho Yenla, "Straight from the Heart: Buddhist Pith
27250 Instructions", translated and introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, published
27251 by Snow Lion Publications
27253 The theory of interdependence allows us to develop a wider perspective.
27254 With wider mind, there is less attachment to destructive emotions like anger,
27255 therefore more forgiveness. In today's world, every nation is heavily
27256 interdependent, interconnected. Under these circumstances, destroying your
27257 enemy--your neighbor--means destroying yourself in the long run. You need
27258 your neighbor. More prosperity in your neighbor, you'll get the benefit.
27259 Now, we're not talking about the complete removal of feelings like anger,
27260 attachment, or pride. Just reduction. Interdependence is important because
27261 it is not a mere concept; it can actually help reduce the suffering caused by
27262 these destructive emotions.
27263 We can say the theory of interdependence is an understanding of reality.
27264 We understand that our future depends on global well-being. Having this
27265 viewpoint reduces narrow-mindedness. With narrow mind, one is more likely to
27266 develop attachment, hatred. I think this is the best thing about the theory
27267 of interdependence--it is an explanation of the law of nature. It affects
27268 profoundly, for example, the environment.
27269 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan, "The Wisdom of Forgiveness:
27270 Intimate Conversations and Journeys"
27272 The Suffering of Change
27273 Feelings of suffering change into those of happiness. Feelings of
27274 happiness change into suffering. Both arise in dependence upon internal and
27275 external causes which change. For example, we see food as pleasurable, but if
27276 we eat too much, then it causes suffering. When we are young, we see our
27277 bodies as a source of pleasure. As we become older, the same body becomes a
27278 source of suffering.
27279 Just as a wave is always changing, so the nature of suffering is always to
27280 change. It may be experienced as pleasure or as suffering, but it arises from
27281 the same source. Pleasure arises from suffering. Seeing pleasure as
27282 happiness constitutes suffering.
27283 ...Pain and pleasure are of the same nature. Although they look different
27284 at different times, they both arise from the same sea of delusion and karmic
27285 action. Pleasure or pain, one or the other, arises and then falls back into
27286 the ocean. Thus we can conclude that pleasure and pain within the ocean of
27287 samsara are basically suffering, and dissolve into suffering.
27288 This becomes evident in the wide variety of sudden changes of experience
27289 depicted in films. Love and hatred, happiness and family strife, peace and
27290 war, follow each other in rapid succession. The continuous change, although
27291 exaggerated in films, is characteristic of life in general.
27292 -- Ven. Gen Lobsang Gyatso, "The Four Noble Truths", translated by Ven.
27293 Sherab Gyatso, published by Snow Lion Publications
27295 We feel money and power can bring happiness and solve problems, but they
27296 are not definite causes of those desired states. If that were so, it would
27297 follow that those who have wealth would necessarily have happiness, and those
27298 who do not have wealth would always experience suffering. Money and power
27299 facilitate, but it is clear that they are not the primary causes of, happiness
27300 and solving our problems. It is justified for us to make material and
27301 financial development for building our nation and providing shelter, etc. for
27302 ourselves; we need to do that. But we also need to seek inner development.
27303 As we can see, there are many people who have wealth and power who remain
27304 unhappy, due to which their health declines, and they are always taking
27305 medicines. On the other hand, we find people who live like beggars but who
27306 always remain peaceful and happy.
27307 Therefore, in our daily life a certain way of thinking makes us happy, and
27308 a certain way of thinking makes us unhappy. In other words, there are certain
27309 states of mind which bring us problems, and they can be removed; we need to
27310 make an effort in that direction. Likewise, there are certain states of mind
27311 that bring us peace and happiness, and we need to cultivate and enhance them.
27312 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama XIV, "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries", the
27313 Jatakamala translated by Tenzin Dorjee edited by Dexter Roberts
27315 Focusing the Mind on the Deity
27317 Those with superior mental capacity should refine their ability by
27318 practicing the development stage without any sense of clinging or fixation.
27319 In this approach, the appearance of the deity and its ornaments are visualized
27320 in such a way that they are totally complete, vivid, and distinct from the
27321 very beginning. This is the form of great wisdom, the union of development
27322 and completion. Beyond being an identifiable entity with a precise nature, it
27323 appears clearly yet is devoid of any essence. In other words, clarity and
27324 emptiness are indivisible. Like the reflection of the moon in a lake, its
27325 very nature is to appear in a distinct manner, down to the pupils of the eyes,
27326 while in reality it is empty.
27327 Those with moderate mental capacity should begin their meditation with a
27328 sudden recollection of the deity's complete appearance. The next step is to
27329 meditate on the clear appearance of the head, and, once this is stable, to
27330 then meditate progressively on the right arm, left arm, torso, right and left
27331 legs, and finally on the complete form of the deity and its seat. Training in
27332 the development stage of illusory clear appearance keeps one from straying
27333 into the view of nihilism. When one grows weary of this, the practitioner
27334 should recollect purity and refine his or her ability in the essence of this
27335 process, the vajra-like absorption. This key point keeps one from straying
27336 into the belief in permanence.
27337 For beginners with less mental capacity, it may be difficult to visualize
27338 in either of these ways. When not yet familiar with this process, one's
27339 ability should be refined using a permanent form. Take a consecrated and
27340 well-formed representation of the yidam deity, such as a painting or clay
27341 statue made by a skilled artisan, and place it before you. Without
27342 intentionally meditating, look directly at it from top to bottom without
27343 blinking. This is referred to as the auxiliary practice of setting
27344 mindfulness into motion. At first, the agitated movement of conditioned
27345 thought patterns will be experienced. This is the experience of movement,
27346 which is said to be "like water cascading off a cliff."
27347 -- Jigme Lingpa, Patrul Rinpoche, and Getse Mahapandita, "Deity, Mantra,
27348 and Wisdom: Development Stage Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra",
27349 translated by the Dharmachakra Translation Committee, fore. by Trulshik
27350 Rinpoche, fore. by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion
27353 The reason why we find so much discussion of epistemology, or how to
27354 define something as a valid cognition, in Buddhist writings is because all our
27355 problems, suffering and confusion derive from a misconceived way of perceiving
27356 things. This explains why it is so important for a practitioner to determine
27357 whether a cognitive event is a misconception or true knowledge. For it is
27358 only by generating insight which sees through delusion that we can become
27360 Even in our own experience we can see how our state of mind passes through
27361 different stages, eventually leading to a state of true knowledge. For
27362 instance, our initial attitude or standpoint on any given topic might be a
27363 very hardened misconception, thinking and grasping at a totally mistaken
27364 notion. But when that strong grasping at the wrong notion is countered with
27365 reasoning, it can then turn into a kind of lingering doubt, an uncertainty
27366 where we wonder: "Maybe it is the case, but then again maybe it is not". That
27367 would represent a second stage. When further exposed to reason or evidence,
27368 this doubt of ours can turn into an assumption, tending towards the right
27369 decision. However, it is still just a presumption, just a belief. When that
27370 belief is yet further exposed to reason and reflection, eventually we could
27371 arrive at what is called 'inference generated through a reasoning process'.
27372 Yet that inference remains conceptual, and it is not a direct knowledge of the
27373 object. Finally, when we have developed this inference and constantly
27374 familiarized ourselves with it, it could turn into an intuitive and direct
27375 realization--a direct experience of the event. So we can see through our own
27376 experience how our mind, as a result of being exposed to reason and
27377 reflection, goes through different stages, eventually leading to a direct
27378 experience of a phenomenon or event.
27379 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
27380 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, foreword by
27381 Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion
27384 Not recognizing their own face, but letting them run wild, one thought leads
27385 to many kinds of [other] thoughts. If you fall into letting this continue,
27386 you wander around in confusion. Through directly looking at the face of
27387 whatever thought that comes up at the very start [of a potential train of
27388 thought], without being able to stand its own ground, just like a rainbow
27389 fading away in space, this thought vanishes into emptiness. Since you arrive
27390 at such within the previous experience of stillness, if you become familiar
27391 with it, the stream of confusion is severed through thoughts coming to rest on
27392 their own and vanishing on their own. Hence, if you know how to sustain this,
27393 even if you regard movement as a flaw and [try to] stop it, you need neither
27394 stop it nor [apply] any other remedy for the movement of thoughts. Rather, by
27395 sustaining the state of realizing their own essence, you realize the essential
27396 point that all the various appearances of happiness and suffering emerge from
27397 the mind and dissolve back into the mind. Through this, you realize the
27398 essential point that all of cyclic existence and nirvana is produced by the
27399 mind, the mind resting naturally settled without being affected by thoughts
27400 about the three times.
27401 -- "Straight From the Heart: Buddhist Pith Instructions", translated and
27402 introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, published by Snow Lion Publications
27404 It's a dangerous business going out your front door. -- JRR Tolkien
27406 The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them. -- Kin Hubbard
27408 Never face facts; if you do,
27409 you'll never get up in the morning.
27413 I hate it as much as I hate peanuts.
27414 But I can't stop eating peanuts.
27417 One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a human. -- Goethe
27419 The opposite of talking isn't listening.
27420 The opposite of talking is waiting.
27423 Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal
27424 with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
27425 you are the one who gets burned.
27426 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
27428 Question: Western religions use the term "God", and Buddhism does not. Could
27429 emptiness or nirvana be considered God? If the afflictive obstruction that is
27430 the conception of inherent existence is eliminated, does one realize that
27433 Dalai Lama: If God is interpreted as an ultimate reality or truth, then
27434 selflessness may be considered as God and even as a creator in the sense that
27435 within the nature of emptiness things appear and disappear. In this sense,
27436 emptiness is the basis of everything; because of emptiness, things can change,
27437 and things can appear and disappear. Thus, voidness--emptiness,
27438 selflessness--is this kind of basis.
27440 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
27441 Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
27442 published by Snow Lion Publications
27446 Because such love and compassion have not arisen in their mindstreams,
27447 people don't understand that all sentient beings are their kind mothers. They
27448 hold on to them as friends or foes, and the power of bad karmic action causes
27449 them to experience the immeasurable suffering of cyclic existence. "Wouldn't
27450 it be a joy if I could carry the suffering of those mothers, and if all beings
27451 could have all of my happiness and virtue? In order to establish these
27452 mothers in happiness, what a joy it would be if, until cyclic existence is
27453 empty, their suffering and the cause and effect of suffering, their sins and
27454 the cause and effect of sins, would all ripen in me and these mothers would
27455 become abundantly happy. I give my body, enjoyments, power, prestige, and
27456 roots of virtue in all times for the sake of these mothers. I won't pursue my
27457 own peace and happiness for even a moment. I will work for the welfare of
27458 beings without regard for life or limb. These mothers must have the entire
27459 range of happiness and the causes of happiness." With that thought, meditate
27461 "Furthermore, I will not shrink away from the specific harm done to
27462 sentient beings, or any kind of sickness, suffering, misfortune, enemies, and
27463 obstructions that happen to me for their sakes. What a joy if all the
27464 suffering of beings ripened in me, so that I would have that kind of
27465 suffering. And even a greater joy when those suffering beings are free of
27466 suffering and dwell in exceptional happiness."
27467 Generate an extraordinary attitude with that thinking. It is important
27468 that such joy does not stray into any kind of bias. And if you know it all to
27469 be like a dream or an illusion, free of fixation to true existence, it is
27470 called immeasurable joy.
27471 -- "Machik's Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chod (Dharma)",
27472 translated and edited by Sarah Harding, a Tsadra Foundation Series
27473 book published by Snow Lion Publications
27475 Curiosity is the very basis of education
27476 and if you tell me curiosity killed the cat
27477 I say only that the cat died nobly.
27478 -- Arnold Edinborough
27480 Knowledge will forever govern ignorance
27481 and a people who mean to be their own governors
27482 must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives...
27485 Question: What should you say to a loved one who is talking about a third
27486 person with hatred or anger? On the one hand, you want to show compassion for
27487 the feelings being experienced by the loved one. On the other hand, you don't
27488 want to reinforce or lend approval to that hatred. What might one say?
27490 Dalai Lama: Here I would like to tell a story. Once there was a Kadampa
27491 master called Gampowa who had many responsibilities. One day he complained to
27492 the Kadampa master Dromtonpa that he had hardly any time for his meditation or
27493 for his Dharma practice. So Dromtonpa responded by agreeing with him, "Yes,
27494 that's right. I don't have any time either." Then once an immediate affinity
27495 was established, Dromtonpa skillfully said, "But, you know what I am doing is
27496 for the service of the Dharma. Therefore, I feel satisfied." Similarly, if
27497 you find one of your beloved ones speaking against someone out of anger or
27498 hatred, maybe your initial reaction should be one of agreement and sympathy.
27499 Then once you have gained the person's confidence, you can say, "But...."
27500 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
27501 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published
27502 by Snow Lion Publications
27504 ...if you have not purified ordinary appearances into emptiness, how could
27505 you possibly meditate on the mandala circle? The fact that all phenomena are
27506 emptiness, that samsara and nirvana are inseparable, is the very reason we are
27507 able to actualize this by meditating on the mandala circle. In other words,
27508 emptiness is the basis for the development stage. As it is said, "For the one
27509 to whom emptiness is possible, anything is possible." If all phenomena were
27510 not empty and ordinary appearances were truly present, development stage
27511 meditation would be impossible, as the following quotation points out: "Even
27512 though one might empower wheat to be rice, rice won't actually appear."
27513 However, even if all phenomena are realized to be empty in this way, without
27514 the momentum of great compassion you will not be able to manifest the
27515 rupakayas to benefit others. This is similar to the listeners and solitary
27516 buddhas, who enter into a state of cessation and do not benefit others with
27517 rupakaya emanations.
27518 Once one understands this point, it will be like the following saying:
27519 "All these phenomena are like an illusion and birth is like taking a stroll
27520 in a park...." Said differently, one will no longer dwell in existence, while
27521 through compassion, one will not get caught up in a state of peace either.
27522 This is the great, universal path of the offspring of the victorious ones.
27523 For all these reasons, making sure the three absorptions are not isolated from
27524 one another is a vitally important point.
27525 -- Jigme Lingpa, Patrul Rinpoche, and Getse Mahapandita, "Deity, Mantra,
27526 and Wisdom: Development Stage Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra",
27527 translated by the Dharmachakra Translation Committee, fore. by Trulshik
27528 Rinpoche, fore. by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Pub.
27530 We can experience things without confusion and without being tense. Even
27531 the most disturbed, nervous person has moments of clarity and calmness--even
27532 if only when he or she is peacefully asleep and dreaming pleasant or innocuous
27533 dreams. This demonstrates that confusion and tension are not integral parts
27534 of the nature of mind. Thus confusion can be removed. Not only can it be
27535 removed, but since confusion cannot be validated and can be totally replaced
27536 by understanding, which can be verified, confusion can be eliminated forever.
27537 Thus it is possible for a total absence of confusion to exist. Furthermore,
27538 since confusion limits mind from using its full potentials, once confusion is
27539 gone, a utilization of all potentials can also exist. Therefore, since we all
27540 have a mind, and all minds have the same nature of being able to experience
27541 whatever exists, we can all realize and experience the definitive Three
27543 Thus, if we aim to remove our confusion and realize our potentials as
27544 indicated by the Buddhas, their achievement, their teachings, what they have
27545 built up along the path and those who are progressing along it, we are
27546 traveling through life with a safe, reliable and positive direction. Taking
27547 refuge, then, means to put this realistic, safe direction in our life.
27548 Without it, our practice of mahamudra either has no direction and leads
27549 nowhere, or an unsound direction leading to more confusion and trouble. In
27550 addition, the further we travel in this safe direction through the mahamudra
27551 techniques--in other words, the more we realize the nature of mind and its
27552 relation to reality--the more confident we become in the soundness of this
27553 direction and our ability to reach its goal. The stronger our confidence, the
27554 further we progress along the path.
27555 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
27556 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
27558 The Rolling Stones have a song that goes,
27559 "Wild horses couldn't drag me away.
27560 Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them some day."
27561 That is the level that we have to reach, where wild horses cannot drag us
27562 away from the present moment of awareness. Once we have reached that level of
27563 training, then even in the bardos of death we will be able to guide our mind
27564 steadily past all difficulties toward awakening, toward freedom from samsara.
27565 There is another well-known image; it compares our wild minds to a mad
27566 elephant in a china shop. When untamed, this elephant can very easily destroy
27567 many things in the shop, and even the shop itself. With one move, the
27568 elephant can destroy a wall; and with another move, another wall. In only
27569 four moves, this elephant can destroy the whole structure. In the same way,
27570 if our minds are not tamed, they can easily destroy our whole collection of
27571 virtue--all the merit and wisdom we have accumulated through the
27572 accomplishment of countless positive deeds.
27573 Vipashyana meditation is the process of taming and training our minds.
27574 How do we do it? We catch our minds with shamatha and we train them with
27575 vipashyana. Then we ride our minds with mindfulness while remaining aware of
27576 the greater environment. Following these methods, we will reach our goal
27577 quite quickly--especially when we remember the thought of impermanence, which
27579 -- Dzogchen Ponlop, "Mind Beyond Death", published by Snow Lion Publications
27581 With or without religion, you would have good people doing
27582 good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good
27583 people to do evil things, that takes religion.
27586 Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
27589 I was born not knowing and have had only a little
27590 time to change that here and there.
27593 As for me, except for an occasional heart attack,
27594 I feel as young as I ever did.
27597 It is possible to understand the Buddhist teachings as a method of
27598 psychological healing, comparable to psychotherapy, that teaches us how we can
27599 master destructive forces like anger, envy, and greed. Human beings seem to
27600 be a bundle of different qualities and psychological processes. We should
27601 attentively examine our qualities and be alertly aware of our experiences in
27602 order to recognize what we truly feel and think. At the same time, the
27603 personality of human beings is not seen as a unified whole. According to
27604 these teachings, the heart of consciousness is composed of various elements,
27605 the five types of attachment, or skandhas: body, sensations, perceptions,
27606 instinctual forces, and consciousness.
27607 These inner forces impart the false concept of an ego-consciousness. The
27608 basic problem of emotional disorders therefore lies in a false concept of
27609 identity. This I-blindness should therefore be abolished through self-
27610 study.... The goal is not self-realization but selflessness.
27611 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama with Felizitas Von Schonborn, "Path of
27612 Wisdom, Path of Peace", foreword by Wei Jingsheng
27614 Life would be unbearable if everything stayed the same because human beings
27615 find situations that are fixed and predictable very hard to tolerate. Even in
27616 small matters, we become uneasy if we feel there is no end in sight. I know
27617 of couples who live harmoniously together for ten years then marry and are
27618 divorced within a year. As soon as they feel bound to each other for the rest
27619 of their lives, they begin to fight. Impermanence removes our reasons for
27620 quarrelling with each other. Arguments only break out if we imagine that our
27621 relationships are endless. When we appreciate that our time with our
27622 families, partners, and friends may be shorter than we think, we get on better
27623 with each other. Awareness of impermanence gives us extraordinary inner
27624 strength and resilience.
27625 -- Ringu Tulku, "Mind Training", edited by B.M. Shaughnessy, published by
27626 Snow Lion Publications
27628 Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.
27631 The ability to look at events from different perspectives can be very
27632 helpful. Then, practicing this, one can use certain experiences, certain
27633 tragedies, to develop a calmness of mind. One must realize that every
27634 phenomenon, every event, has different aspects. Everything is of a relative
27635 nature. For example, in my own case, I lost my country. From that viewpoint,
27636 it is very tragic--and there are even worse things. There's a lot of
27637 destruction happening in our country. That's a very negative thing. But if I
27638 look at the same event from another angle, I realize that as a refugee, I have
27639 another perspective. As a refugee there is no need for formalities, ceremony,
27640 protocol. If everything were status quo, if things were okay, then on a lot
27641 of occasions you merely go through the motions; you pretend. But when you are
27642 passing through desperate situations, there's no time to pretend. So from
27643 that angle, this tragic experience has been very useful to me. Also, being a
27644 refugee creates a lot of new opportunities for meeting with many people.
27645 People from different religious traditions, from different walks of life,
27646 those whom I may not have met had I remained in my country. So in that sense
27647 it's been very, very useful.
27648 It seems that often when problems arise, our outlook becomes narrow. All
27649 of our attention may be focused on worrying about the problem, and we may have
27650 a sense that we're the only one that is going through such difficulties. This
27651 can lead to a kind of self-absorption that can make the problem seem very
27652 intense. When this happens, I think that seeing things from a wider
27653 perspective can definitely help--realizing, for instance, that there are many
27654 other people who have gone through similar experiences, and even worse
27655 experiences. This practice of shifting perspective can even be helpful in
27656 certain illnesses or when in pain. At the time the pain arises it is of
27657 course often very difficult, at that moment, to do formal meditation practices
27658 to calm the mind. But if you can make comparisons, view your situation from a
27659 different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at that
27660 one event, then it appears bigger and bigger. If you focus too closely, too
27661 intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you
27662 compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem
27663 from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.
27664 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
27665 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
27667 Three Forms of Compassion
27669 Chandrakirti explained three types of compassion: compassion aimed at
27670 suffering, aimed at phenomena, and unaimed. With the first, we look at
27671 animate beings in light of their suffering and develop the wish for them to be
27672 free from both that suffering and its causes. One source of their suffering
27673 is their unawareness that they even have any problems, let alone their not
27674 knowing the causes of their problems. For example, our friend becomes upset
27675 at the slightest thing that goes wrong and sees this as normal. He or she
27676 does not understand that hypersensitivity is to blame and that something can
27677 be done to remedy this. When we see this sad situation, our compassion for
27678 our friend becomes even stronger.
27679 Compassion aimed at phenomena looks at beings in light of their moment-to-
27680 moment changes. With it, we wish others to be free of suffering and its
27681 causes based on the understanding that these both are impermanent. We also
27682 see that others are unaware of this fact and so, when depressed, for example,
27683 they make their sufferings worse by imagining that they will last forever.
27684 Realizing this further enhances compassion for them.
27685 Unaimed compassion looks at beings in terms of their voidness. It has the
27686 same wish as the other two forms, but is based on not identifying others
27687 concretely with their suffering. Seeing that others do not have this insight
27688 and that consequently they identify themselves with their problems intensifies
27689 our compassion for them even more.
27690 -- Alexander Berzin, "Developing Balanced Sensitivity: Practical Buddhist
27691 Exercises for Daily Life", published by Snow Lion Publications
27693 Don't be confused; the point of Scrum and XP and other agile methodologies is
27694 the same point behind any management technique of the past 100 years--squeeze
27695 every drop of work out of your workers until they are empty husks and can be
27696 thrown away. If you're a programmer and you think Scrum is going to "empower"
27697 you, you could not be more mistaken. Management will hide behind the
27698 principles of Scrum when it suits them and then still do whatever they want
27699 otherwise. When it's pointed out to them that they're violating the agile
27700 principles, they will simply claim that this is how the system is tailored
27701 for our company's "needs" and that we shouldn't blindly follow it. But if you
27702 need to break with an agile practice, oh no, the process is *God* and we must
27703 follow it to the exact letter.
27706 I always believe that each individual human being has some kind of
27707 responsibility for humanity as a whole....
27708 Through my own profession, I try my best to contribute as much as I can.
27709 This proceeds without my being concerned whether another person agrees with
27710 my philosophy or not. Some people may be very much against my belief, my
27711 philosophy, but I feel all right. So long as I see that a human being suffers
27712 or has needs, I shall contribute as much as I can to contribute to their
27714 -- Dalai Lama XIV, "Consciousness at the Crossroads", edited by Zara
27715 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by
27716 Snow Lion Publications
27718 A Song on Impermanence
27720 With this spouse and these near and dear ones you desire to live together,
27721 Inseparable for all times, but there is no doubt that you will be separated.
27723 From this excellent home you would like to be inseparable forever
27724 And take root in it, but you will surely depart.
27726 From this happiness, well-being, and wealth you want to be inseparable forever
27727 So you can relish them, but it is certain you will lose them.
27729 From this supreme human body with its freedoms and riches you wish to be
27731 And own it until the end of times, but there is no way that you won't die.
27733 From this really great teacher you yearn to be inseparable
27734 And listen to the dharma for all eternity, but there is no question that you
27737 From these good friends you wish to be inseparable forever
27738 So you can hang out together, but it's a sure thing that you will be parted.
27740 Therefore, from today on, don your armor of vigor--
27741 The time has come to travel to the land of inseparable great bliss.
27742 You friends who have developed weariness from the depths of your hearts,
27743 I, a dharma-beggar, request you to do so.
27745 -- The Omniscient Longchen Rabjam, "Straight from the Heart: Buddhist Pith
27746 Instructions", translated and introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, published
27747 by Snow Lion Publications
27749 The wisdom that realizes emptiness, that has gained insight into the
27750 nature of reality, is of varying kinds, depending upon the level of subtlety
27751 of the consciousness perceiving the emptiness. In general, there are rough
27752 levels of consciousness, more subtle levels, and then the innermost subtle
27753 level of consciousness. It is the uncommon characteristic of Tantric practice
27754 that through it one can evoke this most subtle consciousness at will and put
27755 it to use in a most effective way. For example, when emptiness is realized by
27756 this subtlest level of mind, it is more powerful, having a much greater effect
27757 on the personality.
27758 In order to activate or make use of the more subtle levels of
27759 consciousness, it is necessary to block the rougher levels--the rougher or
27760 grosser levels must cease. It is through specifically Tantric practices, such
27761 as the meditations on the chakras and the channels, that one can control and
27762 temporarily abandon the rougher levels of consciousness. When these become
27763 suppressed, the subtler levels of consciousness become active. And it is
27764 through the use of the subtlest level of consciousness that the most powerful
27765 spiritual realizations can come about. Hence, it is through the Tantric
27766 practice involving the most subtle consciousness that the goal of
27767 enlightenment can most quickly be realized.
27768 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
27769 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
27771 By building up good habits of the mind in meditation, our behavior in daily
27772 life gradually changes. Our anger decreases, we are better able to make
27773 decisions, and we become less dissatisfied and restless. These results of
27774 meditation can be experienced now. But we should always try to have a broader
27775 and more encompassing motivation to meditate than just our own present
27776 happiness. If we generate the motivation to meditate in order to make
27777 preparation for future lives, to attain liberation from the cycle of
27778 constantly recurring problems, or to reach the state of full enlightenment for
27779 the benefit of all beings, then naturally our minds will also be peaceful now.
27780 In addition, we'll be able to attain those high and noble goals.
27781 -- Thubten Chodron, "Buddhism for Beginners", published by Snow Lion
27784 ...all four tantra sets make use of deity yoga, the special tantric means
27785 for amassing the collections of merit and wisdom quickly. Highest Yoga Tantra
27786 has, in addition, techniques for generating subtler minds that realise
27787 emptiness and for using the winds or currents of energy that are the mounts of
27788 these subtler minds as the substantial cause of an actual divine body.
27789 Through this enhancement of the wisdom consciousness the obstructions to
27790 omniscience are quickly removed and Buddhahood is attained.
27791 In the three lower tantras--Action, Performance, and Yoga--deity yoga is
27792 used to bring about the speedy achievement of many common feats and to come
27793 directly under the care of Buddhas and high Bodhisattvas, receiving their
27794 blessings, and so forth. This is done through a threefold process known as
27795 prior approximation, effecting the achievement of feats, and using the feats
27796 in the performance of activities for the welfare of others.
27797 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Deity Yoga in
27798 Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow Lion Publications
27800 If you are able to think about the meaning of cyclic existence in general and
27801 human life in particular, then it is possible to discipline the mind through
27802 religious practice which is the process of becoming peaceful and anxiety-free.
27803 Otherwise, if too much emphasis is put on the sufferings of the hells and the
27804 imminence of death, there is a chance of falling into paralysing fear. There
27805 is a story in Tibet about an abbot of a monastery who went to give a
27806 discourse. A fellow asked the abbot's servant where the abbot had gone, and
27807 the servant said, "He has gone to frighten old men and women." If you fulfil
27808 the value of a human lifetime through engaging in religious practice, then
27809 there is no point in worrying about death.
27810 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
27811 published by Snow Lion Publications
27813 ...if a fire which consumes
27814 One house moves to another,
27815 It is right to throw out anything
27816 Like straw which could ignite.
27818 Likewise anything to which the mind
27819 Is attached ignites the fire of anger.
27820 Fearing our merit will be consumed,
27821 It should be discarded at once.
27823 If a house is on fire and the fire is spreading, we need to clear away straw,
27824 wood or anything else which is highly flammable and could cause a conflagration
27825 that would consume our entire home and property. Similarly, one way to prevent
27826 desire and attachment is to avoid contact with the objects that stimulate it.
27827 If anything comes between us and what we desire or if the thing to which we're
27828 attached is harmed or threatened, we instantly feel angry. This destroys the
27829 positive energy we've created.
27830 Another way is not to avoid the objects but to contemplate their unappealing
27831 aspects, because desire results from focusing only on their attractive side.
27832 The third way is to contemplate their lack of true existence, since desire and
27833 clinging are based on seeing them as very real and objectively existent.
27834 Whichever technique we employ, the aim is to prevent desire and attachment,
27835 since they bring many other problems.
27836 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas",
27837 translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
27839 Usually when we breathe, we breathe in and, as soon as we have finished
27840 breathing in, we immediately start breathing out. And as soon as we have
27841 finished breathing out, we start breathing in again. There is never any space
27842 or gap in between the in-breath and the out-breath. Now, many different ways
27843 of focusing the mind on the breathing have been taught.... There are
27844 basically six methods taught in the abhidharma. But here we have something
27845 different from any of those. This is called gentle threefold breathing. It
27846 is called gentle because there is no particular attempt to manipulate the
27847 breathing, except that instead of breathing in and then immediately breathing
27848 out, after breathing in, you wait before you breathe out...here the duration
27849 of the inhalation, of the retention, and of the exhalation should all be
27850 equal, three equal periods within each complete breath.
27851 In doing this, some people combine the phases of the breath with the
27852 mental repetition of the three mantra syllables: OM AH HUM (HUNG)--OM
27853 coordinated with the in-breath, AH with the retention of the breath, and HUM
27854 (HUNG) with the out-breath. But what is most important here is simply to
27855 recollect, as they occur, the inhalation, retention, and exhalation, so that,
27856 while you are inhaling, you are aware that you are doing so; while you are
27857 retaining the breath, you are aware that you are doing so; and while you are
27858 exhaling, you are aware that you are doing so. In the beginning, it is
27859 recommended that beginners start with doing, for example, twenty-one of these
27860 breaths as a series, and it is important to practice with enough mindfulness
27861 so that, while you breathe in, and so forth, you maintain an awareness of what
27862 part of the breathing process you are in.
27863 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "The Ninth Karmapa's Ocean of Definitive
27864 Meaning", edited, introduced and annotated by Lama Tashi Namgyal,
27865 published by Snow Lion Publications
27867 Life is fragile, like the dew hanging delicately on the grass, crystal
27868 drops that will be carried away on the first morning breeze.
27869 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
27871 ...though the emptiness of an impure phenomenon and the emptiness of a
27872 pure phenomenon are the same, there is a difference. What is the difference?
27873 The continuum of an impure substratum will later cease, not existing in
27874 Buddhahood, whereas a pure substratum's continuum of similar type will exist
27875 right through Buddhahood. Since the deity as whom you are imaginatively
27876 meditating yourself is a divine figure that exists in the state of Buddhahood
27877 when all defilements have been abandoned, this substratum is, for your
27879 Hence, it is important when doing deity yoga to put great effort into:
27880 * working at realizing emptiness as much as you can,
27881 * then imagining that the wisdom realizing emptiness appears itself
27882 as a compassionately directed divine body with a face, arms, and
27884 * and then taking this divine figure as the substratum and
27885 continuously meditating on its emptiness.
27886 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
27887 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by
27888 Snow Lion Publications
27890 ...when you explain or hear the teachings, if your mind and the teachings
27891 remain separate, then whatever is explained will be inconsequential. Hence,
27892 listen in such a way that you determine how these teachings apply to your
27893 mind. For example, when you want to find out whether or not there is some
27894 smudge, dirt, or whatever, on your face, you look in a mirror and then remove
27895 whatever is there. Similarly, when you listen to the teachings, your faults
27896 such as misconduct and attachment appear in the mirror of the teachings. At
27897 that time, you regret that your mind has become like this, and you then work
27898 to clear away those faults and establish good qualities. Hence, you must
27899 train in the teachings.
27900 --Tsong-kha-pa, "The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to
27901 Enlightenment: The Lamrim Chenmo", translated by the Lamrim Chenmo
27902 Translation Committee, Joshua Cutler, Editor in Chief, published
27903 by Snow Lion Publications
27905 if god exists, then god doesn't need me to believe in god. it will not
27906 harm god if i do not believe, because god's existence is not dependent on
27907 my belief. god could contact me directly if god existed and actually cared
27908 what i believed, thus i see no reason to believe in god until then. since
27909 i don't need to believe in god, this frees me from wasting any mental
27910 effort *believing* when that belief will not create god if god doesn't
27911 exist, and when my disbelief will not destroy god if god does exist.
27912 i can't change the state of god's existence one way or the other--i have
27913 realized this limitation in my capabilities.
27914 instead, god needs to believe in me. it's my existence that presumably
27915 requires god's participation in some way, if god does exist. but regardless
27916 of any effort to placate a deity, i feel that i need to be the kind of person
27917 who is worth believing in, by god or by anyone else. my seeking perfection
27918 should not come from fear of an ignored and needy deity. i must build the
27919 best moral and ethical system that i can come up with for myself in this life.
27920 it is my own self-control and my behavior towards others that is the final
27921 word on whether i am worth believing in.
27924 Sometimes doing nothing is doing something.
27925 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar
27927 Enjoy now, another now is coming.
27928 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar
27930 Less pain, more gain.
27931 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar
27933 The pause is a part of the walk.
27934 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27936 Go ahead, look around.
27937 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27939 You better wait for the unexpected.
27940 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27942 Making a mistake is also an achievement.
27945 Leave for tomorrow what you can't do today.
27948 The further you are from a problem, the smaller it gets.
27951 If you think you know it all, you are missing something.
27954 Proper rules are not written.
27955 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27957 Sometimes a step forward needs a step back.
27960 If you get to the top on your own, who'll take the picture?
27961 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar, aka Lord Dewar
27963 When a man says his word is as his bond--get his bond.
27964 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar, aka Lord Dewar
27966 Never invest in a going concern until you know which way it is going.
27969 The quality of the article should be its greatest achievement.
27970 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27972 If you do not advertise, you fossilize.
27973 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
27975 Yesterday's success belongs to yesterday.
27978 In charity there is no excess.
27981 The greatest mistake you can make is to be
27982 continually fearing you will make one.
27985 Life is a one-way street and you're not coming back.
27986 -- Sir Thomas Robert Dewar
27988 Fish stimulates the brain, but fishing stimulates the imagination.
27991 Respectability is the state of never being caught
27992 doing anything which gives you pleasure.
27995 Of two evils, choose the more interesting.
27998 There is no traffic congestion on the straight and narrow path.
28001 We have a great regard for old age when it is bottled.
28004 A philosopher is a man who can look at an empty glass with a smile.
28005 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
28007 A teetotaller is one who suffers from thirst instead of enjoying it.
28008 -- Sir Thomas Dewar
28010 Experience is what you get when you're looking for something else.
28013 Ability without enthusiasm is like a rifle without a bullet.
28016 You can send a boy to college but you can't make him think.
28019 If we are here to help others, I often wonder what the others are here for.
28022 Don't question your wife's judgment; look who she married.
28025 I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we may succeed in
28026 building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in
28027 doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.
28028 -- His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech,
28029 Oslo, December 1989, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by
28032 Benefiting living beings is my main practice, and I would like to give a brief
28033 introduction to the three qualities that are its basis: pure love, compassion,
28034 and bodhichitta, the awakened mind. Pure love is the desire that all living
28035 beings have happiness and its causes. Compassion is the desire that living
28036 beings be free of suffering and its causes, such as unwholesome actions.
28037 Bodhichitta is the desire that all living beings be free of suffering and that
28038 we will be able to place them on the unsurpassed level of awakening, or
28040 -- "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art, and Teachings of the 17th Gyalwa
28041 Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje", by Michele Martin, published by Snow
28044 How can we eliminate the deepest source of all unsatisfactory experience?
28045 Only by cultivating certain qualities within our mindstream. Unless we
28046 possess high spiritual qualifications, there is no doubt that the events life
28047 throws upon us will give rise to frustration, emotional turmoil, and other
28048 distorted states of consciousness. These imperfect states of mind in turn
28049 give rise to imperfect activities, and the seeds of suffering are ever planted
28050 in a steady flow. On the other hand, when the mind can dwell in the wisdom
28051 that knows the ultimate mode of being, one is able to destroy the deepest root
28052 of distortion, negative karma and sorrow.
28053 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", translated and
28054 edited by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
28056 It is important to realize that there is nobody else who can wake us up and
28057 save us from samsara. There is no such thing in Buddhism. That may be
28058 Buddhism's biggest drawback, and at the same time its greatest advantage.
28059 This view shows us that there is nobody else in control of our lives, our
28060 experiences, our freedom or our bondage. Who is responsible? Who is in
28061 control? It is us. We are in control. We can bind ourselves further in
28062 samsara or we can free ourselves from it right now. It is all up to us. We
28063 are the ones who have to keep looking at our thoughts, looking for the nature
28064 of our mind. There is no guru, deity, buddha or bodhisattva out there to look
28065 for it for us. Although they would happily do this, it would not help us; it
28066 would only help them. We have to do it for ourselves. That is the key point.
28067 -- Dzogchen Ponlop, "Mind Beyond Death", published by Snow Lion Publications
28069 ...mistakenly apprehending inherent existence in all phenomena
28070 serves as the root of all other delusions...
28072 The opponent force powerful enough to eliminate the delusions should be a
28073 wisdom which combines calm abiding and special insight. In order to cultivate
28074 an advanced meditative stabilization that is free of both subtle mental
28075 sinking and mental excitement, first of all there should be a basis: the
28076 practice of morality, an abstaining from negative actions. Therefore, the
28077 path leading to liberation is comprised of the three higher trainings: the
28078 training of morality as the foundation, the training of meditative
28079 stabilization as the complementing factor, and the actual path which is the
28080 training of wisdom. By enhancing the practice of wisdom and by developing it
28081 to its fullest extent, you will be able to eliminate totally the delusions,
28082 particularly ignorance which misapprehends the mode of being of phenomena.
28083 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", translated by Geshe Thupten
28084 Jinpa, edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
28086 There is considerable ongoing debate regarding the traditional view of the
28087 guru-disciple relationship, which asserts that seeing the guru as Buddha,
28088 impeccable and without failings, is vital to ripen the disciple's potential to
28089 attain the fruits of the path. This is reinforced by the admonition that to
28090 see faults in one's own guru will result in karmic downfalls and future
28091 suffering for the disciple. Any faults in the teacher should be seen as the
28092 disciple's aberrations projected outside. The tantric teachings insist this
28093 pure view should be held at all times to protect the disciple from accruing
28095 However, underlying this is also the need to preserve the integrity,
28096 authority, and status of the teacher. This leads to a great deal of confusion
28097 when students begin to see evident flaws in teachers, and it would be folly to
28098 explain them away as the students' impure perception. Consequently it has
28099 become necessary to cultivate a less dogmatic, more pragmatic view. A teacher
28100 may not be a perfect carrier of the projection, but this does not contradict
28101 the tantric view that essentially the guru, an inner phenomenon projected
28102 outside, is Buddha.
28103 If we literalize this principle of the teacher as the embodiment of
28104 perfection, we are in danger of blinding ourselves to the reality that most
28105 teachers are human, and therefore not perfect. An individual can have deep
28106 insights into the nature of reality and still have human failings, a shadow
28107 that has not been fully eradicated. According to the teachings on the Ten
28108 Grounds or Stages of the Bodhisattva, until the final ground is reached, there
28109 are still subtle obscurations to full enlightenment that can manifest in
28110 flawed behavior. Believing without question that the outer guru is Buddha
28111 also traps the teacher in an unrealistic, unconscious position. The Dalai
28112 Lama has commented that too much deference harms the teacher, because we never
28113 challenge him or her.
28114 When disciples become devoted to teachers, considerable power and
28115 authority is entrusted to them. While a teacher's role is to support and
28116 empower disciples to discover their own potential, sometimes this does not
28117 happen. Some teachers become caught in the powerful position they have been
28118 endowed with and are unaware of their own desire for power and authority.
28119 They may begin to enjoy their power too much and take advantage of it for
28120 their own needs. This keeps their disciples disempowered, and ultimately does
28121 not allow growth and individual responsibility to emerge. Teachers may be
28122 unconsciously afraid to empower their disciples and allow them to gain a sense
28123 of their own authority and autonomy. They may try to hold on to their
28124 disciples, when to genuinely empower them could lead to their leaving to
28125 engage in their own journey.
28126 --Rob Preece, "The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra", foreword by Stephen
28127 Batchelor, published by Snow Lion Publications
28129 Attachment increases desire, without producing any satisfaction. There
28130 are two types of desire, unreasonable and reasonable. The first is an
28131 affliction founded on ignorance, but the second is not. To live, you need
28132 resources; therefore, desire for sufficient material things is appropriate.
28133 Such feelings as, "This is good; I want this. This is useful," are not
28134 afflictions. It is also desirable to achieve altruism, wisdom, and
28135 liberation. This kind of desire is suitable; indeed, all human development
28136 comes out of desire, and these aspirations do not have to be an affliction.
28137 ...when you have attachment to material things, it is best to desist from
28138 those very activities that promote more attachment. Satisfaction is helpful
28139 when it comes to material things, but not with respect to spiritual practice.
28140 Objects to which we become attached are something to be discarded, whereas
28141 spiritual progress is something to be adopted--it can be developed
28142 limitlessly, even in old age.
28143 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Expand Love", translated and edited by
28146 Some people find it helpful to set a determination of a reasonable period
28147 of time during which they will sit in meditation without moving. If you do
28148 this, do not make it into a contest in which you grit your teeth in pain just
28149 to say that you sat without moving for a certain length of time. That isn't
28150 conducive for focusing with wisdom on the object of meditation. On the other
28151 hand, avoid moving whenever you feel the slightest bit of restlessness or
28152 discomfort. Doing that isn't conducive for developing concentration either.
28153 Rather, note when there is the urge to move but don't move. Observe the
28154 sensation: Is it really pain or is it simply restless energy in the body?
28155 Learn to differentiate between these two. Learn, also, to differentiate
28156 between pain and discomfort. Watch and study both of those when they arise in
28157 your field of experience.
28158 In general, when attachment, anger, jealousy, or other distracting
28159 emotions arise, observe them without getting involved in their stories.
28160 Experience the feeling, rather than repeat the story to yourself again and
28161 again. Be aware of what it feels like in your body when you are angry,
28162 jealous, arrogant, or clingy. Be aware of the feeling tone in your mind when
28163 one of these emotions is present. Observe how the feeling changes, never
28164 remaining the same.
28165 ...It is important to avoid criticizing yourself when your mind is
28166 distracted or dull. Do not fall into discouraging thoughts or self-hatred
28167 because these are unproductive and are to be abandoned on the path. Remember
28168 that internal transformation takes time and rejoice in your opportunity to
28169 learn and practice the Dharma. "Slowly, slowly," as Lama Thubten Yeshe used
28170 to say. Learn to be satisfied with what you are able to do now while you
28171 aspire to improve in the future.
28172 -- Ven. Thubten Chodron, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the Path",
28173 foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion Publications
28175 A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these
28176 minds love one another the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden.
28177 But if these minds get out of harmony with one another it is like a storm
28178 that plays havoc with the garden.
28179 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
28181 You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.
28182 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
28184 Buddhists take a vow of morality in the context of first taking refuge--in
28185 Buddha, in the states of realization, and in the spiritual community. Refuge
28186 is the foundation for the practice of morality. Buddha teaches us how to find
28187 refuge from suffering and limitation, but the chief refuge, or source of
28188 protection, is found in the states of realization achieved through practicing
28189 morality, concentrated meditation, and wisdom. ...A lama from the Drukpa
28190 Kagyu tradition and I were very close. We met frequently and always used to
28191 joke, teasing each other back and forth. On one occasion I asked him about
28192 his spiritual experience. He told me that when he was young, he was staying
28193 with his lama who had him perform the preliminary practice of making a hundred
28194 thousand prostrations to the Buddha, the doctrine, and the spiritual
28195 community. Early in the morning and late in the evening he had to make
28196 prostrations on a low platform the length of his body. His lama was
28197 meditating in the dark in the next room; so to trick him into thinking he was
28198 making prostrations he would tap with his knuckles on the prostration
28199 platform. Years later, after his lama passed away, he was taking a meditation
28200 retreat in a cave, during which he recalled his lama's great kindness over
28201 years of training him, and he wept and wept. He almost fainted, but then
28202 experienced the clear light, which he continuously practiced. Subsequently,
28203 after successful meditations he occasionally would remember past lives in
28204 vivid reflections before him.
28205 --His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
28206 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
28207 http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?isbn=HOPRPA
28209 A practitioner needs faith, or trust.... Guru Rinpoche said that we
28210 should meditate in the same way that a sparrow enters a nest. A sparrow
28211 spends some time investigating whether or not it is safe to enter. Once his
28212 examination is over, he then enters unhesitatingly. That's a wonderful
28213 metaphor for practice. First clear up all your doubts about your technique,
28214 then throw yourself into the technique with no separation or self-
28215 consciousness. Of course, it's easy to say, but that is the direction toward
28216 which we should be moving.
28217 Another necessary quality is determination. It's easy to gear oneself up
28218 for counting mantras or prostrations. For some, physical discipline is also
28219 easy. But the determination of the meditator is different. We must be
28220 determined to strive to purify our obscurations until they're completely
28221 gone--in other words, until our buddha-nature unobstructedly shines through.
28222 When we sit, we decide to do our best not to be swayed by our negativity. We
28223 should cultivate this attitude at the beginning of our session. Otherwise, no
28224 matter how much we practice, we will daydream a lot and our meditation will
28225 always be wishy-washy. I know this from experience--I may do my session of
28226 meditation, but it is tepid. Why? I don't have that inner strength to remain
28227 unmoved by the arising of the various mental contents.
28228 -- Bruce Newman, "A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism", published by
28229 Snow Lion Publications
28231 This is the way of peace:
28232 "Overcome evil with good,
28233 falsehood with truth, and
28237 The seeing of Truth cannot be dualistic (a "thing" seen). It cannot be seen
28238 by a see-er, or via a see-er. There can only be a seeing which itself is
28239 Truth. "All Else is Bondage; Non-Volitional Living"
28242 An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet,
28243 who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
28244 -- Nicholas Chamfort
28246 A joke's a very serious thing.
28247 -- Charles Churchill
28249 You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
28252 The five subtler aggregates* will eventually be transformed into the
28253 Buddhas of the five lineages. They are now as if accompanied by mental
28254 defilements. When the defilements are removed, these factors do not become
28255 any coarser or subtler; their nature remains, but [when they] become separated
28256 from the faults of mental pollution, they become the Buddhas of the five
28257 lineages. So if you ask whether the Buddhas of the five lineages are present
28258 now in our continuums, these factors are currently bound by faults, and since
28259 there cannot be a Buddha who has a fault, they are not Buddhas. One is not
28260 yet fully enlightened, but that which is going to become a Buddha is present;
28261 therefore, these factors presently existent in our continuums are Buddha seeds
28262 and are called the Buddha nature, or the essence of the One Gone Thus
28264 * The five consituents that are included within a person's continuum--earth,
28265 water, fire, wind, and space--that will be purified into the five Buddha
28266 lineages [the exalted manifestations of these constituents].
28267 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness,
28268 Clarity, and Insight", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
28269 co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion Publications
28271 ...an inherently existent "I" appears to us, but instead of assenting to
28272 that appearance and holding it to be true, we analyze how the "I" actually
28274 At those times in our life when there's a very solid feeling of "I," it's
28275 helpful to examine how that "I" appears. I remember the first time I stayed
28276 out all night in college and my mother didn't know. I came home the next day
28277 with this feeling that "I" really existed: "I did this and my mother doesn't
28278 know!" The feeling of "I" was just enormous, incredibly solid, because I did
28279 something I wasn't supposed to do.
28280 Examine how that "I" appears, that big "I," especially when you have a
28281 strong emotion. Get familiar with that sense of "I." When somebody criticizes
28282 us or accuses us of doing something that we didn't do, this feeling comes up
28283 very quickly. Usually, we're focused not on the feeling of "I," but on
28284 attacking the other person or escaping from him. But if we can step back,
28285 it's an incredible opportunity to study the feeling of "I." The person who
28286 irritates us the most can be our best Dharma asset, because he gives us an
28287 opportunity to look at this sense of "I."
28288 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga
28289 Method of Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by
28290 Snow Lion Publications
28292 One time when I was giving an exposition on Nagarjuna's "Fundamentals of the
28293 Middle Way," which deals explicitly with the topic of emptiness, one student
28294 who did not have a prior background of learning in great treatises made a
28295 comment to another colleague. He said: 'Today's teaching was a little
28296 strange. His Holiness began with the presentation of the Buddha's path and
28297 built up the edifice one layer at a time. Then, all of a sudden, he started
28298 talking about emptiness and the absence of inherent existence, so that this
28299 whole edifice he had spent much time building was completely dismantled.'
28300 He couldn't really see the point. There is that danger. However, if we
28301 understand the importance of the need to generate wisdom into emptiness as a
28302 means of bringing about the cessation of the afflictions, particularly
28303 fundamental ignorance, then we recognise the value of deepening our
28304 realisation of emptiness. Also, as Dharmakirti points out, emotions such as
28305 loving kindness and compassion cannot directly challenge fundamental
28306 ignorance. It is only by cultivating insight into no-self that we can
28307 directly overcome our fundamental ignorance.
28308 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
28309 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
28311 Having committed yourself to certain practices, be steadfast and never
28312 transgress the promises you have made. Let go of everything that could tempt
28313 you to do so and devote yourself entirely and single-mindedly to the
28314 accomplishment of your aims. For six years the Buddha did not waver from his
28315 practice of the meditative stabilization known as "Pervading Space." This
28316 meditation focuses on the fundamental nature of phenomena, which is present
28317 wherever there is space. Everywhere throughout space there are suffering
28318 living beings on whom this meditation also focuses with the compassionate wish
28319 to relieve their suffering and the loving wish to give them happiness. Thus
28320 it combines essential wisdom and skillful means.
28321 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path: An Oral
28322 Teaching", translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion
28325 If you're not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled
28326 remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work.
28327 -- John Alejandro King
28329 Only fools are positive. -- Moe Howard
28331 Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace
28332 that wasn't immune to bullets.
28335 We are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by
28336 selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a
28337 shadow that never leaves them.
28340 If you find a good companion, who is following the same spiritual
28341 path, travel together, overcoming obstacles as they arise.
28344 Man is harder than rock and more fragile than an egg.
28345 -- Yugoslav Proverb
28347 That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.
28348 -- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
28350 Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
28353 A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
28354 -- Christopher Morley, Human Being
28356 The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so,
28357 this purpose has any similarity to ours.
28358 -- Bertrand Russell
28360 Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a
28361 world made for man--who has no gills.
28364 Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.
28367 Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
28368 -- John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
28370 In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with
28371 humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive
28375 Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
28378 We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.
28381 Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
28384 Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological
28385 clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant
28386 perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are
28387 still in the early morning of our April day.
28388 -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Our Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980
28390 Such is the human race, often it seems a pity
28391 that Noah... didn't miss the boat.
28394 There are too many people, and too few human beings.
28397 It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be
28398 nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a
28400 -- David Ormsby Gore
28402 Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge,
28403 virtue, and abiding love.
28404 -- George Bernard Shaw
28406 The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts
28407 at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo
28408 sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
28409 -- Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up
28411 Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
28414 The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
28417 Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders;
28418 he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard;
28419 sometimes he's a cerebrate.
28420 -- Martin H. Fischer
28422 Men are cruel, but Man is kind.
28423 -- Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916
28425 Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.
28426 -- David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978
28428 Human nature, if healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its
28429 thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek it in the wrong. God
28430 never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints.
28433 Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as
28434 large and wise as a man's head.
28435 -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
28437 Monkeys are superior to men in this:
28438 When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
28439 -- Malcolm de Chazal
28441 It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
28442 -- Mariane Moore, "A Grave," Collected Poems, 1951
28444 The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that
28445 procession but carrying a banner.
28446 -- Mark Twain, "Reflections on Being the Delight of God."
28448 Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache.
28449 -- Hungarian Proverb
28451 Why was man created on the last day? So that he can be told, when pride
28452 possesses him: God created the gnat before thee.
28455 Man--a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
28458 I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.
28461 O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
28462 -- Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. I, book II, chapter 1
28464 God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day.
28467 Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
28470 The progress of evolution from President Washington to
28471 President Grant [is] alone enough to upset Darwin.
28472 -- Henry Adams, Education, 1907
28474 Man--a being in search of meaning. -- Plato
28476 Ultimately, aren't we all just talking monkeys with an attitude problem?
28477 -- "Uncle" Ben, as seen on quotes-r-us.org
28479 The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
28480 -- Gustave Flaubert
28482 Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,
28483 Of all things breathing and moving.
28486 Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.
28487 -- Miguel de Cervantes
28489 Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting
28490 on the wall until his back is up against it.
28493 It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
28496 God doesn't measure His bounty, but oh how we do!
28497 -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
28499 The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;
28500 men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
28501 -- Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, 1911
28503 The human race is governed by its imagination.
28506 Man uses his intelligence less in the care of his own species than he does in
28507 his care of anything else he owns or governs.
28508 -- Abraham Meyerson
28510 Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite
28511 nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
28514 Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him
28515 when he shows no mercy to what is under him?
28516 -- Pierre Troubetzkoy
28518 The small percentage of dogs that bite people is monumental proof that the dog
28519 is the most benign, forgiving creature on earth.
28520 -- W.R. Koehler, The Koehler Method of Dog Training
28522 Man was created a little lower than the angels,
28523 and has been getting lower ever since.
28526 We have no choice but to be guilty.
28527 God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
28528 -- Archibald MacLeish, JB, 1958
28530 Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives
28531 as to improve them.
28532 -- Mark Goulston, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating
28535 As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a
28536 man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
28539 What is man's greatest bane? His brother man alone.
28540 -- Bias of Priene, Maxims
28542 Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.
28543 -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
28545 The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
28546 -- Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945
28548 Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery
28549 but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again
28550 like pimples on an angel's arse?
28551 -- John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960
28553 God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man.
28554 -- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
28556 I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker;
28557 for it was not on the door of heaven.
28558 -- Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth,
28559 by Two Brothers, 1827
28561 I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us.
28562 A single sentence will suffice for modern man:
28563 He fornicated and read the papers.
28566 Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.
28567 -- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
28569 Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it
28570 into a garden; give him nine years' lease of a garden, and he will
28571 convert it into a desert.
28572 -- Arthur Young, Travels in France, 1792
28574 Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal,
28575 our souls animal with a sliver of human.
28578 Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient.
28579 It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the
28580 Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which
28581 they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the
28582 principal industries of the Orient.
28583 -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
28585 Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal
28586 that is struck with the difference between what things are and what
28588 -- William Hazlitt, The English Comic Writers, 1819
28590 Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a
28591 desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in
28595 A simple and irrefutable argument to knock creationism on its ass: (1) Humans
28596 are a mistake--subproof: opposable thumbs and enlarged brain capacity are the
28597 combined number one factor in the increasingly speedy destruction of planet
28598 Earth. (2) God doesn't make mistakes. (3) Therefore, God couldn't have
28600 -- Cassus Garrulitas
28602 Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the
28603 understanding of everything were all inside him.
28604 -- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
28606 My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected
28607 with the concept of what I "should" be doing.
28610 Man will do many things to get himself loved;
28611 he will do all things to get himself envied.
28612 -- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
28614 We are all parasites; we humans, the greatest.
28615 -- Martin H. Fischer
28617 Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human
28618 body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was
28619 duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the
28620 left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a
28621 leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on
28622 each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin
28623 ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take
28624 it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that
28625 there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he
28626 was right, he would be wrong.
28627 -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity," Orthodoxy
28629 It is the nature of mortals to kick a fallen man.
28630 -- Aeschylus, Agamemnon
28632 God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world
28633 with factory rejects.
28634 -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
28636 Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external
28637 circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.
28638 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28640 So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He
28641 can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but
28642 give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty
28643 billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million
28644 miles up in the sky.
28645 -- Russell Baker, New York Times, 21 July 1969
28647 Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is
28648 a problem which he has to solve.
28649 -- Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947
28651 When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved,
28652 man's remains will be in rigor mortis.
28653 -- Martin H. Fischer
28655 Man is nature's sole mistake.
28658 The average man's judgment is so poor, he runs a risk every time he uses it.
28661 Man--a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
28662 -- Alexander Hamilton
28664 We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all
28665 his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible
28666 stamp of his lowly origin.
28667 -- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871
28669 We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our
28670 whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
28671 -- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
28673 Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not
28674 depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
28675 -- R. Buckminister Fuller
28677 Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
28678 -- David Herbert Lawrence, White Peacock, 1911
28680 The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel?
28681 I am on the side of the angels.
28682 -- Benjamin Disraeli
28684 I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.
28685 -- Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape
28687 Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she
28688 desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him
28689 to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.
28690 -- Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
28693 The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.
28694 -- T.H. Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics," 1893
28696 Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature,
28697 when they are only repelled by man.
28698 -- William Ralph Inge
28700 People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful;
28701 up close, all beady little eyes.
28702 -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
28704 Evolution is individual--devolution is collective.
28705 -- Martin H. Fischer
28707 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-
28708 contain'd. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and
28709 whine about their condition.... Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented
28710 with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind
28711 that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the
28713 -- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
28715 As long as people believe in absurdities
28716 they will continue to commit atrocities.
28719 I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me
28720 a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape.
28721 I myself most assuredly know of none.
28722 -- Carl Linnaeus, 1788
28724 In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
28727 Evolution: that last step was a doozy!
28730 We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all.
28731 -- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
28733 Evolution: one small step for man, one giant leap backward for mankind.
28734 -- The Quote Garden
28736 I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of
28737 man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place
28738 where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.
28739 -- Henry David Thoreau, journal, 2 April 1852
28741 Nature does not deceive us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
28742 -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762
28744 It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.
28745 -- Niccolo Machiavelli
28747 Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees
28748 that it is old enough to know better.
28751 Question: How can one work with deep fears most effectively?
28753 DL: There are quite a number of methods. The first is to think about actions
28754 and their effects. Usually when something bad happens, we say, "Oh, very
28755 unlucky," and when something good happens, we say, "Oh, very lucky." Actually,
28756 these two words, lucky and unlucky, are insufficient. There must be some
28757 reason. Because of a reason, a certain time became lucky or unlucky, but
28758 usually we do not go beyond lucky or unlucky. The reason, according to the
28759 Buddhist explanation, is our past karma, our actions.
28761 One way to work with deep fears is to think that the fear comes as a result of
28762 your own actions in the past. Further, if you have fear of some pain or
28763 suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it.
28764 If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything,
28765 then there is also no need to worry.
28767 Another technique is to investigate who is becoming afraid. Examine the
28768 nature of your self. Where is this I? Who is I? What is the nature of I?
28769 Is there an I besides my physical body and my consciousness? This may help.
28771 Also, someone who is engaging in the Bodhisattva practices seeks to take
28772 others' suffering onto himself or herself. When you have fear, you can think,
28773 "Others have fear similar to this; may I take to myself all of their fears."
28774 Even though you are opening yourself to greater suffering, taking greater
28775 suffering to yourself, your fear lessens.
28776 -- "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
28777 About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, Foreword
28778 by Sen. Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
28782 When a subject is analyzed, the object to be negated is determined to be
28783 either an appearance or something imagined. It is not logical, [however,] to
28784 negate momentary appearances, because reasonings cannot negate them. To take
28785 an example: for people with eye diseases, the appearances of floaters [bits of
28786 optical debris], double moons, and the like do not stop as long as their
28787 eyesight is impaired. Similarly, as long as beings are not free from
28788 unafflicted ignorance, illusionlike appearances [manifesting] to the six modes
28789 of consciousness do not stop.
28790 It is not necessary to negate [appearances], because our mistakes do not
28791 come from appearances: they arise from fixating on those [appearances]. This
28792 is the case because if we do not fixate on appearances, we are not bound--we
28793 are like a magician who, having conjured up a young woman, has no attachment
28794 towards her. [On the other hand, if,] like naive beings attached to an
28795 illusory young woman, we fixate intensely [on appearances], our karma and
28796 mental afflictions will increase.
28797 To intentionally negate appearances would be wrong because, if they were
28798 negated, emptiness would come to mean the [absolute] nonexistence of things.
28799 Another reason this would be a mistake is that yogins and yoginis meditating
28800 on emptiness would fall into the extreme of nihilism since they would be
28801 applying their minds to a negation that [equals] the [absolute] nonexistence
28803 Thus, [Madhyamikas] set out to negate only what is imagined, because that
28804 is what can be negated. Like a rope mistaken for a snake, what is imagined
28805 does not conform to facts: it is simply the mind's fixations.
28806 -- Kongtrul Lodro Taye, "The Treasury of Knowledge, Book Six, Part Three:
28807 Frameworks of Buddhist Philosophy", translated by Elizabeth M. Callahan,
28808 published by Snow Lion Publications
28810 Even though Mac Users may be only 10% of the market,
28811 always remember that we are the top 10%.
28814 While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An
28815 important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that
28816 you get an A not for effort but for results.
28819 We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the
28820 complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is
28824 C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when
28825 you do, it blows away your whole leg.
28826 -- Bjarne Stroustrup
28828 The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether
28829 submarines can swim.
28832 Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the
28833 tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the
28835 -- Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
28837 UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because that
28838 policy would also keep them from doing clever things.
28841 Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a Web
28842 page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had
28843 very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another
28844 word processor, or another network.
28847 If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?
28848 Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
28851 The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his
28852 own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility; and
28853 among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
28856 A programming language is a tool that has profound influence
28857 on our thinking habits.
28860 The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is
28862 -- Deep Thought, 2nd greatest Computer in the Universe of Time and Space
28864 If Windows is the solution, can we please have the problem back?
28867 This is a fascinating property: Writing texts in programming languages can not
28868 only be as creative as poetry, the creations more than in poetry, belong to
28869 the real world as soon as run through the machine.
28872 Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of
28873 indirection. But that usually will create another problem.
28876 Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger Dijkstra
28878 It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
28879 had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
28880 mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
28883 Good artists copy. Great artists steal. -- Pablo Picasso
28885 I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order I may learn how to do it.
28888 Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
28891 Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
28894 A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
28897 The debt is like a crazy aunt we keep down in the basement. All the neighbors
28898 know she's down there, but nobody wants to talk about her.
28901 Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
28904 Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a
28905 pretext for a thousand.
28906 -- Charles Caleb Colton
28908 Whatever limits us, we call Fate. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
28910 The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard
28911 those who think alike than those who think differently.
28912 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
28914 Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
28915 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28917 Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think
28919 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28921 It often takes more courage to change ones opinion than to keep it.
28924 Let's be grateful for those who give us happiness; they are the charming
28925 gardeners who make our soul bloom.
28928 It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
28931 There are only two forces that unite men--fear and interest.
28932 -- Napoleon Bonaparte
28934 If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their
28935 own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have
28936 a paradise in a few years.
28939 The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
28942 If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward,
28943 then we are a sorry lot indeed.
28946 Your character must be above suspicion and
28947 you must be truthful and self controlled.
28950 Either you live or you are consequential. -- Erich Kaestner
28952 Pedaled curd gets wide--not strong. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28954 Do not follow where the path may lead.
28955 Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
28956 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
28958 She wore too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. Thats always
28959 a sign of despair in a woman.
28962 Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
28965 First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
28969 Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with
28970 sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers,
28971 and to cowardice on the part of the governed.
28974 We want to be poets of our life--first of all in the smallest
28975 most everyday matters.
28976 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
28978 Without music, life would be an error. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
28980 Joseph LaGrange believed that a mathematician has not thoroughly understood
28981 his own work till he has made it so clear that he can go out and explain it
28982 effectively to the first man he meets on the street.
28985 There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from
28986 failure of human wisdom.
28987 -- Andres Bonar Law
28989 Perfect nonviolence is the highest bravery. -- Mahatma Gandhi
28991 There never was a good war or a bad peace. -- Benjamin Franklin
28993 There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing
28994 good in war. Except its ending.
28997 I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only
28998 temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
29001 An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. -- Mahatma Gandhi
29003 Trust no one in whom the desire to punish is strong. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
29005 If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if
29006 from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
29007 -- Charles Caleb Colton
29009 The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
29012 Ability is nothing without opportunity. -- Napoleon Bonaparte
29014 Never work just for money or for power.
29015 They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
29016 -- Marian Wright Edelman
29018 Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their
29019 pleasure takes joy, even as though it were his own.
29020 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29022 Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power,
29024 -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29026 Censorship cannot eliminate evil, it can only kill freedom. -- unknown
29028 Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
29029 -- John G. Riefenbaker
29031 People demand freedom of speech to make up for
29032 the freedom of thought which they avoid.
29033 -- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
29035 Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the
29036 fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
29039 If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make
29040 philosophy out of it.
29043 I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
29044 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
29046 I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more
29047 to be than a good dancer.
29048 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
29050 Faith means not wanting to know what is true. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
29052 True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
29053 -- Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld
29055 This war, like the next war, is a war to end war. -- David Lloyd George
29057 How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!
29058 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
29060 When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
29061 -- Rodney Dangerfield
29063 When your mind is trained in self-discipline, even if you are surrounded
29064 by hostile forces, your peace of mind will hardly be disturbed. On the other
29065 hand, if your mind is undisciplined, your mental peace and calm can easily be
29066 disrupted by your own negative thoughts and emotions. The real enemy is
29067 within, not outside. Usually we define our enemy as a person, an external
29068 agent, whom we believe is causing harm to us or to someone we hold dear. But
29069 such an enemy is dependent on many conditions and is impermanent. One moment,
29070 the person may act as an enemy; at yet another moment, he or she may become
29071 your best friend. This is a truth that we often experience in our own lives.
29072 But negative thoughts and emotions, the inner enemy, will always remain the
29073 enemy. They are your enemy today, they have been your enemy in the past, and
29074 they will remain your enemy in the future as long as they reside within your
29076 This inner enemy is extremely dangerous. The destructive potential of an
29077 external enemy is limited when compared to that of its inner counterpart....
29078 In a time when every country is a potential target for the nuclear weapons of
29079 others, human beings still continue to develop defense systems of greater and
29080 greater sophistication. I do not know if it will ever be possible to create a
29081 defense system capable of guaranteeing worldwide protection against all
29082 external forces of destruction. However, one thing is certain: as long as
29083 those destructive internal enemies of anger and hatred are left to themselves
29084 unchallenged, the threat of physical annihilation will always loom over us.
29085 In fact, the destructive power of an external enemy ultimately derives from
29086 the power of these internal forces. The inner enemy is the trigger that
29087 unleashes the destructive power of the external enemy.
29088 Shantideva tells us that as long as these inner enemies remain secure
29089 within, there is great danger. Shantideva goes on to say that even if
29090 everyone in the world were to stand up against you as your enemies and harm
29091 you, as long as your own mind was disciplined and calm, they would not be able
29092 to disturb your peace. Yet a single instance of delusion arising in your mind
29093 has the power to disturb that peace and inner stability.
29094 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Compassionate Life"
29096 (Each day before breakfast the founder and abbess of Sravasti Abbey, Thubten
29097 Chodron, gives a morning motivation for residents and guests. We were moved
29098 by these inspiring words, and hope you will be, too.)
29102 Let's recall our motivation in the morning and think that today, the most
29103 important thing I have to do is to guard my body, speech and mind so that I
29104 don't harm anybody through what I do with my body, through what I say, or even
29105 through what I think. That's the most important thing, more important than
29106 anything else today.
29107 The second most important thing is, as much as possible, to be of benefit
29108 to others. Thoroughly cultivate that as your motivation simply for being
29109 alive today. Our purpose for being alive isn't just to keep this body alive,
29110 to eat and sleep, and have pleasure. We have a higher purpose, a higher
29111 meaning: to really work for the benefit of living beings. If the purpose of
29112 our life is simply to keep the body alive and have pleasure, then at the end
29113 of life, we have nothing to show for it. The body dies and all the pleasures,
29114 like last night's dream, have gone. But if we work for a higher motivation, a
29115 higher purpose, to really do what's beneficial for all living beings, then
29116 there's happiness and benefit now.
29117 At the end of the life, the benefit that we've given to others continues,
29118 as do all the imprints of the attitude of kindness, the attitude of care
29119 towards others. All the imprints of having generated that positive mind go on
29120 with us into the next life. So even at the time of death, that kind heart
29121 brings incredible benefit and carries through into the next life.
29122 And then let's also generate a third motivation--a really long-term
29123 motivation--to become fully enlightened. In other words, to have the wisdom,
29124 compassion, and skill so that in the long term, we'll be able to be of the
29125 greatest benefit to all living beings, even being able to lead them on the
29126 path to enlightenment. That's our really long-term purpose.
29127 As we change and develop a kind heart, that influences every single living
29128 being we encounter in a positive way. Then, through the influence on them, it
29129 spreads out to all the people they know. So, just spending one day with a
29130 positive, long-term motivation may seem like a small thing, but when we think
29131 of the ripple effect it has now, and the benefit it has in future lives and
29132 for progressing along the path to liberation and enlightenment, we see that
29133 even one day spent with this motivation of kindness, directly and indirectly
29134 benefiting sentient beings, has tremendous outcomes--many, many good results.
29135 -- Thubten Chodron, who is the author of many books, including her latest
29136 work, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the Path", published by
29137 Snow Lion Publications
29139 ...We can't blame one individual for what happens in our world. I think
29140 we should blame our entire society. Society produces our leaders and
29141 politicians, and if we try to develop a more compassionate and affectionate
29142 society, we will have human beings with a more peaceful nature. Leaders,
29143 politicians, and businesspeople coming from such a society would offer hope
29144 for a better world. Our long-term responsibility--everyone's responsibility,
29145 whether they are believers or nonbelievers--is to find ways to promote a
29146 peaceful and compassionate society.
29147 I think one way is quite simple. Each individual must try to ensure peace
29148 and compassion in his [or her] family. Put together ten peaceful,
29149 compassionate homes, or one hundred, and that's a community. The children in
29150 such a society would receive affection in their family and in their schools
29151 from the educators concerned. We might have one or two setbacks, but
29152 generally I think we could develop a sensible society. Sensible here means a
29153 sense of community, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of commitment.
29154 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Many Ways to Nirvana: Reflections
29155 and Advice on Right Living", edited by Renuka Singh, published by
29156 Snow Lion Publications
29158 We can see that there are many ways in which we actively contribute to our
29159 own experience of mental unrest and suffering. Although, in general, mental
29160 and emotional afflictions themselves can come naturally, often it is our own
29161 reinforcement of those negative emotions that makes them so much worse. For
29162 instance when we have anger or hatred towards a person, there is less
29163 likelihood of its developing to a very intense degree if we leave it
29164 unattended. However, if we think about the projected injustices done to us,
29165 the ways in which we have been unfairly treated, and we keep on thinking about
29166 them over and over, then that feeds the hatred. It makes the hatred very
29167 powerful and intense. Of course, the same can apply to when we have an
29168 attachment towards a particular person; we can feed that by thinking about how
29169 beautiful he or she is, and as we keep thinking about the projected qualities
29170 that we see in the person, the attachment becomes more and more intense. But
29171 this shows how through constant familiarity and thinking, we ourselves can
29172 make our emotions more intense and powerful.
29173 We also often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive,
29174 overreacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally. We
29175 tend to take small things too seriously and blow them up out of proportion,
29176 while at the same time we often remain indifferent to the really important
29177 things, those things which have profound effects on our lives and long-term
29178 consequences and implications.
29179 So I think that to a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you
29180 respond to a given situation.
29181 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
29182 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
29184 Realizations come only if we practice joyfully, with confidence and
29185 courage. Realization doesn't grow within a timid or weak state of mind--it
29186 blossoms in the mind free of doubt and hesitation. Realization is fearless.
29187 When we see the true nature of reality, there's nothing hidden, nothing left
29188 to fear. At last we're seeing reality as it is, full of joy and peace.
29189 Our habitual patterns can only be removed by understanding the great
29190 emptiness aspect of true nature, that which is named the Mother of all the
29191 buddhas. Emptiness is freedom; emptiness is great opportunity. It is
29192 pervasive and all phenomena arise from it. As the great master Jigme Lingpa
29193 said, "The entire universe is the mandala of the dakini." The Mother's mandala
29194 is all phenomena, the display of the wisdom dakini.
29195 Without this ultimate great emptiness, the Mother of the buddhas, the
29196 universe would be without movement, development, or change. Because of this
29197 great emptiness state of the Mother, we see phenomena continually arising.
29198 Each display arises, transforms, and radiates, fulfilling its purpose and then
29199 dissolving back into its original state. This dramatic dance of energy is the
29200 activity, ability, or mandala of the wisdom dakini. Thus, the combination of
29201 the great emptiness or openness state, together with the activities of love
29202 and compassion, is both the ultimate Mother and the ultimate wisdom dakini.
29203 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche,
29204 "Tara's Enlightened Activity: An Oral Commentary on 'The Twenty-one
29205 Praises to Tara' ", published by Snow Lion Publications
29207 Just as your innermost wish is to be free from suffering and to abide in
29208 happiness, so too is it the aspiration of all other beings. But, they, like
29209 you, encounter sufferings and problems in their lives, and often their
29210 difficulties are much worse than your own. Examine your capacity to help
29211 them. At this time your ability to help them is quite limited, but if you
29212 reduce your own ignorance, anger, attachment, and other faults, and increase
29213 your good qualities such as generosity, patience, loving-kindness, compassion,
29214 and wisdom, you will be of greater benefit. If you become fully enlightened,
29215 you will be of the greatest possible benefit to all beings. Thus generate the
29216 altruistic intention to become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient
29217 beings most effectively.
29218 -- Thubten Chodron, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the Path",
29219 foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion Publications
29221 ...at Bodh Gaya, [Shakyamuni] displayed the ways of becoming fully
29222 enlightened. Then in stages he turned the three renowned wheels of doctrine.
29223 In the first period, at Varanasi, Buddha turned the wheel of doctrine that
29224 is based on the four noble truths; he did this mainly in consideration of
29225 those having the lineage of Hearers (Sravaka). In the middle period, at
29226 Grdhrakuta, he set forth the middle wheel of doctrine, which is based on the
29227 mode of non-inherent existence of all phenomena; he did this mainly in
29228 consideration of trainees of sharp faculties who bear the Mahayana lineage.
29229 In the final period, at Vaisali, he set forth the final wheel [which is based
29230 on discriminating between those phenomena that do and those that do not truly
29231 exist]; he did this mainly in consideration of trainees of middling and lower
29232 faculties who bear the Mahayana lineage. The teacher Buddha also appeared in
29233 the body of Vajradhara, setting forth tantric doctrines.
29234 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
29235 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
29237 There are different levels of faith. First, clear faith refers to the joy and
29238 clarity and change in our perceptions that we experience when we hear about
29239 the qualities of the Three Jewels and the lives of the Buddha and the great
29240 teachers. Longing faith is experienced when we think about the latter and are
29241 filled with a great desire to know more about their qualities and to acquire
29242 these ourselves. Confident faith comes through practicing the Dharma, when we
29243 acquire complete confidence in the truth of the teachings and the
29244 enlightenment of the Buddha. Finally, when faith has become so much a part of
29245 ourselves that even if our lives were at risk we could never give it up, it
29246 has become irreversible faith.
29247 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "The Excellent Path to Enlightenment",
29248 translated by The Padmakara Translation Group, published by Snow
29251 ...when seeking work, or if you already have a job, it is important to
29252 keep in mind that a human being isn't meant to be some kind of machine
29253 designed only for production. No. Human life isn't just for work, like [a
29254 socialistic] vision where everyone's purpose is just to work for the state,
29255 and there is no individual freedom, where the state even arranges the person's
29256 vacations and everything is planned out for the individual. That is not a
29257 full human life. Individuality is very important for a full human life, and
29258 then accordingly some leisure time, a bit of holiday, and time spent with
29259 family or friends. That is the means to a complete form of life.... If your
29260 life becomes only a medium of production, then many of the good human values
29261 and characteristics will be lost--then you will not, you cannot, become a
29263 So if you're looking for work and have a choice of a job, choose a job
29264 that allows the opportunity for some creativity, and for spending time with
29265 your family. Even if it means less pay, personally I think it is better to
29266 choose work that is less demanding, that gives you greater freedom, more time
29267 to be with your family, or to do other activities, read, engage in cultural
29268 activities, or just play. I think that's best.
29269 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The
29270 Art of Happiness at Work"
29272 Our painful experiences have brought the five poisons* right into our
29273 world. Our heavy sense of being a separate person has led to an anxiety about
29274 our safety in the world. This leads us to aversion and attachment, as we long
29275 to predict and control our relation with the environment. From this all the
29276 other fixed and defensive positions arise. And so the world that we encounter
29277 is covered over and suffused with many subtle moods of hopes and fears,
29278 doubts, jealousies, pride. So even here on a dharma retreat, as we look
29279 around the room, we have a complex sense of whose faces we can look at, and
29280 who we might have to look away from. This is not at all a neutral place. The
29281 force of projections, interpretations and impulsive reactions keeps us busy in
29282 trying to stay ahead of the game....
29283 However in dzogchen we are trying to get to the essential point where
29284 nirvana and samsara separate. This is like a great weed killer: If you spray
29285 it once all the weeds, all the confusion, all the pain and suffering will
29286 vanish. You don't need to pluck out each weed by itself. Believing that you
29287 are a bad person is very unhelpful for the practice of dzogchen. Also
29288 believing that you are a good person is not very helpful in the practice of
29289 dzogchen. You are not a person! Resting in the unborn state we are a pure
29290 awareness free of the least defilement. When you give up your ego identity,
29291 your samsara citizenship, you tear up your identity card and all the problems
29292 and sins and police records linked to that identity vanish immediately.
29293 * Five poisons (dug nga)--the five poisonous mental afflictions are
29294 desire, aggression, ignorance, pride, and jealousy. (Penetrating Wisdom)
29295 -- "Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text of Nuden Dorje Entitled 'The
29296 Mirror of Clear Meaning' ", with commentary by James Low, published by
29297 Snow Lion Publications
29299 And just as men depend upon
29300 A boat for traversing the sea,
29301 So does the mental body need
29302 The matter-body for occurrence.
29303 And as the boat depends upon
29304 The men for traversing the sea,
29305 So does the matter-body need
29306 The mental body for occurrence.
29307 Depending each upon the other
29308 The boat and men go on the sea.
29309 And so do mind and matter both
29310 Depend the one upon the other.
29311 -- Visuddhimagga (XVIII, 36)
29313 There is a Buddhist practice in which one imagines giving joy and the
29314 source of all joy to other people, thereby removing all their suffering.
29315 Though of course we cannot change their situation, I do feel that in some
29316 cases, through a genuine sense of caring and compassion, through our sharing
29317 in their plight, our attitude can help alleviate their suffering, if only
29318 mentally. However, the main point of this practice is to increase our inner
29319 strength and courage.
29320 I have chosen a few lines that I feel would be acceptable to people of all
29321 faiths, and even to those with no spiritual belief. When reading these lines,
29322 if you are a religious practitioner, you can reflect upon the divine form that
29323 you worship. Then, while reciting these verses, make the commitment to
29324 enhance your spiritual values. If you are not religious, you can reflect upon
29325 the fact that, fundamentally, all beings are equal to you in their wish for
29326 happiness and their desire to overcome suffering. Recognizing this, you make
29327 a pledge to develop a good heart. It is most important that we have a warm
29328 heart. As long as we are part of human society, it is very important to be a
29329 kind, warm-hearted person.
29330 May the poor find wealth,
29331 Those weak with sorrow find joy.
29332 May the forlorn find new hope,
29333 Constant happiness and prosperity.
29335 May the frightened cease to be afraid,
29336 And those bound be free.
29337 May the weak find power,
29338 And may their hearts join in friendship.
29339 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday
29340 Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Khyongla Rato
29343 Although there are as many categories of emptiness* as there are types of
29344 phenomena, when you realize the emptiness of one specific phenomenon, you also
29345 realize the emptiness of all phenomena. The ultimate nature, or emptiness, of
29346 all phenomena is of equal taste and of the same undifferentiable nature. Even
29347 though the nature of emptiness of all phenomena is the same, and all the
29348 different aspects of phenomena, such as whether they are good or bad, or the
29349 way they change, arise from the sphere of emptiness, you should understand
29350 that emptiness cannot be found apart from the subject or the object.
29351 Emptiness refers to an object's being free of intrinsic existence. Things
29352 depend on causes and conditions. This very dependence on causes and
29353 conditions signifies that phenomena lack independent, or intrinsic, existence.
29354 It also demonstrates how all the diverse aspects of things that we experience
29355 arise because they are by nature empty. When we talk about emptiness, we are
29356 not dealing with those different aspects, we are dealing with phenomena's
29358 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", trans. by Ven. Geshe
29359 Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and Jeremy Russell,
29360 published by Snow Lion Publications
29362 The Treasure Discoverers
29363 Most of the influential terma [hidden treasures or teachings] were
29364 purportedly secreted by Padmasambhava or his immediate disciples, and specific
29365 instructions were also laid down for each terma at the time of its
29366 concealment. The theory behind this system is that certain teachings would be
29367 especially effective at particular points in the future, and so they were
29368 hidden in a "time release" system which assured that at the appropriate time a
29369 terton would locate the teaching and disseminate it. When Padmasambhava hid
29370 these treasures, he prophesied the circumstances for the discovery of each
29371 terma and the terton who would find it. He predicted that there would be
29372 three "grand" tertons, eight "great" ones, twenty-one "powerful" ones, one
29373 hundred eight "intermediate," and one thousand "subsidiary" tertons. Most of
29374 these were to be recognized as emanations of Padmasambhava or his chief
29376 ...Many hidden treasures still remain undiscovered, awaiting the proper
29377 time for their dissemination. They continue to reinvigorate the Nyingma
29378 tradition, and a number have been incorporated into other lineages. The
29379 institution of terma serves as a link with the past of the tradition, a link
29380 that periodically revitalizes the present and points the way to the future.
29381 The system reflects the Mahayana ideal of skill in means, the ability to adapt
29382 teachings to changing circumstances.
29383 -- John Powers, "Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow Lion
29386 Practicing compassion will bring about the recognition of emptiness* as
29387 the true nature of the mind. When you practice virtuous actions of love and
29388 compassion on the relative level, you spontaneously realize the profound
29389 nature of emptiness, which is the absolute level. In turn, if you focus your
29390 meditation practice on emptiness, then your loving-kindness and compassion
29391 will spontaneously grow.
29392 These two natures, the absolute and the relative, are not opposites; they
29393 always arise together. They have the same nature; they are inseparable like a
29394 fire and its heat or the sun and its light. Compassion and emptiness are not
29395 like two sides of a coin. Emptiness and compassion are not two separate
29396 elements joined together; they are always coexistent.
29397 In Buddhism, emptiness does not mean the absence of apparent existence.
29398 Emptiness is not like a black hole or darkness, or like an empty house or an
29399 empty bottle. Emptiness is fullness and openness and flexibility. Because of
29400 emptiness it is possible for phenomena to function, for beings to see and
29401 hear, and for things to move and change. It is called emptiness because when
29402 we examine things we cannot find anything that substantially and solidly
29403 exists. There is nothing that has a truly existent nature. Everything we
29404 perceive appears through ever-changing causes and conditions, without an
29405 independent, solid basis. Although from a relative perspective things appear,
29406 they arise from emptiness and they dissolve into emptiness. All appearances
29407 are like water bubbles or the reflection of the moon in water.
29408 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche,
29409 "Opening to our Primordial Nature", published by Snow Lion Publications
29411 [Preceding story: Before reaching enlightenment, the Buddha was born as Prince
29412 Visvantara, who, despite facing many challenges and adversity, brought all of
29413 his heart and courage to bear against a single enemy--human suffering.]
29415 In giving we not only find wealth while in cyclic existence but we achieve the
29416 zenith of prosperity in supreme enlightenment. Therefore we all have to
29417 practice giving. A Bodhisattva's giving is not just overcoming miserliness
29418 and being generous to others; a pure wish to give is cultivated, and through
29419 developing more and more intimacy with it, such giving is enhanced infinitely.
29420 Therefore it is essential to have the firm mind of enlightenment rooted in
29421 great love and compassion and, from the depths of one's heart, to either give
29422 one's body, wealth and virtues literally to sentient beings as infinite as
29423 space, or to dedicate one's body, wealth and virtues for them while striving
29424 in all possible ways to enhance the wish to give infinitely. As mentioned in
29425 Engaging in Bodhisattva Activities and in The Precious Garland, we should
29426 literally give material help to the poor and needy, give teaching to others,
29427 and give protection to them, even the small insects, as much as we can. In
29428 the case of things which we are not able to part with, we should cultivate the
29429 wish to give them away and develop more and more intimacy with that wish.
29430 -- "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries by H.H. the Dalai Lama XIV on the
29431 Jatakamala", translated by Tenzin Dorjee, edited by Dexter Roberts
29433 Mad yogins are known in virtually every tradition in Tibet, but most often
29434 in the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages, and also in the Shije (Pacification) and
29435 Chod traditions. The Nyingma, Kagyu, and Chod traditions are the three with
29436 which Tangtong Gyalpo had the closest ties. One of the texts in Tangtong's
29437 Oral Transmission, a collection of teachings originally passed down from
29438 Tangtong, quotes the great yogini Machik Labdron's statement concerning proper
29439 yogic conduct following realization. In response to a question by one of her
29440 sons, Machik recommended that a practitioner act like a child with unfeigned
29441 spontaneity, like a lunatic with no regard for what is conventionally
29442 acceptable, like a leper with no attachment to his or her own physical health,
29443 and like a wild animal wandering in isolated and rough terrain.
29444 ...Guru Padmasambhava himself prophesied that Tangtong Gyalpo would care
29445 for living beings by means of unpredictable actions. Tangtong's unusual
29446 conduct began to manifest at an early age, and resembled traits noted in the
29447 lives of other mad yogins. He was first called insane by his father and the
29448 members of his village when, as a child, he subdued a malicious spirit
29449 responsible for an epidemic. Several other early incidents are mentioned in
29450 the biographies. When he went to take scholastic examinations at the renowned
29451 monastery of Sakya he earned the nickname Tsondru Nyonpa (Crazy Tsondru)
29452 because of his disinterest in explaining the scriptural definitions of the
29453 highest states of realization. He preferred to spend his time absorbed in
29454 actually experiencing these states. When he was later practicing deliberate
29455 behavior secretly in a vast and empty wasteland, the dakinis gave him five
29456 names indicating his high realization, one of which was Lungtong Nyonpa
29457 (Madman of the Empty Valley).
29458 -- Cyrus Stearns, "King of the Empty Plain: The Tibetan Iron Bridge
29459 Builder Tangtong Gyalpo", a Tsadra Foundation book, published by
29460 Snow Lion Publications
29462 ...In the Buddhist teachings, when we search for the causes of suffering,
29463 we find what is called 'the truth of the origin of suffering', namely that
29464 negative actions--karma--and the negative emotions that induce such actions
29465 are the causes of suffering.
29466 Talking about causes, if we take a step further and investigate more
29467 deeply, we find that the cause alone is not sufficient for bringing about the
29468 results. Causes themselves have to come in contact with co-operative
29469 circumstances or conditions. For instance, say we search for a material or
29470 substantial cause for this plant, we will find that it has a continuity
29471 stretching back into beginningless time.
29472 There are certain Buddhist texts that speak of space particles, existing
29473 before the evolution of this present universe. According to these texts, the
29474 space particles serve as the material and substantial cause for matter, such
29475 as this plant. Now if the essential and substantial cause for matter is
29476 traced to these space particles, which are all the same, how do we account for
29477 the diversity that we see in the material world? It is here that the question
29478 of conditions and circumstances comes into play. When these substantial
29479 causes come in contact with different circumstances and conditions, they give
29480 rise to different effects, that is, different kinds of matter. So we find
29481 that the cause alone is not sufficient for bringing about a result. What is
29482 required is an aggregation of many different conditions and circumstances.
29483 Although you can find certain differences among the Buddhist philosophical
29484 schools about how the universe came into being, the basic common question
29485 addressed is how the two fundamental principles--external matter and internal
29486 mind or consciousness--although distinct, affect one another. External causes
29487 and conditions are responsible for certain of our experiences of happiness and
29488 suffering. Yet we find that it is principally our own feelings, our thoughts
29489 and our emotions, that really determine whether we are going to suffer or be
29491 -- H.H. The Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
29492 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, Foreword
29493 by Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion
29496 Right now many of us wish for liberation, yet sometimes we cannot keep
29497 ourselves from creating the causes for cyclic existence. When we understand
29498 true suffering well, our wish for liberation will become firm. At present our
29499 resolve to reach liberation is not firm because we think of suffering, but not
29500 deeply. The deluded attitude believing that the unsatisfactoriness of change
29501 is true happiness easily arises in us because we are not yet deeply convinced
29502 that all happiness in cyclic existence is contaminated and is in fact only a
29503 variety of suffering. To remedy this, we should meditate on true suffering
29504 more often and explore its meaning deeply. Then our wish for liberation will
29506 We consider many things--clothes, food, good health, nice possessions,
29507 financial security, the higher rebirths--as true happiness. As a result, we
29508 are attached to them and create more causes for suffering in cyclic existence
29509 in order to gain them. Thinking that the human birth is something marvelous,
29510 we work at creating the causes that propel us toward it. In fact all we are
29511 doing is creating the cause for yet another rebirth in cyclic existence,
29512 together with all the problems that such a rebirth involves.
29513 If we understand that by its nature, cyclic existence is unsatisfactory,
29514 we will have a deep aversion to it. If we do not have a deep aversion to it,
29515 we will not be determined to be free, and therefore will not be able to
29516 destroy our self-grasping ignorance, which is the root of cyclic existence.
29517 In that case, we will not be able to attain liberation. However, when we
29518 deeply feel the extent to which we suffer in cyclic existence, we will
29519 automatically want to abandon the true origin of suffering, attain the true
29520 cessation, and meditate on the true path. Having realized true suffering, we
29521 will easily realize the other three of the four noble truths. Thus it is
29522 said: suffering is to be known. The origin is to be abandoned. The cessation
29523 is to be attained. The path is to be practiced. The determination to be free
29524 is the wish for ourselves to be free of cyclic existence. When we wish others
29525 to be free, that is compassion.
29526 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage:
29527 An Explanation of the Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", edited by
29528 Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
29530 Mantras are invocations to buddhas... prayers, or a combination of these.
29531 Tantric practitioners repeat them in order to forge karmic connections between
29532 themselves and meditational deities and to effect cognitive restructuring
29533 through internalizing the divine attributes that the mantra represents. A
29534 person who wishes to develop greater compassion, for instance, might recite
29535 the mantra of Avalokitesvara, who embodies this quality: om mani padme hum...
29536 [a] mantra [that] is well known to Tibetans. It represents for them the
29537 perfect compassion of Avalokitesvara, who they believe has taken a special
29538 interest in the spiritual welfare of the Tibetan people. He epitomizes
29539 universal compassion that is unsullied by any trace of negative emotions or
29540 mental afflictions.
29541 Among ordinary beings there are, of course, many acts of compassion, but
29542 these are generally tinged by self-interest, pride, or desire for recognition.
29543 Avalokitesvara's compassion, by contrast, is completely free from all
29544 afflictions and is so vast that it encompasses all sentient beings without
29545 exception and without distinction. People who wish to develop such a
29546 perspective recite Avalokitesvara's mantra over and over, meditating on its
29547 significance, and in so doing they try to restructure their minds in
29548 accordance with the cultivation of his exalted qualities. According to the
29550 'mani'... symbolizes the factors of method--the altruistic intention to
29551 become enlightened, compassion, and love. Just as a jewel is capable of
29552 removing poverty, so the altruistic mind of enlightenment is capable of
29553 removing the poverty, or difficulties, of cyclic existence and of solitary
29554 peace.... The two syllables, 'padme'... symbolize wisdom. Just as a lotus
29555 grows forth from mud but is not sullied by the faults of mud, so wisdom is
29556 capable of putting you in a situation of non-contradiction whereas there would
29557 be contradiction if you did not have wisdom.... Purity must be achieved by an
29558 indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable
29559 'hum', which indicates indivisibility.... Thus the six syllables, 'om mani
29560 padme hum', mean that in dependence on a path which is an indivisible union of
29561 method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into
29562 the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha.
29563 -- John Powers, "Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow
29566 "Now let's look at ultimate reality," the Dalai Lama said, pointing a
29567 little finger to his mug. "What exactly is it? We're seeing color, shape.
29568 But if we take away shape, color, material, what is mug? Where is the mug?
29569 This mug is a combination of particles: atoms, electrons, quarks. But each
29570 particle is not 'mug.' The same can be said about the four elements, the
29571 world, everything. The Buddha. We cannot find the Buddha. So that's the
29572 ultimate reality. If we're not satisfied with conventional reality, if we go
29573 deep down and try to find the real thing, we ultimately won't find it."
29574 Thus, the Dalai Lama was saying, the mug is empty. The term "mug" is
29575 merely a label, something we use to describe everyday reality. But each mug
29576 comes into existence because of a complex web of causes and conditions. It
29577 does not exist independently. It cannot come into being by itself, of its own
29579 For example: suppose I decide to make a black mug. To do this, I mix
29580 black clay and water, shape it to my liking, and fire the resulting mixture in
29581 an oven. Clay plus water turns into a mug because of my actions. But it
29582 exists because of the myriad different ways that atoms and molecules interact.
29583 And what about me, the creator of the black mug? If my parents had never met,
29584 the black mug might never have existed.
29585 Therefore the mug does not exist independently. It comes into being only
29586 through a complex web of relationships. In the Dalai Lama's own words, and
29587 this is the key concept in his worldview, the mug is "dependently originated."
29588 It came to be a mug because of a host of different factors, not under its own
29589 steam. It is empty. "Empty" is shorthand for "empty of intrinsic, inherent
29590 existence." Or to put it another way, empty is another word for
29592 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan, "The Wisdom of
29593 Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys"
29595 Buddha teaches that one should not practice extremes.... As Nagarjuna's
29596 "Precious Garland of Advice" says,
29597 Practice is not done
29598 By mortifying the body,
29599 Since you have not forsaken injuring others
29600 And are not helping others.
29601 When you disregard the basic needs of the body, you harm the many sentient
29602 organisms that live within the body. You should also avoid the opposite
29603 extreme of living in great luxury. It is possible to make use of good food,
29604 clothing, residence, and furnishings without producing afflictive emotions
29605 such as attachment, pride, and arrogance. The crucial point is the control of
29606 internal factors such as lust and attachment; external factors are not in and
29607 of themselves good or bad. It is not suitable if attachment increases toward
29608 even mediocre food, clothing, and so forth.
29609 Contentment is the key. If you have contentment with material things, you
29610 are truly rich. Without it, even if you are a billionaire, you will not have
29611 happiness. You will always feel hungry and want more and more and more,
29612 making you not rich but poor. If you seek contentment externally, it will
29613 never happen. Your desire will never be fulfilled. Our texts speak of a king
29614 who gained control over the world, at which point he began thinking about
29615 taking over the lands of the gods. In the end his good qualities were
29616 destroyed by pride. Contentment is necessary for happiness, so try to be
29617 satisfied with adequate food, clothing, and shelter.
29618 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving
29619 Relationships", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
29621 There is another way of speaking about the two types of meditation. In this
29622 case, they are differentiated into 1) meditation that perceives the object and
29623 2) meditation in which our mind is transformed into a specific affective
29624 state. An example of the former is meditating on impermanence and emptiness.
29625 These are subtle objects that we must use analytical meditation to perceive.
29626 An example of the latter is meditation on the four immeasurables
29627 (brahmaviharas)--love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Here we are not
29628 trying to perceive a subtle object, but are practicing to transform our minds
29629 into those mental states. For example, everyone admires the quality of love,
29630 but we cannot just say, "I should love everyone," and expect our deepest
29631 feelings to change. First, we must free our minds from the gross obstacles of
29632 attachment to friends, hostility to people who threaten or harm us, and apathy
29633 towards strangers. On this basis, we then train our mind to recognize the
29634 kindness of others, which arouses in us a natural wish to reciprocate and
29635 share our kindness with them. After this we meditate on love and cultivate a
29636 genuine wish for all sentient beings to have happiness and its causes.
29637 Initially that feeling will arise in us but will not be stable. Anger may
29638 still flash into our mind making our good feelings towards others disappear.
29639 We need to cultivate love continuously and do so with a focused mind. The
29640 greater our concentration, the more stable and penetrative the experience
29642 -- Thubten Chodron, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the Path",
29643 foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion Publications
29645 ...for the Christian practitioner, the Creator and the acceptance of the
29646 Creator as almighty, is a very important factor within that tradition in order
29647 to develop self-discipline, compassion, or forgiveness and to increase them in
29648 one's intimate relationship with God. That's something very essential. In
29649 addition, when God is seen as absolute and almighty, the concept that
29650 everything is relative becomes a little bit difficult. However, if one's
29651 understanding of God is in terms of an ultimate nature of reality or ultimate
29652 truth, then it is possible to have a kind of unified approach.
29653 ...As to one's personal religion, I think this must be based on one's own
29654 mental disposition.... Generally speaking, I think it is better to practice
29655 according to your own traditional background, and certainly you can use some
29656 of the Buddhist techniques. Without accepting rebirth theory or the
29657 complicated philosophy, simply use certain techniques to increase your power
29658 of patience and compassion, forgiveness, and things like that.
29659 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
29660 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow
29663 When we compare two ancient spiritual traditions like Buddhism and
29664 Christianity, what we see is a striking similarity between the narratives of
29665 the founding masters: in the case of Christianity, Jesus Christ, and in the
29666 case of Buddhism, the Buddha. I see a very important parallel: in the very
29667 lives of the [founders] the essence of their teachings is demonstrated. For
29668 example... the essence of the Buddha's teaching is embodied in the Four Noble
29669 Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the
29670 truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to this
29671 cessation. These Four Noble Truths are very explicitly and clearly
29672 exemplified in the life of... the Buddha himself. I feel [it] is the same
29673 with the life of Christ. If you look at the life of Jesus, you will see all
29674 the essential practices and teachings of Christianity exemplified. And in the
29675 lives of both Jesus Christ and the Buddha, it is only through hardship,
29676 dedication and commitment, and by standing firm on one's principles that one
29677 can grow spiritually and attain liberation. That seems to be a central and
29679 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", compiled and edited
29682 With the achievement of quiescence, the attention is drawn inwards and is
29683 maintained continuously, single-pointedly upon its object. Tsongkhapa
29684 emphasizes that genuine quiescence is necessarily preceded by an experience of
29685 an extraordinary degree of mental and physical pliancy, which entails an
29686 unprecedented sense of mental and physical fitness and buoyancy.
29687 In the state of meditative equipoise, only the aspects of awareness,
29688 clarity, and joy of the mind appear, and all one's other sense faculties
29689 remain dormant. Thus, while one's consciousness seems as if it has become
29690 indivisible with space, one lacks any sensation of having a body; and when
29691 rising from that state, it seems as if one's body is suddenly coming into
29692 being. When genuine quiescence is achieved, one's attention can effortlessly
29693 be maintained for hours, even days, on end, with no interference by either
29694 laxity or excitation.
29695 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Balancing the Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist Approach
29696 to Refining Attention", published by Snow Lion Publications
29698 In Mahayana Buddhism, when one takes the bodhisattva vow, one pledges to
29699 work tirelessly in this life and all future lives to awaken oneself and purify
29700 oneself in order to help all other beings attain freedom from suffering
29701 through spiritual enlightenment. One vows to help beings whenever possible,
29702 and a profound way of doing this is to give a being the gift of life through
29703 an act of kindness. This can take the form of helping an animal in danger
29704 cross the road to safety before being struck by a vehicle or freeing an animal
29705 that is in captivity before it is killed by buying it from the captor and
29706 letting it roam free. If one is in a position to help save another's life--
29707 whether a human or an animal--one must practice fearless kindness to help the
29708 other being in danger.
29709 In Tibetan Buddhism, it is believed that due to the countless incarnations
29710 all beings have undergone throughout time, at one point or another any given
29711 living creature has been one's mother in a past life. Therefore, it is viewed
29712 as an obligation to repay the kindness of those who are referred to as "mother
29713 sentient beings." If your own mother in this life were in danger, you would
29714 certainly do whatever you could to save her life. Similarly, dedicated
29715 holders of the bodhisattva vow feel this kind of urgency to save the lives of
29716 all "mother sentient beings."
29717 -- Chatral Rinpoche, "Compassionate Action", edited, introduced and
29718 annotated by Zach Larson, published by Snow Lion Publications
29720 In the frenzy of modern life we lose sight of the real value of humanity.
29721 People become the sum total of what they produce. Human beings act like
29722 machines whose function is to make money. This is absolutely wrong. The
29723 purpose of making money is the happiness of humankind, not the other way
29724 around. Humans are not for money, money is for humans. We need enough to
29725 live, so money is necessary, but we also need to realize that if there is too
29726 much attachment to wealth, it does not help at all. As the saints of India
29727 and Tibet tell us, the wealthier one becomes, the more suffering one endures.
29728 ...Eating, working, and making money are meaningless in themselves.
29729 However, even a small act of compassion grants meaning and purpose to our
29731 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life",
29732 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
29734 Unlike the Lesser Vehicle tenet systems, which teach only a selflessness of
29735 persons, the Great Vehicle tenet systems teach that the most profound reality,
29736 the most subtle and important type of selflessness, is a selflessness, or
29737 emptiness, that is a quality of all phenomena. They hold that the bodhisattva
29738 trains in altruistically motivated meditation on the emptiness of all
29739 phenomena, thus preparing for the omniscience of buddhahood. Some Great
29740 Vehicle systems maintain that Lesser Vehicle practitioners do not realize the
29741 profound emptiness of phenomena at all and are therefore unable to overcome
29742 the obstructions to omniscience. However, the highest system, the Middle Way
29743 Consequence system, holds that persons on Lesser Vehicle paths do realize
29744 emptiness, but are unable to achieve omniscience on their paths because their
29745 wisdom is not empowered by association with altruism and altruistically
29746 motivated actions of giving, ethics, patience, etc.
29747 -- Guy Newland, "Appearance and Reality: The Two Truths in the Four
29748 Buddhist Tenet Systems", published by Snow Lion Publications
29750 Selflessness in Context: Ultimate Bodhichitta
29751 Let us return for a moment to the beginning of [the Heart] Sutra where the
29752 Buddha enters into the meditative absorption called "appearance of the
29753 profound" and Avalokiteshvara beholds the practice of the profound perfection
29754 of wisdom. Generally speaking, the expression "appearance of the profound"
29755 refers to the bodhisattva deeds, which are encompassed in the practice of the
29756 six perfections. Here, however, the expression refers particularly to the
29757 perfection of wisdom, known in Sanskrit as prajnaparamita. What the text
29758 means by "perfection of wisdom" is a direct, unmediated realization of
29759 emptiness that is also called "ultimate bodhichitta." This is not the direct
29760 realization of emptiness alone; rather it is this direct realization in union
29761 with bodhichitta--the aspiration to become a buddha in order to free all
29762 beings. This union of wisdom and method constitutes the first bhumi, or level
29763 of bodhisattva attainment.
29764 The importance of this altruistic aspiration cannot be overstated.
29765 Bodhichitta is not only important as a motivating factor at the beginning of
29766 practice, it is also important as a complementary and a reinforcing factor
29767 during every stage of the path. The bodhichitta aspiration is twofold,
29768 comprised both of the wish to help others and of the wish to become
29769 enlightened so that one's assistance will be supremely effective.
29770 --from Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama's Heart of Wisdom
29771 Teachings by H.H. the Dalai Lama, translated & edited by Thupten Jinpa
29773 From "The Prayer Requested by Namke Nyingbo" by Padmasambhava
29775 All these things of the outer environment and the beings therein
29776 That come into sight as the objects of your eyes like this,
29777 They may appear, but leave them in the sphere free from clinging to a self.
29778 Since they are pure of perceiver and perceived, they are the luminous-empty
29780 I pray to the guru in whom attachment is self-liberated,
29781 I pray to Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
29783 All these sounds, taken as pleasant or unpleasant,
29784 That resound as the objects of your ears like this,
29785 Leave them in the sphere of inconceivable, empty resonance.
29786 Empty resonance, unborn and unceasing, is the Victor's speech.
29787 I pray to the words of the Victor that resound and yet are empty,
29788 I pray to Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
29790 However these thoughts of afflictions' five poisons,
29791 Which stir as objects in your mind like this, may appear,
29792 Do not mess around with them through a mind that rushes ahead into the future
29793 or lingers in the past.
29794 Through leaving their movement in its own place, they uncoil as the
29796 I pray to the guru whose awareness is self-liberated,
29797 I pray to Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
29799 Grant your blessings that the mind stream of someone like me is liberated
29800 Through the compassion of the Tathagatas of the three times,
29801 So that objects, appearing as if perceived outside, become pure,
29802 That my very mind, perceiving as if inside, becomes liberated,
29803 And that, in between, luminosity will recognize its own face.
29805 -- "Straight from the Heart: Buddhist Pith Instructions", translated and
29806 introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, published by Snow Lion Publications
29808 Some people feel that although it may be right to curb feelings of intense
29809 hatred which can cause us to be violent and even to kill, we are in danger of
29810 losing our independence when we restrain our emotions and discipline the mind.
29811 Actually, the opposite is true. Like their counterparts of love and
29812 compassion, anger and the afflictive emotions can never be used up. They
29813 have, rather, a propensity to increase, like a river flooding in summer when
29814 the snow melts, so that far from being free, our minds are enslaved and
29815 rendered helpless by them. When we indulge our negative thoughts and
29816 feelings, inevitably we become accustomed to them. As a result, gradually we
29817 become more prone to them and more controlled by them. And we become
29818 habituated to exploding in the face of displeasing circumstances.
29819 Inner peace, which is the principal characteristic of happiness, and anger
29820 cannot coexist without undermining one another. Indeed, negative thoughts and
29821 emotions undermine the very causes of peace and happiness. In fact, when we
29822 think properly, it is totally illogical to seek happiness if we do nothing to
29823 restrain angry, spiteful, and malicious thoughts and emotions. Consider that
29824 when we become angry, we often use harsh words. Harsh words can destroy
29825 friendship. Since happiness arises in the context of our relationships with
29826 others, if we destroy friendships, we undermine one of the very conditions of
29828 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Ethics for the New Millennium", edited by
29829 Alexander Norman, translated by Dr. Thupten Jinpa
29833 Psychologists talk about people who are co-dependent because they don't
29834 have a sense of self. What psychologists mean when they say a person has no
29835 sense of self is very different from what the Buddha meant by no-self or
29836 selflessness. People with psychological problems actually have a very strong
29837 sense of self in the Buddhist sense, although they may not in the
29838 psychological sense of the word. Psychologically, they don't see themselves
29839 as efficacious individuals in the world, but they still have a very strong
29840 sense of "I": "I am worthless." When somebody criticizes them, they don't
29841 like it. They get into co-dependent relationships to protect or to please
29842 this "I." When they fall into self-pity, their sense of an inherently
29843 existent "I" is very strong. Thus they still have self-grasping even though
29844 they lack a psychologically healthy sense of self.
29845 Buddhism recognizes two kinds of sense of self. There's one sense of self
29846 that is healthy and necessary to be efficacious on the path. The object of
29847 this sense of self is the conventionally existent "I." The other sense of
29848 self grasps at an inherently existent self that never has and never will
29849 exist. Within Buddhism, when we talk about realizing emptiness, we're
29850 negating the false self, this self that appears inherently existent to us.
29851 -- Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga Method of
29852 Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion
29855 Question: If a person views the self and other phenomena as being empty of
29856 any inherent existence, is it then, in that state, possible for them to take
29857 any animate or inanimate phenomenon as their object, and through the power of
29858 imputation or words, enable that object to actually take on a manifesting role
29859 with the qualities which we view objects to have?
29861 His Holiness: This is an instance of not properly understanding the
29862 meaning of "lack of inherent existence." If we think that "emptiness" means
29863 things cannot function, then, with an improper understanding of the view of
29864 emptiness, one will have fallen into nihilism. So, because one has failed to
29865 reconcile emptiness and the fact that things work, this view is incorrect.
29866 That is why it is said that the meaning of emptiness is to be understood in
29867 terms of dependent arising.
29868 Now, since the meaning of emptiness is to be explained in terms of
29869 dependent arising, we can only explain something as arising dependently if
29870 there is a basis, that is, some thing that is dependent. Hence, such a basis
29871 must exist. We see then that when we speak of dependent arising, we are
29872 indicating that things work. Dependent arising proves that things have no
29873 inherent existence, through the fact that things work in dependence on each
29874 other. The fact that things work and the fact that they do so in dependence,
29875 one on the other, eliminates the possibility of their being independent. This
29876 in turn precludes the possibility of inherent existence, since, to inherently
29877 exist means to be independent. Hence, the understanding of emptiness, of the
29878 the emptiness of a kind of inherent existence that is independent, boils down
29879 to understanding dependent arising.
29880 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
29881 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
29883 In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the most profound and commonly
29884 practiced teachings are those of the Vajrayana. Within this powerful system
29885 of skillful means, the supreme view and most potent methods are found in the
29886 teachings and practices of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. These instructions
29887 are regarded as the pinnacle of the teachings and as the most direct path to
29888 realizing the nature of mind and the reality of the world.
29889 The instructions of the Dzogchen lineage are used to directly point out
29890 the nature of mind and bring the experience of enlightenment into our ordinary
29891 life. These teachings are known as "pith instructions," the pure,
29892 quintessential knowledge that cuts through all confusion and gets straight to
29893 the point. There is a saying, "Don't beat around the bush," meaning, "Get to
29894 the point." That is Dzogchen.
29895 In many ways, these teachings go beyond scripture and the formality of
29896 spiritual techniques. These two do have their place, since it is important to
29897 study scripture and meditate in a step-by-step manner. Yet, at some point we
29898 also must connect directly with the nature of mind. We have to strike the
29899 crucial point, the enlightened state, and leap directly into experiencing and
29900 realizing the true nature of our mind.
29901 -- The Third Dzogchen Rinpoche, "Great Perfection: Outer and Inner
29902 Preliminaries", trans. by Cortland Dahl, intro. by Dzogchen Ponlop,
29903 published by Snow Lion Publications
29905 Dzogchen teaches that practice conducted with contriving, rough, fleeting
29906 minds cannot bring enlightenment. Only practice with the deep awareness of
29907 non-contriving rigpa--pure awareness--can bring us to the state of a Buddha.
29908 We can understand this in the same way as we do the statement that practice of
29909 the yoga class of tantras and below cannot bring us enlightenment by itself.
29910 The ultimate, deepest reason why it cannot is that the pathways of practice of
29911 these levels of teaching cannot by themselves make manifest the deep awareness
29912 of subtlest clear light mind. Without the manifestation of the deep awareness
29913 of clear light mind, we do not have the perpetrating causes for an
29914 enlightening body and enlightening mind of a Buddha--causes that are in the
29915 same uncommon category of phenomena as a Buddha's body and mind. Therefore,
29916 no matter how much we practice with pathway minds of yoga tantra and below, we
29917 are never able to attain to enlightenment on their basis alone.
29918 ...when we make clear light mind of deep awareness prominent or enhanced
29919 through techniques presented in the anuttarayoga tantra texts, and then
29920 transform it into the nature of being a pathway mind, only then do we have
29921 what can actualize an enlightening body and enlightening mind of a Buddha.
29922 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
29923 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
29925 Whenever you consider there is bliss, and the objective conditions for
29926 bliss occur, if you fall under the control of that by becoming arrogant or
29927 conceited, then that will fester as an obstruction to the spiritual path.
29928 Rather than thinking about what has caused this happiness, which most probably
29929 is the accumulation of merit or the removal of obscurations, as soon as the
29930 bliss occurs, you think, "That's my nature." Based on that, you become
29931 arrogant or lazy, thinking, "Well, I've accomplished it." This is the
29932 greatest obstacle to the spiritual path. This is what creates the realms
29933 of deva-gods. Oftentimes it is said that people can handle only a little bit
29934 of felicity, but they can handle a lot of adversity. This is because
29935 happiness on the spiritual path is the most difficult thing to handle. Once
29936 it arises, that's where the path stops.
29937 This does not mean that it is necessary to give it all up. Giving up
29938 happiness is not the practice. The main point is not to become mesmerized by
29939 happiness as the end result. You realize that, "Ah, now, the good quality of
29940 this is that I am fortunate, and this is another result of the great fortune
29941 of the path and the result of the accumulation of merit and wholesome deeds.
29942 Even more than ever, I will carry on with the work at hand to achieve
29943 liberation from cyclic existence." So with more diligence and more courage,
29944 you continue listening to teachings, contemplating, meditating, and
29945 appreciating this precious human rebirth.
29946 -- Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche, "Meditation, Transformation, and Dream Yoga",
29947 translated by Sangye Khandro and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow
29950 As to what might be the mechanism through which karma plays a causal role
29951 in the evolution of sentience, I find helpful some of the explanations given
29952 in the Vajrayana traditions, often referred to by modern writers as esoteric
29953 Buddhism. According to the Guhyasamaja tantra, a principal tradition within
29954 Vajrayana Buddhism, at the most fundamental level, no absolute division can be
29955 made between mind and matter. Matter in its subtlest form is prana, a vital
29956 energy which is inseparable from consciousness. These two are different
29957 aspects of an indivisible reality. Prana is the aspect of mobility, dynamism,
29958 and cohesion, while consciousness is the aspect of cognition and the capacity
29959 for reflective thinking. So according to the Guhyasamaja tantra, when a world
29960 system comes into being, we are witnessing the play of this energy and
29961 consciousness reality.
29962 ...Despite the success of the Darwinian narrative, I do not believe that
29963 all the elements of the story are in place. To begin with, although Darwin's
29964 theory gives a coherent account of the development of life on this planet and
29965 the various principles underlying it, such as natural selection, I am not
29966 persuaded that it answers the fundamental question of the origin of life.
29967 Darwin himself, I gather, did not see this as an issue. Furthermore, there
29968 appears to be a certain circularity in the notion of "survival of the
29969 fittest." The theory of natural selection maintains that, of the random
29970 mutations that occur in the genes of a given species, those that promote the
29971 greatest chance of survival are most likely to succeed. However, the only
29972 way this hypothesis can be verified is to observe the characteristics of
29973 those mutations that have survived. So in a sense, we are stating simply
29974 this: "Because these genetic mutations have survived, they are the ones that
29975 had the greatest chance of survival."
29976 From the Buddhist perspective, the idea of these mutations being purely
29977 random events is deeply unsatisfying for a theory that purports to explain the
29978 origin of life. ...One empirical problem in Darwinism's focus on the
29979 competitive survival of individuals, which is defined in terms of an
29980 organism's struggle for individual reproductive success, has consistently been
29981 how to explain altruism, whether in the sense of collaborative behavior, such
29982 as food sharing or conflict resolution among animals like chimpanzees or acts
29983 of self-sacrifice. There are many examples, not only among human beings but
29984 among other species as well, of individuals who put themselves in danger to
29986 ...From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical
29987 assumption--but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is
29988 material and originated out of pure chance.
29989 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of
29990 Science and Spirituality"
29992 Praising others should be part of our daily life and a component of our
29993 Dharma practice. Imagine what our life would be like if we trained our minds
29994 to dwell on others' talents and good attributes. We would feel much happier
29995 and so would they! We would get along better with others, and our families,
29996 work environments, and living situations would be much more harmonious. We
29997 plants the seeds from such positive actions on our mindstream, creating the
29998 cause for harmonious relationships and success in our spiritual and temporal
30000 An interesting experiment is to try to say something nice to or about
30001 someone every day for a month. Try it. It makes us much more aware of what
30002 we say and why. It encourages us to change our perspective so that we notice
30003 others' good qualities. Doing so also improves our relationships
30005 A few years ago, I gave this as a homework assignment at a Dharma class,
30006 encouraging people to try to praise even someone they didn't like very much.
30007 The next week I asked the students how they did. One man said that the first
30008 day he had to make something up in order to speak positively to a fellow
30009 colleague. But after that, the man was so much nicer to him that it was easy
30010 to see his good qualities and speak about them!
30011 -- Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion Publications
30013 Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many. -- Unknown
30015 To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.
30018 He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
30019 -- Benjamin Franklin
30021 If, after having performed a virtuous action and accumulated its potency,
30022 that potency remained without degenerating until its fruit issued forth in
30023 either this or a future life, it would not be so fragile. But that is not the
30024 case. Rather, the generation of a strong nonvirtuous state of mind, such as
30025 anger, overpowers the capacity of a virtuously established potency so that it
30026 cannot issue forth, much like scorching a seed. Conversely, the generation of
30027 a strong virtuous attitude overpowers potencies established by nonvirtues,
30028 making them unable to issue their effects. Thus it is necessary not only to
30029 achieve many powerful constructive causes but also to avoid contrary forces
30030 that would cause those beneficial causes to degenerate.
30031 The good actions required for accumulating these causes, or potencies,
30032 arise from a tamed mind, whereas bad actions arise from an untamed mind.
30033 Common beings like us have been accustomed to an untamed mind since
30034 beginningless time. Given this predisposition, we can conclude that actions
30035 performed with an untamed mind are more powerful for us and actions performed
30036 with a tamed mind are weaker. It is important to appreciate that this
30037 excellent life support of a human body that we now possess is a wholesome
30038 result of many powerful good actions from a tamed mind in the past. It was
30039 very difficult to gain, and, since it is very rare, you must take care to use
30040 it well, making sure that it is not wasted.
30041 ...If this human endowment, so difficult to attain, were stable and
30042 permanent--not prone to deterioration--there would be time later to make use
30043 of it. However, this life-support system is fragile and easily disintegrates
30044 from many external and internal causes. Aryadeva's "Four Hundred Stanzas on
30045 the Yogic Deeds of Bodhisattvas" says that once the body depends on the four
30046 elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, which themselves oppose each other,
30047 physical happiness is just an occasional balance of these elements, not an
30049 ...So this human body is a precious endowment, potent and yet fragile.
30050 Simply by virtue of being alive, you are at a very important juncture, and
30051 carry a great responsibility. Powerful good can be achieved for yourself and
30052 others, so becoming distracted by the minor affairs of this lifetime would be
30053 a tremendous waste. You should make wishes to use this lifetime in this body
30054 effectively and make petitions to your guru, the three refuges, and other
30055 sources of help. In doing so, urge yourself on from the inside and seek
30056 assistance from the outside.....
30057 In sum, since this human body, which supports your life, is beneficial,
30058 was difficult to gain, and easily disintegrates, you should use it for your
30059 benefit and that of others. Benefits come from a tamed mind: When your mind
30060 is peaceful, relaxed, and happy, external pleasures such as good food,
30061 clothing, and conversation make things even better, but their absence does not
30062 overpower you. If your mind is not peaceful and tamed, no matter how
30063 marvelous the external circumstances are, you will be burdened by frights,
30064 hopes, and fears. With a tamed mind, you will enjoy wealth or poverty, health
30065 or sickness, you can even die happily. With a tamed mind, having many friends
30066 is wonderful, but if you have no friends, it is all right, too. The root of
30067 your own happiness and welfare rests with a peaceful and tamed mind.
30068 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Mind of Clear Light: Advice on Living Well
30069 and Dying Consciously", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
30071 One of the reasons there is a need to adopt a strong countermeasure
30072 against someone who harms you is that, if you let it pass, there is a danger
30073 of that person becoming habituated to extremely negative actions, which in the
30074 long run will cause that person's own downfall and is very destructive for the
30075 individual himself or herself. Therefore a strong countermeasure, taken out
30076 of compassion or a sense of concern for the other, is necessary. When you are
30077 motivated by that realization, then there is a sense of concern as part of
30078 your motive for taking that strong measure.
30079 ...One of the reasons why there is some ground to feel compassionate
30080 toward a perpetrator of crime or an aggressor is that the aggressor, because
30081 he or she is perpetrating a crime, is at the causal stage, accumulating the
30082 causes and conditions that later lead to undesirable consequences. So, from
30083 that point of view, there is enough ground to feel compassionate toward the
30085 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
30086 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published
30087 by Snow Lion Publications
30089 What do you think would be the chief obstacle in recognizing that each
30090 individual person has been kind to you? In my case, I was afraid of having to
30091 return the kindness, because then I'd be under the control of these people. I
30092 didn't want to do what my parents wanted me to do, although they gave me a lot
30093 of slack--I left college after my first year, went to the woods of Vermont,
30094 went to Tahiti, all on my own with whatever cash I earned. I didn't fit into
30095 the upper-middle-class community where we lived. I didn't want their control;
30096 the lifestyle they were pushing on me was completely unappealing. Therefore,
30097 I refused to recognize their kindness.
30098 However, assuming a debt with respect to every sentient being differs
30099 greatly from having a debt to a few. In this meditation, you start with
30100 friends, then neutral persons, and then enemies and contemplate: "I will
30101 return the debt of kindness that I have with this person through helping her
30102 or him achieve happiness." It is easy to determine that the response to all
30103 sentient beings' kindness cannot be to do everything they want, since, with so
30104 many people, what they want from you would be at cross-purposes. You cannot
30105 even do everything your mother of this lifetime wants you to do, though you
30106 know her advice is, for the most part, motivated by kindness....
30107 Those who help us--our parents, for instance--often attain power over us
30108 for that very reason: "Do as I say because I have helped you." Thus, for some,
30109 it becomes almost a mental habit to refuse to recognize those who have helped
30110 us, because they otherwise would attain some power over us. Still, we know we
30111 should return their many kindnesses. That is one reason why the practice of
30112 reflecting, "This person has helped me in many intimate ways and thus I must
30113 do something in return," gets to be uncomfortable, but when it is extended to
30114 more and more beings, we have to find a way of intending to return their
30115 kindness without coming under their misguided influence.
30116 ...one cannot do everything all those sentient beings want. There are so
30117 many of them, and they want such contradictory things. Besides, to fulfill
30118 what they temporarily want may not be the best way to help them. The greatest
30119 of all ways to return their kindness is to help them become free from all
30120 suffering and to assist in the process of becoming liberated from cyclic
30121 existence and attaining the bliss of Buddhahood. It is important to realize
30122 here in the step of developing an intention to return others' kindness that
30123 acknowledging a debt does not mean that you must do what they say. Otherwise,
30124 you might hold back from the truth of their attentive care.
30125 --Jeffrey Hopkins, "A Truthful Heart: Buddhist Practices for Connecting
30126 with Others", foreword by the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion
30129 ...Nagarjuna's Fundamental Treatise says, "That which arises dependently
30130 we explain as emptiness. This [emptiness] is dependent designation; this is
30131 the middle way." His Refutation of Objections says, "I bow down to the
30132 Buddha, the unequaled, supreme teacher, who taught that emptiness, dependent
30133 arising, and the middle way hold a single meaning."
30134 For Tsong-kha-pa, the compatibility of emptiness and dependent arising is
30135 the very heart of the Madhyamaka view and the key to the path. Dependent
30136 arising means that things come into being in dependence upon causes and
30137 conditions. Understanding dependent arising correctly refutes the idea that
30138 things exist in and of themselves--because they must depend on other things.
30139 In the same moment, it also refutes the nihilist extreme--because it shows
30140 that things do arise, they do come into existence, and they affect one
30141 another. Thus, Tsong-kha-pa advises that if you think that you may have found
30142 the profound view of emptiness, you should check to see if you have negated
30143 too much. Can this "emptiness" you have discovered be reconciled with the
30144 mere existence of things that arise interdependently? If not, then you are
30145 certainly mistaken.
30146 ...The point is that one cannot become a buddha without both compassionate
30147 action and nondual wisdom--and one cannot have these two types of path without
30148 both of the two truths, conventional and ultimate. If only emptiness existed
30149 and there were, in fact, no conventional truths, then there would be no living
30150 beings, no suffering to relieve; thus there would be no compassionate action;
30151 and thus there would be no buddhahood. Therefore, maintaining the
30152 compatibility of the two truths--the compatibility of emptiness and dependent
30153 arising--is crucial to the whole of the Dharma.
30154 -- Guy Newland, "Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's
30155 Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path", published by Snow Lion
30158 Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
30159 -- William S. Burroughs
30161 ...let us discuss true sources of suffering. The fact that sufferings are
30162 not always produced but are produced in some places at some times and cease at
30163 some times and in some places indicates that they are caused. Logically, it
30164 can be said that sufferings are caused because of being produced occasionally.
30165 If sufferings were produced causelessly, either they would never exist or they
30166 would always exist.
30167 Since sufferings are caused, one needs to look into what their causes are.
30168 In the Buddhist systems, the causes are explained to be contaminated actions
30169 and afflictive emotions....
30170 For instance, if I had an angry feeling, this could serve as a motivating
30171 force that would lead to a harsh attitude, harsh speech, and harsh physical
30172 gestures. Since the anger that serves as the motivating factor is a
30173 defIlement--an afflictive emotion--the physical and verbal actions done
30174 through that motivating force are negative karmas, negative actions. Through
30175 them, the atmosphere immediately changes into one of tension. Right away, I
30176 might not feel the effects of those actions, perhaps even feeling that I had
30177 gained a victory over someone, even shouting, "I have won." However, later I
30178 will feel very sorry and shy, deep down experiencing a guilty conscience.
30179 Similarly, those around me would immediately lose their tranquility and peace.
30180 These are painful results of actions impelled by a bad motivation. This is
30181 the law of karma--motivation, action, result.
30182 Conversely, a good, open, sincere motivation such as compassion with a
30183 deep respect for others impels verbal and physical actions that immediately
30184 create a peaceful, harmonious, enjoyable atmosphere. Due to that, I feel
30185 happy and calm, enjoying that atmosphere, and others around me also enjoy the
30186 same. Therefore, bad motivation creates problems, suffering, and pain,
30187 whereas good motivation creates happiness and peacefulness--something good.
30188 This is the general explanation. On a deeper level, right at the time of
30189 an action, predisposing potencies are instilled in the consciousness. The
30190 performance of an action establishes a predisposing potency in the mind that,
30191 in the future, will serve as the causal condition for one's experiencing a
30192 good or bad effect.
30193 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
30194 Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
30195 published by Snow Lion Publications
30197 (Each day before breakfast the founder and abbess of Sravasti Abbey, Thubten
30198 Chodron, gives a morning motivation for residents and guests. Below is a
30199 teaching given during March 2008.)
30203 Have you ever had this experience? You walk outside, and all of a sudden
30204 the silence strikes you--it's in such sharp contrast to the chatter that's
30205 going on in the mind.
30206 We live in a very quiet place. We walk outside and it's pretty quiet--a
30207 few birds chirping, sun shining. Then suddenly the chatter in the mind stops
30208 because we see that it's just chatter. It's in such stark contrast to the
30209 silence that's outside.
30210 We want to learn to notice that chatter before we even have to walk
30211 outside. And we want to be able to find that quiet place inside ourselves and
30212 keep it with us, so that even when we're in a place where there is a lot of
30213 noise, the mind can be quiet.
30214 All that mental chatter is basically negative conceptualization. If we
30215 were thinking about emptiness or developing compassion with that kind of
30216 mental activity, fine! Continue that outside, inside, everywhere. But most
30217 of the time what's going on is, "I like this. I don't like this. I want
30218 this. I don't want that. Why does this person do this? Why don't they do
30219 that?" That kind of mental activity makes the mind quite stressful as well
30220 as accumulates negative karma and wastes a great deal of time.
30221 As soon as we can catch it and be aware of what's going on in our mind,
30222 and come back to that silent space inside, the more peaceful we'll be. Our
30223 lives will be more productive in terms of having the Dharma grow in our
30224 hearts, and we'll be more focused in whatever daily activities we're doing.
30225 We won't be quite so distracted.
30226 -- Thubten Chodron, author of numerous books, including Buddhism for
30227 Beginners; Taming the Mind; Open Heart, Clear Mind; and Working
30230 ...if people have compassion, naturally that's something they can count
30231 on; even if they have economic problems and their fortune declines, they still
30232 have something to share with fellow human beings. World economies are always
30233 so tenuous and we are subject to so many losses in life, but a compassionate
30234 attitude is something that we can always carry with us.
30235 ...Of course, in attempting to explain to someone the importance of
30236 compassion, in some cases, you might be dealing with a very hardened,
30237 individualistic, and selfish person, someone concerned only with her or his
30238 own interests. And it is even possible that there are people who may not have
30239 the capacity to empathize with even someone whom they love or who may be close
30240 to them. But even to such people, it is still possible to present the
30241 importance of compassion and love on the grounds that it's the best way to
30242 fulfill their self-interests. They wish to have good health, live a longer
30243 life, and have peace of mind, happiness, and joy. And if these are things
30244 that they desire, I've heard that there is scientific evidence that these
30245 things can be enhanced by feelings of love and compassion.
30246 ...educating someone about these facts and scientific studies could
30247 certainly encourage some people to cultivate a more compassionate state of
30248 mind. But I think that, even aside from scientific studies, there are other
30249 arguments that people could understand and appreciate from their own practical
30250 or direct everyday experience. For example, you could point out that lack of
30251 compassion leads to a certain ruthlessness. There are many examples
30252 indicating that at some level deep down, ruthless people generally suffer from
30253 a kind of unhappiness and discontent, people like Stalin and Hitler. Such
30254 people suffer from a kind of nagging sense of insecurity and fear. Even when
30255 they are sleeping I think that sense of fear remains... these people lack
30256 something that you can find in a more compassionate person--a sense of
30257 freedom, a sense of abandonment, so when you sleep you can relax and let go.
30258 Ruthless people never have that experience. Something is always gripping
30259 them; there is some kind of hold on them, and they aren't able to experience
30260 that feeling of letting go, that sense of freedom.
30261 ...There are always different degrees of benefit that one might receive
30262 from practicing various methods and techniques, depending on one's particular
30263 circumstances.... First, through learning, thoroughly understanding the value
30264 of compassion--this gives you a feeling of conviction and determination.
30265 Then, employing methods to enhance empathy, such as using your imagination,
30266 your creativity, to visualize yourself in another's situation. And certain
30267 exercises or practices that you can undertake, such as Tong-Len, serve to
30268 strengthen your compassion. But I think it's important to remember that these
30269 techniques... were developed to help as many as possible, at least some
30270 portion of the human population. But it was never expected that these
30271 techniques could help 100 percent of people, the entire human population.
30272 ...the main point really, if we are talking about various methods to
30273 develop compassion, the important thing is that people make a sincere effort
30274 to develop their capacity for compassion. If they make their best efforts to
30275 be kinder, to cultivate compassion and make the world a better place, then at
30276 the end of the day they can say, "At least I've done my best!"
30277 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
30278 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
30280 In ascertaining luminous clarity at the time of the path, the general
30281 technique is to rest evenly in the very essence of luminous clarity. Telopa
30284 Rest relaxed within the uncontrived native state;
30285 Bonds are released and freedom is sure.
30287 This and other such instructions are expressed unanimously by the mighty
30288 adepts. Accordingly, with the body in the seven-point posture of meditative
30289 stability, the mind rests without support, relaxed and uncontrived. This will
30290 create the unerring yogic direct perception of emptiness. This is the
30291 ultimate esoteric instruction of the completion phase found in the profound
30292 tantras. The reason is that once the vital points of the vajra body, which is
30293 the support, are bound, the mind, eyes, and energy currents remain in a state
30294 of nonthought. Because of the special interconnection between body and mind,
30295 the movement in the right and left channels is stopped and immobilized within
30296 the central channel, causing the direct experience of mahamudra, emptiness
30298 Therefore the luminous mind, which is the supported, is realized as empty
30299 appearance arising as the mahamudra of forms of emptiness. This, again,
30300 depends on the dissolution of the energy currents of the right and left
30301 channels in the central channel, the supreme support. There is no more
30302 profound method for affecting this dissolution than resting the mind once it
30303 is uncontrived and relaxed. Therefore, in all the esoteric instructions of
30304 highest tantra, this is called "the esoteric instruction of withdrawal" in the
30306 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, "The Treasury of Knowledge, Book Eight, Part
30307 Four: Esoteric Instructions, A Detailed Presentation of the Process of
30308 Meditation in Vajrayana", trans. and annot. by Sarah Harding, foreword
30309 by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
30311 Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
30314 Dignity does not consist in a silk dress. -- A saying from the Orient
30316 To solve the problems humanity is facing, we need to organize meetings of
30317 scholars, educators, social workers, neuroscientists, physicians, and experts
30318 from all fields to discuss the positive and negative sides of what we have
30319 done thus far, as well as what needs to be introduced and what needs to be
30320 changed in our educational system. Proper environment plays a crucial role in
30321 the healthy growth of a child. All problems, including terrorism, can be
30322 overcome through education, particularly by introducing concern for all others
30323 at the preschool level.
30324 Living in society, we must share the suffering of our fellow citizens and
30325 practice compassion and tolerance not only toward our loved ones but also
30326 toward our enemies. This is the test of our moral strength. We must set an
30327 example by our own practice. We must live by the same high standards of
30328 integrity we seek to convey to others. The ultimate purpose is to serve and
30330 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to See Yourself As You Really Are",
30331 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
30333 "When Tibet was still free, we cultivated our natural isolation,
30334 mistakenly thinking that we could prolong our peace and security that way.
30335 Consequently, we paid little attention to the changes taking place in the
30336 world outside. Later, we learned the hard way that in the international
30337 arena, as well as at home, freedom is something to be shared and enjoyed in
30338 the company of others, not kept to yourself." Budapest, 1994
30339 "I believe that Tibet will be free only when its people become strong, and
30340 hatred is not strength. It is a weakness. The Lord Buddha was not being
30341 religious, in the popular sense of the term, when he said that hatred does not
30342 cease by hatred. Rather, he was being practical. Any achievement attained
30343 through hatred [can only invite] trouble sooner or later." Statement, 10 March
30345 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama" compiled and edited by
30348 Persons from orally oriented cultures, writes Ong, tend to project their
30349 sensibilities, to see them expressed in the world around them. More widely
30350 literate cultures create persons who tend to withdraw for insight into their
30351 own personal psyches. Orally oriented peoples may thus be more inclined than
30352 persons in print-dominated cultures to set their feelings or experiences in
30353 the space around them, including the invisible spirits presumed to occupy that
30354 space, and less likely to project these feelings and experiences onto
30355 individual persons. In Tibet lineages or sects are the most likely targets of
30356 negative projections. Western print-oriented persons are more likely to
30357 project their feelings onto other individuals, especially people in
30358 significant relationships with them. Unlike Tibet, or the premodern West, the
30359 contemporary West tends to identify the mind as the exclusive locus of ideas,
30360 feelings, and values. With this localization, the mind becomes "psychic" in a
30361 new sense, distinct from bodily soma and from the larger world.
30362 This very different configuration of personhood affects the way Westerners
30363 are likely to understand the Great Bliss Queen practice. For example, there
30364 is a tendency among Westerners for "visualization" to be a more disembodied
30365 practice than it is for Tibetans. The point in imagining oneself as the Great
30366 Bliss Queen is not just to replace one visual image of oneself with another,
30367 as if observing a changing scene in a movie theater, but to experience a
30368 physical as well as mental shift from deep inside the body.
30369 -- Anne Carolyn Klein, "Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists,
30370 and the Art of the Self", published by Snow Lion Publications
30372 ...when you recognize how kind someone has been to you, you are using an
30373 ordinary worldly attitude to help keep you from responses of hatred. For
30374 instance, if someone gave me a grant with a blank check to form a team of
30375 translators of Tibetan thought, I would be more than extremely pleased. Now
30376 if the person who gave me the money came by someday and gave me a hard time, I
30377 would feel a measure of restraint due to reflecting on the person's kindness.
30378 I would seek other means to work things out with the person. When you reflect
30379 how kind every person has been, there is that restraint to the point where,
30380 believe it or not, trained Buddhists will look at a fly or an ant walking
30381 across the table and think, "This is someone who bore me in her womb in a
30382 former lifetime, who took care of me."
30383 If you watch how mothers take precautions for a child in the womb, it is
30384 clear that they do a great deal to help it. They eat nourishing foods and
30385 avoid harmful substances like coffee, alcohol, nicotine, and drugs. If you
30386 reflect on how such a mother takes care of the child in the womb and extend
30387 this reflection to all sentient beings, I think that because your field of
30388 awareness is no longer just a few sentient beings but is gradually expanding
30389 to more and more, you can reflect on the mother's kindness without doing it
30390 merely because you were helped. The staggering debt deflates your sense of
30391 exaggerated importance. The boil is pricked.
30392 -- Jeffrey Hopkins, "A Truthful Heart: Buddhist Practices for Connecting
30393 with Others", foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by
30394 Snow Lion Publications
30396 He that can have patience can have what he will. -- Benjamin Franklin
30398 One generation plants the trees, and another gets the shade.
30401 Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad. -- Diogenes the Cynic
30403 Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other. -- Unknown
30405 I'm a born-again atheist. -- Gore Vidal
30407 Buddha's teachings on non-manifest phenomena, such as the extremely subtle
30408 presentations of actions and their effect--which are very hidden phenomena--
30409 cannot be proved with reasoning. How then can they be verified?
30410 There is no need to verify manifest phenomena through reasoning because
30411 they appear directly to the senses. The slightly hidden, however, can be
30412 proved with reasoning that generates inferential understanding, and since
30413 emptiness is very profound but only slightly hidden, it is accessible to
30415 ...very hidden phenomena cannot be proved with reasoning, and it seems
30416 that Buddha can say whatever he likes. However, through our own experience we
30417 can confirm Buddha's teachings on more important topics such as emptiness, the
30418 altruistic mind of enlightenment, love, and compassion, for no matter who
30419 analyses--Buddhist or non-Buddhist--or how much one analyses, if the person is
30420 not biased through desire or hatred, these teachings can bear analysis and
30421 serve as powerful sources of thought. When you see that Buddha does not err
30422 with regard to these more important phenomena, you can accept his other
30424 ...The process of cyclic existence and the eradication of it can be proved
30425 by the reasoning that establishes the misconception of inherent existence as
30426 its root cause and establishes the wisdom cognising emptiness as its antidote.
30427 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in
30428 Tibet", published by Snow Lion Publications
30430 Meditation on [or cultivation of] the six deities is like faith or love
30431 meditation in that the mind is being generated into the entity of the object
30432 meditated. When faith or love are meditated, those two are not the object
30433 observed but the entity into which the consciousness is being generated.
30434 Meditation on impermanence or emptiness, on the other hand, means to take
30435 these as the object and meditate on them. Thus, there are two types of
30436 meditation--of a subjective aspect and on an objective aspect. Meditation on
30437 the six deities is the former, for first one generates a wisdom consciousness
30438 knowing the sameness in suchness of oneself and the deity--the ultimate--and
30439 then causes it to appear as the sounds, letters, and finally the form of the
30441 --His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins,
30442 "Deity Yoga in Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow
30445 Once we realize emptiness, all phenomena are included within this reality,
30446 which is not separate from the cause and effect of karma and which is free of
30447 mental constructs. On this ultimate level of realization, it is possible to
30448 state that there is no wholesome or unwholesome action. When we have realized
30449 the nature of all phenomena, negative actions naturally subside and positive
30450 ones are spontaneously accomplished. Until this time, however, we would be
30451 slipping into nihilism if we said that the phenomena of relative truth, such
30452 as positive and negative actions or karma, do not exist.
30453 Just knowing this authentic view, however, is not enough. For others to
30454 be able to experience it, we must also know the scriptures and reasonings so
30455 that we can teach. Without the support of this knowledge, it will be
30456 difficult for others to trust what we say, and so Milarepa speaks of scripture
30457 and reasoning as an adornment to realization.
30459 Dissolving thoughts into the dharmakaya--
30460 Is this not meditation naturally arising?
30461 Join it with experience
30462 To make it beautifully adorned.
30464 One way to understand meditation is to see it as a practice of working
30465 with the many thoughts that arise in our mind. With realization they arise as
30466 mere appearances of the dharmakaya, the natural arising of mind's essential
30467 nature. Being clear about this true nature of thought is called "attaining
30468 the level of natural arising." At this point, there is no difference in any
30469 thought that may arise, because we see the nature of each thought to be
30470 emptiness, arising as the dharmakaya. Meditation could be defined as
30471 realizing the dharmakaya of the Buddha.
30472 -- Michele Martin, "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art & Teachings of the
30473 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje", published by Snow Lion Publications
30475 Who is the supreme friend
30476 always helpful in times of need?
30477 Mindfulness of the spiritual instructions
30478 learned through study and contemplation.
30479 -- The Seventh Dalai Lama
30481 Ordinary friends desert us when we fall on hard times or become an
30482 inconvenience in their lives. Others simply disappear into their own
30483 destinies. Even our spiritual teachers eventually die and leave us behind.
30484 Our practice of the Dharma, however, that has been cultivated by means of
30485 study, contemplation and meditation, is the one sure anchor that keeps our
30486 ship stable when the seas become choppy. In fact, the more difficult the
30487 situation we encounter, the more helpful it is to us.
30488 When the Buddha had become very old and was preparing to pass away,
30489 several of his disciples were overcome with grief. They asked him, "What
30490 will we do after you are gone?" He replied, "Whenever you rely upon my
30491 teachings, at that time I am there with you."
30492 The Second Dalai Lama wrote, "When we know how to rely on the Dharma, we
30493 are able to be happy in every situation. Where could one find a more
30494 trustworthy and reliable friend?"
30495 -- Glenn H. Mullin, "Gems of Wisdom from the Seventh Dalai Lama",
30496 published by Snow Lion Publications
30498 I always believe that each individual human being has some kind of
30499 responsibility for humanity as a whole. Particularly, I always believe that
30500 as scientists, you have a special responsibility. Besides your own
30501 profession, you have a basic motivation to serve humanity, to try to produce
30502 better, happier human beings. Whether we understand consciousness or not, we
30503 must produce warm-hearted persons. That is important. I want to express
30504 that. Whenever I meet scientists, I always have to say this.
30505 Through my own profession, I try my best to contribute as much as I can.
30506 This proceeds without my being concerned whether another person agrees with my
30507 philosophy or not. Some people may be very much against my belief, my
30508 philosophy, but I feel alright. So long as I see that a human being suffers
30509 or has needs, I shall contribute as much as I can to contribute to their
30510 benefit. Scientists and medically qualified people can contribute especially.
30511 That's different; that's a particular context. A human being needs to be
30512 cared for according to your professional calling. You can contribute; that's
30513 your shared professional responsibility
30514 -- H. H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
30515 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara
30516 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by
30517 Snow Lion Publications
30519 ...while walking in a park the body may be in the park while the mind is
30520 off working in the office, or at home, or talking to a distant friend, or
30521 making a list of groceries. That means the mind has disconnected from the
30522 body. Instead, when looking at a flower, really look at it. Be fully
30523 present. With the help of the flower, bring the mind back to the park.
30524 Appreciation for sensory experience reconnects mind and body. When the
30525 experience of the flower is felt throughout the body, a healing occurs; this
30526 can be the same when seeing a tree, smelling smoke, feeling the cloth of your
30527 shirt, hearing a bird call, or tasting an apple. Train yourself to vividly
30528 experience sensory objects without judgment. Try completely to be the eye
30529 with form, the nose with smell, the ear with sound, and so on. Try to be
30530 complete in experience while remaining in just the bare awareness of the
30532 When this ability is developed, reactions will still occur. Upon seeing
30533 the flower, judgements about its beauty will arise, or a smell may be judged
30534 to be foul. Even so, with practice the connection to the pure sensory
30535 experience can be maintained rather than continuing to become lost in the
30536 mind's distraction. Being distracted by a cloud of concepts is a habit and it
30537 can be replaced with a new habit: using bodily sensual experience to bring us
30538 to presence, to connect us to the beauty of the world, to the vivid and
30539 nourishing experience of life that lies under our distractions. This is the
30540 underpinning of successful dream yoga.
30541 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep",
30542 edited by Mark Dahlby, published by Snow Lion Publications
30544 To succeed in practicing any form of tantra, it is necessary first to
30545 train in developing the altruistic intention to become enlightened. Dzong-
30546 ka-ba says that this needs to be done "in accordance with the quintessential
30547 instructions," these being found in his Great Exposition of the Stages of the
30548 Path to Enlightenment. Specifically, such an altruistic intention is
30549 generated by way of the seven cause and effect quintessential instructions or
30550 the equalizing and switching of self and other. To do those, it is necessary
30551 to identify what liberation is and to develop an awareness seeking liberation,
30552 for which it is necessary to reflect on the three types of suffering and
30553 develop an intention to turn away from over-emphasizing the appearances of
30554 this life and then to turn away from over-emphasizing the appearances of
30555 future lives, developing an intention to leave such cyclic existence entirely,
30556 whereupon it is possible to reflect on how others suffer and develop
30557 compassion. Done continuously over a long period of time, at best one should
30558 develop a fully qualified altruistic intention to become enlightened, and at
30559 least one should develop such an intention from the depths of the heart.
30560 With such altruism as your basic motivation it is possible to receive
30561 initiation and take the pledges that lay out a type of behavior conducive to
30563 ...nowadays some people look on the practice of religion as if it were
30564 something that causes them to lose their freedom. Opposite to this, rules
30565 [for controlling counter-productive ill-deeds and overcoming afflictive
30566 emotions] are for the sake of utilizing your freedom to develop the limitless
30567 qualities of Buddhahood, in the quest for which you should never be satisfied.
30568 Toward material things, which necessarily have a limit, it is best to be
30569 satisfied with what you have, but with regard to the limitless development of
30570 spiritual qualities, you should never be satisfied with a mere portion, but
30571 continually seek higher development. The rules themselves make your mind
30572 conducive to such progress, so there is no reason to be uptight about them.
30573 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra:
30574 Paths to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
30575 published by Snow Lion Publications
30577 The practice of Dzogchen may begin with doing fixation on an object, in
30578 order to calm one's thoughts. Then one relaxes the fixation, dissolving the
30579 dependence on the object, and one fixes one's gaze in open space. Then, when
30580 one succeeds in making the calm state stable, it is important to work with the
30581 movement of one's thoughts and one's energy, integrating this movement with
30582 the presence of contemplation. At this point one is ready to apply
30583 contemplation in one's daily life. The system of practice just described is
30584 characteristic of the Series of the Nature of the Mind, but that is not to say
30585 that in Dzogchen one must necessarily begin with fixation and meditation on a
30586 calm state. In the Series of Primordial Space, and the Series of Secret
30587 Instructions, for example, one enters directly into the practice of
30588 contemplation. Particularly in the former, there are very precise
30589 instructions on how to find the pure state of contemplation. In the latter,
30590 on the other hand, the explanations are mainly concerned with how one
30591 continues in contemplation in all circumstances.
30592 The practice of contemplation is concisely explained in the line that
30593 reads, "but vision nevertheless manifests: all is good." Even if the
30594 condition of "what is" cannot be grasped with the mind, the whole
30595 manifestation of the primordial state, including our karmic vision, does
30596 nevertheless exist. All the various aspects of forms, colours, and so on,
30597 continue to arise without interruption. When we find ourselves in
30598 contemplation, this doesn't mean that our impure vision just disappears
30599 and pure vision manifests instead. If we have a physical body, there is a
30600 karmic cause for that, so there would be no sense in trying to abandon or
30601 deny the situation we find ourselves in. We just need to be aware of it.
30602 If we have a vision of the material, physical level of existence, which is
30603 the cause of so very many problems, we need to understand that this vision
30604 is only the gross aspect of the colours, which are the essence of the elements.
30605 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State", edited by
30606 Adriano Clemente, translated by John Shane, published by Snow Lion Pub.
30608 Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
30611 A tantric yogi who has gained control of the subtle energies of the body
30612 and the subtle levels of consciousness will have control over the inner and
30613 outer elements and consequently can transform his or her ordinary samsaric
30614 form into a joyous rainbow body. But until we can do this, we have to accept
30615 the fact that our physical basis is a magnet attracting every kind of
30616 discomfort and pain.
30617 ...This samsaric body keeps us running all of our lives. We have to run
30618 to fulfill its endless needs, to keep it away from things that may harm it,
30619 and to protect it from anything unpleasant. We have to give it pleasure and
30620 comfort. We become ordained, and at first this is very satisfactory; but soon
30621 our body makes it so difficult for us that we think our practice would be less
30622 disturbed if we were to live as a layperson. So we give up and return to
30623 ordinary life; but then we end up with a family to support, leaving us with no
30624 time or energy for meditation. We have the pressing tasks of feeding,
30625 clothing, and sheltering our children, and of arranging their education and so
30626 forth. Our lives are spent alternating between work and worry, with
30627 occasional short periods of pleasure, and then we have to die; but even this
30628 we cannot do in peace, for, when we lie down to die, our last thoughts are
30629 worried ones concerning the family we are leaving behind. Such is the nature
30630 of worldly existence.
30631 ...To care for our old people--these ones who have given us our body, our
30632 life, and our culture--is a sacred duty of humanity. But most humans act more
30633 like animals than people, and often we see old people who have been abandoned
30634 by their families. Family units were very strong in Tibet, and old people
30635 were usually cared for directly by relatives. The national care for the old
30636 that we see in the West is something very good, a healthy sign, although
30637 perhaps here the spiritual and psychological basis is somewhat lacking.
30638 The suffering of old age is something we all must face, unless we die
30639 prematurely. There is nothing we can do about it. Gone will be that false
30640 sense of personal ability and strength that made us so proud when we were
30641 young. Instead, helpers or friends will bathe us, dress us, spoonfeed us, and
30642 have to take us to the toilet. Rather than live under the delusion of
30643 permanence, we should engage in spiritual training so that we can enter old
30644 age at least with the grace of wisdom.
30645 ...So we can see that this body indeed causes us much grief in this life
30646 and, sadly, in their quest to satisfy its many needs, most people just collect
30647 an endless stream of negative karmic instincts that will lead them to lower
30648 rebirths in the future. These are the sufferings of the human world.
30649 ...The important point here is to become aware of the third type of
30650 suffering, the subtle suffering that pervades all imperfect existence, the
30651 all-pervading misery concomitant with having a perishable, samsaric base....
30652 [All are] enmeshed in suffering because the nature of their body and mind is
30653 bound with compulsive cyclic processes. Until we develop the wisdom that is
30654 able to free the mind from these compelling forces, there is no doubt that we
30655 shall experience suffering throughout our lives, and that we shall continue to
30656 wander endlessly in the wheel of birth, life, death, and rebirth where the
30657 presence of misery can always be felt.
30658 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
30659 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
30661 Observing the Mind Itself
30663 The primary meditative technique of great perfection is remaining in the
30664 state of pure awareness. This is accomplished by calming the mind and then
30665 abiding in comprehension of its basic clear light nature. The meditative
30666 practice involves being cognizant of the arising and passing away of feelings,
30667 emotions, sensations, etc., but understanding them within the context of pure
30668 awareness. The more one does this, the more one realizes that all phenomena
30669 arise from mind and remerge into it. They are of the nature of pure awareness
30670 and are a projection of luminosity and emptiness. Through cultivating this
30671 understanding, mental phenomena of their own accord begin to subside, allowing
30672 the clear light nature of mind to become manifest. They appear as reflections
30673 on the surface of a mirror and are perceived as illusory, ephemeral, and
30675 Those who succeed in this practice attain a state of radical freedom:
30676 there are no boundaries, no presuppositions, and no habits on which to rely.
30677 One perceives things as they are in their naked reality. Ordinary beings view
30678 phenomena through a lens clouded by concepts and preconceptions, and most of
30679 the world is overlooked or ignored. The mind of the great perfection adept,
30680 however, is unbounded, and everything is possible. For many beginners, this
30681 prospect is profoundly disquieting, because since beginningless time we have
30682 been constricted by rules, laws, assumptions, and previous actions. One who
30683 is awakened, however, transcends all such limitations; there is no ground on
30684 which to stand, no limits, nothing that must be done, and no prohibitions.
30685 This awareness is bottomless, unfathomable, immeasurable, permeated by joy,
30686 unboundedness, and exhilaration. One is utterly free, and one's state of mind
30687 is as expansive as space. Those who attain this level of awareness also
30688 transcend physicality and manifest the "rainbow body" ('ja lus), a form
30689 comprising pure light that cannot decay, which has no physical aspects, and
30690 which is coterminous with the nature of mind.
30691 -- John Powers, "A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published by
30692 Snow Lion Publications
30694 Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
30697 In a democracy it's your vote that counts;
30698 in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.
30701 You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. -- Indira Gandhi
30703 Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent.
30704 -- Langston Coleman
30706 Every child is an artist. The problem is how to
30707 remain an artist once he grows up.
30710 Among Tibetans, at least traditionally, the economic conditions are such
30711 that this nine-to-five daily employment isn't really an important part of
30712 [working life]. In Tibet, either you are a farmer or a nomad or a merchant.
30713 The work is seasonal.... During the season they work very hard, and when they
30714 finish they come back and don't have any employment.
30715 ...in modern society, and particularly in industrialized nations, the
30716 issue of unemployment is a very difficult situation. There are no easy
30717 answers. One has no choice but to try to cope, and make one's best effort to
30718 find new work. There is just no other solution.
30719 However, the basic attitude of the individual plays a very significant
30720 role, and can make a big difference in how someone responds. While we may not
30721 have control over our situation, our attitude is something that we have some
30722 control over. So first, what we need to realize is that uncertainty and
30723 change are very much a part of the modern economy, particularly with regard to
30724 employment. That is a serious problem, but a fact that we have to accept.
30725 There is no guarantee that there will be a job tomorrow if you are working
30726 today. So, if we understand this ahead of time, it may change how we respond
30727 when that happens. Then we won't feel so surprised, as if we are singled out.
30728 We understand that the loss of a job has many factors, the result of many
30729 causes and conditions. We will understand that, in many cases, it may even
30730 have roots in global economic issues. This way, we won't become so upset by
30731 taking it personally, or looking around us for someone to blame for our
30732 problems. This alone may help reduce our mental agitation. Of course, here
30733 we are talking about unemployment due to some wider causes or layoffs, not due
30734 to being fired because of one's own incompetence.
30735 So there might be different ways in which individuals will respond to the
30736 challenges of change. What is important is to acknowledge this fact and try
30737 to work out how best to cope with the immediate problem itself. For example,
30738 if you need employment as a means of your livelihood and if you become
30739 unemployed, then all your efforts should be put into looking for new
30740 employment so that your livelihood will be secure. But there are two
30741 different responses. One person may feel demoralized and become sort of
30742 paralyzed, thinking, There is no hope, I lost my job, what am I supposed to
30743 do? But another individual in the same situation might look at it as an
30744 opportunity to make some changes. As a challenge. So that is the more
30745 positive way, the more proactive way of dealing with this problem. But of
30746 course it is not easy.
30747 There may also be other ways that might help at least reduce the mental
30748 anxiety of dealing with the situation, so that a person can use all their
30749 mental energy to find new work. For Buddhists, there are certain thought
30750 processes and considerations that help--for example, the belief in karma
30751 [one's actions] and ultimately taking responsibility for one's own karma.
30752 Although this kind of mental attitude may not have any effect in physically
30753 resolving the situation, at least it will help ease the individual from the
30754 psychological effect of losing the job, and so on. And of course, believers
30755 in other religious systems can also take some consolation in their own
30757 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Howard C. Cutler, M.D.,
30758 "The Art of Happiness at Work"
30760 Compassion and love are not man-made. Ideology is man-made, but
30761 compassion and love are produced by nature. It is important to recognize
30762 natural qualities, especially when we face a problem and fail to find a
30763 solution. For example... in religious business, sometimes even due to
30764 religion, we create a problem. If we try to solve that problem using
30765 religious methods, it is quite certain that we will not succeed. So I feel
30766 that when we face those kinds of problems, it is important to return to our
30767 basic human quality. Then I think we will find that solutions come easier.
30768 Therefore, I usually say that the best way to solve human problems is with
30769 human understanding.
30770 It is very important to recognize the basic nature of humanity and the
30771 value of human qualities. Whether one is educated or uneducated, rich or
30772 poor, or belongs to this nation or that nation, this religion or that
30773 religion, this ideology or that ideology, is secondary and doesn't matter.
30774 When we return to this basis, all people are the same. Then we can truly say
30775 the words brother, sister; then they are not just nice words--they have some
30776 meaning. That kind of motivation automatically builds the practice of
30777 kindness. This gives us inner strength.
30778 ...Next, let us talk about the human being as a social animal. Even if we
30779 do not like other people, we have to live together. Natural law is such that
30780 even bees and other animals have to live together in cooperation. I am
30781 attracted to bees because I like honey--it is really delicious. Their product
30782 is something that we cannot produce, very beautiful, isn't it? I exploit them
30783 too much, I think. Even these insects have certain responsibilities, they
30784 work together very nicely. They have no constitution, they have no law, no
30785 police, nothing, but they work together effectively. This is because of
30786 nature. Similarly, each part of a flower is not arranged by humans but by
30787 nature. The force of nature is something remarkable. We human beings, we
30788 have constitutions, we have law, we have a police force, we have religion, we
30789 have many things. But in actual practice, I think that we are behind those
30791 Sometimes civilization brings good progress, but we become too involved
30792 with this progress and neglect or forget about our basic nature. Every
30793 development in human society should take place on the basis of the foundation
30794 of the human nature. If we lose that basic foundation, there is no point in
30795 such developments taking place.
30796 -- "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
30797 About the Dalai Lama" compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, Foreword by
30798 Sen. Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
30800 Emphasizing neither renunciation nor transformation, though incorporating
30801 both into its preparatory practices, the Great Completeness provides a
30802 method know as "self-liberation" (rang 'grol), sometimes described as
30803 "liberation in its own spot" (rang sar 'grol). Liberation takes place in the
30804 situation just as it is, because one's mind and all things are, despite
30805 powerful appearances to the contrary, primordially pure. If one has not yet
30806 made this essential discovery, the Great Bliss Queen ritual can prepare one
30807 for it. If one is familiar with the Great Completeness perspective, one
30808 performs the visualization and recitation of the Great Bliss Queen ritual
30809 entirely within an experience of innate awareness. In either case, the ritual
30810 encompasses the three nondualisms already discussed.
30811 One way of accessing the primordial purity so important to the Great
30812 Completeness tradition is a practice known as "pure vision." This involves
30813 visualizing companions, family, surroundings, and so forth as creations of
30814 light, the habitat of an enlightened being. From the viewpoint of the Great
30815 Completeness, such pure vision is not an imaginative overlay, but a move
30816 toward understanding things as they are. As Khetsun Sangpo taught it, this
30817 practice allows you to understand that apparently ordinary things and persons
30818 have "been [primordially pure] from the beginning" so that "you are
30819 identifying their own proper nature. Your senses normally misrepresent what
30820 is there, but through this visualization you can come closer to what actually
30821 exists." In short, by identifying one's body, companions, and world with
30822 those of the Great Bliss Queen, one develops the ability to discover what has
30823 always been there. This being so, there is no need to renounce or change
30824 anything, only to see it more completely. This is the Great Completeness
30825 tradition's special mix of ontological and cognitive nondualisms. Unlike the
30826 tantric traditions, in which it is necessary to cease the coarse sense and
30827 mental consciousness in order for the most subtle mind of clear light to
30828 appear, the Dalai Lama observes that "in the Old [Nyingma] Translation School
30829 of the Great Completeness it is possible to be introduced to the clear light
30830 without the cessation of the six operative consciousnesses." Hence the
30831 possibility of "discovering" what is already in our midst. Such discovery
30832 reveals a spontaneous presence (yon dan hlun gyis grub ba) of collateral
30833 qualities such as clarity and spontaneous responsiveness. Thus, comments
30834 Longchen Rabjam, "primordially pure primordial wisdom is free in the face of
30835 thought and the primordial wisdom, with a nature of spontaneity, abides as
30836 primordial radiance, and profound clarity."
30837 -- Anne Carolyn Klein, "Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists,
30838 and the Art of the Self", by published by Snow Lion Publications
30840 Why is it that meeting our yidam deity directly and receiving the deity's
30841 blessing are so important? If we are studying texts and wish to become great
30842 scholars, there are an inconceivable number of the Buddha's teachings along
30843 with the treatises that comment on them. All these have to be studied
30844 diligently so that we can come to a basic understanding of their meaning;
30845 beyond this, it is extremely difficult to enter into the more subtle levels.
30846 In all of this practice and study, it is our own mind that is central.
30847 Without a great blessing or without awakening the generative power of previous
30848 habitual patterns, it will be extremely difficult to realize primordial
30850 Lord Maitreya stated that bodhisattvas abiding on the various levels are
30851 not able to attain omniscience immediately, and he also affirmed that we do
30852 not need to become expert in all five traditional Buddhist sciences. Among
30853 these are all classifications of the inner science that deals with the mind.
30854 In the practice of the Secret Mantrayana, it is said that as long as objects
30855 continue to arise in our minds, so long will the classifications of the Secret
30856 Mantrayana last. As long as we have not realized the simultaneity of concepts
30857 and liberation, as long as we have not been blessed with the knowledge that
30858 knowing the nature of one phenomenon liberates us into knowing the nature of
30859 all, we need to train from lifetime to lifetime in the many aspects of the
30860 teachings. If we try to become expert in all five sciences or try to know all
30861 the objects of knowledge, our training will be endless. For these reasons, it
30862 is extremely important to seek accomplishments and blessings from the yidam
30863 deity, for through the blessing of the deity, our positive habitual patterns
30864 from the past will be awakened and the doubts that cloud our minds will be
30866 -- "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth
30867 Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje" by Michele Martin, published by Snow Lion
30871 When someone whom I have helped
30872 Or in whom I have placed great hopes
30873 Mistreats me in extremely hurtful ways
30874 May I regard him still as my precious teacher.
30875 -- Shantideva, "Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life"
30877 According to worldly norms of human behaviour, when we help someone and
30878 place great trust in them and they mistreat us in return, it is seen as
30879 reasonable to be angry with them because we have been hurt. However,
30880 practitioners of bodhicitta must not give in to this type of conventional
30881 thinking. Instead, we should learn to view such people in a special way, as
30882 objects for our practice of forbearance and loving kindness. We must in fact
30883 recognise these people as our spiritual teachers.
30884 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
30885 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
30887 Advanced meditators develop the ability to create environments of their
30888 own choosing, and they are able to transcend the sufferings that seem so real
30889 to ordinary beings who are bound by mundane conceptions. According to Tsong
30890 Khapa, for one who attains advanced levels of meditation, painful cognitions
30891 no longer occur, no matter what external experiences one encounters. All of
30892 one's cognitions are a union of bliss and emptiness. One recognizes that
30893 nothing is inherently what it appears to be. Whatever occurs is perceived by
30894 one's unshakably blissful consciousness as the sport of luminosity and
30897 "for a Bodhisattva who has attained the meditative stabilisation of
30898 bliss pervading all phenomena, only a feeling of pleasure arises with
30899 respect to all objects; pain and neutrality do not occur, even though
30900 [pieces from his body] the size of a small coin are cut or even though
30901 his body is crushed by elephants, only a discrimination of bliss is
30903 -- Tsong-ka-pa on Ratnarakshita's Commentary
30905 Tantric texts stress that such bodhisattvas are not creating a delusional
30906 system in order to hide from the harsher aspects of reality. Rather, they are
30907 transforming reality, making it conform to an ideal archetype. Since all
30908 phenomena are empty of inherent existence, they have no fixed nature. No one
30909 ever apprehends an object as it is in its true nature, because there is no
30910 such nature. Even if phenomena had fixed essences, we would still never be
30911 able to perceive them, since all we ever experience are our cognitions of
30912 objects, which are overlaid with conceptions about them. All our perceptions
30913 are ideas about things, and not real things. These ideas are also empty,
30914 arising from nothingness and immediately dissolving again into nothingness,
30915 leaving nothing behind. Tantric adepts develop the ability to reconstitute
30916 "reality," which is completely malleable for those who train in yogas
30917 involving blissful consciousnesses realizing emptiness. The sense of bliss
30918 pervades all their cognitions, and their understanding of emptiness allows
30919 them to generate minds that are manifestations of bliss and emptiness.
30920 -- John Powers, "A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published
30921 by Snow Lion Publications
30923 Beware the flatterer; he feeds you with an empty spoon. -- Cosino DeGregrio
30925 Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict
30926 the man before the dollar.
30929 Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of
30930 labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is
30931 the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
30934 For those of you who are not able to devote all your time to meditation,
30935 there is nevertheless the possibility of engaging in practice in a serious
30936 way. For example, the students at the monastic universities in South India
30937 can, with some effort, do meditations during the prayers. When you recite the
30938 prayers, you can mentally do the contemplation. The lifestyle and daily
30939 routine at these monasteries have been structured by the great masters of the
30940 past in a way that is most conducive to individual practice as well as to the
30941 flourishing of the dharma.
30942 If you find that your mind is in a very fluctuating emotional state--
30943 displaying anger, hatred, attachment and so forth--then you should first try
30944 to calm down that state of strong emotion. This should be done by first
30945 transforming it into a neutral state of mind, because there is no way that one
30946 can switch directly from a negative state of mind to a positive one.
30947 Therefore, you should first reduce the force of these emotions and
30948 fluctuations and try to bring about some sort of calmness, using any means--
30949 such as taking a stroll or concentrating on the inhalation and exhalation of
30950 the breath--that will enable you to forget what you are immediately feeling.
30951 This will help you to reduce the force of strong emotion, thereby giving you
30952 the calmness necessary for the practice of dharma. Like a white piece of
30953 cloth which could be dyed any color that you desire, such a neutral state of
30954 mind could then be transformed into a virtuous state of mind.
30955 You could also engage in the preliminary practices of performing 100,000
30956 prostrations, recitations of the Vajrasattva mantra, and so forth. When you
30957 undertake these practices, you should do them properly, not being only
30958 concerned about the number. Many great masters of the past of all traditions
30959 have emphasized the importance of these preliminary practices--they will
30960 enable you to have a very firm start. If through them you can acquire a
30961 fertile mind, then when the seed of meditation is planted, it will readily
30962 bear the fruits of realizations.
30963 Having successfully neutralized the emotional fluctuations within your
30964 mind and having restored a reasonable degree of calmness, engage in the
30965 practice of taking refuge and generating the altruistic aspiration to attain
30966 full enlightenment. Taking refuge in the Three Jewels is the factor that
30967 distinguishes one's practice from that of an erroneous path, and the
30968 generation of the altruistic mind makes it superior to the paths aiming at
30969 individual liberation.
30970 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", translated by Geshe Thupten
30971 Jinpa, edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
30973 ...if you consider just the subtlest mind and the wind or energy that
30974 serves as its mount, the mere factor of luminosity and knowing of the subtlest
30975 mind itself as well as the energy associated with it are what will be
30976 transformed into the mind and body of a Buddha. This is the mind that will
30977 turn into an omniscient consciousness--a Buddha's mind; it is this mind which
30978 will be transformed, not some other mind coming from the outside. In other
30979 words, the Buddha nature is inherent; it is not imported from somewhere else.
30980 This is true because the very entity of the mind, its nature of mere
30981 luminosity and knowing, is not polluted by defilements; they do not abide in
30982 the entity of the mind. Even when we generate afflictive emotions, the very
30983 entity or nature of the mind is still mere luminosity and knowing, and because
30984 of this we are able to remove the afflictive emotions.
30985 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness,
30986 Clarity, and Insight", edited and translated by Jeffrey Hopkins,
30987 co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion Publications
30989 The recognition that worldly attainments just do not provide enduring
30990 happiness, and that we need to work on the internals, rather than the
30991 externals, is an important motivation. It is also the basis of achieving
30992 nirvana, often represented by the lotus flower. It is no accident that most
30993 statues of Buddha have him sitting on cushions resting on a lotus flower--the
30994 symbol of renunciation.
30995 But what if we achieve nirvana? What if, through extreme diligence, we
30996 attain its supreme peace and happiness? Would that be enough, or is there a
30997 more profound level of motivation still?
30998 Some years ago a number of tourists were kidnapped by terrorists in the
30999 Philippines, and held hostage in the jungle for many months. Finally they
31000 were released in small groups. I will never forget the reaction of one
31001 hostage who was interviewed at the airport on his way home to join his wife,
31002 who had been freed just days earlier.
31003 You would think that after months of extreme privation and the constant
31004 threat of uncertainty and death, returning safely to one's wife, home, and
31005 family would be a cause for joyful celebration. But the hostage, while
31006 relieved, could only think of the group of hostages he'd left behind. Those
31007 who, in the preceding months, had been his fellow prisoners, whom he now knew
31008 better than anyone else, and with whom in several cases, he had formed unique
31009 and profound bonds of attachment. His overriding concern was to ensure that
31010 those still being held captive would be safely released to experience the same
31011 freedom he had now. Only then would he really be able to celebrate.
31012 -- David Michie, "Buddhism for Beginners: Finding Happiness in an Uncertain
31013 World", published by Snow Lion Publications
31015 The term "meditation" carries with it a burden of trendy, pseudo-mystical
31016 connotations. The biggest mistake people make is to think that they will "get
31017 something" out of meditation. It would be more accurate to think they will be
31018 getting rid of something. Awareness practice undermines our unwitting
31019 subjugation to hypermentation. It cuts through the cascade of thoughts and
31020 feelings that distract us from the present moment where life actually happens.
31021 The inner newsreel, with its imagined or distorted dramas, becomes less urgent
31022 and seductive. The unexamined hopes and fears that have thrown us into
31023 automatic or reflexive behavior lose their power to toss us about. What we
31024 get rid of, initially, is a great deal of compelling noise with no point or
31025 real substance to it. Even by becoming aware of its nature we de-reify it,
31026 render it less solid and intractable.
31027 ...How can we sort out our neuroses when the mind is a wild, chaotic mess
31028 of fragmented thought? How can we work with our anger when we experience it
31029 as a deluge of highly charged, urgent impulses, all mixed in with fleeting
31030 bits of narrative, physical sensations, whispers of memory, rushes of fear,
31031 and the visceral press to act? We can't. Every beginning meditator discovers
31032 very quickly that the mind has a mind of its own. No beginner sits down,
31033 says, "Peace! Be still!" and accomplishes enlightenment. It's enough at the
31034 start just to see, discover, and acknowledge the chatter. That, in itself, is
31035 a great step towards self-awareness. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught that the
31036 awareness of our confusion is the first step towards clarity.
31037 Over time, we can learn to just take note of whatever arises without being
31038 pushed and pulled emotionally. We can sit still and not respond reflexively
31039 to our hypermentation. We can allow ourselves to rest, to gently release
31040 thoughts, to find a quiet space apart from the discursive jumble. We can
31041 choose to be simply and quietly aware. In these quiet moments, experiences
31042 arise much more clearly and distinctly. Only then can we discover the source
31043 of our suffering and our anger.
31044 I once attended a conference between a highly esteemed Tibetan lama,
31045 Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, and a group of psychiatrists. Someone asked
31046 Rinpoche: "What is meditation?" Rinpoche looked playfully puzzled, pretended
31047 not to understand, and after a brief consultation with his translator,
31048 answered: "Meditation? Meditation? I don't know what that means. We have
31049 another word for it which means 'paying attention to.' " Whatever the style,
31050 to meditate is to pay attention.
31051 -- Ron Leifer, M.D., "Vinegar into Honey: Seven Steps to Understanding and
31052 Transforming Anger, Aggression, and Violence", published by Snow Lion
31055 ...practice must be carried out in terms of one's own thought. If one
31056 knows how to bring the teachings into one's own thought, all physical and
31057 verbal deeds can be made to accord with practice. If one does not know how to
31058 bring them into one's own thought, even though one might meditate, recite
31059 scriptures, or spend one's life in a temple, it will not help; thought is
31060 therefore important for practice. Thus, taking refuge in the Three Jewels
31061 (Buddha, his Doctrine and the Spiritual Community), taking into account the
31062 relationship between actions and their effects, and generating an attitude of
31063 helping others, are most important.
31065 Formerly in Tibet there was a famous lama called Drom. One day Drom saw a
31066 man walking around a reliquary. 'Walking around a reliquary is good,' he
31067 said. 'Practice is even better.' The man thought, 'Then, reading a holy book
31068 would be good.' He did so, and one day while he was reading, Drom saw him and
31069 said, 'Reading a holy book is good; practice is even better.'
31071 The man thought, 'This also does not seem to be sufficient. Now if I do
31072 some meditation, that will certainly be practice.' Drom saw him in meditation
31073 and said, 'Meditation is good; practice is even better.' The man was amazed
31074 and asked, 'How does one practise?' Drom answered, 'Do not be attached to this
31075 life; cause your mind to become the practices.' Dram said this because
31076 practice depends on thought.
31078 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
31079 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
31081 Dampa said, "If these practitioners want buddhahood, they must reverse their
31084 [Kunga] asked, "What is wrong with their present behavior?"
31088 They practice thinking that what are in actuality obstacles are
31090 They meet the liberating path, but doubting and striving, they part from
31092 Doubting if they should refrain from their ill-omened actions, they
31094 The speech of those without experience has become Dharma--supposedly the
31096 Kunga is never parted from his prayers for the three village girls!
31097 Now, draw your own conclusions!
31103 When I see people clinging to illusions as real, compassion arises with a
31105 If one considers the sufferings of the six realms in terms of oneself, one
31106 has no time to remain ordinary.
31107 When one sees that the characteristic of samsara is suffering, a mind
31108 wanting nothing whatsoever is born!
31109 When one sees the various bases as rootless, self-grasping is not born!
31110 When impermanence is born in the mind, faith and perseverance will come
31112 Those who grasp at permanence will not destroy persistent grasping at
31114 Kunga! Internalize truthlessness and throw the kitchen sauce into the
31116 -- Lion of Siddhas: The Life and Teachings of Padampa Sangye, translated
31117 by David Molk, with Lama Tsering Wangdu Rinpoche, published by Snow
31120 Books have the same enemies as people:
31121 fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
31124 In Buddhism there are basically two types of practices: Sutra and
31125 Tantra.... The special purpose of Tantra is to provide a faster path so that
31126 qualified practitioners can be of service to others more quickly. In Tantra
31127 the power of imagination is harnessed to meditation in a practice called deity
31128 yoga. In this practice you imagine 1) replacing your mind as it ordinarily
31129 appears, full of troubling emotions, with a mind of pure wisdom motivated by
31130 compassion; 2) substituting your body as it ordinarily appears (composed of
31131 flesh, blood, and bone) with a body fashioned from compassionately motivated
31132 wisdom; 3) developing a sense of a pure self that depends on purely appearing
31133 mind and body in an ideal environment, fully engaged in helping others. As
31134 this distinctive practice of Tantra calls for visualizing yourself with a
31135 Buddha's body, activities, resources, and surroundings, it is called "taking
31136 imagination as the spiritual path."
31137 Let us consider a qualm about this practice. You are considering yourself
31138 to have Buddha qualities which you presently do not have. Is this, then, a
31139 correct type of meditative consciousness? Yes. Your mind is involved in
31140 understanding reality, out of which you are appearing as a deity. Therefore,
31141 your mind, from this viewpoint, is correct. Also, you are purposely imagining
31142 yourself as having a divine body even if you do not presently possess one.
31143 This is an imaginative meditation; you are not convinced from the depths that
31144 you actually have pure mind, body, and selfhood. Rather, based in clear
31145 imagination of ideal body and mind, you are cultivating the sense of being a
31146 deity, compassionately helping others.
31147 ...to engage in Tantra at any level demands a powerful intention to become
31148 enlightened for the sake of others, and a feeling that this needs to be done
31150 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
31151 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
31153 Why do we want to be wise and compassionate? If it's because we would simply
31154 like to be wise and compassionate, we are off course, because the "I" cannot
31155 attain wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion can only be revealed once
31156 the "I" has disappeared. When we reach this level, we will be able to benefit
31157 others. In the meantime, it is the blind leading the blind. All true
31158 religions seek to gain access to that level of consciousness which is not ego-
31159 bound. In Buddhism, it is called the unconditioned, the unborn, the
31160 deathless. You can call it anything you like. You can call it atman. You
31161 can call it anatman. You can call it God. The fact is, there is a subtle
31162 level of consciousness which is the core of our being, and it is beyond our
31163 ordinary conditioned state of mind. We can all experience this. Some people
31164 experience it through service, others through devotion. Some even think they
31165 can experience it through analysis and intellectual discipline. Buddhists
31166 usually try to access it through meditation. That's what we are doing.
31167 Breaking through to the unconditioned in order to help others break through to
31168 the unconditioned. But we have to start where we are, from right here. We
31169 start with these minds, these bodies, these problems, these weaknesses, and
31171 -- Venerable Tenzin Palmo, "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings
31172 on Practical Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Publications
31174 Over the last few days I have been meeting scientists, mainly specialists
31175 on the brain, as well as psychologists and psychotherapists.... The majority
31176 of them agreed... that the key cause of the mental unrest and depression so
31177 prevalent today... is lack of sympathy and affection.
31178 I think you might find the following story quite interesting. A few weeks
31179 ago I met someone whose mind, I was told, is severely disturbed. At the
31180 beginning, I used all of my reasoning to encourage him, explaining that, as a
31181 human being, there was no need for him to be discouraged, because we have such
31182 a good human brain and intelligence. I pointed out how, with determination,
31183 we can solve all our human problems and overcome all obstacles, and so there
31184 is no reason to worry or be discouraged or depressed. Personally, I always
31185 find this kind of reasoning is quite effective, but this time it failed. He
31186 was not impressed by this line of thinking. On the contrary, instead of
31187 showing any appreciation, he developed a rather contrary attitude. After
31188 listening to what I had to say, he became even more agitated, and asked me,
31189 "Why are you concerned about my problem? How do I know if your attitude is
31190 sincere or not?" I felt really sad. I was quite moved as well, and as I was
31191 explaining something or other, my hand reached out and caressed his arm. It
31192 was a natural gesture, a sincere expression of how I felt. Gradually, his
31193 mood altered; I could see his face beginning to change, and finally a smile
31194 began to appear. Then as I gained confidence, I increased that expression of
31195 affection. At last a big smile spread right across his face.
31196 I told him, "Please consider me as an old friend. Any time, you can come
31197 to see me. Whatever I can do to help you, I am ready to do. I am at your
31198 service." When I said this, then his mood, it was clear, became very happy
31199 and joyful. The following day he came to see me again. When he arrived, he
31200 already had a happy air about him, but nevertheless he was trying to pretend
31201 otherwise and was not smiling. Anyway, what this incident really gave me was
31202 another confirmation of how powerful genuine compassion, love, or altruism can
31203 be, to affect other people's minds. And how they can remove fear and
31204 suspicion, and alleviate feelings of insecurity and mistrust.
31205 So I always consider compassion as the key, not only for achieving and
31206 maintaining our own mental calmness, stability and happiness, but also as
31207 something extraordinarily useful for creating a healthy human society. By
31208 that I mean a happier and less harmful human society. Therefore--whether it
31209 be in individual cases, on a family level, a national level, or an
31210 international level--altruism, love and compassion are the basis for success,
31211 for happiness, and for a happy environment.
31212 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
31213 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron,
31214 Foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published
31215 by Snow Lion Publications
31217 According to Tibetan Buddhism, ordinary beings are born into life situations
31218 in which they are destined to suffer and die. This is the result of former
31219 contaminated actions and afflictions, which have been accumulated since
31220 beginningless time. Because of this process, physical and mental afflictions
31221 are deeply rooted in sentient beings, and so it is generally considered
31222 necessary to prepare oneself for tantric practice by engaging in the
31223 "preliminary practices," or ngondro (sngon 'gro, purvagama), in order to begin
31224 to reverse one's negative conditioning. These practices combine physical
31225 movements with visualization in order to transform the mind from one that is
31226 fixated on mundane concerns and desires into one that is primarily oriented
31227 toward religious practice for the benefit of others. Some teachers consider
31228 these preparatory trainings to be so essential to successful tantric practice
31229 that they will not give tantric initiations to those who have not completed
31230 them, and even teachers who are willing to waive them generally stress their
31231 importance. The preliminary practices are: (1) taking refuge; (2)
31232 prostration; (3) Vajrasattva meditation; (4) mandala offering; and (5) guru
31234 -- John Powers, "A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism",
31235 published by Snow Lion Publications
31237 [It] is quite clear to me is that the moment you think only of yourself,
31238 the focus of your whole reality narrows, and because of this narrow focus,
31239 uncomfortable things can appear huge and bring you fear and discomfort and a
31240 sense of feeling overwhelmed by misery. The moment you think of others with a
31241 sense of caring, however, your view widens. Within that wider perspective,
31242 your own problems appear to be of little significance, and this makes a big
31244 If you have a sense of caring for others, you will manifest a kind of
31245 inner strength in spite of your own difficulties and problems. With this
31246 strength, your own problems will seem less significant and bothersome to you.
31247 By going beyond your own problems and taking care of others, you gain inner
31248 strength, self-confidence, courage, and a greater sense of calm. This is a
31249 clear example of how one's way of thinking can really make a difference.
31250 One's own self-interest and wishes are fulfilled as a byproduct of
31251 actually working for other sentient beings. As the well-known fifteenth-
31252 century master Tsongkhapa points out in his Great Exposition of the Path to
31253 Enlightenment, "The more the practitioner engages in activities and thoughts
31254 that are focused and directed toward the fulfillment of others' well-being,
31255 the fulfillment or realization of his or her own aspiration will come as a
31256 byproduct without having to make a separate effort." Some of you may have
31257 actually heard me remark, which I do quite often, that in some sense the
31258 bodhisattvas, the compassionate practitioners of the Buddhist path, are
31259 "wisely selfish" people, whereas people like us are the "foolishly selfish."
31260 We think of ourselves and disregard others, and the result is that we always
31261 remain unhappy and have a miserable time.
31262 ...we find that kindness and a good heart form the underlying foundation
31263 for our success in this life, our progress on the spiritual path, and our
31264 fulfillment of our ultimate aspiration, the attainment of full enlightenment.
31265 Hence, compassion and a good heart are not only important at the beginning but
31266 also in the middle and at the end. Their necessity and value are not limited
31267 to any specific time, place, society, or culture.
31268 Thus, we not only need compassion and human affection to survive, but they
31269 are the ultimate sources of success in life. Selfish ways of thinking not
31270 only harm others, they prevent the very happiness we ourselves desire. The
31271 time has come to think more wisely, hasn't it? This is my belief.
31272 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Compassionate Life"
31274 ...all apparent phenomena are nothing but delusion and there is, moreover,
31275 no freedom from delusion to be achieved by dispelling delusion. Delusion is,
31276 by its own essence, completely pure and, hence, enlightened. All phenomena
31277 are, in this way, primordially, fully, and completely enlightened. Phenomena
31278 appearing as various attributes are, therefore, indeed the mandala of vajra
31279 body, speech, and mind. They are like the Buddhas of the three times, never
31280 transcending the essence of complete purity. Sentient beings and Buddhas are
31281 not differentiated in terms of their essence. Just like distinct causes and
31282 results appearing in a dream, they are nothing but perceptions of individual
31283 minds brought forth by the power of imputation.
31284 Here the issue might be raised, "although the scriptures do teach this,
31285 there is no certainty whether it is to be taken at face value or requires
31286 interpretation. Therefore the essential purity of phenomena may well be
31287 established, but it is unreasonable to say that precisely the nature of that
31288 which appears as subjects with attributes is primordially enlightened. For,
31289 if it were that way, thorough affliction and samsara would be entirely absent.
31290 There can't be a reasoning that establishes such a philosophy." The
31291 conceptual mind that takes objects that appear in the experience of sentient
31292 beings as valid is, since beginningless time, deluded. It accepts or negates
31293 with reference to the way things appear to it. With such dialectics it is,
31294 indeed, not possible to establish the vast and profound meaning. Nevertheless,
31295 since the nature of phenomena is inconceivable, it is not the case that there
31296 is no way to realize it by means of discriminating knowledge. Thus it is not
31297 in any way a mistake if one, rather than that, is inclined to approach simply
31298 by faith, regarding the scriptures and oral instructions as valid. One will
31299 then gain access through trust.
31300 One may object, "Well, if one cannot prove [the primordial mandala] with
31301 reasoning, one cannot gain access to it either." We can prove it as follows:
31302 That phenomena are fully enlightened as the mandala of vajra body, speech, and
31303 mind is proven with the reasoning of the intrinsic nature. Just as it is
31304 stated in a sutra, "Form is empty by nature. Why is that? It is so because
31305 that is its nature." All phenomena are pure by their intrinsic nature and,
31306 therefore, there is not a single phenomenon that is impure. This is the
31307 intrinsic nature of phenomena. Complete purity is, therefore, also the
31308 intrinsic nature of body, speech, and mind, and their complete purity is
31309 enlightenment. Therefore, body, speech, and mind, distinguished by their
31310 complete purity, are inseparable, free from mental constructs, and perfectly
31311 pervasive. One must in this way understand them to be the mandala of vajra
31312 body, speech, and mind.
31313 -- Heidi I. Koppl, "Establishing Appearances as Divine: Rongzom
31314 Chozang on Reasoning, Madhyamaka, and Purity", published by
31315 Snow Lion Publications
31317 Because spirits can be positive or negative in relation to humans, it is
31318 wise to be careful with practices that connect the practitioner to a spirit.
31319 It is currently popular for people to take drum journeys in their imaginations
31320 and to look for guardian spirits and power animals and so on. Although
31321 usually this is beneficial, or at least harmless, there really are beings with
31322 whom the rare individual will connect. Not all of them are beings anyone
31323 should want to connect with. There seems to be little regard for who the
31324 being is; this can be a dangerous practice. People are much more careful
31325 about choosing a business partner or a roommate than they seem to be about
31326 choosing a non-physical being for a guide or guardian.
31327 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "Healing with Form, Energy and Light:
31328 The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen",
31329 published by Snow Lion Publications
31331 ...reflect upon the negative consequences of our strong attachment to
31332 friends and hostility toward enemies. Our feelings for a friend or a loved
31333 one sometimes blind us to certain of his or her aspects. We project a quality
31334 of absolute desirability, absolute infallibility, upon that person. Then,
31335 when we see something contrary to our projections, we are stunned. We swing
31336 from the extreme of love and desire to disappointment, repulsion, and
31337 sometimes even anger. Even that sense of inner contentment and satisfaction
31338 in a relationship with someone we love can lead to disappointment,
31339 frustration, and hatred. Though strong emotions, like those of romantic love
31340 or righteous hatred, may feel profoundly compelling, their pleasure is
31341 fleeting. From a Buddhist point of view, it is far better not to be in the
31342 grip of such emotions in the first place.
31343 What are the repercussions of becoming overpowered by intense dislike?
31344 The Tibetan word for hatred, shedang, suggests hostility from the depth of
31345 one's heart. There is a certain irrationality in responding to injustice or
31346 harm with hostility. Our hatred has no physical effect on our enemies; it
31347 does not harm them. Rather, it is we who suffer the ill consequences of such
31348 overwhelming bitterness. It eats us from within. With anger we slowly begin
31349 to lose our appetite. We cannot sleep at night and often end up just rolling
31350 back and forth, back and forth, all night long. It affects us profoundly,
31351 while our enemies continue along, blissfully unaware of the state we have been
31353 Free of hatred or anger, we can respond to actions committed against us
31354 far more effectively. If we approach things with a cool head, we see the
31355 problem more clearly and judge the best way to address it. For example, if a
31356 child is doing something that could be dangerous to himself or others, such as
31357 playing with matches, we can discipline him. When we behave in such a
31358 forthright manner, there is a far greater chance that our actions will hit the
31359 mark. The child will respond not to our anger but to our sense of urgency and
31361 This is how we come to see that our true enemy is actually within us. It
31362 is our selfishness, our attachment, and our anger that harm us. Our perceived
31363 enemy's ability to inflict harm on us is really quite limited. If someone
31364 challenges us and we can muster the inner discipline to resist retaliating, it
31365 is possible that no matter what the person has done, those actions do not
31367 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in
31368 Everyday Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Khyongla
31369 Rato and Richard Gere
31371 "All phenomena should be understood as lacking an end and a middle, just
31372 as the mind does not have an end or a middle. With the knowledge that the
31373 mind is without an end or a middle, no identity of the mind is perceived.
31374 What is thoroughly realized by the mind, too, is realized as being empty.
31375 By realizing that, the very identity, which is established as the aspect
31376 of the mind, like the identity of physical form, and so forth, is also
31377 ultimately not perceived. In this way, when the person does not ultimately
31378 see the identity of all phenomena through wisdom, he will not analyze
31379 whether physical form is permanent or impermanent, empty or not empty,
31380 contaminated or not contaminated, produced or non-produced, and existent
31381 or non-existent. Just as physical form is not examined, similarly feeling,
31382 recognition, compositional factors, and consciousness are not examined.
31383 When the object does not exist, its characteristics also cannot exist.
31384 So how can they be examined?"
31385 -- Stages of Meditation by Kamalashila
31387 The above passage deals with ultimate reality; its meaning is that in the
31388 ultimate sense the object of imputation is not findable. In this context we
31389 find in the Heart Sutra phrases like: "There is no physical form, no sound, no
31390 smell, no taste, and no object of touch." The mind, too, is not findable in
31391 the ultimate sense. Since in the ultimate sense such things are non-existent,
31392 there is no point examining whether they are permanent or impermanent.
31393 Ultimately all phenomena, including the aggregates and so forth, are devoid of
31394 true existence. Within the notion of ultimate reality, things are devoid of
31395 true existence. In the same way, suchness, which is an attribute of
31396 phenomena, is also devoid of true existence. This is important. Even when we
31397 understand that phenomena like physical form and so forth are devoid of true
31398 existence, there is a danger of thinking that ultimate reality may have true
31400 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", root text by Kamalashila,
31401 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
31402 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
31404 We usually discriminate strongly between someone who intends to harm us
31405 and someone who doesn't. We think, "That's all right; he didn't mean it"; or
31406 the person who has harmed us can say, "Why do you blame me so much? I didn't
31407 mean to." But we get really angry when we know people mean to harm us. How
31408 could we possibly see such people as intimate, close, dear--as dear as our
31410 If you can retain a little compassion when people harm you
31411 unintentionally, you have made progress. But if you retain it when someone
31412 intends to harm you, you are really successful. It's not that you think,
31413 "This person is marvelous; she's trying to rob me," but you don't take these
31414 facts as reasons for hating the person. You recognize the intention and put
31415 your wallet in your front pocket. You take such measures, but the conditions
31416 that prompted them no longer serve as reasons for hatred. Our wish to love
31417 everyone and the actual attitudes we have under pressure are in constant
31418 conflict. That's just the way we are. We've been wandering in cyclic
31419 existence since beginningless time, because of desire and hatred, and it's
31420 going to take a lot of familiarization to change this. Be relaxed about it.
31421 Don't put pressure on yourself, thinking things like, "Oh, I'm a scumbag
31422 because I hate so deeply." Rather, try this attitude: "I have to admit it.
31423 As much as my ideals say I should love so-and-so--or at least be neutral--I
31424 have to face the fact that I don't." Go easy on yourself.
31425 -- Jeffrey Hopkins, "A Truthful Heart: Buddhist Practices for Connecting
31426 with Others", foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by
31427 Snow Lion Publications
31429 Many types of valid consciousnesses derive from basic, natural, and
31430 obvious perception. All of us have an innate "I," although if we try to
31431 locate this "I," we get into a lot of difficulties. This sense of "I" gives
31432 us a well-founded aspiration to happiness and a wish not to suffer.
31433 There are different levels of happiness and different kinds of suffering.
31434 Material things usually correspond to physical happiness, whereas spiritual
31435 development corresponds to mental happiness. Since our "I" has these two
31436 aspects--physical and mental--we need an inseparable combination of material
31437 progress and internal, or spiritual, progress. Balancing these is crucial to
31438 utilizing material progress and inner development for the good of human
31440 Big schemes for world development arise from this wish to gain happiness
31441 and relieve suffering. But there are higher levels of happiness beyond these
31442 worldly forms, in which one seeks something longer-term, not just confined to
31443 this lifetime. Just as we need a long-range perspective that protects the
31444 environment, we need an internal long-range perspective that extends to future
31446 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of
31447 Loving Relationships", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
31450 Desire is painful because of not getting,
31451 Anger is painful through lack of might,
31452 And confusion through not understanding.
31453 Because of this, these are not recognized.
31455 Desire produces suffering when one does not encounter what one badly
31456 wants. Anger produces suffering when one lacks might to crush the strong.
31457 Confusion* induces suffering when one fails to understand a subtle matter
31458 thoroughly. The inability to recognize these forms of suffering when one is
31459 overwhelmed by desire and so forth is great suffering indeed. Therefore,
31460 persevere in getting rid of the disturbing emotions. It is like a poor man's
31461 son who suffered because he wanted a queen.
31462 A certain poor man wanted a queen, but kings keep their queens heavily
31463 guarded, and because he could not get her, his desire made him suffer. He
31464 felt anger toward the king for guarding his queens well, and since he could
31465 not do the slightest harm to the king, he suffered acutely on account of his
31466 anger. Blinded by desire and anger his confusion grew, and unable to
31467 understand the situation properly, he was tormented by the suffering it caused
31470 * confusion's function is to feed desire and anger.
31472 -- "Aryadeva's Four Hundred Stanzas on the Middle Way: with Commentary by
31473 Gyel-tsap by Aryadeva and Gyeltsap, additional commentary by Geshe Sonam
31474 Rinchen", translated by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
31476 Never hope more than you work. -- Rita Mae Brown
31478 To lead the people, walk behind them. -- Lao Tzu
31480 To consider those things which are existent, there are many phenomena
31481 which are produced only occasionally. For example, certain plants grow only
31482 during certain seasons, not all the time. That shows that they have been
31483 produced by their causes and conditions. On the other hand, certain phenomena
31484 exist permanently. Those are the two types of phenomena. In the case of
31485 phenomena which arise only occasionally for a certain period of time then
31486 cease to exist, their production is evidence used to prove their dependence on
31487 their causes and conditions. But permanent phenomena are not dependent on
31488 causes and conditions. Generally speaking, almost all phenomena which are
31489 beneficial or harmful to us belong to the category of the occasional, the
31490 dependent--the impermanent. Even our mind, which is to be disciplined and
31491 subdued, belongs to that category.
31492 Within the kind of phenomena which are existent, we can talk about
31493 different types: those which are animate and those which are inanimate; those
31494 with form and those formless; visible and invisible; audible and inaudible.
31495 And there are phenomena which definitely exist but can be experienced only by
31496 our mind, not our sense perceptions; in other words, we can talk about two
31497 types of phenomena, external matter and internal consciousness. When we talk
31498 about subduing mind, we refer to internal consciousness, that which has
31499 clarity and cognitive power and is capable of experiencing objects. Although
31500 our mind has arisen depending upon its causes and conditions, we need to find
31501 out to what extent it can be transformed, for it is through the transformation
31502 of our mind that we can subdue it. The way of transformation is to pacify the
31503 mind's faults and to cultivate and enhance its good qualities. Although there
31504 are certain phenomena which, having arisen from their causes and conditions,
31505 remain as they are and cannot be changed by any means, there are others,
31506 including our mind, which can be. To establish that kind of distinction, the
31507 reasons provided in the Lam-rim section on analytical meditation to generate
31508 special insight are especially important and useful.
31509 -- "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries", H.H. the Dalai Lama XIV on the
31510 Jatakamala translated by Tenzin Dorjee edited by Dexter Roberts
31512 Whatever appears, nothing has moved from the absolute nature.
31514 Decide that nothing is extraneous to the absolute nature, taking the
31515 example of gold jewelry.
31516 Once we know how to remain in the absolute nature, the manifold thoughts
31517 that arise in the mind are no different from gold jewelry. One can make all
31518 sorts of things out of gold, such as earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, but
31519 although they have a variety of different shapes, they are all made of gold.
31520 Likewise, if we are able to not move from the absolute nature, however many
31521 thoughts we might have, they never depart from the recognition of the absolute
31522 nature. A yogi for whom this is the case never departs from that realization,
31523 whatever he does with his body, speech, and mind. All his actions arise as
31524 the outer display or ornament of wisdom. All the signs one would expect from
31525 meditating on a deity come spontaneously without him actually doing any formal
31526 practice. The result of mantra recitation is obtained without his having to
31527 do a large number of recitations. In this way everything is included in the
31528 recognition that nothing is ever extraneous to the absolute nature.
31529 In that state one does not become excited at pleasant events or depressed
31530 by unpleasant ones.
31531 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Zurchungpa's Testament: A Commentary on
31532 Zurchung Sherab Trakpa's 'Eighty Chapters of Personal Advice'", based
31533 on Shechen Gyaltsap's Annotated Edition, translated by the Padmakara
31534 Translation Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
31536 crashola in second life:
31537 due to having been in a vehicle which crossed into forbidden land and got
31538 taken away, my avatar was left in an indeterminate and very unhealthy state.
31539 i was unable to move, deep underground, and i saw this object off down to
31540 my left, so i clicked on it and picked 'edit'. i realized as i was doing
31541 it, that this was my disembodied hair, which had flown off for some reason.
31542 once i clicked edit, *crunch*, no more second life.
31544 It makes no sense to brood anxiously on the harmful actions we have committed
31545 in the past to the point where we become paralyzed. They are done, it is
31546 over. If the person is a believer in God, the appropriate action is to find
31547 some means of reconciliation with Him. So far as Buddhist practice is
31548 concerned, there are various rites and practices for purification. When the
31549 individual has no religious beliefs, however, it is surely a matter of
31550 acknowledging and accepting any negative feelings we may have in relation to
31551 our misdeeds and developing a sense of sorrow and regret for them. But then,
31552 rather than stopping at mere sorrow and regret, it is important to use this as
31553 the basis for resolve, for a deep-seated commitment never again to harm others
31554 and to direct our actions all the more determinedly to the benefit of others.
31555 The act of disclosure, or confession, of our negative actions to another--
31556 especially to someone we really respect and trust--will be found to be very
31557 helpful in this. We are quite wrong if we merely acknowledge the gravity of
31558 our actions inwardly and then, instead of confronting our feelings, give up
31559 all hope and do nothing. This only compounds the error. Above all, we should
31560 remember that as long as we retain the capacity of concern for others, the
31561 potential for transformation remains.
31562 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Ethics for the New Millennium"
31564 According to Buddhism, compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind,
31565 wanting others to be free from suffering. It's not passive--it's not empathy
31566 alone--but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others
31567 from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and lovingkindness.
31568 That is to say, one must understand the nature of the suffering from which we
31569 wish to free others (this is wisdom), and one must experience deep intimacy
31570 and empathy with other sentient beings (this is lovingkindness). Let's
31571 examine these two elements.
31572 The suffering from which we wish to liberate other sentient beings,
31573 according to Buddha's teachings, has three levels. The first level includes
31574 the obvious physical and mental sensations of pain and discomfort that we can
31575 all easily identify as suffering. This kind of suffering is primarily at the
31576 sensory level--unpleasant or painful sensations and feelings. The great
31577 Tibetan master Panchen Losang Chokyi Gyaltsan, tutor to the fifth Dalai Lama,
31578 reminds us that even animals seek to avoid physical suffering and pain.
31579 The second level of suffering is the suffering of change. Although
31580 certain experiences or sensations may seem pleasurable and desirable now,
31581 inherent within them is the potential for culminating in an unsatisfactory
31582 experience. Another way of saying this is that experiences do not last
31583 forever; desirable experiences will eventually be replaced by a neutral
31584 experience or an undesirable experience. If it were not the case that
31585 desirable experiences are of the nature of change, then, once having a happy
31586 experience, we would remain happy forever! In fact, if desirability were
31587 intrinsic to an experience, then the longer we remained in contact with it,
31588 the happier we would become. However, this is not the case. In fact, often,
31589 the more we pursue these experiences, the greater our level of
31590 disillusionment, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness becomes.
31591 ...But the third level of suffering is the most significant--the pervasive
31592 suffering of conditioning. This refers to the very fact of our unenlightened
31593 existence, the fact that we are ruled by negative emotions and their
31594 underlying root cause, namely our own fundamental ignorance of the nature of
31595 reality. Buddhism asserts that as long as we are under the control of this
31596 fundamental ignorance, we are suffering; this unenlightened existence is
31597 suffering by its very nature.
31598 If we are to cultivate the deepest wisdom, we must understand suffering at
31599 its deepest, most pervasive level. In turn, freedom from that level of
31600 suffering is true nirvana, true liberation, the true state of cessation.
31601 Freedom from the first level of suffering alone--merely being free of
31602 unpleasant physical and psychological experiences--is not true cessation of
31603 suffering. Freedom from the second level is again not true cessation.
31604 However, freedom from the third level of suffering--being completely free from
31605 the very source of suffering--that is genuine cessation, genuine liberation.
31606 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama's Heart
31607 of Wisdom Teachings", translated & edited by Geshe Thupten Jinpa
31609 The only conclusion that can legitimately be reached is that the self is a
31610 fiction, a mere label superimposed onto the aggregates, a concept created and
31611 reified by the mind but lacking any substantial reality. This reasoning
31612 process alone does not eliminate the idea, however; it merely weakens it.
31613 Because it is so deeply ingrained, the idea of self is only eliminated through
31614 repeated meditation on the reasonings of no-self, which enable the yogin to
31615 become progressively more familiar with the understanding that no self or
31616 essence exists. The Dalai Lama concludes that "when such a realization is
31617 maintained and reinforced through constant meditation and familiarization, you
31618 will be able to develop it into an intuitive or direct experience." (From Path
31620 Many Westerners reject this notion, contending that it would be a sort of
31621 cognitive suicide. The idea that the self (which is assumed even by people
31622 who reject religions that propound the idea) does not exist is profoundly
31623 disturbing to many non-Buddhists, but in Buddhist thought the denial of self
31624 is not seen as constituting a loss, but rather is viewed as a profoundly
31625 liberating insight. Since the innate idea of self implies an autonomous,
31626 unchanging essence, if such a thing were in fact the core of one's being, it
31627 would mean that change would be impossible, and one would be stuck being just
31628 what one is right now. Because there is no such self, however, we are open
31629 toward the future. One's nature is never fixed and determined, and so through
31630 engaging in Buddhist practice one can exert control over the process of change
31631 and progress in wisdom, compassion, patience, and other good qualities. One
31632 can even become a buddha, a fully awakened being who is completely liberated
31633 from all the frailties, sufferings, and limitations of ordinary beings. But
31634 this is only possible because there is no permanent and static self, no soul
31635 that exists self-sufficiently, separated from the ongoing process of change.
31636 -- John Powers, "A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published
31637 by Snow Lion Publications
31639 I often encounter people in and our of my office who seem to be lost in
31640 thought. I sometimes ask them what they are thinking about. They are usually
31641 startled by the question. They look at me blankly and are often surprised to
31642 hear themselves admit with embarrassment that they don't know or can't say.
31643 Or they describe one small, fleeting fragment of disconnected thought. The
31644 "normal" human state of mind is constant, incessant thinking--an enigmatically
31645 linked stream of consciousness, sensations, memories, feelings, desires,
31646 fears, and chatter. And at the center of the narrative, the star of the show
31647 is always--ME! This is why the first leg of the journey requires courage. To
31648 become familiar with the chaotic, egotistical, and often nonsensical narrative
31649 of our own mind stream is disconcerting and painful. To discover directly
31650 that we are literally "lost in thought" can be frightening. But this is where
31651 we are and where we must begin.
31652 It's consoling to remember that everyone is neurotic, each one of us. The
31653 "normal" mind suffers from a complex of conflicting desires and aversions.
31654 The best we can do is to become aware of our neuroses, to become wiser in our
31655 thinking and our conduct of life. In my experience, meditation is the most
31656 direct and efficient method for developing self-awareness. Self-awareness is
31657 not a steady state because experience is not a steady state. Through the
31658 practice of meditation, we can learn to watch our ever-fluctuating mental
31659 processes from a more detached, aerial perspective. Without necessarily
31660 understanding ourselves in some intellectual way, we can directly discover how
31661 the mind works. The mind has its causes and effects, its motivations and
31662 intentions, and its awareness and evaluation of their possible consequences.
31663 -- Ron Leifer, M.D., "Vinegar Into Honey: Seven Steps to Understanding and
31664 Transforming Anger, Aggression, and Violence", published by Snow Lion
31667 "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow,
31668 "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow
31669 old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to
31670 the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world
31671 about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the
31672 sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn
31673 why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can
31674 never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust,
31675 and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what
31676 a lot of things there are to learn."
31677 -- T. H. White, "The Once and Future King"
31679 In Chapter 4 we looked at the when and where of meditation. Whatever
31680 works best for you, given your personal circumstances and temperament, the
31681 important thing is to do it regularly, preferably every day.
31682 I would also recommend that you keep the session to a length of time that
31683 feels comfortable. This is because in the early stages of meditation it's
31684 easy to become discouraged and have thoughts along the lines of: "This might
31685 work for other people, but I don't have the right personality/mind/lifestyle/
31686 partner for meditation." Or: "I've been doing this for six months and my
31687 concentration is no better than when I started." With thoughts like these, you
31688 may start to resent the time you spend meditating and consider giving up.
31689 Much better to keep your practice light and easy to begin with; short
31690 sessions, and concentrated attention, especially towards the end of your
31691 practice so that you "finish like a winner" and feel encouraged for the next
31692 day. Better to end a short session thinking you could have gone on longer
31693 than keep glancing at your watch with the thought that has passed through the
31694 mind of every meditator at some stage--"My watch must have stopped. It's been
31695 longer than two minutes--surely?!"
31696 Having reviewed the meditation practices outlined in the previous chapter,
31697 you may decide you quite like the sound of several of them. On what basis
31698 should they be practiced? My own preference is to have a simple calendar of
31699 activity so that, for example, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are breath-
31700 counting days; Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are visualization days; and
31701 Sundays are for whatever I'm in the mood to do.
31702 On this point, I once asked a high-ranking Tibetan lama which of a number
31703 of meditation practices I should focus on. He gave me an indulgent smile and
31704 said simply, "Whichever you enjoy the most." D'oh!
31705 -- David Michie, "Hurry Up and Meditate: Your Starter Kit for Inner Peace
31706 and Better Health", published by Snow Lion Publications
31708 "Always be sustained by cheerfulness."
31710 The effectiveness of our practice can be measured by looking at our mood.
31711 If we are in better spirits, the practice is working. We can take heart
31712 because we have a purpose, to exchange whatever sadness we meet for joy. The
31713 smallest personal damage can be put to use to dissolve great suffering and do
31714 away with negativity. If there is a way, we try to stop unfortunate things
31715 from happening, but when unhappy events occur we meet them optimistically. We
31716 never let negativity discourage us or injure our ability to help.
31717 Setting out on any adventure demands determination. We may have to toil
31718 and struggle with setbacks along the way but the trials we face are short-
31719 lived. We can endure them because we have a great end in mind: to benefit all
31720 sentient beings. Remaining good-natured and enthusiastic shows that our
31721 efforts are succeeding. Being cheerful is the sign of a good practitioner.
31722 -- Ringu Tulku, "Mind Training", edited by B.M. Shaughnessy, published
31723 by Snow Lion Publications
31725 Once we take ourselves and the quality of our life seriously, and
31726 acknowledge the difficulties we may be experiencing, the next step is to have
31727 confidence that (1) it is possible to overcome them, (2) there is a way to
31728 accomplish this, and (3) we are capable of achieving it [Buddha-nature]. This
31729 bring us to the topics of refuge and Buddha-nature.
31730 Taking refuge is not a passive act of placing ourselves in the hands of a
31731 higher power that will do everything for us, as the English word "refuge"
31732 might imply. It is an active process of putting a safe, reliable and positive
31733 direction in our life. That direction is indicated by the Buddhas, the Dharma
31734 and the Sangha--the Three Precious Gems. They are precious in the sense that
31735 they are both rare and valuable....
31736 In short, the definitive level of the Three Precious Gems of Buddha,
31737 Dharma and Sangha presents the goal we would like to achieve. Their
31738 interpretable level indicates what we rely on, externally, to bring ourselves
31739 there. But we also have internal factors that we need to rely on as well.
31740 These refer to our Buddha-nature.
31741 We are capable of eliminating our problems and achieving the definitive
31742 Three Precious Gems because everyone has Buddha-nature, namely the various
31743 factors or working materials that make it possible. Of all our natural
31744 resources, the most important is mind. We all have a mind which, in its
31745 nature, is unhampered by anything from experiencing whatever exists. No
31746 matter what happens--no matter how confused, stressed or unhappy we may be--we
31747 experience it. Even death is something that we experience when it occurs.
31748 Therefore, because we have a mind that allows us to experience whatever
31749 exists, we have the basic resource that allows us to experience a total
31750 absence of confusion and a utilization of all possible good qualities for
31751 helping others--provided that such a total absence and utilization actually
31752 exist. In other words, if we can establish that it is possible for these two
31753 things to exist--and that they are not just objects of nice but totally
31754 unrealistic wishes--we can be confident that we are capable of attaining them,
31755 simply because we have a mind.
31756 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition
31757 of Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
31759 Actually, we Buddhists are supposed to save all sentient beings, but
31760 practically speaking, this may be too broad a notion for most people. In any
31761 case, we must at least think in terms of helping all human beings. This is
31762 very important. Even if we cannot think in terms of sentient beings
31763 inhabiting different worlds, we should nonetheless think in terms of the human
31764 beings on our own planet. To do this is to take a practical approach to the
31765 problem. It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our
31766 daily lives. If we find we cannot help another, the least we can do is to
31767 desist from harming them. We must not cheat others or lie to them. We must
31768 be honest human beings, sincere human beings.
31769 On a very practical level, such attitudes are things which we need.
31770 Whether one is a believer, a religious person, or not, is another matter.
31771 Simply as an inhabitant of the world, as a member of the human family, we need
31772 this kind of attitude. It is through such an attitude that real and lasting
31773 world peace and harmony can be achieved. Through harmony, friendship, and
31774 respecting one another, we can solve many problems in the right way, without
31776 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
31777 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
31779 We may have all come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now.
31780 -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
31782 ...Maitreya, in his text the Sublime Continuum, gives three reasons on the
31783 basis of which one can conclude that the essence of Buddhahood permeates the
31784 minds of all sentient beings. First, he says that the Buddha's activities
31785 radiate in the heart of all sentient beings. Now this can be understood in
31786 two different ways: one is that we can understand that in every sentient being
31787 there is a seed of virtue, and one could see the seed of virtue as an act of
31788 the completely enlightened, compassionate Buddha. But one could also see it
31789 in deeper terms, that is, that all sentient beings possess the potential for
31790 perfection. Therefore, there is a kind of perfected being inherent within all
31791 sentient beings, radiating. So one can understand it in these ways. Second,
31792 so far as the ultimate nature of reality is concerned, there is total equality
31793 between the samsaric state and nirvana. Third, we all possess a mind which
31794 lacks intrinsic reality and independent existence, which allows us to then
31795 remove the negativities and delusory states that obscure it. For these three
31796 reasons, Maitreya concludes that all sentient beings possess the essence of
31798 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
31799 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by
31800 Snow Lion Publications
31802 ...Compassion diminishes fright about your own pain and increases inner
31803 strength. It gives you a sense of empowerment, of being able to accomplish
31804 your tasks. It lends encouragement.
31805 Let me give you a small example. Recently, when I was in Bodh Gaya, I
31806 fell ill from a chronic intestinal infection. On the way to the hospital, the
31807 pain in my abdomen was severe, and I was sweating a great deal. The car was
31808 passing through the area of Vulture Peak (Buddha taught here) where the
31809 villagers are extremely poor. In general, Bihar State is poor, but that
31810 particular area is even more so. I did not even see children going to or
31811 coming from school. Just poverty. And sickness. I have a very clear memory
31812 of a small boy with polio, who had rusty metal braces on his legs and metal
31813 crutches up to his armpits. It was obvious that he had no one to look after
31814 him. I was very moved. A little later on, there was an old man at a tea
31815 stop, wearing only a dirty piece of cloth, fallen to the ground, left to lie
31816 there with no one to take care of him.
31817 Later, at the hospital, my thoughts kept circling on what I had seen,
31818 reflecting on how sad it was that here I had people to take care of me but
31819 those poor people had no one. That is where my thoughts went, rather than to
31820 my own suffering. Though sweat was pouring out of my body, my concern was
31822 In this way, though my body underwent a lot of pain that prevented sleep
31823 (a hole had opened in my intestinal wall), my mind did not suffer any fear or
31824 discomfort. It would only have made the situation worse if I had concentrated
31825 on my own problems. This is an example from my small experience of how an
31826 attitude of compassion helps even oneself, suppressing some degree of physical
31827 pain and keeping away mental distress, despite the fact that others might not
31828 be directly helped.
31829 Compassion strengthens your outlook, and with that courage you are more
31830 relaxed. When your perspective includes the suffering of limitless beings,
31831 your own suffering looks comparatively small.
31832 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Mind of Clear Light: Advice on Living
31833 Well and Dying Consciously", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
31836 ...blissful light, with a Chenrezig on the tip of each ray, streams out of
31837 you and touches each and every sentient being--those whom you like, those whom
31838 you don't, and those you don't know. When this glowing light touches each
31839 sentient being, it performs two functions: it purifies them of their
31840 negativities, and it inspires them to realize all the stages of the path to
31841 enlightenment. We may start imagining the light touching the beings in the
31842 room and gradually spreading out to those in the area, the country, the
31843 continent, the world, and the universe. Or we can start with our friends and
31844 family, then radiate light to strangers, and finally to those who have harmed
31845 us or of whom we're afraid. Or, we can first radiate light to human beings,
31846 then animals, hungry ghosts, hell beings, demi-gods, and gods. We can use our
31847 creativity and imagination when doing this visualization. Each meditation
31848 session can have a different emphasis.
31849 It's very easy to love sentient beings in a general way. But it's more
31850 effective to be specific in our visualizations. Send light to the guy who cut
31851 you off on the highway. Send light to the IRS employee who questioned your
31852 tax return. Send light to the terrorist who thinks that killing others in the
31853 name of God will cause him to be reborn in heaven. Send light to government
31854 leaders who think that bombing others solves problems. Send light to your
31855 teenager who leaves his room a mess and gets mad when you comment on it. Send
31856 light to specific people you know and care about, people who are having
31857 problems, strangers, and people you don't like. Send it to hospitals, the
31858 Middle East, the inner cities, and Beverly Hills. There's suffering
31859 everywhere. The light frees sentient beings from their suffering.
31860 -- Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga Method
31861 of Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion
31864 In Tibetan drenpa means "mindfulness," and sheshin means "awareness."
31865 Drenpa also means "mindfulness and memory." It means that one is mindful of
31866 what one is doing and remembers what one has to do whether one is meditating,
31867 whether one has lost the power of concentration, and so on. Mindfulness is
31868 like a causal condition and awareness is like the result. If one has very
31869 concentrated mindfulness, one immediately notices a thought arising and this
31870 becomes awareness, which becomes sheshin, and one knows what is occurring.
31871 Normally, one does not know what is in one's mind or what one is thinking, so
31872 there is no awareness. But if one has mindfulness, then it is said to the
31873 extent that mindfulness brings mental stability, one has awareness. So when
31874 one has mindfulness, it is through one's awareness of what is happening.
31875 At this level of pacification we become aware of the negative qualities of
31876 distraction. Santideva explains this by saying that when the mind is
31877 distracted, it is between the fangs of the wild animal of the kleshas
31878 [emotional obscurations], and from mental distractions come all the
31879 difficulties and mental hardships of this and future lives. Being in a state
31880 of distraction will increase the negative qualities of the mind more and more.
31881 However, being aware of the negative qualities motivates us to meditate.
31882 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "The Practice of Tranquillity and Insight:
31883 A Guide to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation", translated by Peter Roberts,
31884 published by Snow Lion Publications
31886 Developing a flexible approach to living is not only instrumental in
31887 helping us cope with everyday problems--it also becomes the cornerstone for a
31888 key element of a happy life: balance.
31889 Settling comfortably into his chair one morning, the Dalai Lama explained
31890 the value of leading a balanced life.
31891 "A balanced and skillful approach to life, taking care to avoid
31892 extremes, becomes a very important factor in conducting one's everyday
31893 existence. It is important in all aspects of life. For instance, in planting
31894 a sapling of a plant or a tree, at its very early stage you have to be very
31895 skillful and gentle. Too much moisture will destroy it, too much sunlight
31896 will destroy it. Too little will also destroy it. So what you need is a very
31897 balanced environment where the sapling can have a healthy growth. Or, for a
31898 person's physical health, too much or too little of any one thing can have
31899 destructive effects. For example, too much protein I think is bad, and too
31901 "This gentle and skillful approach, taking care to avoid extremes,
31902 applies to healthy mental and emotional growth as well."
31903 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., "The Art of
31904 Happiness: A Handbook for Living"
31906 ...Idle talk is usually considered a destructive action because it wastes
31907 our time. But if our friend is depressed and can't listen to wise advice, we
31908 can joke, tell silly stories, and use small talk to lighten his mood. Because
31909 our motivation is kind, our joking and chatting are positive.
31910 Laughing and having a good time aren't in opposition to Dharma. The more
31911 we leave behind attachment, anger, jealousy, and pride, the more we'll enjoy
31912 whatever we're doing. Our hearts will open to others and we can laugh and
31913 smile with ease. The holy beings I've been fortunate to meet have a wonderful
31914 sense of humor and are very friendly.
31915 In Buddhist groups, it's important for people to get to know each other
31916 and have a sense of fellowship. We can share experiences with our Dharma
31917 friends and encourage each other on the path. Buddhism isn't an isolated
31918 path, and it's important for Buddhists to cultivate group unity and
31920 It's not beneficial to retreat inside ourselves, thinking, "Every time I
31921 talk to someone I'm motivated by attachment. Therefore I'll concentrate on
31922 meditation and chanting and won't socialize with others." One of the
31923 fundamental principles of Buddhism is care and compassion for others.
31924 Although at times we may need to distance ourselves from others in order to
31925 settle our own minds, whenever possible we should actively develop genuine
31926 love for others. To do this, we must be aware of what's happening in others'
31927 lives, care about them as we do ourselves, and offer help whenever possible.
31928 Our ability to act with love develops with time and practice, and it has to be
31929 balanced with our need for private contemplation.
31930 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion
31933 Young men and young women may work systematically six days in the week and
31934 rise fresh in the morning, but let them attend modern dances for only a few
31935 hours each evening and see what happens. The Waltz, Polka, Gallop and other
31936 dances of the same kind will be disastrous in their effects to both sexes.
31937 Health and vigor will vanish like the dew before the sun. It is not the
31938 extraordinary exercise which harms the dancer, but rather the coming into
31939 close contact with the opposite sex. It is the fury of lust craving
31940 incessantly for more pleasure that undermines the soul, the body, the sinews
31941 and nerves. Experience and statistics show beyond doubt that passionate
31942 excessive dancing girls can hardly reach twenty-five years of age and men
31943 thirty-one. Even if they reached that age they will in most instances be
31944 broken in health physically and morally. This is the claim of prominent
31945 physicians in this country.
31946 -- Quote from a 1910 periodical.
31948 Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but...
31949 -- I'm trying to see how long I can go without saying yes.
31950 -- I'm attending the opening of my garage door.
31951 -- The monsters haven't turned blue yet, and I have to eat more dots.
31952 -- I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian.
31953 -- I have to fulfill my potential.
31954 -- I don't want to leave my comfort zone.
31955 -- It's too close to the turn of the century.
31956 -- I have to bleach my hare.
31957 -- I'm worried about my vertical hold knob.
31958 -- I left my body in my other clothes.
31960 I remember most vividly my first lesson on epistemology as a child, when I
31961 had to memorize the dictum "The definition of the mental is that which is
31962 luminous and knowing." Drawing on earlier Indian sources, Tibetan thinkers
31963 defined consciousness. It was years later that I realized just how
31964 complicated is the philosophical problem hidden behind this simple
31965 formulation. Today when I see nine-year-old monks confidently citing this
31966 definition of consciousness on the debating floor, which is such a central
31967 part of Tibetan monastic education, I smile.
31968 These two features--luminosity, or clarity, and knowing, or cognizance--
31969 have come to characterize "the mental" in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought.
31970 Clarity here refers to the ability of mental states to reveal or reflect.
31971 Knowing, by contrast, refers to mental states' faculty to perceive or
31972 apprehend what appears. All phenomena possessed of these qualities count as
31973 mental. These features are difficult to conceptualize, but then we are
31974 dealing with phenomena that are subjective and internal rather than material
31975 objects that may be measured in spatiotemporal terms. Perhaps it is because
31976 of these difficulties--the limits of language in dealing with the subjective--
31977 that many of the early Buddhist texts explain the nature of consciousness in
31978 terms of metaphors such as light, or a flowing river. As the primary feature
31979 of light is to illuminate, so consciousness is said to illuminate its objects.
31980 Just as in light there is no categorical distinction between the illumination
31981 and that which illuminates, so in consciousness there is no real difference
31982 between the process of knowing or cognition and that which knows or cognizes.
31983 In consciousness, as in light, there is a quality of illumination.
31984 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence
31985 of Science and Spirituality"
31987 False conceptions are exaggerated modes of thought that do not accord with
31988 the facts. Even if an object--an event, a person, or any other phenomenon--
31989 has a slightly favorable aspect, once the object is mistakenly seen as
31990 existing totally from its own side, true and real, mental projection
31991 exaggerates its goodness beyond what it actually is, resulting in lust. The
31992 same happens with anger and hatred; this time a negative factor is
31993 exaggerated, making the object seem to be a hundred percent negative, the
31994 result being deep disturbance. Recently, a psychotherapist told me that when
31995 we generate anger, ninety percent of the ugliness of the object of our anger
31996 is due to our own exaggeration. This is very much in conformity with the
31997 Buddhist idea of how afflictive emotions arise.
31998 At the point when anger and lust are generated, reality is not seen;
31999 rather, an unreal mental projection of extreme badness or extreme goodness is
32000 seen, evoking twisted, unrealistic actions. All of this can be avoided by
32001 seeing the fuller picture revealed by paying attention to the dependent-
32002 arising of phenomena, the nexus of causes and conditions from which they arise
32003 and in which they exist.
32004 Looked at this way, the disadvantages of afflictive emotions are obvious.
32005 If you want to be able to perceive the actual situation, you have to quit
32006 voluntarily submitting to afflictive emotions, because in each and every
32007 field, they obstruct perception of the facts.....
32008 Love and compassion also involve strong feelings that can even make you
32009 cry with empathy, but they are induced not by exaggeration but by valid
32010 cognition of the plight of sentient beings, and the appropriateness of being
32011 concerned for their well-being. These feelings rely on insight into how
32012 beings suffer in the round of rebirth called "cyclic existence," and the depth
32013 of these feelings is enhanced through insight into impermanence and
32014 emptiness.... Though it is possible for love and compassion to be influenced
32015 by afflictive emotions, true love and compassion are unbiased and devoid of
32016 exaggeration, because they are founded on valid cognition of your relationship
32017 to others. The perspective of dependent-arising is supremely helpful in
32018 making sure that you appreciate the wider picture.
32019 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to See Yourself As You Really Are",
32020 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
32022 The Prajna Paramita is a very profound philosophical doctrine, and I will just
32023 outline the main ideas in it in order to clarify the Chod. First we start off
32024 with the confused egocentric state of mind. This state of mind causes us to
32025 suffer, and so, to alleviate the suffering, we start to practice meditation.
32026 What happens in meditation is that the speedy mind begins to slow down and
32027 things begin to settle, like the mud sinking to the bottom of a puddle of
32028 water when it is left undisturbed. When this settling has occurred, a kind of
32029 clear understanding of the way things work in the mind takes place. This
32030 understanding is prajna, profound cognition. Then, according to Buddhist
32031 doctrine, through the use of this prajna, we begin to see that, in fact,
32032 although we think that we have a separate and unique essence, or self, which
32033 we call the "ego," when we look closely, we are a composite of form, sense-
32034 perceptions, consciousness, etc., and are merely a sum of these parts. This
32035 realization is the understanding of sunyata, usually translated as emptiness,
32036 or voidness. It means there is no self-essence, that we are "void of a self."
32037 If we are void of a self, there is no reason to be egocentric, since the whole
32038 notion of a separate ego is false. Therefore we can afford to be
32039 compassionate, and need not continually defend ourselves or force our desires
32041 -- Tsultrim Allione, "Women of Wisdom", published by Snow Lion Publications
32043 There is a film called "Groundhog Day," which is really a Buddhist movie
32044 because this is exactly what the plot is about. For those of you who haven't
32045 seen it, it's about somebody who had to relive the same day again and again
32046 until he got it right. He started out with an extremely negative attitude,
32047 and so throughout the first day he created a lot of negative causes. People
32048 related back to him from his own level of negativity, and so he had a very bad
32049 day. Then the next day he had to experience the same day all over again.
32050 Then again, and again. He became desperate to find a way out. He attempted
32051 suicide many times, but the next morning, there he was again in the same room
32052 and the same bed. The date hadn't changed, and the same song was playing on
32053 the radio. His attitude underwent many, many changes, until in the end he
32054 spent most of his time trying to help people. He forestalled tragedies he
32055 knew were going to happen because he had lived the day over so many times, and
32056 his whole attitude gradually turned around into working out ways to help
32057 others. As his inner attitude transformed, the day gradually got better and
32058 better. Finally, he was able to break through to a new day.
32059 The important thing is how we respond to our situation. We can transform
32060 anything if we respond in a skillful way. This is precisely what karma is
32061 about. If we greet situations with a positive attitude, we will eventually
32062 create positive returns. If we respond with a negative attitude, negative
32063 things will eventually come our way. Unlike the scenario in the movie, it
32064 doesn't always happen right away. We can be very nice people but still have
32065 lots of problems. On the other hand, we can be awful people and have a
32066 wonderful time. But from a Buddhist perspective, it's just a matter of time
32067 before we receive the results of our conduct. And usually it is true that
32068 people with a positive attitude encounter positive circumstances. Even if the
32069 circumstances do not appear positive, they be transformed through a positive
32070 view. On the other hand people with negative minds complain even when things
32071 are going well. They also transform circumstances, but they transform
32072 positive ones into negative ones!
32073 Both our present and our future depend on us. From moment to moment, we
32074 are creating our future. We are not a ball of dust tossed about by the winds
32075 of fate. We have full responsibility for our lives. The more aware we
32076 become, the more capable we are of making skillful choices.
32077 -- Venerable Tenzin Palmo, "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings
32078 on Practical Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Publications
32080 Why is endeavor necessary? If we consider material progress, we see that
32081 research started by one person can always be continued by another. But this
32082 is not possible with spiritual progress. The realization we talk about in the
32083 Buddhadharma is something that has to be accomplished by the individual. No
32084 one else can do it for us. Of course, it would be wonderful if in the future
32085 we could attain realization through some sort of new injection or by means of
32086 a new generation of computers, without having to go through any difficulties.
32087 If we could be absolutely certain that such a time would come, we could simply
32088 lie back and wait to get enlightened. But I doubt that this will ever happen.
32089 It is better to make an effort. We have to develop endeavor.
32091 Thus with patience I will practice diligence,
32092 For it is through zeal that I will reach enlightenment.
32093 If there is no wind, then nothing stirs;
32094 Neither is there merit where there is no diligence.
32095 We can be patient in various ways, such as by not thinking ill of those
32096 who harm us or by accepting suffering as the path. Of these two, the latter
32097 is the more important for generating endeavor, and it is endeavor that enables
32098 us to attain enlightenment. As Shantideva says, "It is through zeal that I
32099 will reach enlightenment." In the same way that protecting a lamp from the
32100 wind allows the flame to burn without flickering, endeavor enables the
32101 virtuous mind to grow undisturbed.
32102 What is endeavor? It is finding joy in doing what is good. To do that,
32103 it is necessary to remove anything that counteracts it, especially laziness.
32104 Laziness has three aspects: having no wish to do good, being distracted by
32105 negative activities, and underestimating oneself by doubting one's ability.
32106 Related to these are taking undue pleasure in idleness and sleep and being
32107 indifferent to samsara as a state of suffering.
32108 -- Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "A Flash of
32109 Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of
32110 Life", translated by The Padmakara Translation Group.
32112 Western women emerging from crisis situations often choose to live alone,
32113 intuitively knowing that the confrontation with oneself that this brings will
32114 lead to a deeper understanding. These women in our society (which sees them
32115 as pitiable and unfortunate) can take strength from the stories of Tibetan
32117 These Western women also seek the support of other women or
32118 psychotherapists to help them to emerge from their descents, just as the
32119 yoginis sought the guidance of their teachers and spiritual friends, and the
32120 Greeks needed the help of the "therapeutes" [helpers] to make sense of the
32121 memories they brought back from the oracle cave.
32122 Speaking of the descent myth in terms of her experiences in controlled
32123 therapeutic regressions, Jungian analyst M.L. Von Franz describes the descent
32124 process in relation to the story of "The Handless Maiden":
32125 In the Middle Ages there were many hermits, and in Switzerland there
32126 were the so-called Wood Brothers and Sisters. People who did not want
32127 to live a monastic life but who wanted to live alone in the forest had
32128 both a closeness to nature and also a great experience of spiritual
32129 inner life. Such Wood Brothers and Sisters could be personalities on
32130 a high level who had a spiritual fate and had to renounce active life
32131 for a time and isolate themselves to find their own inner relation to
32132 God. It is not very different from what the shaman does in the Polar
32133 tribes, or what medicine men do all over the world, in order to seek
32134 an immediate personal religious experience in isolation.
32135 ...If we avoid the descent because of fear of what we will discover about
32136 ourselves in the "underworld," we block ourselves off from a powerful
32137 transformative process. This process has been recognized by modern
32138 psychologists and ancient mystery religions alike.
32139 -- Tsultrim Allione, "Women of Wisdom", published by Snow Lion Publications
32141 The modes of thought in pride and in courageous thought are entirely
32143 Depression caused by disintegration of the ego probably comes from not
32144 being able to posit a conventionally existent I. Still, when some
32145 understanding of emptiness develops, you have a different feeling of I than
32146 that to which you previously were accustomed. Our usual feeling is that the I
32147 is something solid, really independent, and very forceful. Such no longer
32148 remains, but at the same time there is a sense of a mere I that accumulates
32149 karma and performs actions. Such a sense of self is not at all a source of
32151 If you have difficulty positing a merely nominal I as well as merely
32152 nominal cause and effect of actions--if you get to the point where if you
32153 assert selflessness, you cannot posit dependent-arising--then it would be
32154 better to assert dependent-arising and give up selflessness. Indeed, there
32155 are many levels of understanding selflessness, and Buddha, out of great
32156 skillfulness in method, taught many different schools of tenets that posit
32157 coarser levels of selflessness for those temporarily unable to understand the
32158 more subtle levels. It is not the case that only if the most profound level
32159 is immediately accessible, it is suitable, and if it is not accessible, the
32160 whole endeavor should be thrown away. You have to proceed step by step with
32161 whatever accords with your level of mind. Between emptiness and dependent-
32162 arising, you should value dependent-arising more highly.
32163 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the
32164 Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins,
32165 published by Snow Lion Publications
32167 Puba Supoche asked, "Dampa, tell me what it's like when you really
32168 practice sincerely! I understand neither heads nor tails of it!"
32169 Dampa said, "View is the destruction of extreme ideas regarding things!
32170 Cutting pride of self with confidence is realization! Being without support
32171 in luminosity is meditation! In insight, absence of recognition is the
32172 innate! Finding nowhere to place the mind among shifting phenomena is
32173 subsequent attainment! In their absence, there is no antidote but natural
32174 intensity! Naked awareness without grasping is dharmakaya! Disappearance
32175 without being anything is experience! Don't you wonder whether all this truly
32177 -- Padampa Sangye, "Lion of Siddhas: The Life and Teachings of Padampa
32178 Sangye", translated by David Molk, with Lama Tsering Wangdu Rinpoche,
32179 published by Snow Lion Publications
32181 [do you have any thoughts about how a person could go about increasing their
32182 feeling of autonomy or freedom at work?]
32184 ...it will completely depend on the person's individual circumstances,
32185 what position they are in. Let's take the example of a prisoner. Now of
32186 course it is best not to be in prison, but even in that situation, where a
32187 person may be deprived of freedom, he or she may discover small choices that
32188 they are able to make. And even if somebody is in prison, with very rigid
32189 rules, they can undertake some spiritual practices to try to lessen their
32190 mental frustrations, try to get some peace of mind. So they can work on
32191 internal development...if people can do this under the extreme conditions of
32192 prison, in the workplace people may try to discover small things, small
32193 choices that they can make in how to go about their work. And of course,
32194 somebody may work on an assembly line with little variation in how to do their
32195 tasks, but they still have other kinds of choices in terms of their attitudes,
32196 how they interact with their co-workers, whether they utilize certain inner
32197 qualities or spiritual strengths to change their attitude at work even though
32198 the nature of the work may be difficult. Isn't it? So, perhaps that would
32200 Of course, when you are talking about rigid rules and lack of freedom,
32201 that doesn't mean that you are required to blindly follow and accept
32202 everything others tell you. In instances where the worker might be exploited,
32203 where the employer thinks of nothing but profit and pays a small salary and
32204 demands a lot of overtime, or where one may be asked to do things that are not
32205 appropriate or are unethical, one should not simply think, "Well, this is my
32206 karma," and take no action. Here it is not enough to think, "I should just be
32208 If there is injustice, then I think inaction is the wrong response. The
32209 Buddhist texts mention what is called "misplaced tolerance," or "misplaced
32210 forbearance." So...misplaced patience or forbearance refers to the sense of
32211 endurance that some individuals have when they are subject to a very
32212 destructive, negative activity. That is a misplaced forbearance and
32213 endurance. Similarly, in the work environment, if there is a lot of injustice
32214 and exploitation, then to passively tolerate it is the wrong response. The
32215 appropriate response really is to actively resist it, to try to change this
32216 environment rather than accept it. One should take some action...perhaps one
32217 could speak with the boss, with the management, and try to change these
32218 things. One needs to actively resist exploitation. And in some cases, one
32219 may simply need to quit and to look for other work.
32220 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Howard C. Cutler, M.D.,
32221 "The Art of Happiness at Work"
32223 The purpose of Buddha's coming to the world was for the sake of sentient
32224 beings' attaining the wisdom that he achieved. The paths that he taught are
32225 only a means leading to Buddhahood; he does not lead sentient beings with a
32226 low vehicle that is not a method leading to Buddhahood. He establishes
32227 sentient beings in the powers and so forth that exist in his own state.
32229 "Manjushri, all the doctrines that I teach to sentient beings are for
32230 the sake of attaining omniscient wisdom. Flowing into enlightenment
32231 and descending into the Mahayana, they are means of achieving
32232 omniscience, leading completely to one place. Therefore, I do not
32233 create different vehicles."
32234 -- from "Chapter of the True One Sutra".
32236 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
32237 published by Snow Lion Publications
32239 We are aiming to develop a strong feeling of love and compassion with
32240 respect to everyone, but this cannot be done without first seeing an equality
32241 of all beings throught meditatively cultivating equanimity. Otherwise, you'll
32242 easily be able to generate love and compassion for friends and may be able to
32243 extend a little of this to neutral people, but even minor enemies will remain
32244 a huge problem. Thus at first it is necessary to recognize how friends,
32245 neutral persons, and enemies are equal.
32246 This is done in two ways. One way to break down rigid classifications of
32247 people is by reflecting first with respect to friends, then neutral persons,
32249 "Just as I want happiness and don't want suffering, so this friend
32250 wants happiness and doesn't want suffering. And equally, this neutral
32251 person wants happiness and doesn't want suffering. And equally, this
32252 enemy wants happiness and doesn't want suffering."
32253 Another way is to reflect on what your relationships have been with others
32254 over the course of lifetimes, beginning with neutral persons, then friends,
32255 and finally enemies. An enemy in this lifetime wants to do you in, but over
32256 the course of lifetimes was this person just an enemy? No. If you do not
32257 believe in rebirth, utilize the rebirth game, the rebirth perspective, as a
32258 technique for making your mind more flexible.
32259 Either of these techniques will work:
32260 - Reflecting on the similarity of yourself and others in the basic
32261 aspiration to gain happiness and be rid of suffering.
32263 - Reflecting on the changeability of relationships over the course
32265 -- Jeffrey Hopkins, "A Truthful Heart: Buddhist Practices for Connecting
32266 with Others", foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by
32267 Snow Lion Publications
32269 What is wisdom? It is as explained in the perfection of supreme knowledge
32270 teachings: all phenomena are free from elaborations, and when the perceiving
32271 subject as well becomes equally free from elaborations, that is wisdom. In
32272 particular, the wisdom of the buddha consists in the pacification of the
32273 elaborations and their habitual tendencies in relation to suchness. It is the
32274 inseparability of the expanse and wisdom. It is free from singularity and
32275 multiplicity, quality and qualified. It realizes the nonduality of subjects
32276 and objects. In it all phenomena--samsara and nirvana, faults and qualities,
32277 and so on--are always undifferentiable and equal. Outside of that, there is
32278 no way to posit wisdom.
32279 In a nonanalytical context of repeating what others accept, we Followers
32280 of the Middle Way describe knowable objects as existing. The wisdom of the
32281 buddhas is the same. Since we speak of all phenomena as existing from the
32282 perspective of others (even though from our own perspective they are free of
32283 the elaborations of existence and nonexistence), it is unreasonable to debate
32284 solely about the existence or nonexistence of the wisdom of buddhas.
32285 -- "The Karmapa's Middle Way: Feast for the Fortunate by the Ninth Karmapa,
32286 Wangchuk Dorje", trans. by Tyler Dewar, published by Snow Lion
32289 Well timed silence hath more eloquence than speech. -- Martin Fraqhar Tupper
32291 A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind,
32292 instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head.
32295 To achieve great things, two things are needed;
32296 a plan, and not quite enough time.
32297 -- Leonard Bernstein
32299 To bend a bamboo, start when it is a shoot. -- Malaysian Proverb
32301 Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.
32304 No shade tree? Blame not the sun, but yourself. -- Chinese Proverb
32306 'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool,
32307 than to speak and remove all doubt.
32310 Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin
32312 When this world initially formed, there seem to have been two types of
32313 events or entities, one sentient, the other insentient. Rocks, for instance,
32314 are examples of nonsentient entities. You see, we usually consider them to
32315 have no feelings: no pains and no pleasures. The other type, sentient beings,
32316 have awareness, consciousness, pains and pleasures.
32317 But there needs to be a cause for that. If you posit there is no cause
32318 for consciousness, then this leads to all sorts of inconsistencies and logical
32319 problems. So, the cause is posited, established. It is considered certain.
32320 The initial cause must be an independent consciousness. And on that basis
32321 is asserted the theory of continuation of life after death. It is during the
32322 interval when one's continuum of awareness departs from one's body at death
32323 that the subtle mind, the subtle consciousness, becomes manifest. That
32324 continuum connects one life with the next.
32325 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations
32326 with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara
32327 Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by
32328 Snow Lion Publications
32330 Channels and cakras represent the inner structure of the human body,
32331 referred to in the tantric teachings as the 'vajra body'. 'Vajra' means
32332 'indestructible', and 'vajra body' refers to the dimension of the three
32333 fundamental components: the channels and cakras, the prana that flows through
32334 them, and the bindu or thigle, the white and red seed-essences of the physical
32335 body that form the basis for practices such as the Tummo.
32336 In the tantras of the Upadesa section of Dzogchen, it is explained that
32337 after the conception of a human being the first thing to develop is the navel
32338 cakra. Then from this, through a channel, the head cakra develops followed by
32339 the other main cakras of the throat and the heart. This channel or meridian,
32340 known as the life-channel, develops into the spinal cord and spine. At the
32341 same time it remains as the fundamental energy of the central channel.
32342 The central channel, known as Uma in Tibetan, is connected with the two
32343 lateral channels called Roma and Kyangma. The Roma channel, which is white
32344 and corresponds to lunar energy, is on the right side in men and on the left
32345 in women. Ro means 'taste', and the main function of this channel is to give
32346 the sensation of pleasure. The Kyangma channel, red and corresponding to
32347 solar energy, is on the left side in men and on the right in women. Kyang
32348 means 'sole', and unlike the Roma, this channel is not connected with many
32349 secondary channels. Control of this channel is fundamental in order to
32350 cultivate the experience of emptiness. These are the characteristic features
32351 of the two channels, which are related to the two principles of upaya or
32352 method, and of prajna or energy. Method denotes everything pertaining to the
32353 visible or material dimension; while 'prajna', which generally means
32354 discriminating wisdom, in this context denotes the energy of emptiness that is
32355 the base of any manifestation.
32356 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "Yantra Yoga: The Tibetan Yoga of Movement",
32357 translated by Adriano Clemente, published byy Snow Lion Publications
32359 Flowers leave some of their fragrance in the hand that bestows them.
32362 The taller the bamboo grows, the lower it bends.
32365 You can't depend on the man who made the mess to clear it up.
32368 You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. -- John Adams
32370 Kissing is like drinking salted water; you drink and your thirst increases.
32373 The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the
32374 mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own
32375 capacity.... Fuss, the god of the Southern Ocean, and Fret, the god of the
32376 Northern Ocean, happened once to meet in the realm of Chaos, the god of the
32377 center. Chaos treated them very handsomely and they discussed together what
32378 they could doto repay his kindness. They had noticed that, whereas everyone
32379 else had seven apertures, for sight, hearing, eating, breathing and so on,
32380 Chaos had none. So they decided to make the experiment of boring holes in
32381 him. Every day they bored a hole, and on the seventh day, Chaos died.
32384 Everybody loves to talk about calm and peace, whether in a family,
32385 national, or international context. But without inner peace how can we make
32386 real peace? World peace through hatred and force is impossible. Even in the
32387 case of individuals, there is no possibility to feel happiness through anger.
32388 If in a difficult situation one becomes disturbed internally, overwhelmed by
32389 mental discomfort, then external things will not help at all. However, if
32390 despite external difficulties or problems, internally one's attitude is of
32391 love, warmth, and kind-heartedness, then problems can be faced and accepted.
32393 The necessary foundation for world peace and the ultimate goal of any new
32394 international order is the elimination of violence at every level. For this
32395 reason the practice of non-violence surely suits us all. It simply requires
32396 determination, for by its very nature non-violent action requires patience.
32397 While the practice of non-violence is still something of an experiment on this
32398 planet, if it is successful it will open the way to a far more peaceful world
32399 in the next century.
32400 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by
32403 On the tenth night of the twelfth month, Gyal Dawa, the girl, came again.
32404 She said, "Don't neglect my request for a prayer. It is very important."
32405 That's the dream she had. I thought, "I'll write it on the full moon day."
32406 So on the night of the fourteenth I prayed with single-pointed devotion to
32407 Guru Rinpoche to grant blessing that the prayer would be beneficial and then
32408 fell asleep. Early in the morning of the fifteenth I dreamed I was sitting in
32409 front of the shrine in a very large building that looked like a temple.
32410 Suddenly a young white man dressed in white with his hair falling loosely over
32411 his shoulder appeared at the entrance. He was playing the cymbals melodiously
32412 and dancing the swirling, joyous dance of the Ging. He came closer and
32415 If you want to establish the dharma,
32416 Establish it in your mind.
32417 In the depth of mind, you will find Buddha.
32418 If you wish to visit the buddha fields,
32419 Purify ordinary deluded attachment.
32420 The perfectly comfortable buddha field is close by.
32421 Develop the joyful effort to practice,
32422 That is the essence of the teaching.
32423 Without practice, who can gain the siddhis?
32424 It is hard to see one's faults,
32425 But to see them nakedly is powerful advice.
32426 In the end when faults have been cleared away,
32427 The enlightened qualities increase and shine forth.
32429 At the end of this he rolled his cymbals. Then he crashed them together,
32430 and I awoke. After I woke up, I did not forget what he had said. I
32431 understood it to have been advice on practicing what to accept and what to
32432 reject. I was sad that although I had actually seen the face of my only
32433 father, Guru Padmasambhava, I had not recognized him.
32434 I, Jigdral Yeshe Dorje, old father of the Nyingma, wrote this from my own
32435 experience. Sarva Mangalam [May all be auspicious].
32436 -- Khenpo Tsewaang Dongyal Rinpoche, "Light of Fearless Indestructible
32437 Wisdom: The Life and Legacy of His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche", published
32438 by Snow Lion Publications
32440 The modern economy has no national boundaries. When we talk about ecology,
32441 the environment, when we are concerned about the ozone layer, one individual,
32442 one society, one country cannot solve these problems. We must work together.
32443 Humanity needs more genuine cooperation. The foundation for the development
32444 of good relations with one another is altruism, compassion, and forgiveness.
32445 For small arguments to remain limited, in the human circle the best method is
32446 forgiveness. Altruism and forgiveness are the basis for bringing humanity
32447 together. Then no conflict, no matter how serious, will go beyond the bounds
32448 of what is truly human.
32449 -- "The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
32450 About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited bby Sidney Piburn, Foreword
32451 by Sen. Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
32453 Creation in four vajra steps entails meditation on emptiness; generating a
32454 moon, sun, and seed-syllable from which light emanates and then converges; the
32455 full manifestation of the deity resulting from the convergence of the light
32456 and transformation of the seed-syllable; and visualization of three syllables
32457 at the deity's three places. [The syllables om, ah, and hum are imagined at
32458 the forehead, throat, and heart, respectively.]
32459 ...Kongtrul explains that all the varieties of the creation phase
32460 incorporate the four key elements of form, imagination, result, and
32461 transformative power. "Form" means meditating on forms that represent the
32462 aspects of awakening and generating clear images of these forms, thereby
32463 stopping impure appearances. "Imagination" means using the force of creative
32464 imagination to convert the visualized forms of awakening into reality.
32465 "Result" means meditating on the result, that is, the very goal to be
32466 attained, and thereby achieving that goal. "Transformative power" means
32467 turning the ordinary body and mind into pristine awareness by relying on the
32468 transformative powers of awakened beings. Among these, Kongtrul points out,
32469 the most important element for realization of the path is the transformative
32470 power of the vajra master combined with one's own devotion to that master.
32471 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taaye, "The Treasury of Knowledge, Book Eight,
32472 Part Three: The Elements of Tantric Practice", translated by Ingrid
32473 Loken McLeod and Elio Guarisco, published by Snow Lion Publications
32475 From The Prayer Requested by Namke Nyingbo
32478 All these things of the outer environment and the beings therein
32479 That come into sight as the objects of your eyes like this,
32480 They may appear, but leave them in the sphere free from clinging to a self.
32481 Since they are pure of perceiver and perceived, they are the
32482 luminous-empty body of the deity.
32483 I pray to the guru in whom attachment is self-liberated,
32484 I pray to Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
32486 All these sounds, taken as pleasant or unpleasant,
32487 That resound as the objects of your ears like this,
32488 Leave them in the sphere of inconceivable, empty resonance.
32489 Empty resonance, unborn and unceasing, is the Victor's speech.
32490 I pray to the words of the Victor that resound and yet are empty,
32491 I pray to Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
32493 However these thoughts of afflictions' five poisons,
32494 Which stir as objects in your mind like this, may appear,
32495 Do not mess around with them through a mind that rushes ahead into the
32496 future or lingers in the past.
32497 Through leaving their movement in its own place, they uncoil as the dharmakaya.
32498 I pray to the guru whose awareness is self-liberated, I pray to
32499 Padmasambhava from Uddiyana.
32501 Grant your blessings that the mind stream of someone like me is liberated
32502 Through the compassion of the Tathagatas of the three times,
32503 So that objects, appearing as if perceived outside, become pure,
32504 That my very mind, perceiving as if inside, becomes liberated,
32505 And that, in between, luminosity will recognize its own face.
32507 -- "Straight from the Heart: Buddhist Pith Instructions", translated
32508 and introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, published by Snow Lion Publications
32510 The actual method of cultivating the correct attitudes towards the
32511 spiritual master is to practice contemplative meditation upon the guru's good
32512 qualities and the beneficial effects that he or she introduces into one's
32513 life. By reflecting again and again on the great kindness the guru performs,
32514 a confidence suitable for spiritual training under him or her is born. This
32515 process of reflecting on the role of the guru is important in the beginning as
32516 well as in the higher practices, for as we sit in contemplation we become
32517 faced with a stream of reactions, which if understood at an early stage can
32518 clear the mind of much doubt, confusion and superstition.
32519 The spiritual master is the source of all spiritual progress. In this
32520 context, Geshe Potowa once said, "If even those who want to learn a common
32521 worldly trade must study under a qualified teacher, how much more so must we
32522 who seek enlightenment? Most of us have come from the lower realms and have
32523 no background or experience in the paths and stages to enlightenment; and, if
32524 we wish to gain this experience, why should we not study with someone
32525 qualified to teach us the methods that develop it?"
32526 In the beginning of his Great Exposition, Lama Tsongkhapa writes, "The
32527 root of spiritual development is to cultivate an effective relationship with a
32528 master." This means that we must cultivate the correct attitudes and then
32529 demonstrate them correctly in action. This is the root that, if made strong,
32530 supports the trunk, branches, leaves and flowers of practice. When the roots
32531 of a tree are strong, the entire tree becomes strong, whereas when the roots
32532 are weak, the entire tree will remain weak.
32533 ...We should engender respect such that we see the guru as a Buddha. If
32534 we can do this, then we experience the guru as we would a Buddha and
32535 consequently are sufficiently inspired to practice what he or she teaches.
32536 The instruction to see the guru as a Buddha is not unreasonable, for in many
32537 ways the spiritual master is Buddha himself.
32538 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
32539 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Liion Publications
32541 ...when you start practicing, you should not expect too much. We live in
32542 a time of computers and automation, so you may feel that inner development is
32543 also an automatic thing for which you press a button and everything changes.
32544 It is not so. Inner development is not easy and will take time. External
32545 progress, the latest space missions and so forth, have not reached their
32546 present level within a short period but over centuries, each generation making
32547 greater developments based on those of the previous generation. However,
32548 inner development is even more difficult since internal improvement cannot be
32549 transferred from generation to generation. Your past life's experience very
32550 much influences this life, and this life's experience becomes the basis for
32551 the next rebirth's development, but transference of inner development from one
32552 person to another is impossible. Thus, everything depends on yourself, and it
32554 I have met Westerners who at the beginning were very enthusiastic about
32555 their practice, but after a few years have completely forgotten it, and there
32556 are no traces of what they had practiced at one time. This is because at the
32557 beginning they expected too much. Shantideva's Engaging in the Bodhisattva
32558 Deeds emphasizes the importance of the practice of patience--tolerance. This
32559 tolerance is an attitude not only towards your enemy but also an attitude of
32560 sacrifice, of determination, soo that you do not fall into the laziness of
32561 discouragement. You should practice patience, or tolerance, with great
32562 resolve. This is important.
32563 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatsoo, "Kindness,
32564 Clarity, and Insight 25th Anniversary Edition", edited and translated
32565 by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow
32568 I take refuge until I am enlightened in the Buddhas,
32569 the Dharma, and the Sangha.
32570 By the positive potential I create by practicing generosity
32571 and the other far-reaching attitudes (ethical discipline,
32572 patience, joyous effort, meditative stabilization, and wisdom),
32573 may I attain Buddhahood in order to benefit all sentient beings.
32575 It takes only a few moments to think in this way and to recite the prayer,
32576 yet doing so has a significant effect on the rest of our day. We'll be more
32577 cheerful and will be sure of our direction in life. Especially if we don't do
32578 a regular meditation practice, starting the day in this way is extremely
32580 In the evening, after reviewing the day's activities and freeing our minds
32581 from any remaining afflictions that may have arisen during the day, we again
32582 take refuge and generate the altruistic intention.
32583 Before going to sleep, we can envision the Buddha, made of light, on our
32584 pillow. Placing our head in his lap, we fall asleep amidst the gentle glow of
32585 his wisdom and compassion. Instead, we can learn the guidelines and try to
32586 implement them as much as we can, reviewing them periodically to refresh our
32587 minds. We may choose one guideline to emphasize this week in our daily lives.
32588 Next week, we can add another, and so on. In that way, we'll slowly build up
32589 the good habits of practicing all of them.
32590 -- Ven. Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion
32593 Compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering;
32594 love is wanting them to have happiness.
32595 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Compassionate Life"
32597 The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past,
32598 worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present
32599 moment wisely and earnestly.
32602 Our patience will achieve more than our force. -- Edmund Burke
32604 The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his tax return,
32605 it's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
32606 -- Arthur C. Clarke
32608 Despite all the material progress in this and the last century we still
32609 experience suffering, especially in relation to mental well-being. In fact,
32610 if anything, the complex way of life created by modernisation or globalisation
32611 is causing new problems and new causes of mental unrest. Under these
32612 circumstances I feel that the various religious traditions have an important
32613 role to play in helping to maintain peace and the spirit of reconciliation and
32614 dialogue, and therefore harmony and close contact between them is essential.
32615 Whether we are believers or non-believers and, within the category of the
32616 believers, whether we hold this or that belief, we must respect all the
32617 traditions. That's very important.
32618 I always tell people in non-Buddhist countries that followers of other
32619 religions should maintain their own tradition. To change religion is not
32620 easy, and people can get into trouble as a result of confusion. So it is much
32621 safer to keep to one's own tradition, while respecting all religions. I'm
32622 Buddhist--sometimes I describe myself as a staunch Buddhist--but, at the same
32623 time, I respect and admire the works of other traditionss' figures such as
32624 Jesus Christ. Basically, all the religious traditions have made an immense
32625 contribution to humanity and continue to do so, and as such are worthy of our
32626 respect and admiration.
32627 When we contemplate the diversity of spiritual traditions on this planet
32628 we can understand that each addresses the specific needs of different human
32629 beings, because there is so much diversity in human mentality and spiritual
32630 inclination. Yet, fundamentally, all spiritual traditions perform the same
32631 function, which is to help us tame our mental state, overcome our negativities
32632 and perfect our inner potential.
32633 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
32634 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
32636 ...For one who abides in thought
32637 Feats do not arise.
32638 Therefore abandon thought
32639 And think a mantra form.
32641 'Abandon thought' refers to the eradication of thought conceiving self
32642 [inherent existence] through the wisdom of selflessness; it does not mean to
32643 stop any and all types of thought. 'Think a mantra form' means to meditate on
32644 a deity. The measure of firmness in deity yoga is indicated by 'whether
32645 going, standing, or sitting is always immovable though moving about'. When
32646 one has attained the capacity to hold the mind on the divine body in all types
32647 of behaviour--whether in meditative equipoise or not--without moving to
32648 something else, one has the capacity to remove the pride of ordinaariness.
32649 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins,
32650 "Deity Yoga in Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow
32653 A person who is liberated, who has freed his or her mind of all mental
32654 afflictions, still experiences physical suffering. The difference between us
32655 and an arhat, a person who has freed the mind from mental affliction, is that
32656 an arhat doesn't identify with pain. Arhats experience physical pain vividly
32657 but don't grasp onto it; they can take action to avoid or alleviate pain, but
32658 whether they do so or not, the physical pain doesn't come inside. What an
32659 arhat does not experience is mental suffering. A buddha, one who is perfectly
32660 spiritually awakened, has gone a further step. A buddha has no mental
32661 suffering of his or her own, but is vividly and non-dually aware of the
32662 suffering of others.
32663 Superficially, the arhat who is free from mental suffering can seem to us
32664 who lack this realization as numb and detached, in a state of existential
32665 anesthesia. A buddha, one who is fully awakened, presents the paradox of
32666 being free from suffering and also non-dually present with other people's joys
32667 and sorrows, hopes and fears. A buddha taps into immutable bliss, the
32668 ultimate ground state of awareness beyond the dichotomy of stimulus-driven
32669 pain and pleasure. The mind of a buddha has been purified of all obscuration
32670 and from its own nature there naturally arises immutable bliss, like a spring
32671 welling up from the earth. With the unveiling of the buddha-nature of
32672 unconditioned bliss, there is also a complete erosion of an absolute
32673 demarcation between self and other. The barrier is gone. This is why buddhas
32674 are vividly and non-dually aware of the suffering of others, their hopes and
32675 fears, the whole situation, and at the same time are not disengaged from the
32676 purity and bliss of their own awareness. The mind of a buddha doesn't block
32677 out anything and nothing is inhibited, and this is why the awareness of an
32678 awakened being is frequently described as "unimaginable."
32679 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point
32680 Mind Training", published by Snow Lion Publications
32682 The fifth Tara is known as Wangdu Rigje Lhamo. She is Kurukulle in
32683 Sanskrit and Rigjema or Rigje Lhamo in Tibetan. Wangdu means power of
32684 "gathering, summoning," or "magnetizing." We can think of it as attracting
32685 everything beneficial, to benefit all beings. Rigjema means "she who
32686 precisely understands everything" and Lhamo is "divine lady." So she is known
32687 as the Tara who precisely understands the power of magnetizing.
32688 Kurukulle's practice is very extensively taught throughout Tibetan
32689 Buddhism. She is often named the "Red Tara" because of her color. Her Praise
32691 CHAG TSHAL TUT TA RA HUNG YI GE
32692 Homage, Mother, filling all regions, sky, and the realm of desire
32694 DO DANG CHOG DANG NAM KHA GANG MA
32695 With the sounds of TUTTARA and HUNG,
32697 JIG TEN DUN PO ZHAB CHI NEN TE
32698 Trampling the seven worlds with her feet,
32700 LU PA ME PAR GUG PAR NU MA
32701 Able to summon all before her.
32702 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab annd Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal, "Tara's Enlightened
32703 Activity: An Oral Commentary on 'The Twenty-one Praises to Tara'",
32704 published by Snow Lion Publications
32706 The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
32709 Always bear in mind that your resolution to succeed
32710 is more important than any one thing.
32713 Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless-like water. Now you put water into a
32714 cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle,
32715 you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can
32716 crash. Be water, my friend.
32719 All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability.
32720 The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
32723 A wise man can learn more from a foolish question
32724 than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
32727 The remembrance of youth is a sigh. -- Oriental Maxim
32729 Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
32730 -- Herbert Henry Asquith
32732 The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
32733 -- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
32735 What we play is life. -- Louis Armstrong
32737 Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain
32738 the whole truth, or the only truth.
32741 Some say the glass is half empty,
32742 some say the glass is half full,
32743 I say, are you going to drink that?
32746 Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. -- Carl Jung
32748 Since a politician never believes what he says,
32749 he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
32750 -- Charles de Gaulle
32752 On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.
32753 The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the
32754 other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out
32755 is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting
32756 against each other.
32757 -- Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984
32759 Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
32760 -- William Ruckelshaus
32762 Those who get too big for their briches will be exposed in the end. -- Anon.
32764 "We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird
32765 because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world
32766 is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my
32767 interest has been to convince you that you must accept responsibility for being
32768 here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous
32769 time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count,
32770 since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for
32771 witnessing all the marvels of it."
32772 -- Don Juan, Yaqui Shaman
32774 Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
32777 People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true. -- Francis Bacon
32779 The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling,
32780 but in rising every time we fall.
32783 Stapp's Ironical Paradox:
32784 The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any
32785 human accomplishment an incredible miracle.
32786 -- Col. John P. Stapp
32788 When the only tool you own is a hammer,
32789 every problem begins to resemble a nail.
32792 Peace is not a little white dove. It is you and me. -- Rigoberta Menchu Tum
32794 If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
32797 The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes,
32798 in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip
32799 himself of almost all sense and meaning.
32800 -- Sir Winston Churchill
32802 Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is? -- Frank Scully
32804 Money often costs too much. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
32806 The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
32809 The true meaning of life is to plant trees
32810 under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
32811 -- Nelson Henderson
32813 The first human being who hurled an insult instead
32814 of a stone was the founder of civilization.
32817 When the weight of the world has got you down
32818 and you want to end your life.
32819 Bills to pay, a dead-end job,
32820 and problems with the wife.
32821 But don't throw in the tow'l,
32822 'cuz there's a place right down the block...
32823 Where you can drink your misery away...
32824 At Flaming Moe's.... (Let's all go to Flaming Moe's...)
32825 When liquor in a mug (Let's all go to Flaming Moe's...)
32826 can warm you like a hug. (Flaming Moe's...)
32827 And happiness is just a Flaming Moe away...
32828 Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away...
32829 -- Flaming Moe's Theme Song, The Simpsons.
32831 Stop living for what's around the corner
32832 and start enjoying the walk down the street.
32835 Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. -- George Iles
32837 One day Ananda, who had been thinking deeply about things for a while, turned
32838 to the Buddha and exclaimed: "Lord, I've been thinking--spiritual friendship
32839 is at least half of the spiritual life!" The Buddha replied: "Say not so,
32840 Ananda, say not so. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!"
32841 -- Samyutta Nikaya, Verse 2
32843 There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human
32844 limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on
32845 some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly
32846 moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one,
32847 and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.
32850 A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but
32851 together can decide that nothing can be done.
32854 An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
32855 -- Robert A. Humphrey
32857 The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best--and therefore
32858 never scrutinize or question.
32859 -- Stephen Jay Gould
32861 41. One's own awareness, fresh and uncontrived
32862 One's own awareness, fresh and uncontrived,
32863 Is the primordially present ultimate Lama
32864 From whom you have not been separated for even an instant.
32865 This meeting with the original abiding nature--how amazing!
32866 I, Jnana, wrote this in response to Changchub Palmo's request.
32867 -- "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart Advice", translated by
32868 Ron Garry, a Tsadra Foundation Series book, published by Snow Lion
32870 I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring
32871 newspaper headings concerning railroad disasters, less than three hundred
32872 people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve
32873 months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had
32874 killed forty-six.or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know
32875 the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway
32876 suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more
32877 business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed
32878 ceased to be matter for surprise.
32879 By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the
32880 Erie ran eight passenger trains each way every day.sixteen altogether; and
32881 carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six
32882 months.the population of New York city. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen
32883 to twenty-three persons out of its million in six months; and in the same
32884 time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair
32886 "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in travelling by rail, but
32887 in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again."
32888 --Mark Twain on Risk Analysis, 1871
32890 The activities of this degenerate age are like a madman's performance of dance.
32891 No matter what we do, there is no way to please others.
32892 Think about what is essential.
32893 This is my heart's advice.
32894 --Bhande Dharmaradza
32896 In any group of people, there is always some misunderstanding. You cannot
32897 satisfy everyone, no matter what you do. The Bodhicaryavatara says that every
32898 individual has a different way of thinking. Thus, it is very difficult to
32899 please everyone. Even the Buddha could not do it, so how can we? Instead of
32900 trying to please others, please yourself by applying yourself fully to
32902 Investigate your situation carefully, according to the Dharma. For us, it is
32903 more important to know what is best than to know how to please everyone. Know
32904 what is right, and on the basis of your own wisdom and skill, just do it.
32905 Don't expect that other people will be pleased with you or that they will be
32906 happy about what you do. Rather, do what's best, what's helpful for yourself
32907 and for others. If they are happy about it, that's fine. If they are not
32908 happy, what can you do?
32909 -- "A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path", by Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen,
32910 edited by Khenmo Trinlay Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
32912 Lochen Gyurme Dechen, nephew of the great accomplished master Tangtong
32913 Gyalpo, sang this song, a prayer of the Six Doctrines, called "The Rain
32916 Nama Shri Jnana Daki Nigupta-ye!
32918 Lady of the celestial realms, compassionate one,
32919 Chief of wisdom dakinis, Niguma,
32920 When I, your child, pray fervently to you,
32921 In your expanse free from formulations, please think of me.
32922 Lady who reveals the sacred circle of great secrets,
32923 Bestow now the empowerment of the four joys!
32924 Lady who opens the door to the unborn state,
32925 Clear away now my negative acts and obscurations with the purification
32927 Lady who emits fire from the short Ah,
32928 Burn now my soiled aggregates and sense elements!
32929 Lady who draws great bliss from the syllable Ham,
32930 Bestow now coemergent wisdom!
32931 Lady who reveals the natural experience of illusion,
32932 Destroy now my attachment to the reality of anger and desire!
32933 Lady who emanates and transforms during lucid dreams,
32934 Lady who makes spontaneous luminosity arise,
32935 Dispel now the darkness of my stupidity!
32936 Lady who leads above at the time of departure,
32937 Guide me now to the celestial realms!
32938 Lady who overcomes the appearances of delusion in the intermediate state,
32939 Grant me now the invincible body of enlightenment's perfect rapture.
32941 This prayer was sung by the religious teacher Gyurme Dechen.
32943 -- "Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse of the Shangpa Masters", compiled by
32944 Jamgon Kongtrul, translated & edited by Ngawang Zangpo, a Tsadra
32945 Foundation Series book, published by Snow Lion Publications
32947 ...ngondro, the foundational practices, are ways to bring body, speech, or
32948 energy, and all aspects of mind into increasingly effortless harmony with the
32949 oceanic expanse central to Dzogchen teachings. This expanse is another name
32950 for reality, the heart of our being, and thus for mind-nature. Its vastness
32951 challenges the cramped and reified self-images that temporarily obstruct our
32952 view of the whole. Finitudes of any kind--the sense of being small and
32953 contained, the familiar urgent rush of business, passions, or plans--are
32954 simply conceptions. These conceptions are both cause and effect of energetic
32955 holdings in the body. The foundational practices illuminate these holdings
32956 and, in the end, lead to their dissolution into the expanse. As Khetsun
32957 Sangpo Rinpoche has said, "Like a fire that burns fuel, the mind consumes
32958 thought by working with it."
32959 In the Tibetan traditions, teaching and practice sessions typically open
32960 with a reference, brief or extensive, to the foundational practices. Every
32961 lineage has its own variations, but the basic structure and principles of
32962 these practices are virtually identical. After an acknowledgment of one's
32963 guru or lineage and the intention to benefit all beings, the sequence usually
32964 begins with the four thoughts. These are reflections on (1) the preciousness
32965 of one's own life, (2) the fragility of life and the uncertainty of death's
32966 timing, (3) the inexorable nature of karma, and (4) the impossibility of
32967 avoiding suffering so long as ignorance holds one in samsara. In addition,
32968 there are two other contemplations: (5) the benefits of liberation compared to
32969 life in samsara and (6) the importance of a spiritual guide. These six are
32970 known as the outer foundational practices.
32971 These six are combined with five inner practices, each of which is repeated
32972 one hundred thousand times. The first inner foundational practice is refuge.
32973 Refuge, writes Adzom Drukpa, is the cornerstone of all paths. Without it, he
32974 adds, quoting Candrakirti, all vows come to nothing. Most succinctly, refuge
32975 helps us cultivate a quality vital to the path and to human interaction in
32976 general: this is the quality of trust, the ability to fruitfully rely on
32977 someone or something other than oneself. Adzom Paylo Rinpoche once said that
32978 whereas relying on others in the context of samsara generally leads us astray,
32979 relying on the Dharma increases our good qualities.
32980 -- "Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse: A Story of Transmission", by Anne C.
32981 Klein, foreword by Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, preface by Tulku Thondup
32982 Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
32984 1.18 Fruition of the Seed of Enlightenment
32986 When we engage in virtuous actions, we realize they are beneficial not only
32987 for others, but also for ourselves. Our good deeds can earn the praise and
32988 appreciation of others, and the benefits of our work come back to us through
32989 others. When we are involved with virtuous works, people respect us and hold
32990 us in high esteem. And we know we must be doing something good, because we
32991 experience a wholesome, pleasant feeling about our life's work. We quickly
32992 begin to see the short-term benefits of our involvement in virtuous action as
32993 our bodies and minds become more peaceful in our daily lives.
32994 This serenity in turn increases our longevity as our body and mind become
32995 more harmonized. Even after our death, we will be reincarnated in higher
32996 realms of existence as a result of our involvement with virtuous works during
32997 this life. Yet a higher rebirth is merely a short-term benefit, a temporary
32998 relief from the sufferings of samsara, for until we achieve liberation from
32999 samsara we remain trapped in the cycle of suffering, and "whatever goes up,
33001 Within the mundane world, when our evil deeds are common knowledge, no one
33002 sings their praises. If such deeds are remembered at all, it is in infamy.
33003 However, when a being lives with a mind of true bodhichitta and does great
33004 works of pure altruism, their deeds are remembered for centuries. Of such
33005 cases we have many examples within the Kagyu lineage alone: the historical
33006 Buddha, Guru Rinpoche, Milarepa, the Karmapas, and countless others. Yet it
33007 is also important to remember that virtuous action eventually leads us to the
33008 liberation of buddhahood; this is the ultimate long-term benefit of planting
33009 the seed of enlightenment of which we speak. Hence, as we make this journey
33010 towards liberation, it is extremely important for us to learn to recognize
33011 which of our actions are virtuous and which are not.
33012 -- Lama Dudjom Dorjee, "Heartfelt Advice", Snow Lion Publications
33014 Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, addressing those who have or will undertake a
33015 retreat, gives this advice:
33017 "You will fall sick, experience pain, and encounter many adverse
33018 circumstances. At such times do not think, 'Although I am practicing the
33019 Dharma, I have nothing but trouble. The Dharma cannot be so great. I have
33020 followed a teacher and done so much practice, and yet hard times still befall
33021 me.' Such thoughts are wrong views. You should realize that through the
33022 blessing and power of the practice, by experiencing sickness and other
33023 difficulties now, you are purifying and ridding yourself of negative
33024 actions.... By purifying them while you have the chance, you will later go
33025 from bliss to bliss. So do not think, 'I don't deserve this illness, these
33026 obstacles, these negative influences.' Experience your difficulties as
33027 blessings...when you do experience such difficulties, you should be very happy
33028 and avoid having adverse thoughts like, 'Why are such terrible things
33031 As Rinpoche advises, relating to hardship properly depends on the strength
33032 of one's view. In general, having a view is knowing exactly where you want
33033 to go and how to get there. It is the vision of knowing what you want. For
33034 example, if you have the view to become a doctor, your vision guides you
33035 through financial burdens, physical and emotional difficulties, and obstacles
33036 that get in your way. You know it will be difficult and involve sacrifice,
33037 but with a strong view, you forge to the finish line.
33038 Similarly, if you want to become spiritually awakened, it is the power of
33039 your view that gets you there. If you are having a hard time getting to the
33040 meditation cushion, or engaging in the necessary study, it is because your
33041 view is not strong enough or is incomplete. A partial view, in this case, is
33042 one that doesn't include hardship. You can strengthen your view and
33043 accelerate progress by understanding how you lose your view in the fog of
33044 hardship, and therefore lose sight of your path.
33045 -- Dr. Andrew Holecek, "The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual
33046 Hardship into Joy", published by Snow Lion Publications
33048 Chod is a very powerful path to buddhahood. Its power comes from working
33049 with the practitioner's afflictive emotions. Chod is purposely performed in
33050 frightening places to help the practitioner heighten his fear so that he has
33051 the opportunity to cut through it.
33052 -- adapted from Chod Practice in the Bon Tradition, by Alejandro Chaoul,
33053 published by Snow Lion Publications
33055 Under the heading of the great way's [Mahayana's] perspective, we read of how
33056 the Buddha merely demonstrates the process of enlightenment in this world,
33057 something he has done and will do repeatedly. Kongtrul quotes the Buddha in
33058 an important discourse:
33060 "In the past, countless ages ago, in a world-system that united as many
33061 realms as there are grains of sand in the Ganges, I attained enlightenment as
33062 Transcendent Buddha Crown of the Powerful One, aided beings, and transcended
33063 sorrow. Then once again, from that point until the present age, I have
33064 repeatedly demonstrated the inconceivable process of enlightenment.
33065 "I will continue, until cyclic existence is empty, to demonstrate [this
33066 process of] enlightenment beginning with the initial development of the mind
33067 of awakening as an ordinary being."
33069 While such statements do not help us grasp the nature of the Buddha's
33070 enlightenment, they do underline the fact that enlightenment is a specific
33071 experience, the result of a known and knowable process that the Buddha
33072 deliberately demonstrates time and again so that we might follow his example,
33073 no guesswork involved.
33074 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, "Treasury of Knowledge, Books Two, Three,
33075 and Four: Buddhism's Journey to Tibet" translated and introduced by
33076 Ngawang Zangpo, published by Snow Lion Publications
33080 The essence of thoughts that suddenly arise is without any nature. Do not
33081 inhibit their appearance in any way, and without thinking of any essence, let
33082 them arise clearly, nakedly, and vividly. Likewise, if one thought arises,
33083 observe its nature, and if two arise, observe their nature. Thus, whatever
33084 thoughts arise, let them go without holding onto them. Let them remain as
33085 fragments. Release them unimpededly. Be naked without an object. Release
33086 them without grasping. This is close to becoming a Buddha. This is the self-
33087 extinction of samsara, samsara is overwhelmed, samsara is disempowered, and
33088 samsara is exhausted. Knowledge of the path of method and wisdom, appearances
33089 and emptiness, the gradual stages, the common and special paths, and the 84,
33090 000 entrances to the Dharma is made perfectly complete and fulfilled in an
33091 instant. This is self-arisen, for it is present like that in the very nature
33092 [of awareness]. Natural liberation is the essence of all the stainless paths,
33093 and it bears the essence of emptiness and compassion.
33094 -- Karma Chagme, "A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the
33095 Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga", commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche, trans.
33096 by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
33098 We must learn to trust ourselves when we practice the doctrines of the Buddha.
33099 In time, we come to trust the infallibility of karmic cause and effect and of
33100 the interdependence of all actions. We must come to know and trust the
33101 importance of the accumulation of merit and wisdom, in the same way we know
33102 and trust that even the smallest drops of water falling into a bucket will
33103 eventually fill it.
33104 We must learn to trust that our own dharma practice will remove our entire
33105 jungle of kleshas [unwholesome qualities], much like knowing a raging wildfire
33106 can clear an entire forest from the earth. All of our negativities can be
33107 swept away by the firestorm of our compassionate wisdom. We must trust that
33108 all of our happiness and sadness is completely dependent on, and a result of,
33109 our previous karma; when we trust this process we can begin the accumulation
33110 of virtuous actions immediately.
33111 No one achieves perfection in anything meaningful the very first time they
33112 try; however, we've heard the phrase over and over again that "practice makes
33113 perfect." It is true that with multiple repetitions and patience everyone can
33114 achieve perfection over time. I don't know of anyone who has sat down to
33115 meditate for the very first time and immediately attained enlightenment, but
33116 just like the drops of water that we trust will eventually fill our bucket,
33117 consistent dharma practice will eventually lead us to liberation.
33118 -- Lama Dudjom Dorjee, "Heartfelt Advice", published by Snow Lion
33120 Unbroken practice is like a watchful guard.
33121 It is simply unscattered and is free from acceptance or rejection.
33122 There is no duality of things to be abandoned and their antidotes.
33123 This is my heart's advice.
33125 This verse and the following instructions concern how to continue with
33126 Mahamudra practice. Once we have received instructions, we have to accomplish
33127 them and perfect the practice. Continuity of practice is essential for the
33128 perfection of enlightenment.
33129 Unbroken practice means that one is mindful all the time, like a watchful
33130 guard. Thieves and robbers may come at any time, so the guard of a mansion
33131 containing great treasure must be alert twenty-four hours a day. In the same
33132 way, it is important to watch our mind since the thieves of attachment,
33133 desire, anger, and forgetfulness can come at any time and steal the wealth of
33134 our compassion and wisdom, along with our realization of Mahamudra.
33135 Once mindfulness is continuously established, an unscattered mind is "just
33136 there," on the spot, whether we are walking, eating, driving, or performing
33137 other activities. We can watch the mind and see how our mental state shapes
33138 our world. But when we watch it, we should just relax. Milarepa advises us
33141 Rest naturally, like a small child.
33142 Rest like an ocean without waves.
33143 Rest with clarity, like a candle flame.
33144 Rest without self-concern, like a corpse.
33145 Rest unmoving like a mountain.
33147 -- Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, "A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path",
33148 edited by Khenmo Trinlay Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
33150 Every time we begin to practice, it helps not to plunge in right away.
33151 Instead, take a few moments to stop your ordinary chain of thoughts. This is
33152 especially relevant if you are very busy and have only five minutes for your
33153 daily practice, but even ordinarily we have this constant stream of thoughts.
33154 Suppose that just before practice you have a fight with your fianc�. This
33155 will probably trigger a chain of thoughts about what you want to say to your
33156 partner. If you start your practice in the midst of all this, it is not going
33157 to go so well. This is why it helps to put a stop to this chain of thoughts
33158 for just a few moments.
33159 I have found this to be very, very useful. There are actually countless
33160 methods for stopping the chain of thoughts, but for me, before I practice, I
33161 just sit for a while. Every time a thought comes along, I try to stop it by
33162 cultivating a sense of renunciation, and I do this over and over again. I
33163 think about how I am now forty-years-old and, even if I live to be eighty, I
33164 only have half of my life left. I think that out of this forty years, I am
33165 going to sleep the equivalent of twenty years. So now there are only twelve
33166 hours a day that could actually be termed living. If we then factor in
33167 watching at least one movie a day, eating, and gossip, we have maybe five
33168 hours or so left. Out of forty years that means eight years remain, and most
33169 of that will go to indulging our paranoia, anxiety, and all that.... There is
33170 actually very little time for practice!
33171 This should give you an idea of how to stop the chain of thoughts. Don't
33172 immediately throw yourself into the practice; instead, just watch yourself,
33173 watch your life, and watch what you are doing. If you are doing ten minutes
33174 of practice every day, you should try to stop the chain of thoughts for at
33175 least two to three minutes. We do this to transform the mind by invoking a
33176 sense of renunciation. When we think, "I am dying. I am coming closer to
33177 death" and other such thoughts, it really helps.
33178 -- Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in the commentary to "Entrance to the Great
33179 Perfection: A Guide to the Dzogchen Preliminary Practices", compiled,
33180 translated, and introduced by Cortland Dahl, published by Snow Lion
33183 Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that
33184 something else is more important than fear.
33187 Good timber does not grow with ease;
33188 the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.
33191 Q: Does every kind of desire lead to pain?
33193 A: Not all desire leads directly to pain. However, the very word expresses
33194 the sense of sticking to something. It does not permit freedom. It binds.
33195 When attached and fastened to something, we cannot move far away. It is as if
33196 the desired object pulls us back, and we cannot free ourselves from it. For
33197 this kind of desire we use a term meaning attachment. So long as we are
33198 attached, we stick there and cannot achieve liberation. However, this does
33199 not necessarily entail chaos and pain.
33201 Q: Does that mean that some desire is actually beneficial?
33203 A: In the Tibetan language, desire names an attachment that harms ourselves
33204 and others. The source of benefit for ourselves and others receives a
33205 different name; we call that "longing."
33207 -- "Essential Practice: Lectures on Kamalashila's Stages of Meditation in
33208 the Middle Way School by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche", translated and
33209 introduced by Jules B. Levinson, published by Snow Lion Publications
33211 He who plants a tree plants hope. -- Lucy Larcom
33213 We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with
33214 nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a
33215 presumption that once our eyes watered.
33218 The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do
33222 It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are meant to live on it,
33223 helping each other, not destroying each other.
33226 When one has the feeling of dislike for evil, when one feels tranquil, one
33227 finds pleasure in listening to good teachings; when one has these feelings and
33228 appreciates them, one is free of fear.
33231 In Buddhism, there is a teaching called the "three bodies" (sanjin), also
33232 called the "three properties" or the "three enlightened properties". These
33233 are the three kinds of form that a Buddha may manifest as: 1) the Dharma Body
33234 (dharmakaya or hosshin) is the form in which a Buddha transcends physical
33235 being and is identical with the undifferentiated unity of being or Suchness
33236 (Skt. tathata, Jp. shinnyo); 2) the Bliss or Reward Body (sambhogakaya or
33237 hojin) is obtained as the "reward" for having completed the bodhisattva
33238 practice of aiding other beings to end their suffering and having penetrated
33239 the depth of the Buddha's wisdom. Unlike the Dharma Body, which is
33240 immaterial, the Bliss Body is conceived of as an actual body, although one
33241 that is still transcendent and imperceptible to common people; 3) the
33242 Manifested Body (nirmanakaya or ojin) is the physical form in which the Buddha
33243 appears in this world in order to guide sentient beings. It is considered
33244 that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, is nirmanakaya. Honen believed that
33245 Amida is sambhogakaya.
33247 Sometimes we put our glasses in our pockets or on our heads and later we ask,
33248 "Where are my glasses?" This is quite common. We look everywhere else without
33249 finding our glasses. That is why we need the guru, who can say to us, "There
33250 are your glasses." That is all that the Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachers do:
33251 they simply point out. What they are pointing out is something that you
33252 already have. It is not something that they give you. They do not give you
33253 new glasses. They cannot afford to give you new glasses, but they can afford
33254 to point out where you can find your own glasses.
33255 When we receive pointing-out instructions from our root teacher, we are
33256 being introduced directly and nakedly to the reality of mind's nature. These
33257 instructions become very effective if we have prepared ourselves to receive
33259 ...Pointing-out is similar to pointing to the sky when it is very cloudy and
33260 saying to someone, "There is the blue sky." The person will look up and say,
33261 "Where?" You may reply, "It is there--behind the clouds." The person to whom
33262 you are pointing out the blue sky will not see it at first. However, if even
33263 a patch of blue sky appears, then you can say, "Look--the blue sky is like
33264 that." The person then gets a direct experience. He or she knows
33265 experientially that there is blue sky, which will be fully visible when the
33267 -- The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "Mind Beyond Death", published by Snow
33270 In general, clear light is of two types--the objective clear light that is
33271 the subtle emptiness [of inherent existence], and the subjective clear light
33272 that is the wisdom consciousness realizing this emptiness.
33273 -- Lati Rinbochay, "Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth"
33275 [At the time of Buddha, a farmer asked to be ordained as a monk. Shariputra
33276 did not see his merit. But, with a great, compassionate mind, the Buddha took
33277 his hand and said, "I will give you ordination. You do have a seed to attain
33279 The Buddha explained, "Thousands and thousands of kalpas ago, this man was
33280 born as a fly. He was sitting on a pile of cow dung when a sudden rush of
33281 water caught the cow dung, along with the fly, and sent them into the river.
33282 Downstream, someone had placed a prayer wheel in the water, and that cow dung
33283 and fly swirled around and around it. Because of that circumambulation, this
33284 man now has a seed to attain arhatship in this lifetime."
33285 Cause and result are so subtle that only omniscient wisdom can perceive
33286 every detail. That is why we must be very careful that our actions are truly
33288 Reciting just one mantra, protecting the life of even one small bug, giving
33289 a small thing--we should not ignore such actions by saying, "This is nothing;
33290 it makes no difference if I do it or not." Many small actions will gather and
33291 swell like the ocean. These are not merely Buddhist beliefs; these are the
33292 causes that create our world no matter who we are. Our study and practice
33293 give us the opportunity to understand this and to be sincere with ourselves
33294 even in small things.
33295 -- Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, "A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path",
33296 edited by Khenmo Trinlay Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
33298 Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
33301 What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we
33302 open and shut our eyes!
33303 -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
33305 Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an
33306 acquaintance, or a stranger.
33307 -- Franklin P. Jones
33309 Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.
33310 Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame,
33311 but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the
33315 Whosoever has heard the law of virtue and vice is as one who has eyes and
33316 carries a lamp, seeing everything and will become completely wise.
33319 ...in Dzogchen, one applies specific practices in order to create a variety of
33320 sensations, so that the practitioner is more clearly enabled to distinguish
33321 the state of presence--which always remains the same--from the sensations
33322 which change according to the practice being carried out. This obviously
33323 enables one to 'no longer remain in doubt' as to what the state of pure
33324 presence is. The practices known as the twenty-one Semdzin found in the
33325 Dzogchen Mennagde, or Upadesha, series, have this particular function,
33326 enabling the practitioner to separate the ordinary, reasoning mind from the
33327 nature of the mind.
33328 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra
33329 and Dzogchen", compiled and edited by John Shane, published by Snow Lion
33332 People often wonder how to reconcile the Buddha's teachings on non-attachment
33333 with those on love. How can we love others without being attached to them?
33334 Non-attachment is a balanced state of mind in which we cease overestimating
33335 others' qualities. By having a more accurate view of others, our unrealistic
33336 expectations fall away, as does our clinging. This leaves us open to loving
33337 others for who they are, instead of for what they do for us. Our hearts can
33338 open to care for everyone impartially, wishing everyone to be happy simply
33339 because he or she is a living being. The feeling of warmth that was
33340 previously reserved for a select few can now be expanded to a great number of
33342 -- Ven. Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion Pub.
33344 Even in this world, and even now, there are said to be many hidden yogis or
33345 discreet yogis, called bepay naljor in Tibetan. It means those realized ones
33346 who are not generally recognized as great spiritual sages or saints, but have
33347 deeply tasted the fruit of enlightenment, and are living it. Perhaps they are
33348 anonymously doing their good works here among us right now!
33349 The infinite vast expanse is one's own inconceivable nature. Who can say
33350 who has realized it and who hasn't? When we travel around the world or
33351 experience other dimensions, there are so many beings who have tasted it. We
33352 can see it in their behavior, in their countenance, and in stories that are
33353 told--not just in the Dzogchen tradition or the Buddhist tradition, but in any
33354 tradition, and in our Western world too.
33355 This true nature is so vast and inconceivable that even some birds and
33356 animals and beings in other unseen dimensions can be said to have realized it,
33357 as in some of the ancient Indian Jataka stories and other teaching tales. It
33358 is always said that everything is the self-radiant display of the primordial
33359 Buddha Samantabhadra. There are infinite numbers of Buddhas and infinite
33360 numbers of beings. Who can say who is excluded from it?
33361 -- Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche and Lama Surya Das, "Natural Great Perfection:
33362 Dzogchen Teachings and Vajra Songs", published by Snow Lion Publications
33364 Many spiritual seekers are not yet ready to become the disciples of
33365 spiritual mentors. Their present levels of commitment may suit working only
33366 with Buddhism professors, Dharma instructors, or meditation or ritual
33367 trainers. Even if they are ready to commit themselves to the Buddhist path
33368 and to spiritual mentors, they may not yet have found properly qualified
33369 mentors. Alternatively, the spiritual teachers available to them may be
33370 properly qualified and may even have shown them great kindness. Yet, none
33371 seem right to be their mentors. They feel they can relate to them only as
33372 their Buddhism professors. Nevertheless, the Kadam style of guru-meditation
33373 may still help such seekers to gain inspiration from these teachers at the
33374 present stages of their spiritual paths.
33375 Unless our spiritual teachers are total charlatans or complete scoundrels,
33376 all of them have at least some good qualities and exhibit at least some level
33377 of kindness. Our Buddhism professors, Dharma instructors, or meditation or
33378 ritual trainers may lack the qualities of great spiritual mentors. Still,
33379 they have some knowledge of the Dharma, some insight from applying the Dharma
33380 to life, or some technical expertise in the practice. Our teachers are kind
33381 to instruct us, even if their motivations contain the wish to earn a living.
33382 If we correctly discern and acknowledge whatever qualities and levels of
33383 kindness that our professors, instructors, or trainers in fact possess, we may
33384 derive inspiration, through guru-meditation, by focusing on them with
33385 conviction and appreciation.
33386 -- Dr. Alexander Berzin, "Wise Teacher, Wise Student: Tibetan Approaches to
33387 a Healthy Relationship", published by Snow Lion Publications
33389 A tenth-century Bengali pandita named Palden Atisha reintroduced Buddhism
33390 into Tibet. He had a servant who was really awful. He was abusive to Atisha,
33391 disobedient, and generally a big problem. The Tibetans asked Atisha what he
33392 was doing with such an awful guy who was so completely obnoxious. They said,
33393 "Send him back. We'll take care of you." Atisha replied, "What are you
33394 talking about? He is my greatest teacher of patience. He is the most
33395 precious person around me!"
33396 Patience does not mean suppression, and it doesn't mean bottling up our
33397 anger or turning it in on ourselves in the form of self-blame. It means
33398 having a mind which sees everything that happens as the result of causes and
33399 conditions we have set in motion at some time in this or past lives. Who
33400 knows what our relationship has been with someone who is causing us
33401 difficulties now? Who knows what we have have done to him in another life!
33402 If we respond to such people with retaliation, we are just locking ourselves
33403 into that same cycle. We are going to have to keep replaying this part of
33404 the movie again and again in this and future lifetimes. The only way to break
33405 out of the cycle is by changing our attitude.
33406 -- "Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism by
33407 Venerable Tenzin Palmo", published by Snow Lion Publications
33409 [Understanding through the merging of sound and meaning takes place when one
33410 immediately understands the meaning of a teaching through hearing the sound of
33413 One might ask what these words are in the key instructions on the Three
33414 Words That Strike the Vital Point. The sound and the word are the same. For
33415 example, the word "mother" can be understood as indicating someone who is very
33416 kind. If one says "mother," the meaning of what that word expresses is
33417 pointed out. What is known as "the three words" is like that.
33418 What are the three words? "View," "meditation," and "action." What does it
33419 mean to "strike the vital point" with these three words? If one wants to kill
33420 a man and strikes his heart with a weapon, the man will not live another hour.
33421 He will die immediately. What vital point do these three words strike? Just
33422 as oil is present in a mustard seed, all of us, all sentient beings, have
33423 buddha nature. Though it is present, we do not recognize it, because our
33424 minds are obscured by delusions. When, as a result of the view, meditation,
33425 and action, we come to recognize these delusions, we can get rid of them in a
33426 moment. In one day sentient beings can be transformed into buddhas--that is
33427 the ultimate view, meditation, and action of dzogchen. Such a power of
33428 transformation is called "striking the vital point."
33429 -- Dilgo Khyentse, "The Collected Works of Dilgo Khyentse", edited by
33430 Matthieu Ricard and Vivian Kurz, excerpt from Volume 3: "Primordial
33431 Purity", published by Snow Lion Publications
33433 If we can attain nondual, nonconceptual awareness in meditation, we are
33434 engaged in profound political activity, even though we may lose this awareness
33435 during the times we are not formally meditating (the buddha's awareness in
33436 post-meditation is the same as during meditation). Meditating in nondual,
33437 nonconceptual awareness, which is meditating on the dharmadhatu, immediately
33438 begins systematically to destroy in ourselves the structure of dualistic
33439 consciousness with all its attendant cognitive obscurations and emotional
33440 affiictions. From the standpoint of duality, since this dualistic
33441 consciousness also involves other sentient beings as the other pole of our
33442 duality, our activity in dissolving this consciousness has a profound impact
33444 While our nondualistic, nonconceptual meditation is purifying our own
33445 obscurations and afflictions and thereby transforming our personal experience
33446 of others, it is also becoming a spark of buddha activity in those others. As
33447 our meditation becomes effective, the attitude of others towards us begins to
33448 change, and they themselves begin to turn inward and to search with greater
33449 conscientiousness through the stuff of their own minds and lives for spiritual
33450 solutions to their own problems. And as the power of our meditation
33451 increases, this effect reaches ever-widening concentric circles of sentient
33452 beings with whom we have karmic interdependence, which in this day and age
33453 includes not only our immediate family and friends, working associates, and
33454 local communities, but also everyone with whom we are connected through all
33455 the media of our lives.
33456 --Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "The Ninth Karmapa's Ocean of Definitive
33457 Meaning", edited, introduced and annotated by Lama Tashi Namgyal,
33458 published by Snow Lion Publications
33460 Realizations come only if we practice joyfully, with confidence and courage.
33461 Realization doesn't grow within a timid or weak state of mind--it blossoms in
33462 the mind free of doubt and hesitation. Realization is fearless. When we see
33463 the true nature of reality, there's nothing hidden, nothing left to fear. At
33464 last we're seeing reality as it is, full of joy and peace.
33465 ...Thinking of Tara will bring total calm, peace, and protection from all
33466 fears and all frightening situations. Tara's practice removes the two
33467 obscurations: negative emotions and subtle conceptual thinking. It will
33468 increase the two merits: accumulation merit and wisdom merit. From the moment
33469 you start praying to and practicing Tara, your life will be always under the
33470 protection of the Great Mother. From then on rebirth in the lower realms will
33471 be prevented. If you do this prayer for others, it will bring them the same
33472 benefits; it will protect them in their lifetimes as well as uproot future
33473 births in the lower realms. So there is great benefit.
33474 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal in "Tara's Enlightened
33475 Activity: An Oral Commentary on 'The Twenty-one Praises to Tara'",
33476 published by Snow Lion Publications
33478 Realizations come only if we practice joyfully, with confidence and courage.
33479 Realization doesn't grow within a timid or weak state of mind--it blossoms in
33480 the mind free of doubt and hesitation. Realization is fearless. When we see
33481 the true nature of reality, there's nothing hidden, nothing left to fear. At
33482 last we're seeing reality as it is, full of joy and peace.
33483 ...Thinking of Tara will bring total calm, peace, and protection from all
33484 fears and all frightening situations. Tara's practice removes the two
33485 obscurations: negative emotions and subtle conceptual thinking. It will
33486 increase the two merits: accumulation merit and wisdom merit. From the moment
33487 you start praying to and practicing Tara, your life will be always under the
33488 protection of the Great Mother. From then on rebirth in the lower realms will
33489 be prevented. If you do this prayer for others, it will bring them the same
33490 benefits; it will protect them in their lifetimes as well as uproot future
33491 births in the lower realms. So there is great benefit.
33492 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal in "Tara's Enlightened
33493 Activity: An Oral Commentary on 'The Twenty-one Praises to Tara'",
33494 published by Snow Lion Publications
33496 6. Meditation on the Buddha
33497 Begin by observing your breath for a few minutes to calm the mind.
33498 Think of the qualities of infinite love, compassion, wisdom, skillful means,
33499 and other wonderful qualities you aspire to develop. What would it feel like
33500 to have those qualities? Get a sense of the expansiveness and peace of having
33501 a wise and kind heart that reaches out impartially to work for the benefit of
33503 Those qualities of love, compassion, wisdom, skillful means, and so on now
33504 appear in the physical form of the Buddha, in the space in front of you. He
33505 sits on an open lotus flower, and flat sun and moon disks. His body is made
33506 of radiant, transparent light, as is the entire visualization. His body is
33507 golden and he wears the robes of a monk. His right palm rests on his right
33508 knee and his left is in his lap, holding a bowl of nectar, which is medicine
33509 to cure our afflictions and other hindrances. The Buddha's face is very
33510 beautiful. His smiling, compassionate gaze looks at you with total acceptance
33511 and simultaneously encompasses all sentient beings. His eyes are long,
33512 narrow, and peaceful. His lips are red and his earlobes long.
33513 Rays of light emanate from each pore of the Buddha's body and reach every
33514 part of the universe. These rays carry countless miniature Buddhas, some
33515 going out to help beings, others dissolving back into the Buddha after having
33516 finished their work.
33517 The Buddha is surrounded by the entire lineage of spiritual teachers, all
33518 meditational deities, innumerable other Buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, dakas,
33519 dakinis, and Dharma protectors. To the side of each spiritual master is an
33520 elegant table upon which are arranged volumes of Dharma teachings.
33521 Surrounding you are all sentient beings appearing in human form, with your
33522 mother on your left and your father on your right. The people you do not get
33523 along with are in front of you. All of you are looking to the Buddha for
33525 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the
33526 Path", foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion
33529 If we investigate on a deeper level, we will find that when enemies inflict
33530 harm on us, we can actually feel gratitude toward them. Such situations
33531 provide us with rare opportunities to put to test our own practice of
33532 patience. It is a precious occasion to practice not only patience but the
33533 other bodhisattva ideals as well. As a result, we have the opportunity to
33534 accumulate merit in these situations and to receive the benefits thereof.
33535 The poor enemy, on the other hand, because of the negative action of
33536 inflicting harm on someone out of anger and hatred, must eventually face the
33537 negative consequences of his or her own actions. It is almost as if the
33538 perpetrators of the harm sacrifice themselves for the sake of our benefit.
33539 Since the merit accumulated from the practice of patience was possible only
33540 because of the opportunity provided us by our enemy, strictly speaking, we
33541 should dedicate our merit to the benefit of that enemy. This is why the Guide
33542 to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life speaks of the kindness of the enemy.
33543 --Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "The Compassionate Life"
33545 If our practice does not diminish self-grasping, or perhaps even enhances
33546 it, then no matter how austere and determined we are, no matter how many hours
33547 a day we devote to learning, reflection, and meditation, our spiritual
33548 practice is in vain.
33549 A close derivative of self-grasping is the feeling of self-importance. Such
33550 arrogance or pride is a very dangerous pitfall for people practicing Dharma.
33551 Especially in Tibetan Buddhism, with its many levels of practice, the exalted
33552 aspirations of the bodhisattva path, and the mystery surrounding initiation
33553 into tantra, we may easily feel part of an elite. Moreover, the philosophy of
33554 Buddhism is so subtly refined and so penetrating that, as we gain an
33555 understanding of it, this also can give rise to intellectual pride.
33556 But if these are the results of the practice, then something has gone awry.
33557 Recall the well-known saying among Tibetan Buddhists that a pot with a little
33558 water in it makes a loud noise when shaken, but a pot full of water makes no
33560 People with very little realization often want to tell everyone about the
33561 insights they have experienced, the bliss and subtleties of their meditation,
33562 and how it has radically transformed their life. But those who are truly
33563 steeped in realization do not feel compelled to advertise it, and instead
33564 simply dwell in that realization. They are concerned not to describe their
33565 own progress, but to direct the awareness of others to ways in which their own
33566 hearts and minds can be awakened.
33567 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
33568 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
33570 What is method, within the context of the unity of method and wisdom? It is
33571 a dedicated heart of bodhichitta, based on love and compassion. It apprehends
33572 its object, enlightenment, with the intention to achieve it in order to
33573 benefit others. Compassion, as its basis, apprehends its object, the
33574 suffering of others, with the wish to remove it.
33575 Wisdom, on the other hand, is a correct view that understands voidness--the
33576 absence of fantasized, impossible ways of existing. Even if it is aimed at
33577 the same object as method, it apprehends that object as not existing in an
33579 The ways wisdom and compassion each apprehend their object are not at all
33580 the same. Therefore, we need to actualize these two, as method and wisdom,
33581 first separately and then together.
33582 Even if we speak about the mahamudra* that is method and wisdom, inseparable
33583 by nature in the ultimate tantric sense, the first stage for its realization
33584 is understanding the abiding nature of reality.
33585 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
33586 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
33588 In Buddhism we speak of three types of phenomena: First, there are evident
33589 phenomena that are perceived directly.
33590 Second, there are slightly hidden phenomena, which are not accessible to
33591 immediate perception. There are differences of opinion on this even within
33592 Buddhist philosophy. Generally speaking, we think this second type of
33593 phenomena can be known indirectly by inference.
33594 One example of something known by inference is that anything arising in
33595 dependence upon causes and conditions is itself subject to disintegration and
33596 momentary change. This momentary change is not immediately evident to your
33597 senses. You can look at something with your eyes, and it does not appear to
33598 be changing right now, but by inference you can know that it is momentarily
33599 changing. This is an example of the second category of phenomena.
33600 Third, there are very concealed phenomena, which cannot be known by either
33601 of the two preceding methods. They can be known only by relying upon
33602 testimony of someone such as the Buddha.
33603 -- "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on
33604 Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B.
33605 Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
33607 I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in
33608 magnificent glow, than asleep and permanent as a planet.
33611 Sometimes our life can feel devoid of meaning even though we may try in
33612 different ways to put meaning into it.... Meaning comes when we go deeply
33613 within, wait, listen, and open. It begins to come when we genuinely open to
33614 the suffering of those around us with a compassionate heart. Equally, it
33615 comes as we respond to the environment within which we live with care and
33617 The meaning or purpose to be found in bodhichitta is less associated with
33618 what we do than with the quality we bring to what we engage in. Small, simple
33619 aspects of our life can be profoundly meaningful and have deep impact both for
33620 ourselves and others. Meaning lies in the quality of heart that we put into
33622 It is not, therefore, the outer manifestation of what we can achieve that is
33623 the root of meaning. It is the undercurrent of bodhichitta's intention or
33624 purpose and meaning that flows within. What bodhichitta implies is that in
33625 attuning to our buddha nature or buddha potential, we touch a source of
33626 meaning in ourselves that will come through whatever we do.
33627 This root of meaning gives the bodhisattva the capacity to live a relatively
33628 ordinary life and transform adverse circumstances into the path. Even small
33629 things become meaningful, like the way we respond to someone's distress or a
33630 gesture of friendliness that lifts someone's day. This deeper sense of
33631 purpose is reflected in the care we give to our relationships and the
33633 Being present and responsive to what arises may mean that the eventual goal
33634 of our sense of purpose is less crucial. We are seldom, if ever, able to see
33635 fully where our path will take us, and once we are open to the meaning present
33636 in bodhichitta, the ego must surrender ambitions and allow the journey to
33638 -- Rob Preece, "The Courage to Feel: Buddhist Practices for Opening to
33639 Others", published by Snow Lion Publications
33641 We have to admit impermanence into our lives. It's important to live with
33642 impermanence as a frame of reference so that we can approach each moment or
33643 each day with a sense of humility about what we are able to do and what we are
33644 not able to do and relinquish control over things we cannot have control over.
33645 It is important to live as if things are as permanent as stone.
33646 You have to invest yourself in love and concern for people, accept people's
33647 love as if that's the only thing that exists. The commitment to living as if
33648 everything is always there forever with the acceptance that nothing is going
33650 --David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge, "Impermanence: Embracing Change",
33651 published by Snow Lion Publications
33653 We are the people our parents warned us about. -- Jimmy Buffett
33655 To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid,
33656 you must also be well-mannered.
33659 I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
33662 Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time.
33663 Hatred ceases through love.
33664 This is an unalterable law.
33665 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
33667 The Tibetan controversies about instantaneous enlightenment through
33668 recognition of the nature of the mind have been studied by David Jackson.
33669 As he shows, it is mainly members of the Kagyu traditions in Tibet who have
33670 maintained this doctrine, although it is certainly common in Chinese Ch'an
33671 Buddhism and in the teachings of the Great Perfection in Tibet. Dolpopa
33672 quotes the position that is the object of his refutation: "Recognizing the
33673 very essence naturally purifies them, without rejection." This expresses the
33674 view that through recognition of the essence of the thoughts as the dharmakaya
33675 they are purified or dissolved into the dharmakaya, and also the idea that any
33676 affliction that arises is actually a manifestation or self-presencing of
33677 primordial awareness itself. Thus there is no need to reject thoughts or
33678 afflictions, which are naturally purified by means of the recognition. This
33679 type of viewpoint is widespread in Tibetan Buddhism.
33680 In contrast to these views, Dolpopa claims that the definition of an
33681 ordinary sentient being or a buddha, and of samsara or nirvana, is determined
33682 by the presence or absence of the incidental and temporary obscurations that
33683 veil the true nature of reality. It is not determined solely by recognition
33684 of the nature of the mind or the thoughts.
33685 ...While the ground buddhahood of the dharmakaya and the resultant
33686 buddhahood of the dharmakaya have not the slightest difference in essence,
33687 they are distinguished as ground and result by means of the presence or
33688 absence of incidental stains.
33689 -- Cyrus Stearns, "The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought
33690 of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen", a Tsadra Foundation
33691 Series book, published by Snow Lion Publications
33693 We live in an ocean of cyclic existence whose depth and extent cannot be
33694 measured. We are troubled again and again by the afflictions of desire and
33695 hatred as if repeatedly attacked by sharks.
33696 Our mental and physical aggregates are impelled by former contaminated
33697 actions and afflictions and serve as a basis for present suffering as well as
33698 inducing future suffering. While such cyclic existence lasts, we have various
33699 thoughts of pleasure and displeasure: 'If I do this, what will people think?
33700 If I do not do this, I will be too late; I won't make any profit.' When we see
33701 something pleasant we think, 'Oh, if I could only have that!'
33702 ...Day and night, night and day we spend our lives in the company of the
33703 afflictions, generating desire for the pleasant and anger at the unpleasant,
33704 and continue thus even when dreaming, unable to remain relaxed, our minds
33705 completely and utterly mixed with thoughts of desire and hatred without
33707 To what refuge should we go? A source of refuge must have completely
33708 overcome all defects forever; it must be free of all faults. It must also
33709 have all the attributes of altruism--those attainments which are necessary for
33710 achieving others' welfare. For it is doubtful that anyone lacking these two
33711 prerequisites can bestow refuge; it would be like falling into a ditch and
33712 asking another who is in it to help you out. You need to ask someone who is
33713 standing outside the ditch for help; it is senseless to ask another who is in
33714 the same predicament. A refuge capable of protecting from the frights of
33715 manifold sufferings cannot also be bound in this suffering but must be free
33717 Furthermore, the complete attainments are necessary, for if you have fallen
33718 into a ditch, it is useless to seek help from someone standing outside it who
33719 does not wish to help or who wishes to help but has no means to do so.
33720 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
33721 published by Snow Lion Publications
33723 If we were forced to choose between a sense of practical application and
33724 learnedness, a sense of practical application would be more important, for one
33725 who has this will receive the full benefit of whatever he knows. The mere
33726 learnedness of one whose mind is not tamed can produce and increase bad states
33727 of consciousness, which cause unpleasantness for himself and others instead of
33728 the happiness and peace of mind that were intended. One could become jealous
33729 of those higher than oneself, competitive with equals and proud and
33730 contemptuous towards those lower and so forth. It is as if medicine had
33732 Because such danger is great, it is very important to have a composite of
33733 learnedness, a sense of practical application and goodness, without having
33734 learnedness destroy the sense of practical application or having the sense of
33735 practical application destroy learnedness.
33736 -- The Dalai Lama, "A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and
33737 About the Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by Sidney Piburn, Foreword
33738 by Sen. Claiborne Pell, published by Snow Lion Publications
33740 A bodhisattva, having generated a sincere and spontaneous desire to attain
33741 full enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, enters the Mahayana
33742 path of accumulation. Here the bodhisattva cultivates the four mindfulnesses
33743 and develops mental quiescence, then passes on to the path of application,
33744 where she or he strives for a conceptual insight into emptiness. When
33745 quiescence and insight are combined in examining emptiness, the bodhisattva
33746 attains a direct, non-conceptual realization of emptiness, and thus becomes an
33747 arya, on the path of seeing.
33748 The path of seeing corresponds to the first of the ten bhumis, i.e. stages,
33749 levels, or grounds said to be traversed by a bodhisattva. The other nine
33750 bodhisattva stages are coextensive with the path of development, during the
33751 course of which the disciple completely eliminates not only the defilements
33752 that are obstacles to liberation but even the traces of defilement, which are
33753 obstacles to full enlightenment.
33754 When the path of development is completed, the disciple is ready to enter
33755 the path of no-more-training; this marks the attainment of full enlightenment,
33756 the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya of an omniscient, compassionate,
33757 and powerful buddha.
33758 -- Geshe Lhundub Sopa, Roger Jackson, John Newman, "The Wheel of Time: The
33759 Kalachakra in Context", edited by Beth Simon, published by Snow Lion
33762 "If you fear you are running after the objects of the six senses, hold
33763 yourself with the hook:"
33764 'Employ the watchman that is mindfulness.'
33766 Someone who has been captured with a hook has no option but to go wherever
33767 he is led. In the same way, if we catch hold of our mind--which risks being
33768 distracted by the objects of the six senses--with the hook of mindfulness, and
33769 with vigilance and carefulness, this will be of enormous benefit. We should
33770 use this watchman to constantly check how many positive or negative thoughts
33771 and actions we produce during the day. When we are able to control our minds
33772 through mindfulness, everything that appears in samsara and nirvana becomes an
33773 aid in our practice and serves to confirm the meaning of the teachings. All
33774 appearances are understood as being dharmakaya. We perceive everything in its
33775 natural purity, and there is nothing we can call impure.
33776 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "Zurchungpa's Testament: A Commentary on
33777 Zurchung Sherab Trakpa's 'Eighty Chapters of Personal Advice'", based on
33778 Shechen Gyaltsap's Annotated Edition, translated by the Padmakara
33779 Translation Group, published by Snow Lion Publications
33781 A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.
33784 Art is science made clear. -- Jean Cocteau
33786 A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper
33787 cannot be understood.
33790 A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff
33791 that nature replaces it with.
33792 -- Tennessee Williams
33794 The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
33795 -- Willem de Kooning
33797 We need to understand the essential nature of the broad diversity of
33798 phenomena. For example, if we are obliged to be involved frequently with a
33799 man who exhibits a personality that is true only on the surface, as well as
33800 another basic personality, it is important for us to know both of them. To
33801 engage in a relationship with this person that does not go awry, we must know
33802 both aspects of his personality. To know only the facade that he presents is
33803 insufficient; we need to know his basic disposition and abilities. Then we
33804 can know what to expect from him; and he will not deceive us.
33805 Likewise, the manifold events in the world are not non-existent; they do
33806 exist. They are able to help and hurt us--no further criterion for existence
33807 is necessary. If we do not understand their fundamental mode of existence, we
33808 are liable to be deceived, just as in the case of being involved with a person
33809 whose basic personality we do not know.
33810 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Transcendent Wisdom", translated, edited and
33811 annotated by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
33813 One has to be cautious when one is very successful since at that time there
33814 is danger of becoming prideful and becoming involved in the non-religious, and
33815 one has to be cautious also when one has undergone lack of success and so
33816 forth since there is a danger of becoming discouraged--the life of the mind,
33817 so to speak, dying--due to which harm to one's practice could be incurred.
33818 ...Specifically, in situations of low self-esteem, Shantideva recommends
33819 reflection this way:
33820 "Even very tiny bugs and worms have the Buddha nature and thus, when they
33821 encounter certain conditions, through the power of effort they can achieve
33822 the non-abiding nirvana of a Buddha. Now, I have been born as a human with
33823 the capacity to understand what is to be adopted in practice and what is to
33824 be discarded; thus, there is no reason for me to be discouraged. The great
33825 saints and so forth of the past who achieved a high level were people with
33826 a life-basis such as I have, not something separate."
33827 Through such reflection, a resurgence of will can be generated.
33828 -- "The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace by
33829 H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso", translated and edited by
33830 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
33832 When we understand the evolution of our unsatisfactory experiences in cyclic
33833 existence, we will see that meditating on emptiness is their antidote. All
33834 knowable things--people and phenomena--appear to our minds to be inherently
33835 existent. We then grasp at them as existing inherently. Our inappropriate
33836 attention focuses on them, and that gives rise to the various disturbing
33837 attitudes of anger, attachment, and so on. These disturbing attitudes
33838 motivate our actions, which in turn leave karmic imprints on our mindstreams.
33839 When these imprints ripen, we meet with suffering.
33840 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage: An
33841 Explanation of the Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", edited by
33842 Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
33844 The essential point about this condition of potentiality is that, although
33845 there is a causal relationship between the physical world and the world of
33846 mental phenomena, in terms of their own continuum one cannot be said to be the
33847 cause of the other. A mental phenomenon, such as a thought or an emotion,
33848 must come from a preceding mental phenomenon; likewise, a particle of matter
33849 must come from a preceding particle of matter.
33850 Of course, there is an intimate relationship between the two. We know that
33851 mental states can influence material phenomena, such as the body; and,
33852 similarly, that material phenomena can act as contributory factors for certain
33853 subjective experiences. This is something that we can observe in our lives.
33854 Much of our gross level of consciousness is very closely connected to our
33855 body, and in fact we often use terminology and conventions which reflect this.
33856 For example, when we say 'human mind' or 'human consciousness' we are using
33857 the human body as the basis to define a particular mind state. Likewise, at
33858 the gross levels of mind such as our sensory experiences, it is very obvious
33859 that these are heavily dependent upon our body and some physiological states.
33860 When a part of our body is hurt or damaged, for instance, we immediately
33861 experience the impact on our mental state. Nevertheless, the principle
33862 remains that mental phenomena must come from preceding phenomena of the same
33864 If we trace mental phenomena back far enough, as in the case of an
33865 individual's life, we come to the first instant of consciousness in this life.
33866 Once we have traced its continuum to this point of beginning, we then have
33867 three options: we can either say that the first instant of consciousness in
33868 this life must come from a preceding instant of consciousness which existed in
33869 the previous life. Or we can say that this first instant of consciousness
33870 came from nowhere--it just sort of 'popped up'. Or we can say that it came
33871 from a material cause.
33872 From the Buddhist point of view, the last two alternatives are deeply
33873 problematic. The Buddhist understanding is that, in terms of its continuum,
33874 consciousness or mind is beginningless. Mental phenomena are beginningless.
33875 Therefore, the person or the being--which is essentially a designation based
33876 on the continuum of the mind--is also devoid of beginning.
33877 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
33878 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
33880 If someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists.
33881 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
33883 If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? -- Abraham Lincoln
33885 There is something about the outside of a horse
33886 that is good for the inside of a man.
33887 -- Sir Winston Churchill
33889 Life is a party on death row. Recognizing mortality means we are willing to
33890 see what is true. Seeing what is true is grounding. It brings us into the
33891 present and, eventually, into presence. It also brings us into our bodies,
33892 especially if we combine meditation on impermanence with an energetic
33893 awareness at the base of the spine. At first, the important thing about
33894 impermanence seems to be the limited time we have in this precious life. This
33895 is crucial and foundational, and yet it is not the whole story.
33896 The teachings on impermanence concern the death of a self that never
33897 existed. Our sense of such a false and finite self, which initially is
33898 inseparable from our wish to practice, can dissolve. Understanding
33899 impermanence, Khetsun Rinpoche says, will lead you into the natural clarity of
33900 your own mind. To know impermanence is thus not only a path leading to what
33901 Dzogchen traditions speak of as "unbounded wholeness" (thigle nyag cig), it is
33902 also integral to that wholeness.
33903 -- Anne C. Klein, "Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse: A Story of
33904 Transmission", foreword by Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, preface by Tulku
33905 Thondup Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
33907 Now, you see, world peace through mental peace is an absolute. It is the
33908 ultimate goal. But as for the method, there are many factors that must be
33909 taken into consideration. Under a particular set of circumstances, a certain
33910 approach may be useful while under other circumstances another may be useful.
33911 This is a very complicated issue which compels us to study the situation at a
33912 particular point of time. We must take into account the other side's
33913 motivation, etc., so it is a very complex matter.
33914 But we must always keep in mind that all of us want happiness. War, on the
33915 other hand, only brings suffering--that is very clear. Even if we are
33916 victorious, that victory means sacrificing many people. It means their
33917 suffering. Therefore, the important thing is peace. But how do we achieve
33918 peace? Is it done through hatred, through extreme competition, through anger?
33919 It is obvious that through these means it is impossible to achieve any form of
33920 lasting world peace. Hence, the only alternative is to achieve world peace
33921 through mental peace, through peace of mind. World peace is achieved based
33922 only on a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, on the basis of compassion.
33923 The clear, genuine realization of the oneness of all mankind is something
33924 important. It is something we definitely need. Wherever I go, I always
33925 express these views.
33926 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
33927 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
33929 koan for dependency inversion:
33931 High-level modules should not depend upon low-level modules.
33932 Both should depend upon abstractions.
33934 Abstractions should not depend upon details.
33935 Details should depend upon abstractions.
33937 People harm others only when they are unhappy. No one wakes up in the morning
33938 and says, "I feel so great today! I think I'll go out and harm someone!" When
33939 we can allow ourselves to know the depth of the pain and confusion felt by
33940 those who have harmed us, compassion--the wish that they be free from such
33941 suffering--can easily arise. Thinking in this way does not mean whitewashing
33942 or denying harm that was done. Rather, we acknowledge it, but go beyond
33943 amassing resentment, because we know that grudges help neither ourselves nor
33945 -- Thubten Chodron, "Working with Anger", published by Snow Lion Publications
33947 The reason why the qualities of a teacher are described at such length in
33948 the scriptures is because we should know what to look for when seeking a guru
33949 capable of opening up the Buddhist paths within us. To take up training under
33950 an unqualified teacher can be disastrous. It is said in the tantric
33951 scriptures that one is not unwise to examine a guru for twelve years before
33952 accepting that person as one's teacher. The choice of teachers is an
33953 important one and must be made carefully.
33954 Not only does the guru perform the work of the Buddhas and thus equal them
33955 in activity, in terms of kindness the guru surpasses them. Of all Buddhas of
33956 the past who have manifested as universal teachers, it is said that Buddha
33957 Shakyamuni is kindest to us; for it is with his teachings that we have come
33958 into contact...even though Buddha Shakyamuni is most kind of the past Buddhas,
33959 still we are unable to receive teachings from him or witness his inspiring
33961 Were all the Buddhas and lineage masters of the past to manifest before us
33962 at this very moment, we would not be able to recognize them as enlightened
33963 beings. Due to our not having a sufficiently strong karmic connection with
33964 them, they would be unable to affect us. The guru performs the great kindness
33965 of coming to us in an ordinary form which we can perceive and to which we can
33966 relate, and carries out the work of the Buddhas in our lives. The fact that a
33967 donkey like us is brought into the family of spiritual beings is purely due to
33968 the kindness of the guru. The Buddhas can only come to us through him or her.
33969 Thus if we do not respect the guru and heed his or her teachings, what hope do
33970 we have? We should meditate upon the guru's unexcelled kindness and give
33971 birth to profound appreciation.
33972 The reason why we have been wandering unceasingly in cyclic existence since
33973 time immemorial is because we have not met a spiritual master before; or even
33974 if we have met one we did not cultivate an effective relationship with him or
33975 her. We should determine to take the opportunities afforded by our present
33976 human situation and cultivate a spiritual practice under the guidance of a
33978 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
33979 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
33981 There was once a Spartan boy,
33982 who, one night, stole a fox.
33983 In order not to be caught,
33984 he hid it under his cloak.
33985 He stood stock still as his
33986 elder looked him over,
33987 but all the while the fox
33988 chewed away at his insides.
33989 The boy bit his lip against
33990 the pain until he inevitably fell,
33991 dead to the ground.
33994 An exalting task for all humankind
33995 The West is fascinated by efficiency. And there is no doubt that in many
33996 areas its efficiency is quite admirable. That is why I would like to ask this
33997 question, which seems natural to me: why not apply this technical efficiency
33998 to protect all forms of life? This would be an exalting task for all
33999 humankind, especially as we seem to lack a truly large-scale project or ideal.
34000 It is difficult, yet it is absolutely necessary. If the question of human
34001 survival is not solved, there will be nobody left to solve the problem. And
34002 Buddhism can help here.
34003 -- "The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace: The Essential Life and
34004 Teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama"
34006 If you continue to practice meditation, then your experience will gradually
34007 increase and there will be greater and greater stability and greater and
34008 greater lucidity. However, the experiences that can arise in meditation can
34009 take various different forms. And in spite of the fact that the person has a
34010 real recognition of the mind's nature, there is still the possibility or
34011 probability of fluctuation in experience even after that.
34012 Sometimes you may feel that you have amazing, tremendous meditation, and at
34013 other times you may feel that you have no meditation at all. This
34014 characterizes meditation experience, which fluctuates a great deal.
34015 Realization, which is distinct from experience, does not change, but
34016 experiences can fluctuate a great deal or alternate between good and bad.
34017 There will still be times when you will have what you regard as good
34018 experiences and, in contrast, what you regard as bad experiences. When that
34019 occurs, just keep on looking. Don't get distracted or sidetracked by the
34020 experience. Whatever meditation experience arises, you should recognize that
34021 it is transitory. As is said, "meditation experience is like mist, it will
34023 Experiences are different from the actual fact of the recognition itself.
34024 Because they are ephemeral experiences, they aren't worth investing in. So if
34025 you have a bad meditation experience, do not be alarmed, because it too will
34026 vanish. If you have a good meditation experience, you need to continue; if
34027 you have a bad meditation experience, you need to continue. In either case,
34028 you simply need to continue to rest in this recognition of the mind's nature.
34029 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "Pointing Out the Dharmakaya", published by
34030 Snow Lion Publications
34032 The person witnessing another person's suffering has only one appropriate
34033 response: "How can I help?" When karma comes to fruition and causes suffering,
34034 the response should never be, "This is your karma. It's your destiny, so I
34035 can't help." Your own karma may very well present itself as an opportunity to
34036 help a suffering person. Misunderstanding actions and their consequences can
34038 From the Buddhist perspective, the type of fortune we encounter, happiness
34039 or sorrow, is not due to somebody doing something to us. If I win the
34040 lottery, it is not because Buddha selected me for a bonus. No god or buddha
34041 is responsible for what happens to us....This does not imply that a suffering
34042 person is morally degenerate any more than suffering the consequences of
34043 eating contaminated food does. The suffering we experience is due to karma
34044 accumulated under the influence of delusion and mental afflictions. This is
34045 true for all sentient beings.
34046 The Buddhist response to the non-virtues we all commit while strapped to the
34047 wheel of samsara can be inspiring and encouraging. The Buddhist teaching is
34048 that it is possible to neutralize negative karmic seeds embedded in the stream
34049 of consciousness. Deeds cannot be undone, but it is possible to purify one's
34050 mind-stream so that the impact of karmic seeds will be nullified.
34051 The method used to purify the mind-stream is the "four remedial powers"
34052 [remorse, reliance, resolve, and purification]. The metaphor for the
34053 effectiveness of the four remedial powers is that of burning a seed. Karma,
34054 like a seed, can be scorched in the fire of purification so that it will not
34055 sprout. The seed won't vanish, but it will not sprout.
34056 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point
34057 Mind Training", published by Snow Lion Publications
34059 ...it is said that through the power of believing one's own body, speech,
34060 and mind to be undifferentiable from the deity's exalted body, speech, and
34061 mind all one's physical actions and movements are seals and all one's speech
34062 is mantra. In this way the Vajrapani Initiation Tantra says:
34063 "A son or daughter of lineage* who has seen a mandala, who generates the
34064 mind of enlightenment, who is compassionate, skilled in means and in teaching
34065 the ways of letters--the door of Secret Mantra--should think thus, 'Separate
34066 from speech, there is no mind. Separate from mind, there is no speech.
34067 Separate from mind, there is no divine form. Mind itself is speech; speech
34068 itself is mind; divine form itself is also mind, and speech itself is also
34070 "If a mantra practitioner believes in this way that these are
34071 undifferentiable, he attains purity of mind. At those times when he has a
34072 pure mind, he always views in all ways his own body to be the same as the
34073 deity's body, his own speech to be the same as the deity's speech, and his own
34074 mind to be the same as the deity's mind; then, he is in meditative equipoise."
34075 * One who is a suitable vessel for the teaching.
34076 -- "Deity Yoga in Action and Performance Tantra", by His Holiness the Dalai
34077 Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Pub.
34079 My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but
34080 tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward,
34081 and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
34082 -- Kodos gives a speech, "Treehouse of Horror VII"
34084 Mind is empty like an illusion;
34085 Separate from body, it cannot achieve.
34086 Body also is like a wall;
34087 Separate from mind it is without activity.
34088 Similarly the yoga of seals....
34091 Mind separate from body cannot openly display activities; body separate from
34092 mind is the same. Rather, actions must be done upon the aggregation of mind
34093 and body. Just so, here when practicing techniques for transforming basic--or
34094 ordinary--body, speech, mind, and activities into those of the fruit stage of
34095 Buddhahood, it is necessary both to cultivate (1) internal meditative
34096 stabilization on a divine body, on a vajra on a moon disc at the heart, on a
34097 seed syllable on a vajra in the throat, and on a vajra at the heart, and (2)
34098 at the same time to construct the appropriate gesture, or seal, with the
34099 hands. These must be done in unison, for it is said in Yoga Tantra ritual
34100 texts that if you fail to construct seals with the hands, the rite is
34101 nullified. Unlike on other occasions, it is not just that if the hand-seals
34102 are constructed, it is better, but if not, there is no fault of nullifying the
34103 rite. Here, they must be done.
34104 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
34105 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by
34106 Snow Lion Publications
34108 Following the Vajrayana teachings, we do not give up or reject anything;
34109 rather we make use of whatever is there. We look at our negative emotions and
34110 accept them for what they are. Then we relax in this state of acceptance.
34111 Using the emotion itself, it is transformed or transmuted into the positive,
34112 into its true face.
34113 When, for instance, strong anger or desire arises, a Vajrayana practitioner
34114 is not afraid of it. Instead he or she would follow advice along the
34115 following lines: Have the courage to expose yourself to your emotions. Do not
34116 reject or suppress them, but do not follow them either. Just look your
34117 emotion directly in the eye and then try to relax within the very emotion
34118 itself. There is no confrontation involved. You don't do anything.
34119 Remaining detached, you are neither carried away by emotion nor do you reject
34120 it as something negative. Then, you can look at your emotions almost casually
34121 and be rather amused.
34122 When our usual habit of magnifying our feelings and our fascination
34123 resulting from that are gone, there will be no negativity and no fuel. We can
34124 relax within them. What we are trying to do, therefore, is to skillfully and
34125 subtly deal with our emotions. This is largely equivalent to the ability of
34126 exerting discipline.
34127 -- Ringu Tulku, "Daring Steps: Traversing the Path of the Buddha", edited and
34128 translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, published by Snow Lion Publications
34130 Although we did not have the fortune to see Buddha Shakyamuni himself in
34131 person, we do have the great fortune of having access to his own precious
34132 teachings, which is actually superior to seeing him in person. The same is
34133 the case with masters like Nagarjuna and his immediate disciples. If we make
34134 the necessary effort, and undertake the practice and study, we can fully enjoy
34135 a benefit equal to that of having met them in person.
34136 ...So visualize in space, in front of you, all the exalted masters,
34137 including Buddha Shakyamuni, Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, eighty mahasiddhas, the
34138 Nyingma masters, Atisha, the Kadampa masters, the five great masters of the
34139 Sakya tradition, the lineages of Lamdre practice, the great masters of the
34140 Kagyu lineage, such as Marpa, Milarepa, and also the great masters of the
34141 Gelugpa lineage, Lama Tsongkhapa, and all of their followers.
34142 Around you also are the protectors who have taken the oath in the presence
34143 of Buddha Shakyamuni to safeguard and protect the precious doctrine of Buddha.
34144 Visualize as well the harmful spirits--actually an embodiment of your own
34145 delusions--from which you are being protected by the guardians. Also
34146 visualize various emanations of the buddhas actively working for the benefit
34147 of all living beings. Surrounding you are all sentient beings...undergoing
34148 the sufferings of their individual realms of existence. Now generate a strong
34149 force of compassion directed towards all these sentient beings, particularly
34151 Having created this mental image, question yourself as to how all these
34152 objects of refuge, the buddhas and the masters of the past, achieved such a
34153 high state of realization and reached a state where they can provide
34154 protection to all living beings. You will find that it is because of their
34155 having made effort in the practice of dharma in general and, in particular,
34156 the practice of bodhicitta*. Think as follows: "I shall, from today, follow
34157 in the footsteps of these great masters, and take the initiative of generating
34159 * The aspiration to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings.
34160 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", translated by Geshe Thupten
34161 Jinpa, edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
34163 To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
34166 I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire
34167 to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
34170 The question then is "How do we cultivate and develop this bodhicitta, the
34171 mind of enlightenment?" The key, and the root, is great compassion.
34172 Compassion here refers to a state of mind that makes it utterly unbearable for
34173 us to see the suffering of other sentient beings. The way to develop this is
34174 through understanding how we feel about our own suffering. When we become
34175 conscious of our own suffering, we have a spontaneous wish to be free from it.
34176 If we are able to extend that feeling to all other beings, through realizing
34177 the common instinctive desire we all have to avoid and overcome suffering,
34178 then that state of mind is called 'great compassion'.
34179 All of us have the potential to develop that kind of compassion, because
34180 whenever we see people who are suffering, especially those close to us, we
34181 immediately feel empathy towards them, and witness a spontaneous response
34182 within our minds. So all we have to do is to bring that potential out, and
34183 then to develop it to become so impartial that it can include all sentient
34184 beings within its embrace, whether friend or foe.
34185 To cultivate this great compassion within ourselves, first of all we need to
34186 develop what is called loving-kindness, a feeling of connectedness or
34187 closeness with all living creatures. This closeness and intimacy should not
34188 be confused with the kind of feeling we normally have toward our loved ones,
34189 which is tainted by attachment...ego and selfishness. On the contrary, we are
34190 seeking to develop a feeling of closeness towards other sentient beings, and
34191 affection for them, by reflecting on the fact that suffering is inherent in
34192 their very nature, on the helplessness of their situation, and on the
34193 instinctive desire they all have to overcome suffering.
34194 The greater the force of our loving kindness towards other beings, the
34195 greater the force of our compassion. And the greater the force of our
34196 compassion, the easier it will be for us to develop a sense of responsibility
34197 for taking upon ourselves the task of working for others. The greater that
34198 sense of responsibility, the more successful we will be in generating
34199 bodhicitta, the genuine altruistic aspiration to attain buddhahood for the
34201 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
34202 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, Foreword by
34203 Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion Pub.
34205 Understanding the power of the path provides the inspiration that keeps us
34206 going forward; exploring its pain provides the understanding of what holds us
34207 back. It doesn't take long to discover the power, nor to feel the pain.
34208 Waking up hurts. And if we don't understand why, we will run from the pain
34209 and abandon the path. There are countless people who have become spiritual
34210 dropouts, or who are lost in detours because they have not understood
34212 When your arm falls asleep, it prickles and burns as it returns to life.
34213 Frozen fingers sting when they thaw; we jolt awake when the alarm clock rings.
34214 But physical instances of anesthesia are mild compared to the anesthesia born
34215 of ignorance, and so is the level of discomfort upon awakening. The longer
34216 something has been asleep, the more painful it is to wake it up. If your
34217 fingers are merely cold, it is easy to warm them up. But if your fingers are
34218 frozen solid, it hurts like hell when they thaw. According to the traditions,
34219 unless one is already a buddha, an "awakened one," one has been snoring from
34220 beginningless time, and it can really hurt before we completely wake up.
34221 Mingyur Rinpoche writes,
34222 "I'd like to say that everything got better once I was safely settled among
34223 the other participants in the three-year retreat.... On the contrary,
34224 however, my first year in retreat was one of the worst in my life. All the
34225 symptoms of anxiety I'd ever experienced--physical tension, tightness in the
34226 throat, dizziness, and waves of panic--attacked in full force. In Western
34227 terms, I was having a nervous breakdown. In hindsight, I can say that what I
34228 was actually going through was what I like to call a 'nervous breakthrough'."
34229 -- Dr. Andrew Holecek, "The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual
34230 Hardship into Joy", published by Snow Lion Publications
34232 Through our eyes the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears the
34233 universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witness through which the
34234 universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
34235 -- McMurdo Station Forklift Driver paraphrasing Alan Watts
34237 As human beings we are deeply insecure and we do not know who we truly are.
34238 Of course this problem does not show on the surface of our lives. We are
34239 always telling ourselves who we are, based on this notion that we are separate
34240 from everything else. This sense that "I am separate" is the ground of our
34241 sense of self. It is reinforced by various false identities that we cling to,
34242 notions that "I am this" or "I am that." Whatever beliefs we have about
34243 ourselves are just another extension. Most of the time when we look around,
34244 we immediately see that our surroundings are validating these false
34245 identities. For this very reason, it is a challenging endeavor to deconstruct
34246 this illusion of self.
34247 Every time we look into our mirror we might have some thought about
34248 ourselves. Each of these thoughts adds up. They become the conceptual bricks
34249 we use to keep building this illusory castle of self. Yet, there is a
34250 suspicion that this notion of self might be very fragile and transient, and
34251 this thought is silently lurking somewhere in our consciousness. Most of the
34252 time this suspicion is not brought into the light of awareness, but if it is,
34253 some deep, inner wisdom will arise without choice.
34254 Our suspicion of the fragility of this false notion of self can go in one of
34255 two directions. In general it becomes a source of fear, anxiety, and
34256 insecurity. We often see people who are fearful and overly defensive when it
34257 comes to their own identity. We ourselves tend to become fearful if our
34258 identity is threatened. But at other times the suspicion can go another way.
34259 When that happens, it can be a life-changing revelation that can lead us to
34260 the realization of the highest level of truth. This idea is not some new,
34261 lofty theory. It is timeless wisdom that has been realized by many people in
34262 human history. Buddha taught this wisdom, and in his tradition it is called
34263 anatman or "no self." Anatman, or "no self," is the term used to mean that one
34264 has seen through this false sense of self. One has seen that this false sense
34265 of self is merely an identification with one's roles in life. It is just a
34266 mask, not the truth.
34267 -- Anam Thubten, "No Self, No Problem", edited by Sharon Roe, published by
34268 Snow Lion Publications
34270 It is common worldly knowledge that by believing untrue information to be
34271 true we fall into confusion and are harmed. Similarly, by believing phenomena
34272 to be inherently existent when in fact they are not inherently existent, we
34273 are also harmed. For example, with respect to the different ways in which
34274 there can be a consciousness of 'I', there is a definite difference between
34275 the way the 'I' is apprehended when desire, hatred, pride and so forth are
34276 generated based on this 'I', and the way the 'I' is apprehended when we are
34277 relaxed without any of those attitudes being manifest.
34278 Similarly, there is the mere consciousness that apprehends an article in a
34279 store before we buy it, and there is the consciousness apprehending that
34280 article after it has been bought, when it is adhered to as 'mine' and grasped
34281 with attachment. Both these consciousnesses have the same object, and in both
34282 cases the mode of appearance of the article is the appearance of it as
34283 inherently existent. However, there is the difference of the presence or
34284 absence of our adhering to it as inherently or independently existent.
34285 ...a consciousness conceiving inherent existence precedes any bad
34286 consciousness, leading it on by the nose, and also accompanies, or aids, many
34287 other bad consciousnesses as well. Thus, if there were no ignorance
34288 conceiving inherent existence, then there would be no chance for desire,
34289 hatred and so forth to be generated.
34290 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
34291 Jeffrey Hopkins, with Anne Klein, published by Snow Lion Publications
34295 As practitioners we will face many obstacles and sidetracks on our path to
34296 liberation, and these will provide us with many challenges along the way. We
34297 shouldn't allow our practice to become interrupted due to these obstacles and
34298 sidetracks, such as the appearance and disappearance of the many friends we
34299 will have over the course of our lives.
34300 We also shouldn't allow our practice to become interrupted by a change in
34301 the availability or quality of food and shelter. And we shouldn't allow our
34302 practice to become interrupted by the obstacles and sidetracks presented by
34303 the many distractions of mind that are readily available in the mundane world
34304 of our external environment. We shouldn't allow our practice to be
34305 interrupted by obstacles and sidetracks that arise due to the desire and
34306 attachment we feel for loved ones, or our aversion to enemies, or our
34307 indifference towards others. Finally, we should not allow our practice to
34308 become interrupted by our desire to accumulate wealth, or by our attachment to
34309 our material possessions. Only an advanced practitioner, motivated by deep
34310 bodhichitta, can get through these obstacles and avoid these sidetracks to
34311 reach their goal of liberation from samsara.
34312 -- Lama Dudjom Dorjee, "Heartfelt Advice", published by Snow Lion Pub.
34314 Cultivating an aspiration to help other sentient beings becomes a cause for
34315 wanting to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. These are
34316 the two levels of the awakening mind of bodhichitta.
34317 Such a mind cannot be cultivated in a mere few months or years, but this
34318 does not mean it cannot be cultivated at all. If you continue your practice
34319 to cultivate bodhichitta, a time will come when you will be successful. For
34320 example, in the initial stage you may not even understand the meaning of the
34321 word bodhichitta. You might wonder how you could ever cultivate such a mind.
34322 But through repeated practice and familiarity, you will gradually come closer
34324 It is the nature of conditioned things that they change depending on causes
34325 and conditions. So it is important to recall the advantages and benefits of
34326 such a mind and cultivate a strong determination to achieve it. Make ardent
34327 prayers. Whether you sleep, walk, or sit, you should think: "How good it
34328 would be if I could cultivate such a mind." Try to cultivate bodhichitta even
34329 on an aspirational level. If you spend your days in such repeated and
34330 persistent practice, you can definitely develop it. Make the determination to
34331 cultivate it even if it will take many aeons. As Shantideva prays in his
34332 Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life:
34334 As long as space endures
34335 And as long as sentient beings remain,
34337 To dispel the sufferings of all sentient beings.
34339 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", root text by Kamalashila,
34340 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
34341 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
34343 The theory of dependent-arising can be applied everywhere. One benefit of
34344 applying this theory is that viewing a situation this way gives you a more
34345 holistic picture, since whatever the situation is--good or bad--it depends on
34346 causes and conditions. An event is not under its own power but depends on
34347 many present causes and conditions as well as many past causes and conditions.
34348 Otherwise, it could not come into being.
34349 When you think from this viewpoint, you can see much more of the whole
34350 picture, and from this wider perspective, you can see the reality of the
34351 situation, its interdependence. With the help of this relational outlook, the
34352 action that you take will be realistic.
34353 ...Failure to look at the whole picture means realism is lost. The attitude
34354 that money alone is sufficient leads to unforeseen consequences. Money is
34355 certainly necessary; for instance, if you thought that religious retreat in
34356 meditation alone was sufficient, you would not have anything to eat. Many
34357 factors have to be considered. With awareness of the fuller picture, your
34358 outlook becomes reasonable, and your actions become practical, and in this way
34359 favorable results can be achieved.
34360 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to See Yourself As You Really Are",
34361 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
34363 Fear and Fearlessness.
34365 Perhaps the first reaction we have to our own suffering is fear. Fear
34366 arises in us almost automatically when we experience strong emotions or pain.
34367 We don't have to sit there and generate fear--it just arises. When we
34368 experience a disturbing emotion such as jealousy we think, "No, I don't want
34369 this." We would rather not experience it. However, if we examine fear
34370 closely, we see that it is a thought to which we have been habituating our
34371 mind for a very long time. We have repeated this thought pattern of fear for
34372 many years, and from a Buddhist point of view, many lifetimes.
34373 In just the same way, when we habituate our minds to being fearless, to
34374 being brave and open towards our emotions, fearlessness will also arise
34375 naturally. In order for this to happen, we must train in applying antidotes
34376 to our thought patterns that are caught up in fear. In this way, we transcend
34377 fear first through a conceptual process, which later becomes nonconceptual, a
34378 natural fearlessness. In order to become fearless in this way, we need
34379 determination and the willingness to face our emotions. With that strong
34380 determination and courage, fearlessness will arise effortlessly.
34381 -- "Trainings in Compassion: Manuals on the Meditation of Avalokiteshvara",
34382 trans. by Tyler Dewar under the guidance of The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche,
34383 published by Snow Lion Publications
34385 There is both a reason and a purpose for cultivating the meditative
34386 stabilization observing exhalation and inhalation of the breath. The reason
34387 is mainly to purify impure motivations. What exactly is to be purified? The
34388 main of these are the three poisons--desire, hatred, and obscuration. Even
34389 though we have these at all times and even though the meditator will still
34390 retain them, she or he is seeking to suppress their manifest functioning at
34391 that time. The specific purpose for cleansing impure motivations before
34392 meditation is to dispel bad motivations connected with this lifetime, such as
34393 having hatred toward enemies, attachment to friends, and so forth.
34394 In terms of the practice I am explaining here, even the thought of a
34395 religious practitioner of small capacity is included within impure
34396 motivations; such a person engages in practice mainly for the sake of a good
34397 future lifetime. Similarly, if on this occasion one has the motivation of a
34398 religious practitioner of middling capacity--that of only oneself escaping
34399 from cyclic existence, this is also impure.
34400 What is a pure motivation? To take as one's aim the welfare of all sentient
34401 beings. This is the motivation of a religious practitioner of great capacity.
34402 Meditators should imagine or manifest their own impure motivation in the form
34403 of smoke, and with the exhalation of breath should expel all bad motivation.
34404 When inhaling, they should imagine that all the blessings and good qualities
34405 of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, in the form of bright light, are inhaled into
34406 them. This practice is called purification by way of the descent of ambrosia.
34407 There are many forms of this purification, but the essence of the practice is
34409 -- Geshe Gedun Lodro, "Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving Spiritual
34410 Transformation Through Meditation", translated and edited by Jeffrey
34411 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
34413 Tsongkhapa pays homage to the "foremost holy lamas," for it is in dependence
34414 upon a qualified lama that the three principal aspects of the path are
34416 The high title "lama" alone does not qualify someone as a lama; the good
34417 qualities associated with the title must also be present. The three words--
34418 foremost, holy, and lama--set forth the three qualities of a lama.
34419 "Foremost" describes a person who has diminished emphasis on this lifetime
34420 and is primarily concerned with future lifetimes and deeper topics. Such a
34421 person has a longer perspective than the shortsighted one of those who mainly
34422 look to the affairs of this life and thus, in relation to common beings whose
34423 emphasis is mainly on this life, is the foremost, or a leader.
34424 "Holy" refers to one who, as a result of developing renunciation for all
34425 forms of cyclic existence, is not attached to any of its marvels and is
34426 seeking liberation. A holy person has turned his or her mind away from
34427 attachment outside to the better things of cyclic existence and focused it
34429 In the word "lama", "la" means high, and "ma" is a negative, which indicates
34430 that there is none higher; this is a person who has turned away from self-
34431 cherishing to cherishing others, has turned away from the lower concern for
34432 personal benefit in order to achieve the higher purpose of attaining benefit
34434 -- "Kindness, Clarity, and Insight 25th Anniversary Edition", by The
34435 Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, edited and translated
34436 by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion
34439 ...beginning with an attitude
34440 Of love for all living creatures,
34441 Consider beings, excluding none,
34442 Suffering in the three bad rebirths,
34443 Suffering birth, death and so forth.
34445 The" attitude of love" to which the text refers is the affection which sees
34446 all living beings as lovable. The stronger our affection the more easily
34447 compassion arises and the more intense and steadfast it is. Compassion can
34448 arise without it, but it will not be consistent. Unless we see all living
34449 beings as near, dear, appealing and beloved, we won't care what happens to
34450 them. On the contrary, we may even wish more suffering on those we dislike.
34451 That affection is what a doting mother feels for the apple of her eye, what a
34452 dog-owner feels for a beloved pet--a warm feeling that makes you want to hug
34453 and pat and say, "Adorable!"
34454 At present our feelings of affection are restricted to those we like and,
34455 even then, vanish quite quickly if they do something that goes against our
34456 wishes. It's a tall order to ask us to feel affection toward all living
34457 beings. It doesn't come naturally, which is why we need to train ourselves to
34458 see them in a new way.
34459 -- "Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment", commentary by Geshe Sonam
34460 Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion
34463 Why should one work so hard to please people, doing all sorts of things for
34464 others in order to make them feel happy? If one can't bear one's enemy's
34465 happiness, then why should one do all sorts of things to make anyone else
34467 Shantideva explains an inconsistency regarding this issue. He notes that
34468 when praise is directed toward oneself, when people speak highly of oneself,
34469 one not only feels happy but also expects others to be happy when they hear
34470 this praise. However, this is totally inconsistent with one's attitude toward
34471 others. When people praise others, then not only does one disapprove of
34472 others' happiness but one's own peace of mind and happiness are destroyed as
34473 well. So there seems to be an inconsistency when it comes to relating to
34474 praise directed toward oneself and praise directed toward others.
34475 Then, especially for a Bodhisattva practitioner who has dedicated his or her
34476 life to bringing about joy and happiness in others and leading them to the
34477 ultimate state of happiness, to be jealous of others' happiness and joy is
34478 totally inappropriate. In fact, one should feel that if other sentient beings
34479 of their own accord, from their own efforts, gain any little experience of
34480 happiness and joy here and there, we should be all the more grateful, because
34481 without our helping them, they have been able to achieve these joyful
34482 experiences and happiness.
34483 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
34484 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by
34485 Snow Lion Publications
34487 What is meant by going for refuge is that you are seeking refuge from some
34488 fear. All the objects [Buddha, lama, guru, etc.] in front of you are what is
34489 known as the causal refuge, because they serve as the cause for bringing about
34490 the resultant refuge within you. You should entrust yourself to these objects
34491 from the depth of your heart, and you should see the objects as protectors.
34492 The resultant state of your own future realizations, becoming an arya being
34493 and attaining buddhahood--which depends on your own actualization of the path-
34494 -is called the resultant refuge. Someone in difficulty seeking the assistance
34495 of a high official is analogous to someone seeking refuge in the causal
34497 But depending upon others' protection forever is not a courageous way of
34498 life; therefore, one has to try to achieve a state where one is no longer
34499 dependent upon such a refuge, and this is likened to taking refuge in the
34500 resultant buddha, dharma, and sangha. That is the process of taking refuge by
34501 a person of high faculty and courage. This practice should be done not for
34502 the sake of oneself alone but rather for the sake of all other sentient
34503 beings. When you cultivate such an aspiration focused toward the achievement
34504 of the omniscient state, it is very much like the generation of the
34506 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Union of Bliss and Emptiness: Teachings on the
34507 Practice of Guru Yoga", translated by Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow
34510 Many of the methods of practicing Dharma that are learned during waking can,
34511 upon development of dream awareness, be applied in the dream condition. In
34512 fact, one may develop these practices more easily and speedily within the
34513 Dream State if one has the capacity to dream lucidly. There are even some
34514 books that say that if a person applies a practice within a dream, the
34515 practice is nine times more effective than when it is applied during the
34517 The dream condition is unreal. When we discover this for ourselves within
34518 the dream, the immense power of this realization can eliminate obstacles
34519 related to conditioned vision. For this reason, dream practice is very
34520 important for liberating us from habits. We need this powerful assistance in
34521 particular because the emotional attachments, conditioning, and ego
34522 enhancement which compose our normal life have been strengthened over our
34524 In a real sense, all the visions that we see in our lifetime are like the
34525 images of a dream. If we examine them well, the big dream of life and the
34526 smaller dreams of one night are not very different. If we truly see the
34527 essential nature of both, we will find that there really is no difference
34528 between them. If we can finally liberate ourselves from the chains of
34529 emotions, attachments, and ego by this realization, we have the possibility of
34530 ultimately becoming enlightened.
34531 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light",
34532 ed. & intro. by Michael Katz, published by Snow Lion Publications
34534 Cultivating Memory and Joyful Effort
34536 [This] foundational practice is engaged upon awaking in the morning. It
34537 further cultivates strong intention and also strengthens the capacity to
34538 remember the events of the night.
34539 Begin by reviewing the night. The Tibetan term for this preparation is
34540 literally "remembering." Did you dream? Were you aware that you were in a
34541 dream? If you dreamt but did not attain lucidity, you should reflect, "I
34542 dreamt but did not recognize the dream as a dream. But it was a dream."
34543 Resolve that next time you enter a dream you will become aware of its true
34544 nature while still in the dream.
34545 If you find it difficult to remember dreams, it can be helpful, throughout
34546 the day and particularly before sleep, to generate a strong intention to
34547 remember dreams. You can also record dreams in a notepad or with a tape
34548 recorder, as this will reinforce the habit of treating your dreams as
34549 something valuable. The very act of preparing the notebook or recorder at
34550 night serves to support the intention to recall the dream upon waking. It is
34551 not difficult for anyone to remember dreams once the intention to do so is
34552 generated and sustained, even over just a few days.
34553 If you did have a lucid dream, feel joy at the accomplishment. Develop
34554 happiness relative to the practice and resolve to continue to develop the
34555 lucidity the following night. Keep building intention, using both successes
34556 and failures as occasions to develop ever stronger intent to accomplish the
34557 practice. And know that even your intention is a dream.
34558 --Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep",
34559 published by Snow Lion Publications
34561 On some occasions, people faint. Even when your breath temporarily stops,
34562 during that moment, there is a reduced level of consciousness. Consciousness
34563 is most reduced late in the course of dying. Even after all physical
34564 functions cease, we believe that the "I," or "self," still exists. Similarly,
34565 just at the beginning of life, there must be a subtle form of consciousness to
34566 account for the emergence of consciousness in the individual.
34567 We must explore further the point at which consciousness enters into a
34568 physical location. At conception, the moment when and the site where
34569 consciousness interacts with the fertilized egg is something to be discovered,
34570 although there are some reference to this in the texts.... The Buddhist
34571 scriptures do deal with it, but I am interested to see what science has to say
34572 about this. During this period we believe that without the subtle
34573 consciousness, there would be a life beginning without consciousness. If that
34574 were the case then no one could ever recollect experiences from their past
34575 life. It is also in terms of Buddhist beliefs relating to this topic that
34576 Buddhism expounds its theory of cosmology: how the universe began and how it
34578 Based on this metaphysical reasoning and other arguments, and based on the
34579 testimony of individuals who are able to recollect their experiences in past
34580 lives very vividly, Buddhists make this claim. I am a practitioner, so based
34581 on my own limited experiences, and the experiences of my friends, I cannot say
34582 with one hundred percent certainty that there is a subtle consciousness.
34583 Scientists don't posit consciousness in the same sense that Buddhists do.
34584 At the moment of conception, however, there has to be something that prevents
34585 the sperm and egg from simply rotting, and causes it to grow into a human
34586 body. When does that occur? Why does that occur?
34587 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with
34588 the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara Houshmand,
34589 Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion
34590 Taking the reins is the key to happiness
34592 The state of mind of a Buddhist practitioner should be stable, and should
34593 not be subject to too many conflicting events. Such a person will feel both
34594 joy and pain, but neither will be too weak or too intense. Stability is
34595 developed through discipline. The heart and mind become more full of energy,
34596 more resolute, and therefore less susceptible to being blown about by outside
34598 Deep within the human being abides the wisdom that can support him or her in
34599 the face of negative situations. In this way, events no longer throw him
34600 because he is holding the reins. Similarly, when something good happens it is
34601 also possible to rein it in. Taking the reins is the key to happiness. In
34602 Tibet we have a saying: "If you are beside yourself with joy, tears are not
34603 far behind." This shows how relative what we call joy and pain are.
34604 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner
34605 Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings"
34607 From a Buddhist perspective, busying ourselves with worldly activities is a
34608 form of laziness, because we're lax in self-cultivation. Our lives are so
34609 busy in modern society: Our appointment books are completely full and we're
34610 always running here and there. We often complain there isn't enough time for
34612 However, whenever we have a spare moment, we work overtime or call some
34613 friends to fill in the gap. We always have time to eat, but we hardly ever
34614 have time to nourish ourselves spiritually by attending Dharma classes or
34615 meditating. When the temple has entertainment and free meals, we go; but when
34616 there is meditation or lessons, we're busy.
34617 This hindrance to spiritual progress comes because we're attached to worldly
34618 pleasures: food, money, reputation, amusement, and friends. The harm comes
34619 from our inappropriate way of relating to them. Attached, we selfishly
34620 indulge in them. However, these things in and of themselves aren't bad.
34621 Through pacifying our afflictions, we can enjoy these things with a good
34622 motivation--to improve ourselves for the benefit of others.
34623 -- Ven. Thubten Chodron, "Taming the Mind", published by Snow Lion Pub.
34625 It is important to note that we should make sure that our meditation suits
34626 our mind. If we feel comfortable doing analytical meditation on the various
34627 topics in a progressive way, we should go ahead with it. If, on the other
34628 hand, we find it difficult and it is not compatible with our mind, we should
34629 meditate on whatever topic we like.
34630 If we enjoy meditation on emptiness, we should go ahead with this. If it
34631 suits us and we derive pleasure from meditating principally on the altruistic
34632 intention, we can emphasize this. At some point if we find that we cannot
34633 really get into whatever analytical meditation we have been doing, but doing
34634 prostrations, chanting mantra, visualizing a meditation deity, or reciting
34635 aspirational prayers brings peace and pleasure to our mind, we should do that
34637 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage: An
34638 Explanation of the Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", edited by
34639 Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
34641 Attaining realization is not such a long path once we become able to
34642 integrate all our movements of energy in our practice, because then every
34643 action is governed by presence and becomes a step on the path and an
34644 expression of virtue.
34645 Practice is not only sitting in meditation, reciting mantras, or chanting.
34646 It is the application of practice in daily life that is most difficult,
34647 working with our energy in every life situation, with every sense perception,
34648 with every person we meet, whether we want to encounter that person or not.
34649 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of
34650 Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet", published by Snow Lion
34652 When we focus our attention on the passage of breath, we break the usually
34653 continuous flow of thoughts of attachment, hostility and so forth, whatever
34654 they might be. This causes such thoughts to subside for the moment. Thus, by
34655 occupying the mind with our breath, we cleanse it of all positive and negative
34656 conceptual thoughts and thus remain in a neutral state of mind unspecified as
34657 either constructive or destructive. This is the meaning of the line in the
34658 root text, "Thoroughly clean out your state of awareness." This unspecified or
34659 neutral state of mind, cleaned out of all positive and negative conceptual
34660 thoughts, is the most conducive one to work with. Because an unspecified
34661 state of mind like this is unburdened and supple, it is relatively easy to
34662 generate it into a constructive state.
34663 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
34664 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
34667 "You may ask: If there is no sentient being, whose is the goal? We grant
34668 that desire [for liberation, etc.] is indeed delusive. Still, in order to
34669 eradicate suffering, effective delusion, whose result [is understanding of
34670 the ultimate] is not prevented."
34674 If sentient beings do not exist, who is it that attains the fruition of the
34675 spiritual path--full awakening? And while on the path, for whom does one
34676 cultivate compassion?
34679 Sentient beings do exist. It is for them that compassion is felt, and
34680 compassion is cultivated by existent people. Whatever is designated by
34681 delusion is to be acknowledged. Due to cultivating compassion while on the
34682 spiritual path, the fruition of full awakening is attained. Who attains
34683 awakening? That, too, is to be established conventionally, without [ultimate]
34684 examination or analysis. In order to pacify the suffering of oneself and
34685 others, impure appearances that arise due to ignorance are not to be rejected.
34686 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Transcendent Wisdom", translated, edited and
34687 annotated by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
34689 The object of meditation this time is emotion. In other words, we
34690 specifically focus on the emotions that arise from our feelings of good, bad,
34691 and indifferent. In the first of the equanimity meditations, we made the
34692 choice to not follow up these emotions. This time we make the choice to
34693 meditate on them. We might choose to meditate on sensations and feelings that
34694 arise in our immediate, present environment. We might also choose to meditate
34695 on an event or person that sets off strong sensations, feelings, and emotions.
34696 Let's say you choose to base your meditation on an event such as a family
34697 argument. This time you contemplate an aspect of that event and try to
34698 disentangle the sensations, feelings, and emotions. Sensations are what you
34699 feel with your body. Feelings assess whether that sensation is nice, nasty,
34700 or neutral. What emotions arise as a result of those sensations and feelings?
34701 As we now know, equanimity means not getting caught in further
34702 exaggerations: "Oh, I am so bad because this is what I did," "Look how good I
34703 am," "How could anyone love someone like me?" and so on. In this meditation,
34704 equanimity means not judging whether we are good or bad people, but just
34705 noting what happened.
34706 -- Chonyi Taylor, "Enough! A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release from
34707 Addictive Patterns", published by Snow Lion Publications
34709 Everyone tries to remove superficial pain, but there is another class of
34710 techniques concerned with removing suffering on a deeper level--aiming at a
34711 minimum to diminish suffering in future lives and, beyond that, even to remove
34712 all forms of suffering for oneself as well as for all beings. Spiritual
34713 practice is of this deeper type.
34714 These techniques involve an adjustment of attitude; thus, spiritual practice
34715 basically means to adjust your thought well. In Sanskrit it is called dharma,
34716 which means "that which holds." This means that by adjusting counterproductive
34717 attitudes, you are freed from a level of suffering and thus held back from
34718 that particular suffering. Spiritual practice protects, or holds back,
34719 yourself and others from misery.
34720 From first understanding your own situation in cyclic existence and seeking
34721 to hold yourself back from suffering, you extend your realization to other
34722 beings and develop compassion, which means to dedicate yourself to holding
34723 others back from suffering. It makes practical sense...by concentrating on
34724 the welfare of others, you yourself will be happier.
34725 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Mind of Clear Light: Advice on Living Well
34726 and Dying Consciously", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
34728 Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me eight
34729 times, I must be a f**king idiot.
34730 -- Jon Stewart, on the last eight presidents vowing to end America's
34731 addiction to foreign oil
34733 A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner
34734 waiting for the bus marked "Perfection".
34737 In his closing discussion on loving-kindness, Buddhaghosa asks: "What is the
34738 proximate cause of loving-kindness?" The answer is the observation of
34739 lovableness in the person to whom you are attending.
34740 Bring to mind right now someone whom you find lovable. It could be a person
34741 you have a romance with, or a child, or a dear friend, or a great teacher--
34742 someone to whom your heart would leap like a deer in the forest if this person
34743 were to walk through the door, someone whose presence is so lovable that a
34744 gladness arises on seeing him or her. If you can sense that in a dear friend,
34745 then try to seek out the lovableness of a neutral person. Then, finally, when
34746 you break down all the barriers, see it in a person who has done you injury.
34747 It's a great key if you can seek out something to love, even in the enemy.
34748 Bear clearly in mind that this does not endorse or embrace evil. The crucial
34749 point here is to be able to slice through like a very skilled surgeon,
34750 recognizing vicious behavior that we would love to see annihilated as separate
34751 from the person who is participating in it. The doctor can be optimistic. A
34752 cure is possible: the person is not equivalent to the action or the
34753 disposition. Moreover there is something there that we can hold in affection,
34754 with warmth. That really seems to be a master key that can break down the
34755 final barrier and complete the practice.
34756 One way of approaching this is to look at the person you hold in contempt,
34757 and try to find any quality he might share with someone you deeply admire and
34758 respect. Is there anything at all noble to be seen, anything that would be
34759 akin to what a truly great spiritual being would display? Focus on that:
34760 There is something there that you can love. The rest is chaff, that hopefully
34761 will be blown away quickly, to everyone's benefit. It is as if you could see
34762 a little ray of light from within, knowing that its source is much deeper than
34763 the despicable qualities on the outside. That light is what you attend to.
34765 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Four Immeasurables: Practices to Open the Heart",
34766 edited by Zara Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
34768 Question: I have the strong wish to be reborn in any of the realms in a
34769 position to truly help other sentient beings in that realm. Is it wrong for
34770 me in these circumstances not to have the strong wish to leave the wheel of
34773 Answer: Your wish to stay in order to help is certainly right. One of
34774 Shantideva's prayers, roughly translated is, "As long as there is space, I
34775 will remain with sentient beings, to serve and help them." Therefore, I also
34776 am trying to practice this. Helping others is the real purpose of life; it
34777 will bring the most satisfaction. The one action of helping others out of a
34778 sincere motivation brings two results--satisfaction for yourself and benefit
34779 to others. It is most beautiful.
34780 One might ask whether there is a contradiction between a Bodhisattva's
34781 developing a determination to leave cyclic existence by viewing it as faulty
34782 and a Bodhisattva's wishing to remain in cyclic existence in order to help
34783 others. An answer to this is given in Bhavaviveka's Heart of the Middle Way:
34784 ...because of being under the influence of love and compassion, one is not
34785 captivated by the idea of retreating into solitary peace and, with an attitude
34786 of seeking to bring about the welfare of other sentient beings, remains in
34787 cyclic existence. This attitude is really marvelous. Though you are really
34788 fed up with cyclic existence, still because of a willingness and a
34789 determination to serve others, you voluntarily accept to remain.
34790 However, as is indicated by the frequently cited example of a lotus that is
34791 produced from mud but not polluted by it, a Bodhisattva stays in cyclic
34792 existence but is not affected by its faults. It would indeed be hypocritical
34793 to claim from one's mouth that one had taken up the practice of a Bodhisattva
34794 but actually to be happily stuck in cyclic existence with great attachment.
34796 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet Tenzin Gyatso, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard:
34797 Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey
34798 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
34800 Sutras, tantras, esoteric instructions, and experiences teach
34801 The vital point of deathlessness, awakening without meditating:
34802 How this body of karma fully ripening
34803 Arises as a naturally pure awareness body.
34804 Visualize the fully ripening karmic body as the deity's form
34805 And meditate without fixation on it.
34806 It is itself inseparable from mind.
34807 No essence of mind is established,
34808 So where is something that dies?
34809 "Death" is just a concept.
34810 The hosts of concepts are nonexistent phenomena of samsara and nirvana.
34813 According to this and other statements, since one's own mind in essence has
34814 no real existence whatsoever, it was always unborn. Therefore the great
34815 natural liberation of deathlessness is attained. As for this body of fully
34816 ripening karma, since it is a conglomeration of inert matter, it is not a
34817 basis on which to attribute the designations of birth or death. In fact, the
34818 body even arises as a mere appearance of mind.
34819 When one gains confidence in the realization that the mind is unborn and
34820 undying, then the body appears as the deity's form in mahamudra and one
34821 becomes bound to basic space without erring into the path of deluded
34822 appearance. By this kind of instruction one discovers the kaya of union in
34823 this lifetime. Even just hearing it can cause one to get enlightened in the
34824 intermediate state as the sambhogakaya of the victors. Of the Five Golden
34825 Dharmas, it is said to be like the ripened fruit. (p. 248)
34826 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, "The Treasury of Knowledge, Book Eight, Part
34827 Four: Esoteric Instructions, A Detailed Presentation of the Process of
34828 Meditation in Vajrayana", translated by Sarah Harding, published by Snow
34831 Buddhas and Bodhisattvas see clearly that our neglect of others, our self-
34832 preoccupation and our disregard for the connection between actions and their
34833 effects are responsible for all our miseries. The feeling that it doesn't
34834 matter what we do as long as we can get away with it kills our chances of
34835 liberation and enlightenment. Our selfishness robs us of worldly and
34836 supramundane good qualities, leaving us naked and empty-handed. It separates
34837 us from happiness now and in the future and fetters us to suffering.
34838 Resolve never again to let yourself be dominated by this mean and selfish
34839 way of thinking and do everything in your power to combat it. Your happiness
34840 begins the moment you recognize self-cherishing as your chief foe. There are
34841 many good reasons why cherishing others makes sense. Shantideva says:
34842 The state of Buddhahood is accomplished
34843 Equally through living beings and Victorious Ones.
34844 What kind of behavior then is it to revere
34845 Victorious Ones but not living beings?
34846 ...If we truly want to please Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and all those noble
34847 beings in the world whom we admire and whose sole guiding principles are their
34848 affection, love and compassion for others, we can do nothing better than to
34849 cherish living beings. (p. 100)
34850 -- "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path", an oral teaching by Geshe
34851 Sonam Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow
34854 How Purification Works
34856 During Nyungne [fasting] practice, true purification is possible primarily
34857 because of the power of Chenrezig's compassion and blessing, as well as our
34858 faith, devotion, and correct motivation to do the practice. When such causes
34859 and conditions come together, a result inevitably occurs, and this result is
34860 understood as the interdependently-arising nature of all phenomena.
34861 For the most part, enlightened and unenlightened phenomena all arise due to
34862 this interdependently-arising nature. As a spiritual practitioner, the basic
34863 qualities one must bring to the practice are faith, devotion, and a trust in
34864 the power of the practice and Chenrezig. These qualities stem from our own
34865 pure nature of mind, a purity that is identical to Chenrezig's heart, that is,
34866 unceasing love and compassion. When these two things are combined together,
34867 our devotion and faith and Chenrezig's love and compassion, one could say
34868 miracles happen; a true purification takes place.
34869 It has been said that when one is sitting before the mandala of Chenrezig,
34870 one should believe that although Chenrezig is not physically visible to us, in
34871 fact he is really there in front of us. Just as we would be very careful of
34872 our thoughts and behavior if we were in the presence of a powerful and
34873 clairvoyant enlightened guru, in the same way we must generate vigilance so
34874 that we don't act shamefully in front of this great being. If we develop such
34875 vigilance and noble habit, then our negativities will automatically decrease.
34877 -- Wangchen Rinpoche, "Buddhist Fasting Practice: The Nyungne Method of
34878 Thousand-Armed Chenrezig", published by Snow Lion Publications
34880 Reflect on the basic pattern of our existence. In order to do more than
34881 just barely survive, we need shelter, food, companions, friends, the esteem of
34882 others, resources, and so on; these things do not come about from ourselves
34883 alone but are all dependent on others. Suppose one single person were to live
34884 alone in a remote and uninhabited place. No matter how strong, healthy, or
34885 educated this person were, there would be no possibility of his or her leading
34886 a happy and fulfilling existence.... Can such a person have friends? Acquire
34887 renown? Can this person become a hero if he or she wishes to become one? I
34888 think the answer to all these questions is a definite no, for all these
34889 factors come about only in relation to other fellow humans.
34890 When you are young, healthy, and strong, you sometimes can get the feeling
34891 that you are totally independent and do not need anyone else. But this is an
34892 illusion. Even at that prime age of your life, simply because your are a
34893 human being, you need friends, don't you? This is especially true when we
34894 become old and need to rely more and more on the help of others: this is the
34895 nature of our lives as human beings.
34896 In at least one sense, we can say that other people are really the principal
34897 source of all our experiences of joy, happiness, and prosperity, and not only
34898 in terms of our day-to-day dealings with people. We can see that all the
34899 desirable experiences that we cherish or aspire to attain are dependent upon
34900 cooperation and interaction with others. It is an obvious fact.
34901 Similarly, from the point of view of a Buddhist practitioner, many of the
34902 high levels of realization that you gain and the progress that you make on
34903 your spiritual journey are dependent upon cooperation and interaction with
34904 others. Furthermore, at the stage of complete enlightenment, the
34905 compassionate activities of a buddha can come about spontaneously only in
34906 relation to other beings, for those beings are the recipients and
34907 beneficiaries of those enlightened activities. (p.5)
34908 -- Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "The Compassionate Life"
34910 The difficulty with a purely materialistic interpretation of life is that,
34911 in addition to ignoring an entire dimension of the mind, it does not deal
34912 effectively with the problems of this life. A materialistic mind is an
34913 unstable mind, for its happiness is built on transient, physical
34914 circumstances. Mental disease is as high among the affluent as it is among
34915 the poor, which is a clear indication of the limitations of the approach.
34916 Although it is essential to maintain a reasonable material basis on which to
34917 live, the emphasis in one's life should be on cultivating the mental and
34918 spiritual causes of happiness. The human mind is very powerful and our
34919 worldly needs are not so great that they must demand all of our attention,
34920 especially in light of the fact that materialistic success solves so few of
34921 the many challenges and problems that confront men and women throughout their
34922 lives, and it does nothing for them at death.
34923 On the other hand, if one cultivates spiritual qualities such as mental
34924 harmony, humility, non-attachment, patience, love, compassion, wisdom and so
34925 forth, then one becomes equipped with a strength and intelligence able to deal
34926 effectively with the problems of this life; and because the wealth one is
34927 amassing is mental rather than material, it will not have to be left behind at
34928 death. There is no need to enter the after-death state empty-handed. (31)
34929 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
34930 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
34932 The bardo* of this life does not last forever. We know that, like a guest
34933 in a hotel, our mind is only temporarily sheltered in this body. As we face
34934 the challenges of this life and the impending challenges of the bardos to
34935 come, how does engaging in the three-stage process of study, contemplation and
34936 meditation help us? By applying ourselves to these three, we acquire the
34937 skills to stabilize our mind and we develop actual insight into how our mind
34938 functions. First we gain an understanding of the nature of mind; then, we
34939 experience that nature; and finally, we arrive at the ultimate benefit, which
34940 is fully realizing that nature.
34941 When we practice these stages of the path, it is like accumulating the exact
34942 things we will need to take with us on our trip. When we are ready to pack
34943 our suitcase, we will have what we need without looking further. We will not
34944 have to go out at the last minute and buy a map or a guidebook. We will not
34945 have to worry about whether we are forgetting something crucial.
34946 We have knowledge and experience that has blossomed into realization;
34947 therefore we can handle any situation. We have confidence in ourselves, in
34948 the teachings, and the guidance of our lineage teachers. At this point, we
34949 can let go of all our doubt and hesitation. We can simply relax and be who we
34950 are, wherever we are. (p.58)
34951 * in-between state, interval
34952 -- The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "Mind Beyond Death", published by Snow
34955 The thoughts that in this year and month
34956 I will put right all my tasks and plans
34957 And then start a perfect dharma practice
34958 Is in fact the devil which brings all downfalls.
34960 The lack of death awareness prevents one from undertaking the practice of
34961 dharma. This is very true: If one is not aware of the eventuality of death,
34962 one will be totally concerned and preoccupied with the affairs of this
34963 lifetime alone, and with actions that are just for the benefit of this
34964 lifetime. Such ventures may take all one's time and energy, but no matter how
34965 important they appear to be, since they are directly related to this lifetime
34966 alone, their benefits are limited--once one leaves the present body, their
34967 benefit ends. Even though one might have a best friend, when one has to leave
34968 the body, one cannot take the friend along.
34969 ...Think that after twenty or thirty years even the Dalai Lama will also be
34970 no more. While I am alive, there will be people who are, from the depths of
34971 their hearts, prepared to give their lives for my sake, but on the day when I
34972 have to leave, I cannot take even one among them with me. Neither will I be
34973 able to take any of my possessions, even the body which I have always
34974 preserved and protected. This also will be left behind. At that time of my
34975 death, what will benefit is only the positive seeds that are imprinted upon my
34976 consciousness. No other factors will help at that time. (p.106)
34977 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", translated by Geshe Thupten
34978 Jinpa, edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
34980 At the beginning of the process of deity meditation and mantra repetition
34981 one meditates on emptiness, settling the non-inherent existence of oneself and
34982 the deity through a reasoning such as that of dependent-arising--the fact that
34983 both oneself and the deity arise in dependence on their respective bases of
34984 designation. One's own final nature and the final nature of the deity are the
34985 same, an emptiness of inherent existence.
34986 To perform deity yoga one does not just withdraw ordinary appearances and
34987 then appear as a deity but causes the mind realising emptiness itself to
34988 appear as a deity. Thus, it is essential initially to meditate on emptiness,
34989 cleansing all appearances in emptiness. One then uses that wisdom
34990 consciousness realising emptiness as the basis of emanation of a divine body.
34991 This must be done at least in imitation of a consciousness actually doing
34992 this, for meditation on a truly existent divine body, instead of helping, will
34993 only increase adherence to inherent existence. Meditated properly, the
34994 appearance of a divine figure is the sport of the ultimate mind of
34995 enlightenment, first in imitation and later in fact. (p.39)
34996 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Deity
34997 Yoga in Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow Lion Pub.
34999 If one could attain the state of perfect buddhahood that is free from all
35000 faults, that sees directly all aspects of the qualities to be cultivated and
35001 faults overcome in the quest for enlightenment, and that is physically adorned
35002 with the marks and signs of perfection, the mere perception of which is
35003 beneficial, then one would be beyond the distinction of feeling attraction or
35004 aversion toward the infinite sentient beings. One would regard all beings
35005 with an equal compassion, and would have the ability to really benefit them.
35006 Think, "I should make every effort to attain this all-beneficial state."
35007 In brief, the motivation should be, "For the ultimate benefit of the
35008 sentient beings, who are as infinite as the sky is vast, I must attain the
35009 state of a peerless, perfect, pure buddha." This is the aspirational aspect of
35011 -- Glenn Mullin, "The Practice of Kalachakra", foreword by H.H. the Dalai
35012 Lama, published by Snow Lion Publications
35014 After suffering severe puncture wounds without shooting any goop on my
35015 opponent, I realized I was simply outgunned. Never bring caulk to a
35017 -- Stephanie S. Thompson
35019 My cat Elea added a trick to her repertoire this morning.
35020 I sleep in a bit on the weekend, and both cats protest by
35021 visiting the bed every few minutes until I get up.
35022 Elea, being toothless, is afflicted with a mean case of drool when
35023 she's hungry. So this morning I got a "drool shower" since she
35024 sat next to my face and shook her head vigorously,
35025 flinging drool everywhere (especially onto my face).
35026 I know this wasn't just a fluke because a few minutes later
35027 she came back and did it again.
35030 On Arcadia Asylum, pioneering creator in Second Life...
35031 "Nope, she can't log into Arcadia, Aley Arai, nor Lora Lemon. She's great
35032 at building, but she doesn't think she should have to pay the Lindens for
35033 anything, so she doesn't, and they get mad about that and close her
35036 The important thing is the obvious thing nobody is saying.
35037 -- William S. Burroughs
35039 Our fundamental nature--what we term 'the buddha nature', the very nature of
35040 our mind, is inherently present within us as a natural attribute. This mind
35041 of ours, the subject at hand, has been going on throughout beginningless time,
35042 and so has the more subtle nature of that mind. On the basis of the
35043 continuity of that subtle nature of our mind rests the capacity we have to
35044 attain enlightenment. This potential is what we call 'the seed of
35045 buddhahood', 'buddha nature', 'the fundamental nature', or 'tathagatagarbha'.
35046 We all have this buddha nature, each and every one of us. For example, this
35047 beautiful statue of Lord Buddha here, in the presence of which we are now
35048 sitting, is a representation that honours someone who attained buddhahood. He
35049 awakened into that state of enlightenment because his nature was the buddha
35050 nature. Ours is as well, and just as the Buddha attained enlightenment in the
35051 past, so in the future we can become buddhas too.
35052 ...In any case, there dwells within us all this potential which allows us to
35053 awaken into buddhahood and attain omniscience. The empowerment process draws
35054 that potential out, and allows it to express itself more fully. When an
35055 empowerment is conferred on you, it is the nature of your mind--the buddha
35056 nature--that provides a basis upon which the empowerment can ripen you.
35057 Through the empowerment, you are empowered into the essence of the buddhas of
35058 the five families. In particular, you are 'ripened' within that particular
35059 family through which it is your personal predisposition to attain buddhahood.
35061 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
35062 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, Foreword by
35063 Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion Pub.
35065 For achieving calm abiding... your mind must have two qualities:
35066 -great clarity of both the object and the consciousness itself
35067 -staying one-pointedly on the object of observation.
35068 Two factors prevent these from developing--laxity and excitement. Laxity
35069 prevents the development of clarity, and excitement prevents the stability of
35070 staying with the object.
35071 That which interferes with the steadiness of the object of observation and
35072 causes it to fluctuate is excitement, which includes any scattering of the
35073 mind to an object other than the object of meditation. To stop that, withdraw
35074 your mind more strongly inside so that the intensity of the mode of
35075 apprehension of the object begins to lower. If you need a further technique
35076 to withdraw the mind, it helps to leave the object of meditation temporarily
35077 and think about something that makes you more sober, such as the imminence of
35078 death. Such reflections can cause your heightened mode of apprehension of the
35079 object, the mind's being too tight, to lower or loosen somewhat, whereby you
35080 are better able to stay on the object of observation.
35081 It is not sufficient just to have stability; clarity is also needed. That
35082 which prevents clarity is laxity, which is a case of the mind's becoming too
35083 relaxed, too loose, lacking intensity--the tautness of the mind having become
35084 weak, caused by over-withdrawal inside. Heaviness of mind and body can lead
35085 to becoming lax, which can lead to a type of lethargy in which, losing the
35086 object of observation, you have as if fallen into darkness; this can lead even
35087 to sleep. When this begins to occur, it is necessary to raise, to heighten,
35088 this excessive declination of the mind by making it more taut, more tight. To
35089 accomplish this, it helps to brighten the object of meditation or, if that
35090 does not work, to leave the object of meditation temporarily and think on
35091 something that makes you joyous, such as the wonderful opportunity that a
35092 human lifetime affords for spiritual practice. If that does not work, you can
35093 even leave off meditating and go to a high place or where there is a vast
35094 view. Such techniques cause your deflated mind to heighten, to sharpen.
35095 While holding the object of observation with mindfulness, investigate with
35096 introspection from time to time to see whether the mind has come under the
35097 influence of laxity or excitement and determine the best practice for lowering
35098 or heightening it. In time, your will develop a sense of the proper level of
35099 tautness of the mind such that you will be able to catch laxity and excitement
35100 just before they arise and prevent their arising. (p.50)
35101 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
35102 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow
35105 The position of the body [during meditation] is very important because the
35106 channels within the body will follow the external disposition of the body.
35107 The way the body is placed will set the channels; and the winds, of course,
35108 flow inside the channels, so if they are properly set, the winds will flow
35109 properly. Mind follows the wind. To focus the mind properly, the winds must
35110 also be functioning properly. (p.39)
35111 -- Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, "The Practice of Mahamudra", translated
35112 by Robert Clark, ed. by Ani K. Trinlay Chodron, published by Snow Lion
35114 The real source of my suffering is self-centeredness: my car, my possession,
35115 my well-being. Without the self-centeredness, the suffering would not arise.
35116 What would happen instead? It is important to imagine this fully and to focus
35117 on examples of your own. Think of some misfortune that makes you want to lash
35118 out, that gives rise to anger or misery. Then imagine how you might respond
35119 without suffering. Recognize that we need not experience the misery, let
35120 alone the anger, resentment, and hostility. The choice is ours.
35121 Let's continue with an example. You see that there is a dent in the car.
35122 What needs to be done? Get the other driver's license number, notify the
35123 police, contact the insurance agency, deal with all the details. Simply do it
35124 and accept it. Accept it gladly as a way to strengthen your mind further, to
35125 develop patience and the armor of forbearance. There is no way to become a
35126 Buddha and remain a vulnerable wimp.
35127 Patience does not suddenly appear as a bonus after full enlightenment. Part
35128 of the whole process of awakening is to develop greater forbearance and
35129 equanimity in adversity. Santideva, in the sixth chapter of his Guide to the
35130 Bodhisattva's Way of Life, eloquently points out that there is no way to
35131 develop patience without encountering adversity, and patience is indispensable
35132 for our own growth on the path to awakening. (p.66)
35133 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
35134 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
35136 While the great adept [Tangtong Gyalpo] did not stray from vajralike
35137 meditative concentration on the peak of glorious Riwoche, the ornamental wheel
35138 of his inexhaustible enlightened body, speech, and mind manifested in three
35139 great regions of Kham.
35140 At Gyalmorong, a person who had received the Path with the Result at Sakya,
35141 and who meditated single-mindedly on the Time of the Path during four sessions
35142 and on the Profound Path Guruyoga, saw the great adept to be Vajradhara, the
35143 lord of all spiritual families, and made countless prostrations.
35144 ...A person who recited a thousand of the heart-mantra of Tara every day,
35145 declared, "This isn't Avalokiteshvara. It's Tara."
35146 Also, a person said, "This is the Great Adept of Iron Bridges. O great
35147 adept, why do different visual manifestations appear to us?" The great adept
35149 By bringing the vital winds
35150 and mind under control,
35151 taking control of how things appear to myself,
35152 overwhelming how things appear to others,
35153 and positioning magical bodies,
35154 I display whatever will tame sentient beings
35155 according to their various inclinations.
35157 -- Cyrus Stearns, "King of the Empty Plain: The Tibetan Iron Bridge Builder
35158 Tangtong Gyalpo", a Tsadra Foundation Series book, published by Snow Lion
35160 When I was a boy, Ling Rinpochay, who was then my junior tutor, was always
35161 very stern; he never smiled, not even a little. This bothered me a lot. By
35162 wondering why he was so humorless, I examined more and more what I was doing
35163 in my own mind. This helped me develop self-awareness with regard to my
35164 motivation. By my early twenties when I had matured, Ling Rinpochay
35165 completely changed; he always had a big smile when we were together.
35166 Effective practice of the morality of individual liberation depends upon
35167 sound, long-term motivation. For example, one should not become a monk or a
35168 nun to avoid having to work at a worldly job for food and clothing. Also, it
35169 is not sufficient merely to seek to avoid difficulty in this lifetime. To be
35170 motivated by such trifling purposes does not help to achieve freedom from
35171 cyclic existence--the ultimate reason to practice the morality of individual
35173 This is confirmed by Buddha's life story. One day Shakyamuni slipped
35174 outside the palace wall to experience life for himself. For the first time he
35175 saw a sick person, an old person, and a corpse. Deeply troubled by the
35176 suffering of sickness, aging, and death, he came to the conclusion that
35177 worldly life is without substance. Later, inspired by several religious
35178 practitioners, Buddha became captivated by the possibility of a higher, more
35179 meaningful, spiritual life. At that point he escaped from the palace, leaving
35180 his ordinary life behind to pursue that vision.
35181 What does this teach us? Like Buddha we need to begin by becoming concerned
35182 about the suffering of cyclic existence and by turning away from temporary
35183 distractions. Influenced by this new attitude, we must take up a system of
35184 morality by renouncing cyclic existence and by taking vows of pure behavior
35185 through seeking to avoid the ten nonvirtues. (p.29)
35186 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
35187 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
35189 Tsong-ka-pa's intention in praising Buddhism is not to insult other
35190 teachers. Statements of the greatness of Buddhism are made in order to
35191 develop one-pointedness of mind toward practice, for one who is able to
35192 practise Buddhism must generate effort to do so. It is necessary for him to
35193 have confidence in Buddha's teaching from the round orb of his heart.
35194 There is a Tibetan saying that one cannot sew with a two-pointed needle or
35195 achieve aims with a two-pointed mind. Similarly, if a practitioner is
35196 hesitant, he will not put great force into the practice of any one system.
35197 Tsong-ka-pa states that Buddhism is the best in order that persons who would
35198 be helped more through engaging in the Buddhist path than through another
35199 system might not be diverted to another path. (p.48)
35200 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
35201 published by Snow Lion Publications
35203 At the level of conventional truth we all naturally possess both the desire
35204 and the potential to overcome suffering and to attain happiness. In this
35205 context, we can reflect upon the Buddha's teachings on the Four Noble Truths
35206 and the Two Truths, and on the basis of such reflection we gradually develop
35207 an understanding of how we can gain freedom from suffering and of the
35208 potential we possess within ourselves for accomplishing such a goal.
35209 We can reflect further that: 'Just like me, all other sentient beings
35210 possess this same desire and potential to be happy and overcome suffering',
35211 and ask ourselves: 'If I continue to be guided by my own self-centredness and,
35212 through my single-pointed concern for my own well-being, continue to ignore
35213 the well-being of others, what will the consequences be?'
35214 Then we can reflect: 'From beginningless lifetimes I have harboured this
35215 self-cherishing attitude and have grasped onto the notion of an intrinsically
35216 real, enduring self. I have nurtured these two thoughts of self-cherishing
35217 and self-grasping deep in my heart as if they are twin jewels. But where has
35218 this way of being led me? By pursuing the dictates of my self-grasping and
35219 self-centredness, have I actually managed to attain the fulfilment of my self-
35220 interest? If it were possible, surely by now I should have achieved my goal.
35221 But I know that this is not the case.'
35222 We should then compare ourselves to enlightened beings such as the Buddha
35223 Shakyamuni who achieved total victory over all defilements and perfected all
35224 qualities of goodness. We should then ask ourselves: 'How did the Buddha
35225 accomplish this?' Through contemplation we will come to recognise that, at a
35226 certain point in his existence, the Buddha reversed the normal way of thinking
35227 and being. In the place of self-cherishing he cultivated the thought of
35228 cherishing the well-being of other sentient beings, and in place of self-
35229 grasping he cultivated the wisdom realising the absence of self-existence. In
35230 this way he attained full awakening. (p.30)
35231 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
35232 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
35234 In the history of the Nyungne tradition, many practitioners have been able to
35235 overcome incurable disease through the practice of Nyungne. We could say
35236 miracles like this literally do take place, although in the Buddhist
35237 understanding, overcoming great obstacles and disease would be considered
35238 blessings. A miracle is something else. It is the enlightened power that is
35239 demonstrated by enlightened masters. A true miracle in the Buddhist sense
35240 would be like the miracle of Milarepa entering into a little horn while his
35241 student, Rechungpa, sees him in his usual size yet he is inside the horn. Or
35242 like the miracle of Milarepa sitting on a lake and people seeing that he
35243 hasn't become any larger nor has the lake shrunk in size, yet he is completely
35244 covering it. These are real, enlightened miracles.(p.13)
35245 -- Wangchen Rinpoche, "Buddhist Fasting Practice: The Nyungne Method of
35246 Thousand-Armed Chenrezig", published by Snow Lion Publications
35248 [In listening to teachings one] of the defects is to listen in a way that is
35249 like a container with holes. This means that even though we are listening to
35250 the teachings, we do not retain their contents. In this case we lack
35251 mindfulness and memory. Practice of Dharma means that we should be able to
35252 benefit from what we have heard. It is not a pastime, like listening to a
35253 story. The teachings give us guidance on how to live meaningful lives and how
35254 to develop proper attitudes. So in order to benefit from the teachings, we
35255 must retain them with mindfulness.
35256 In all kinds of learning processes, listening, reading, etc., we must pay
35257 full attention and should endeavor to remember their contents. When our
35258 interest is halfhearted, we only remember half the points, and we retain them
35259 for only a short time. We should reflect and think about whatever we have
35260 heard, over and over again. In this way, the knowledge will stay in our mind
35261 for a long time. Another technique for remembering instructions is debate as
35262 it is practiced in the traditional debating schools. (p.22)
35263 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", root text by Kamalashila,
35264 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
35265 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
35267 We are duped by maya. The whole display of our senses has tricked us into
35268 believing it and thus seduces us into the world of suffering. And the
35269 illusionist is that old trickster, one's own mind. But when this illusory
35270 nature is recognized to be just that, one is released from the bondage of the
35271 magic show, at which time it becomes a wonderful spectacle, even a display of
35272 the unimpeded creativity and freedom of mind. Then maya itself is both the
35273 medium for this realization and the expression of it.
35274 This conscious and intentional method of relating to all phenomena as
35275 illusion is thus cast in a totally positive light on the spiritual path, a
35276 complete turn-around from the original negative valuation of it as deceit.
35277 Now illusion is seen as illumination and opportunity. The nature of our
35278 relationship with it is the salient point, rather than its own nature, which
35279 certainly does not exist anyway, in any way.
35281 Since everything is an illusory display,
35282 it is possible to attain enlightenment.
35283 The transformation of the maya concept from something to escape to something
35284 to engage may be loosely correlated with the shift of emphasis on
35285 understanding emptiness that emerged in the mahayana teachings. A further
35286 development may be seen in the vajrayana teachings with the esoteric
35287 instruction known as Illusory Body (sgyu lus). This occurs as one of the Six
35288 Dharmas of Niguma and in other configurations of completion stage practices in
35289 many lineages. (p.40)
35290 -- Sarah Harding, "Niguma, Lady of Illusion", a Tsadra Foundation Series
35291 book, published by Snow Lion Publications
35293 Afflictions are classed as peripheral mental factors and are not themselves
35294 any of the six main minds [eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mental
35295 consciousnesses]. However, when any of the afflicting mental factors becomes
35296 manifest, a main mind [a mental consciousness] comes under its influence, goes
35297 wherever the affliction leads it, and 'accumulates' a bad action.
35298 There are a great many different kinds of afflictions, but the chief of them
35299 are desire, hatred, pride, wrong view and so forth. Of these, desire and
35300 hatred are chief. Because of an initial attachment to oneself, hatred arises
35301 when something undesirable occurs. Further, through being attached to oneself
35302 the pride that holds one to be superior arises, and similarly when one has no
35303 knowledge of something, a wrong view that holds the object of this knowledge
35304 to be non-existent arises.
35305 How do self-attachment and so forth arise in such great force? Because of
35306 beginningless conditioning, the mind tightly holds to 'I, I' even in dreams,
35307 and through the power of this conception, self-attachment and so forth occur.
35308 This false conception of 'I' arises because of one's lack of knowledge
35309 concerning the mode of existence of things. The fact that all objects are
35310 empty of inherent existence is obscured and one conceives things to exist
35311 inherently; the strong conception of 'I' derives from this. Therefore, the
35312 conception that phenomena inherently exist is the afflicting ignorance that is
35313 the ultimate root of all afflictions. (p.26)
35314 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
35315 Jeffrey Hopkins, with Anne Klein, published by Snow Lion Publications
35317 With regard to awareness of the present moment, our mind is utterly
35318 insubstantial and yet has this characteristic of luminosity (Tib. salwa).
35319 "Luminosity" here simply means the cognitive capacity, the fact that our mind
35320 can know, experience, feel, and so on. This awareness always occurs in the
35321 present. When we are not thinking of the past or thinking of the future, when
35322 we're letting our mind simply rest in the direct experience of the present
35323 moment, then this awareness or lucidity emerges as an unfabricated
35325 Initially we do this very briefly, for one moment, two moments, and so on,
35326 but as we work with this, it starts to take on a momentum. However, it's
35327 important not to interfere with the naturalness of this awareness by
35328 appraising what is occurring, which means that we shouldn't think, "Well, this
35329 is happening, that is happening, I'm aware of this, I'm aware of that." Nor
35330 should we judge what's happening by thinking, "Well, this is good, this is
35331 what's supposed to be happening," or, "This is bad, this isn't what's supposed
35333 On the other hand, we do need to "plant the watchman of mindfulness and
35334 alertness," which means that we maintain some intentional awareness of what is
35335 occurring. Here, mindfulness means a simple, direct recollection of what
35336 we're trying to do. In other words, mindfulness is recollecting that we are
35337 trying to rest in a direct experience of the present moment. Alertness then
35338 is that faculty of mind that becomes aware when we become distracted from this
35339 present experience. However, this watchfulness or, this watchman, has to be
35340 very relaxed and gentle. It can't be too heavy-handed, otherwise the whole
35341 thing becomes a conceptual judgement. The technique of mind is to rest in
35342 this awareness of the present moment with a gentle watchman of mindfulness and
35344 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "Pointing Out the Dharmakaya", foreword by
35345 the Dalai Lama, introduction by Lama Tashi Namgyal, published by Snow
35348 The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. -- William Gibson
35350 Complete spiritual fulfillment requires the ability to act compassionately,
35351 and that involves making practical distinctions. Therefore, Tsong-kha-pa
35352 insists upon the clarifying power of analysis that is not ultimate, analysis
35353 that operates within the constraints and boundaries of conventional fact and
35354 language so as to illuminate what does and what does not exist, what is and
35355 what is not helpful.
35356 Not all useful analysis need immediately reduce everything to emptiness. In
35357 other words, we can learn valuable, practical things by analyzing which car is
35358 good to drive, which action is good to do, which seed is good to plant,
35359 without at each step interrogating the final ontological status of the car,
35361 ...A pervasive sense that things are real and solid and exist just as they
35362 appear is woven right into the fabric of the world as we experience it. While
35363 tables do exist, we have yet to see them just as they are. Our very
35364 perception of them--while a valid source of information--is at the same time
35365 contaminated with a layer of distortion. That distortion is the appearance of
35366 the table as something that is able to be there on its own power, something
35367 that exists in and of itself.
35368 Thus when we begin to see, or even to suspect, that things lack essence and
35369 are not at all as we had supposed, we may feel terrified, as though our world
35370 is coming apart at the seams or evaporating beneath our feet. We calm those
35371 fears by again remembering that it is not that there is nothing. There is
35372 dependent arising, just as there has always been. Analysis threatens nothing
35373 but the false overlay, the distorting superimposition, which has caused us and
35374 others so much misery. (p.43)
35375 -- Guy Newland, "Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's
35376 Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path", published by Snow Lion Pub.
35378 The play of this divine mind,
35379 The union of bliss, the supreme father, and emptiness,
35380 Is unlimited and thus beyond concept.
35381 -- The Seventh Dalai Lama, Kelsang Gyatso
35383 Cultivate a state of mind focused on bliss and emptiness as forcefully as
35384 possible. The wisdom of bliss and emptiness is compared to space, which is
35385 non-obstructive and expansive. Because offerings are the manifestation of the
35386 wisdom of bliss and emptiness, these substances are called "offerings of
35387 Samantabhadra (All-Good)."
35388 Generally speaking, a bodhisattva named Samantabhadra is renowned for his
35389 elaborate offerings to the buddhas and bodhisattvas. But here the term all-
35390 good (samantabhadra) refers most appropriately to the wisdom of bliss and
35391 emptiness. It is all-good from the viewpoint of emptiness and also from the
35392 viewpoint of bliss. This emptiness is the ultimate truth and also the
35393 ultimate virtue. And the wisdom of great bliss is the clear light wisdom:
35394 With a feeling of joy, imagine that offerings having such a nature pervade
35395 entire space. (p.64)
35396 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Union of Bliss and Emptiness: Teachings on the
35397 Practice of Guru Yoga", translated by Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow
35400 The spiritual path is truly simple. It is simple because it is not about
35401 acquiring, accumulating, or achieving anything. It is all about giving up
35402 what we don't need. It's about giving up what isn't useful instead of
35403 acquiring things with the idea of going somewhere or achieving something.
35404 That was the old game. That game which we have been playing for a long time
35405 is like a vicious circle. It has no end.
35406 Sometimes the spiritual search itself prevents us from seeing the truth that
35407 is always one with us. We have to know when to stop the search. There are
35408 people who die while they are searching for the highest truth with
35409 philosophical formulas and esoteric techniques. For them spiritual practice
35410 becomes another egoic plot which simply maintains and feeds delusions.
35411 Amazing! Buddha, God, truth, the divine, the great mystery, whatever you have
35412 been searching for, is here right now. (p.37)
35413 -- Anam Thubten, "No Self, No Problem", edited by Sharon Roe, published
35414 by Snow Lion Publications
35416 Practice of the morality of individual liberation, whether lay or monastic,
35417 leads to contentment.... Examine your attitudes toward food, clothes, and
35418 shelter. By reducing expectations you will promote contentment. The extra
35419 energy which is released should be devoted to meditation and to achieving
35420 cessation of problems, corresponding to the fourth and third noble truths. In
35421 this way, contentment is the basis, and the resulting action is called "liking
35422 meditation and abandonment."
35423 We should be contented in material areas, for those are bound by limitation,
35424 but not with regard to the spiritual, which can be extended limitlessly.
35425 Though it is true that a discontented person who owned the whole world might
35426 want to own a tourist center on the moon, that person's life is limited, and
35427 even the amount that can be owned is limited. It is better right from the
35428 beginning to be contented.
35429 However, with regard to compassion and altruism there is no limit, and thus
35430 we should not be content with the degree that we have. We are just the
35431 opposite; in the spiritual field we are content with slight amounts of
35432 practice and progress, but materially we always want more and more. It should
35433 be the other way around. Everyone needs to practice this, whether lay or
35435 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
35436 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
35438 If we view the world's religions from the widest possible viewpoint and
35439 examine their ultimate goal, we find that all of the major world religions,
35440 whether Christianity or Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism, are dedicated to the
35441 achievement of permanent human happiness. They are all directed toward that
35442 goal. All religions emphasize the fact that the true follower must be honest
35443 and gentle, in other words, that a truly religious person must always strive
35444 to be a better human being. To this end, the different world religions teach
35445 different doctrines which will help transform the person. In this regard, all
35446 religions are the same, there is no conflict. This is something we must
35447 emphasize. We must consider the question of religious diversity from this
35448 viewpoint. And when we do, we find no conflict.
35449 ...Different kinds of food have different tastes: one may be very hot, one
35450 may be very sour, and one very sweet. They are opposite tastes, they
35451 conflict. But whether a dish is concocted to taste sweet, sour, or hot, it is
35452 nonetheless made in this way so as to taste good. Some people prefer very
35453 spicy, hot foods with a lot of chili peppers. Many Indians and Tibetans have
35454 a liking for such dishes. Others are very fond of bland tasting foods. It is
35455 a wonderful thing to have variety. It is an expression of individuality; it
35456 is a personal thing. Likewise, the variety of the different world religious
35457 philosophies is a very useful and beautiful thing. (p.13)
35458 -- "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists by the Dalai Lama", edited
35459 by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
35461 The basic principles and precepts of all true religions are very pure. What
35462 you see as impure is simply the inability of those who adhere to them. So as
35463 Buddhists, for instance, if you fail to embrace and internalize the basic
35464 principles and precepts of the practice, then your mind is always going to be
35465 overrun by the five mental afflictions. These negative afflictions are
35466 desire, hatred, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. They are the basic obstacles
35467 which impede you from making any true progress on the path. It is, in fact,
35468 the function of the preliminary training to prepare the field of the mind so
35469 that you are actually able to put to rest the gross delusions and give rise to
35470 your innermost qualities. This allows you to actualize your true bodhicitta
35471 nature, the mind which cares about others more than self.
35472 Leaving aside the idea of the so-called spiritual path, or religion, if you
35473 are able to uproot these delusions, the stones and boulders, from the field of
35474 your mind, then you will become an honorable person, respected in the world,
35475 with an easier, flexible attitude toward yourself and others. If you are
35476 able, through your development of wisdom and skillful means, to unite the
35477 teachings with your life, then true results will be achieved. (p.96)
35478 -- Ven. Gyatrul Rinpoche, "Meditation, Transformation, and Dream Yoga",
35479 trans. by B. Alan Wallace and Sangye Khandro, published by Snow Lion
35481 What premises or grounds do we have for accepting that mental afflictions
35482 can be ultimately rooted out and eliminated from our mind? In Buddhist
35483 thought, we have three principal reasons for believing that this can happen.
35484 One is that all deluded states of mind, all afflictive emotions and thoughts,
35485 are essentially distorted in their mode of apprehension, whereas all the
35486 antidotal factors such as love, compassion, insight, and so on not only are
35487 undistorted, but they also have grounding in our varied experience and in
35489 Second, all these antidotal forces also have the quality of being
35490 strengthened through practice and training. Through constant familiarity, one
35491 can enhance their capacity and increase their potential limitlessly. So the
35492 second premise is that as one enhances the capacity of these antidotal forces
35493 and increases their strength, one is able to correspondingly reduce the
35494 influences and effects of delusory states of mind.
35495 The third premise is that the essential nature of mind is pure; in other
35496 words, there is the idea that the essential nature of mind is clear light or
35498 So it is on these three premises that Buddhism accepts that delusions, all
35499 afflictive emotions and thoughts, can be ultimately eliminated through
35500 practice and meditation. (p.38)
35501 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
35502 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published
35503 by Snow Lion Publications
35505 As we become aware of the working of our mind, we'll find ourselves
35506 grappling with an inner trickster. Pay attention! The mind in which anger
35507 arises is also the mind that holds it, hides it, fans it, justifies it, or
35508 suppresses it. That's why this first step is crucial--before we can
35509 understand, befriend, tame, and transform our anger, we have to recognize it
35510 clearly and acknowledge it frankly. This is no small task.
35511 Self-awareness is a precondition for understanding and healing our anger.
35512 If we become aware of the workings of our mind we can discover the means by
35513 which we create our anger and the key to healing it. If we become aware that
35514 we are harboring irrational beliefs, ideas with false premises, mistaken
35515 assumptions or flawed logic, we can examine them and correct them. If we
35516 discover that we cherish ideas which are not in harmony with the realities of
35517 life and nature we can learn to relax into existence. If we find that we
35518 harbor desires, hopes, and expectations which cannot be achieved we have the
35519 option of letting them go.
35520 ...To develop awareness is to take a journey within--into the heart of our
35522 -- Ron Leifer, M.D., "Vinegar into Honey: Seven Steps to Understanding and
35523 Transforming Anger, Aggression, and Violence", published by Snow Lion
35525 A kind heart is the essential cause of happiness. Being kind to others is
35526 the nicest thing we can do for ourselves. When we respect others and are
35527 considerate of their needs, opinions and wishes, hostility evaporates. It
35528 takes two people to fight, and if we refuse to be one of them, there is no
35530 ...A kind heart is the root of harmony and mutual respect. It prevents us
35531 from feeling estranged or fearful of others. It also protects us from
35532 becoming angry, attached, closed-minded, proud or jealous. When opportunities
35533 arise to help others we won't lack courage or compassion. If political
35534 leaders had impartial minds and kind hearts, how different our world would be!
35535 As all problems arise from the self-cherishing attitude, it would be wise
35536 for each of us, as individuals, to exert ourselves to subdue it. World peace
35537 doesn't come from winning a war, nor can it be legislated. Peace comes
35538 through each person eliminating his or her own selfishness and developing a
35539 kind heart...we can each do our part beginning today. The beneficial result
35540 in our own lives will immediately be evident. (p.76)
35541 -- Thubten Chodron, "Open Heart, Clear Mind", foreword by His Holiness
35542 the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion Publications
35544 In order to have strong consideration for others' happiness and welfare, it
35545 is necessary to have a special altruistic attitude in which you take upon
35546 yourself the burden of helping others. In order to generate such an unusual
35547 attitude, it is necessary to have great compassion, caring about the suffering
35548 of others and wanting to do something about it. In order to have such a
35549 strong force of compassion, first you must have a strong sense of love which,
35550 upon observing suffering sentient beings, wishes that they have happiness--
35551 finding a pleasantness in everyone and wishing happiness for everyone just as
35552 a mother does for her sole sweet child.
35553 In order to have a sense of closeness and dearness for others, you first
35554 train in acknowledging their kindness through using as a model a person in
35555 this lifetime who was very kind to yourself and then extending this sense of
35556 gratitude to all beings. Since, in general, in this life your mother was the
35557 closest and offered the most help, the process of meditation begins with
35558 recognizing all other sentient beings as like your mother. (p.44)
35559 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness,
35560 Clarity, and Insight 25th Anniversary Edition", edited and translated
35561 by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow
35564 Most people feel cozy enough in samsara. They do not really have the
35565 genuine aspiration to go beyond samsara; they just want samsara to be a little
35566 bit better. It is quite interesting that "samsara" became the name of a
35567 perfume. And it is like that. It seduces us into thinking that it is okay:
35568 samsara is not so bad; it smells nice! The underlying motivation to go beyond
35569 samsara is very rare, even for people who go to Dharma centers. There are
35570 many people who learn to meditate and so forth, but with the underlying motive
35571 that they hope to make themselves feel better. And if it ends up making them
35572 feel worse, instead of realizing that this may be a good sign, they think
35573 there is something wrong with Dharma. We are always looking to make ourselves
35574 comfortable in the prison house. We might think that if we get the cell wall
35575 painted a pretty shade of pale green, and put in a few pictures, it won't be a
35577 ...There are two basic reasons we follow a spiritual path and look for
35578 liberation. One reason is that we want to be free. Let's take the
35579 traditional example of a burning house: your whole house is on fire, and you
35580 run out from it. But all your family--your partner, your children, your
35581 parents, even your pet dog--are all still inside. What are you going to do?
35582 You don't just say, "Well, I'm out. So too bad. Do your best to get out,
35583 too." Naturally this leads to the second basic reason for following a
35584 spiritual path: we will try to pull them out as well. (p.71)
35585 -- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, "Into the Heart of Life", foreword by H.H. the
35586 Gyalwang Drukpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
35588 "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."
35590 We are empty, or rather the matter of which we are composed is empty. But I
35591 must emphasize that emptiness does not mean nothingness. Some commentators
35592 have been mistaken when they have accused Buddhism of being nihilistic. We
35593 believe that the world in which we live is part of a flux, a stream of events.
35594 This does not mean it is nothing. Everything depends on everything else.
35595 Nothing exists on its own. On account of all the influences that come to bear
35596 upon them, things appear, exist, and disappear, and then reappear again. But
35597 they never exist independently. Form is therefore empty, by which we mean it
35598 is not separate and independent. Form depends on a multitude of different
35599 factors. And emptiness is form because all forms emerge from emptiness, from
35600 this absence of independent existence. Emptiness exists only to give rise to
35602 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner
35603 Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings".
35605 When we understand the empty nature of our own mind, then the consequences
35606 of merit and sin will not be realized. In the state of emptiness, there
35607 exists no objective merit or sin.
35608 ...The nature of the mind is like a mirror; merits and sins are like the
35609 reflections in this mirror; and reflections in no way affect or modify the
35610 nature of the mirror. When we are in a state of contemplation, we are living
35611 in the condition of the mirror. At the time when all phenomena are exhausted
35612 and pass into the nature of reality, then our virtuous and vicious deeds will
35613 cause no benefit or harm to us. There is no basis for effect--all
35614 limitations, all frames of reference, all solid ground having been eliminated.
35615 But if we do not understand the nature of the mind and intrinsic awareness
35616 through direct personal experience, it will be a very dangerous situation for
35618 Indeed, it is not sufficient merely to understand these teachings
35619 intellectually; one must first practice and attain realization from this
35620 practice. Otherwise the virtuous and the vicious acts we commit in this life
35621 will create and accumulate karma, leading us again inevitably into
35622 transmigration. From the present time until we realize the ultimate
35623 exhausting of all phenomena into the nature of reality, our behavior must be
35624 refined; it must be heedful and scrupulous. Otherwise our view is only so
35625 much empty intellectual talk. (p.66)
35626 -- "Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness", translation and
35627 commentary by John Myrdhin Reynolds, foreword by Namkhai Norbu, published
35628 by Snow Lion Publications
35630 The attainment of shamata is a serenely stilled state of mind, settled on
35631 mind itself. Although the attainment of such a meditational state focused on
35632 mind is the foundation for developing the highest attainments and is, of
35633 course, very excellent, by itself it is insufficient for reaching those goals.
35634 When we achieve a mind focused on mind with the perfect placement of
35635 absorbed concentration, free from all faults of dullness or flightiness, we
35636 increasingly experience an element of bliss accompanying our meditation. When
35637 we experience serene joy, on both a physical and mental level, brought on by
35638 the force of total absorption of mind on mind, we achieve a meditational state
35639 that fulfills the definition of shamata.
35640 Our ordinary mind is like raw iron ore that needs to be made into a steel
35641 sword. Progressing through the stages for attaining shamata is like forging
35642 the iron into steel. All the materials are there at our disposal. But since
35643 the mind wanders after external objects, then although it is the material for
35644 attaining shamata, it cannot yet be used as this product. We have to forge
35645 our mind through a meditational process. It is like putting the iron ore into
35647 To fashion the steel into a sword, or in this analogy to fashion the mind
35648 into an instrument that understands voidness, our serenely stilled and settled
35649 mind needs to come to decisive realization of voidness as its object. Without
35650 such a weapon of mind, we have no opponent with which to destroy the
35651 disturbing emotions and attitudes. (p.142)
35652 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
35653 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
35655 The Yolmo Valley has many different aspects that are beneficial to
35656 practitioners. Ian Baker writes:
35657 Chatral Rinpoche said that specific [places] in Yolmo are conducive to
35658 particular kinds of practice. Places with waterfalls inspire reflection on
35659 impermanence. Places with steep cliffs where the rocks are dark and jagged
35660 are good for meditating on wrathful deities. Places with rolling hills and
35661 flowering meadows support meditation on peaceful deities....
35662 Chatral Rinpoche clarified that the beyul [hidden lands] that Padmasambhava
35663 established in Tibet are not literal arcadias, but paradises for Buddhist
35664 practice, with multiple dimensions corresponding to increasingly subtle levels
35665 of perception. Beyond Yolmo's visible terrain of mountains, streams, and
35666 forests, he said, lies an inner level, corresponding to the flow of intangible
35667 energies in the physical body. Deeper still, the subtle elements animating
35668 the environment merge with the elements present within the practitioner--the
35670 Finally, at the beyul's innermost level--yangsang--lies a paradisiacal, or
35671 unitary dimension revealed through an auspicious conjunction of person, place,
35672 and time.... Chatral Rinpoche contended that yangsang is not merely a
35673 metaphor for the enlightened state, but an ever-present, if hidden, reality.
35675 -- Chatral Rinpoche, "Compassionate Action", edited and annotated by Zach
35676 Larson, published by Snow Lion Publications
35678 Distinguishing between constructive and destructive emotions is right there
35679 to be observed in the moment when a destructive emotion arises--the calmness,
35680 the tranquillity, the balance of the mind are immediately disrupted. Other
35681 emotions do not destroy equilibrium or the sense of well-being as soon as they
35682 arise, but in fact enhance it--so they would be called constructive.
35683 Also there are emotions that are aroused by intelligence. For example,
35684 compassion can be aroused by pondering people who are suffering. When the
35685 compassion is actually experienced, it is true that the mind is somewhat
35686 disturbed, but that is more on the surface. Deep down there is a sense of
35687 confidence, and so on a deeper level there is no disturbance. A consequence
35688 of such compassion, aroused by intelligent reflection, is that the mind
35690 The consequences of anger--especially its long-term effects--are that the
35691 mind is disturbed. Typically, when compassion moves from simply being a
35692 mental state to behavior, it tends to manifest in ways that are of service to
35693 others, whereas when anger goes to the point of enactment it generally, of
35694 course, becomes destructive. Even if it doesn't manifest as violence, if you
35695 have the capacity to help, you would refrain from helping. That too would be
35696 a kind of destructive emotion. (p.158)
35697 -- "Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?" A Scientific Dialogue
35698 with the Dalai Lama narrated by Daniel Goleman
35700 I love smiles. That is a fact. How to develop smiles? There are a variety
35701 of smiles. Some smiles are sarcastic. Some smiles are artificial-diplomatic
35702 smiles. These smiles do not produce satisfaction, but rather fear or
35703 suspicion. But a genuine smile gives us hope, freshness. If we want a
35704 genuine smile, then first we must produce the basis for a smile to come.
35705 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
35707 Suffering is something very concrete, which everyone knows and wants to
35708 avoid if possible, and the Buddha therefore began his teaching by talking
35709 about it in his famous formulation of the Four Noble Truths.
35710 The first truth draws our attention to the fact that we suffer, pointing out
35711 the existence of the basic dissatisfaction inherent in our condition; the
35712 second truth explains the cause of dissatisfaction, which is the dualistic
35713 state and the unquenchable thirst (or desire) inherent in it: the subject
35714 reifies its objects and tries to grasp them by any means, and this thirst (or
35715 desire) in turn affirms and sustains the illusory existence of the subject as
35716 an entity separate from the integrated wholeness of the universe.
35717 The third truth teaches that suffering will cease if dualism is overcome and
35718 reintegration achieved, so that we no longer feel separate from the plenitude
35719 of the universe. Finally, the fourth truth explains that there is a Path that
35720 leads to the cessation of suffering, which is the one described by the rest of
35721 the Buddhist teachings.
35722 All the various traditions are agreed that this basic problem of suffering
35723 exists, but they have different methods of dealing with it to bring the
35724 individual back to the experience of primordial unity. (p.47)
35725 -- Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, "The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra,
35726 and Dzogchen", compiled and edited by John Shane, published by Snow Lion
35728 To disciples of increasing purity, ability, and rarity the Buddha gave more
35729 private guidance in the subtle mysteries. It appears that such teachings are
35730 included in the Mahayana sutras. There is no certainty, however, that all of
35731 the tantras were taught while the historical Buddha was alive. To an
35732 extremely small number of pure disciples the Buddha could appear today. They
35733 could encounter Vajradhara, the King of the Tantras, and he could reveal
35734 tantras and quintessential guidance to them.
35735 This is possible even though more than twenty-five hundred years have gone
35736 by since the historical Buddha passed away. There is no possibility, after
35737 the Buddha's death, of additions being made to his public discourses. But I
35738 think that teachings to disciples of pure action do not necessarily have to be
35739 given during the historical Buddha's lifetime. (pg.44)
35740 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Transcendent Wisdom", translated, edited and
35741 annotated by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
35744 Since the five perfections without wisdom
35745 Cannot bring perfect enlightenment,
35746 Along with skillful means cultivate the wisdom
35747 Which does not conceive the three spheres [as real]
35748 This is the practice of Bodhisattvas.
35749 -- Gyelsay Togmay Sangpo
35751 Practice of the five perfections without the understanding of reality
35752 remains contaminated, and though it may yield boundless happiness, it doesn't
35753 lead to omniscience. Love and compassion without the understanding of reality
35754 cannot help us to escape from worldly existence.
35755 On the other hand, we may easily remain trapped in a state of personal peace
35756 if we have understood reality but lack enough love and compassion. It is
35757 therefore the practice of Bodhisattvas to combine the two--skillful means and
35758 wisdom. Which of us can say we don't want to possess knowledge, kindness and
35759 pure conduct? Our text is a manual of instruction on how to gain these
35760 qualities and become a fully developed human being. (p.70)
35761 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas",
35762 translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
35764 "The Buddhas have already achieved all their own goals, but remain in the
35765 cycle of existence for as long as there are sentient beings. This is because
35766 they possess great compassion. They also do not enter the immensely blissful
35767 abode of nirvana like the Hearers. Considering the interests of sentient
35768 beings first, they abandon the peaceful abode of nirvana as if it were a
35769 burning iron house. Therefore, great compassion alone is the unavoidable
35770 cause of the non-abiding nirvana of the Buddha."
35773 Compassion's importance cannot be overemphasized. Chandrakirti paid rich
35774 tribute to compassion, saying that it was essential in the initial,
35775 intermediate, and final stages of the path to enlightenment.
35776 Initially, the awakening mind of bodhichitta is generated with compassion as
35777 the root, or basis. Practice of the six perfections and so forth is essential
35778 if a Bodhisattva is to attain the final goal.
35779 In the intermediate stage, compassion is equally relevant. Even after
35780 enlightenment, it is compassion that induces the Buddhas not to abide in the
35781 blissful state of complacent nirvana. It is the motivating force enabling the
35782 Buddhas to enter non-abiding nirvana and actualize the Truth Body, which
35783 represents fulfillment of your own purpose, and the Form Body, which
35784 represents fulfillment of the needs of others. Thus, by the power of
35785 compassion, Buddhas serve the interests of sentient beings without
35786 interruption for as long as space exists. This shows that the awakening mind
35787 of bodhichitta remains crucial even after achieving the final destination.
35789 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, root text by Kamalashila, "Stages of Meditation",
35790 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
35791 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
35793 [During sleep and waking states] there are physiological processes that
35794 correspond to different mental states, and these are associated with
35795 subjectively experienced energies in the body.
35796 In the waking state, these energies tend to be drawn into a locus in the
35797 center of the head, at the level of the forehead. In the dreaming stage,
35798 these energies will be even more drawn to a point in the throat. In the deep
35799 sleep state, these energies are more drawn into the heart. The location is
35800 not the physical heart, the organ, but the heart center which is right in the
35801 center of the chest.
35802 Certain events are experienced in meditation that seem to corroborate this
35803 theory. For example, in meditation, it is possible to bring your awareness
35804 into the heart cakra, and sometimes when this happens, the person will faint.
35805 On other occasions, the meditative awareness, finely concentrated, may be
35806 brought into the area of the navel. And at this juncture, it has been found
35807 experientially that heat is produced by such concentration. If you look at
35808 the anatomy of the body, you don't find these cakra points. (p.106)
35809 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with
35810 the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism", edited by Zara Houshmand,
35811 Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Pub.
35813 When you meditate with concentration, there are three particular experiences
35814 that arise: bliss, clarity, and nonthought.
35815 The experience of meditative bliss is greater than ordinary worldly
35816 happiness. Sometimes when you are meditating, a feeling of blissfulness
35817 suddenly arises from the subtle state of your mind and pervades your entire
35818 body. This bliss is healthy and brings out your inner qualities. Some people
35819 use drugs to induce blissfulness and visions, but drugs are external supports
35820 that cannot bring lasting happiness. The bliss experienced in meditation can
35821 last for many days, according to your ability to meditate. When you
35822 experience this kind of bliss, on the outside you might look very poor, but
35823 inside you remain very joyful.
35824 The second main experience in meditation is clarity. Sometimes while
35825 meditating you can suddenly feel that your mind is very clear and bright.
35826 Even if you are meditating in the dark, you do not feel heavy or tired.
35827 Sometimes your body feels very light and your mind is very clear, and many
35828 kinds of reflections appear. Clarity brings great wisdom and the ability to
35829 read other people's minds, as well as to see your own past and future lives.
35830 The third main experience is nonthought, or a state of equanimity without
35831 distractions. Beginners can also experience this. Nonthought is more settled
35832 than the experiences of bliss and clarity. If you have thoughts, they
35833 suddenly dissolve and you can remain continuously in meditation. As your
35834 ability to meditate develops, your mind becomes more and more settled, so that
35835 you can meditate for one hour or one week or one month without being
35836 distracted by thoughts. You simply remain in the natural state for as long as
35838 Bliss, clarity, and nonthought are the main qualities of concentration.
35839 However, it is important not to be attached to them or concerned about whether
35840 they arise or not; one should simply continue to practice. (p.29)
35841 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche,
35842 "The Buddhist Path: A Practical Guide from the Nyingma Tradition of
35843 Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Publications
35845 The Buddha's teachings can be divided into two main categories: the
35846 scriptures and realization. A verse states:
35848 The teachings of the Teacher have two aspects:
35849 Scripture and realization presented as they truly are.
35850 There is nothing else to do but
35851 Sustain them, speak of them, and practice them.
35853 When we practice listening, reflecting, and meditating, the teachings will
35854 free us from the heavy darkness of suffering. They are like a never-setting
35855 sun whose luminous rays reach to the farthest corners of this world. Among
35856 the eighty-four thousand teachings of the Buddha are those found in Tibet that
35857 maintain the unity of the sutra and mantra traditions. These teachings are
35858 like a tree trunk with numerous branches: a variety of lamas hold lineages
35859 within diverse traditions.
35860 ...In showing how to cut through the delusion of duality, these teachings
35861 open up to every living being the possibility of attaining true mastery over
35862 the immense and profound gates to the eighty-four thousand teachings. They
35863 are precious because they make nonconceptual wisdom manifest and bring forth
35864 the amrita of all-pervading emptiness. Like placing a perfect fruit in the
35865 palm of our hand, these teachings bring about two kinds of wisdom: the wisdom
35866 that sees the multitude of all phenomena distinctly and the wisdom that sees
35867 clearly into their nature.
35868 Relying on an appropriate path allows the fruition of practice to manifest.
35869 This result is possible because buddha nature is found in the mindstream of
35870 all living beings. (p.160)
35871 -- "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth
35872 Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje", by Michele Martin, published by Snow Lion
35874 All is neither real nor delusive--
35875 Held to be like [a reflection of] the moon on water by the learned.
35876 Just this ordinary mind
35877 Is called "dharmadhatu" and "Heart of the victors."
35878 --Venerable Rangjung Dorje
35880 ...Thus, seeming reality consists of the adventitious stains that are like
35881 [mistakenly seeing] a [white] conch as being yellow. Ultimate reality is the
35882 tathagata heart, which is like the [natural] white of the conch. Except for
35883 the mere appearances from the perspective of a mistaken [perceiving] subject,
35884 within the object--the conch--there is nothing white or yellow to be added or
35885 to be removed. Therefore, the pith instruction is to rest naturally and
35887 In brief, what are called "samsara" and "nirvana" are set up from the point
35888 of view of mere seeming appearances, while the nature of both--luminosity free
35889 from reference points--is called tathagata heart. Consequently, in terms of
35890 the definitive meaning, mere appearances and their nature cannot be separated,
35891 just like fire and its heat. For this reason, the mother [sutras] say:
35892 "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is nothing other than
35893 form. Form is nothing other than emptiness." (p.165)
35894 -- "Gone Beyond: The Prajnaparamita Sutras, The Ornament of Clear
35895 Realization, and Its Commentaries in the Tibetan Kagyu Tradition", Volume One
35896 translated and introduced by Karl Brunnholzl, a Tsadra Foundation Series book,
35897 published by Snow Lion Publications
35899 In the Mahayana 'cause and effect' refer to totally supreme emptiness and
35900 supreme immutable bliss. The Brief Explication of Initiations (Shekhoddesha)
35901 [included in the Kalachakra cycle] says:
35903 That bearing the form of emptiness is the cause,
35904 That bearing immutable compassion is the effect.
35905 Emptiness and compassion indivisible
35906 Are called the mind of enlightenment.
35908 The indivisibility of these two is a Cause Vehicle in the sense of being the
35909 means by which one progresses, and it is an Effect Vehicle in the sense of
35910 being that to which one is progressing. Such a Vajra Vehicle has reference to
35911 Highest Yoga Tantra and cannot occur in the lower tantras. For the supreme
35912 immutable bliss can only arise when one has attained the branch of meditative
35913 stabilisation (in the system of the Kalachakra) and thus the branches of
35914 mindfulness and those below must be the means of achieving it. The three
35915 lower tantras do not have all the factors that are included in these causal
35917 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Tantra in Tibet",
35918 published by Snow Lion Publications
35920 ...one of the things you can learn from history is that men have learned
35921 to live with machinery at least as well as, and probably a good deal better
35922 than, they have learned to live with one another.
35923 -- E. E. Morison, from "Computers and the World of the Future"
35925 Everything is perfect in the universe--even your desire to improve it.
35930 I encourage you to conduct your own research on the results of practicing in
35931 various environments. Tibetan yogis are especially attracted to places with
35932 an enormous amount of open space and distant vistas. I have greatly enjoyed
35933 meditating in the high desert of the eastern Sierra Nevada range, where the
35934 views extend to peaks sixty miles away. The ability to direct the attention
35935 to such distant points gives a very expansive feeling to the intervening
35937 In such a spacious environment, allow your awareness to come out, with your
35938 eyes open and your gaze resting vacantly in the space in front of you. The
35939 experience in a vast space is very different from that in a tiny room. Gazing
35940 up at a clear night sky studded with stars is a wonderful way to experience
35941 the sheer enormity of space.
35942 It is important to distinguish between the contents of a space and the space
35943 itself. Colors and shapes constitute the contents of visual space. These are
35944 aspects or representations of ordinary phenomena in the visual field.
35945 Attending to the space of the mind means attending to that space from which
35946 all such contents emerge, in which they are present, and into which they
35947 dissolve; it is the space that lingers in between discrete events. (p.220)
35948 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness",
35949 published by Snow Lion Publications
35951 "Through analytical meditation, you come to a point of clarity and decisive
35952 insight, and at this point it is beneficial to abide in that revelation. Your
35953 insight will grow gradually like a sprout. Simply be present and settle your
35954 mind in the absolute nature of reality. Remain in a state of meditative
35955 equipoise, and do not think of this as a waste of your time. If you think you
35956 should rather be actively engaged in such practices as circumambulations or
35957 the stage of generation, it is the time for you to be simply present in
35958 meditative equipoise. But do not just sit and space out."
35961 In some scholarly discursive meditations in the sutra tradition, one
35962 continually seeks out the mind, and there is a tradition in which
35963 investigation is needed. Here, in the tradition of Mahamudra and Atiyoga, it
35964 is enough to seek and investigate during this phase of Dharma practice, but
35965 afterwards it is not necessary to continue the search. In the Katok
35966 tradition, the investigation of the mind is said to takes months, for one
35967 examines for three days each of the points of the mind's color and shape as
35968 well as the exterior and the interior of the body. Our tradition does not
35969 take so long, so it is important for you to seek out the mind without even a
35970 moment's distraction. (p.100)
35971 -- Karma Chagme, "A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the
35972 Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga", commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche, trans. by B.
35973 Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
35975 When the root of duality--dualistic clinging, dualistic perceptions, deluded
35976 perceptions--is severed, all the leaves, the branches, and even the tree trunk
35977 of samsara and nirvana naturally wither on their own and topple in their own
35978 time. Then this great spreading tree of samsara and nirvana, of duality, of
35979 worldliness, of conditioned being, does not need to be chopped down: it is
35980 already as if dead. We can relax; done is what had to be done, as the Buddha
35982 This is the whole point of the Dharma, of spiritual awakening, of
35983 Buddhahood; this is its ultimate evolution or unfolding. If we aspire to
35984 experience such an awakening, there is nothing else to do except recognize the
35985 true nature of our primordial awareness, our own essential being, our own
35986 birthright, which is within. This is the intrinsic nature of our own heart-
35987 mind, also known as bodhicitta or bodhi-mind. It is our own being, our own
35988 nature, this renowned buddha-nature. It is not a Buddha anywhere else. (p.103)
35989 -- Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche and Lama Surya Das, "Natural Great Perfection:
35990 Dzogchen Teachings and Vajra Songs", published by Snow Lion Publications
35992 A common [Tibetan Buddhist] motif is the "Wheel of Life," symbolizing the
35993 workings of cyclic existence. This is frequently found at the doorway to a
35994 main assembly hall and serves to remind the inhabitants of the dangers of
35995 mundane existence. This striking image has a large central circle divided
35996 into two halves. The top half has three sections, representing the three
35997 "happy transmigrations"--humans, demi-gods, and gods. The lower half also has
35998 three sections, indicative of the three bad transmigrations--animals, hungry
35999 ghosts, and hell beings. A pigeon symbolizes the mental affliction of desire,
36000 a snake represents hatred, and a pig--symbol of ignorance--holds the tails of
36001 the first two in its mouth. These three afflictions are the primary factors
36002 that bind people to cyclic existence, causing them to transmigrate helplessly
36003 from birth to birth.
36004 The theme of cause and effect is further illustrated by twelve sections
36005 around the rim of the wheel, symbolizing the twelve links of dependent arising
36006 (a summary of the process of transmigration). The whole wheel is held in the
36007 jaws of the Lord of Death, indicating that death is inevitable for those who
36008 are caught up in this cycle. Outside of the wheel are buddhas and
36009 bodhisattvas, often shown teaching the dharma, which provides an avenue of
36010 escape for those who are perceptive enough to recognize this and follow their
36011 instructions. (p.239)
36012 -- John Powers, "Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow Lion
36015 Is Anger Beneficial?
36017 We generally consider something beneficial if it promotes happiness. But
36018 when we ask ourselves, "Am I happy when I'm angry?" the answer is undoubtedly
36019 no. We may feel a surge of physical energy due to physiological reasons, but
36020 emotionally we feel miserable. Thus, from our own experience, we can see that
36021 anger does not promote happiness.
36022 In addition, we don't communicate well when we're angry. We may speak
36023 loudly as if the other person were hard of hearing or repeat what we say as if
36024 he had a bad memory, but this is not communication. Good communication
36025 involves expressing ourselves in a way that the other person understands. It
36026 is not simply dumping our feelings on the other. Good communication also
36027 includes expressing our feelings and thoughts with words, gestures, and
36028 examples that make sense to the other person. Under the sway of anger,
36029 however, we neither express ourselves as calmly nor think as clearly as usual.
36030 Under the influence of anger, we also say and do things that we later
36031 regret. Years of trust built with great effort can be quickly damaged by a
36032 few moments of uncontrolled anger.... If we could tame our anger, such
36033 painful consequences could be avoided.(p.23)
36034 -- Thubten Chodron, "Working with Anger", published by Snow Lion Pub.
36036 Why should we want to help our enemies or to give them happiness? Here are
36037 various useful ideas to consider. One approach is to think that the harm they
36038 have done us is, in fact, the result of our own past negative actions through
36039 which we have set ourselves up as a target for their harm. We could also
36040 consider how those who harm us are totally driven by their disturbing
36042 If someone in our family, someone we love dearly, becomes insane and tries
36043 to harm us, we wouldn't think of taking revenge but would try to help them
36044 regain a normal state of mind. Living beings, our mothers, are crazed by
36045 their disturbing emotions. Those who harm us are in particular need of our
36046 love and compassion. (p.52)
36047 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "The Bodhisattva Vow", translated and edited by
36048 Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
36050 On top of the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness, and death, we encounter
36051 the pains of facing the unpleasant, separating from the pleasant, and not
36052 finding what we want. The basic problem lies with the type of mind and body
36053 that we have. Our mind-body complex serves as a basis for present sufferings
36054 in the form of aging, sickness, and death, and promotes future suffering
36055 through our usual responses to painful situations.
36056 By reflecting on birth and on the nature of mind and body, you will be moved
36057 from the depths of your heart to seek relief, thinking, "If I could only be
36058 free from a life driven by afflictive emotions and karma!" Without such
36059 reflection on pain, your knowledge of your own condition will be limited,
36060 which itself will put a limit on your compassion. As Tsonghkapa says:
36061 "If you do not cultivate a genuine sense of disenchantment with cyclic
36062 existence--whose nature is a mind-body complex under the sway of afflictive
36063 emotions and karma--you will have no chance to develop a genuine attitude
36064 intent on liberation, and there will be no way to develop great compassion for
36065 beings wandering in cyclic existence. Therefore, it is crucial to reflect on
36066 your situation." (p.151)
36067 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Becoming Enlightened", trans. and ed. by
36068 Jeffrey Hopkins, PhD
36070 When I was a young boy, Tantra was just a matter of blind faith. At age
36071 twenty-four I lost my own country, and then after coming to India started
36072 really reading Tsongkhapa's explanations on emptiness. Then, after moving to
36073 Dharamsala, I put more effort into the study and practice of the stages of the
36074 path, emptiness, and Tantra. So it was only in my late twenties after gaining
36075 some experience of emptiness that deity yoga made sense.
36076 One time in the main temple in Dharamsala I was performing the ritual of
36077 imagining myself as a deity of Highest Yoga Tantra, called Guhyasamaja. My
36078 mind continuously remained on the recitation of the ritual text, and when the
36079 words "I myself" came, I completely forgot about my usual self in relation to
36080 my combination of mind and body: Instead, I had a very clear sense of "I" in
36081 relation to the new, pure combination of mind and body of Guhyasamaja that I
36082 was imagining. Since this is the type of self-identification that is at the
36083 heart of Tantric yoga, the experience confirmed for me that with enough time I
36084 could definitely achieve the extraordinary, deep states mentioned in the
36085 scriptures. (p.188)
36086 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
36087 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
36089 In Buddhism, one speaks of three different levels of understanding, which
36090 are sequential--an understanding arrived at through learning and studying, an
36091 understanding developed as a result of deep reflection and contemplation, and
36092 an understanding acquired through meditative experience.
36093 There is a definite order in the sequence of this three. So on the basis of
36094 study and learning--which is the first level--we deepen our understanding of a
36095 given topic by constantly reflecting upon it until we arrive at a point where
36096 we gain a high degree of certainty or conviction that is firmly grounded in
36097 reason. At this point, even if others were to contradict our understanding
36098 and the premises upon which it is based we would not be swayed, because our
36099 conviction in the truth has arisen through the power of our own critical
36100 reflection. This is the second level of understanding which, however, is
36101 still at the level of the intellect.
36102 If we pursue this understanding further and deepen it through constant
36103 contemplation and familiarity with the truth, we reach a point where we feel
36104 the impact at the emotional level. In other words, our conviction is no
36105 longer at the level of mere intellect. This is the third level of
36106 understanding, which is experiential, and this is referred to in the Buddhist
36107 texts as an understanding derived through meditative experience.... You will
36108 need to deepen your understanding still further by engaging in regular
36109 meditation so that you can progress to the third level of understanding.
36110 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
36111 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
36113 Shortly after attaining enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the Buddha gave
36114 a sermon in Varanasi sharing the fruits of his realization. This sermon is
36115 referred to as the "first turning of the wheel of Dharma." The word Dharma
36116 here refers to the Buddha's teachings themselves. It was this sermon in which
36117 the Buddha developed what would become the framework for the entirety of his
36118 teachings: the four noble truths.
36119 These four truths are the truth of suffering, the truth of its origin, the
36120 truth of the possibility of its cessation, and the truth of the path that
36121 leads to that cessation. In essence, the four noble truths say that we all
36122 naturally desire happiness and do not wish to suffer--and that the suffering
36123 we wish to avoid comes about as a result of a chain of causes and conditions
36124 begun even before our birth. If we are to pursue our aspiration to gain
36125 freedom from suffering, we need to clearly understand the causes and
36126 conditions that give rise to suffering and strive to eliminate them.
36127 Additionally, we must clearly understand the causes and conditions that give
36128 rise to happiness as well, and actively practice them. This is the essence of
36129 the four noble truths.
36130 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama's
36131 Heart of Wisdom Teachings", translated & edited by Geshe Thupten Jinpa
36133 In Dzogchen, while thoughts are active, rigpa permeates them all, so that
36134 even at the very moment when powerful thoughts like attachment and aversion
36135 are arising, there remains a pervasive quality of clear light rigpa.
36136 Dodrupchen says, "in Dzogchen, since the clear light's natural way of being is
36137 like the sun and its rays, inseparable, if you are able, through this, to
36138 bring out the radiance of genuine mind, you will be able to maintain the
36139 experience of clear light in meditation, without it fluctuating, or coming and
36141 Longchen Rabjam speaks of self-arising wisdom, which is in fact rigpa:
36142 "Self-arising wisdom is rigpa that is empty, clear and free from all
36143 elaboration, like an immaculate sphere of crystal. Its very being is such
36144 that it never explores objects of the senses."
36145 This "self-arising wisdom" is rigpa, which in essence is primordially pure.
36146 Longchenpa describes it as "empty and clear". To call it empty is to refer to
36147 its essence, primordially pure. To call it clear is to speak of its nature,
36148 spontaneously present. As such, it is "free from all elaboration", and free
36149 from the elaborations of adventitious phenomena. So it is like a flawless
36150 crystal sphere, and truly "its very being is such that it never explores
36151 objects of the senses". (p.180-5)
36152 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
36154 There is an Indian saying: if you are struck by a poisonous arrow, it is
36155 important first to pull it out, there is no time to ask who shot it, what sort
36156 of poison it is and so on. First handle the immediate problem, and later we
36157 can investigate. Similarly, when we encounter human suffering, it is
36158 important to respond with compassion rather than question the politics of
36159 those we help. Instead of asking whether their country is enemy or friend, we
36160 must think, "These are human beings, they are suffering, and they have a right
36161 to happiness equal to our own."
36162 Our attitude towards suffering is very important because it can affect how
36163 we cope with it when it arises. Our usual attitude consists of an intense
36164 aversion and intolerance of our own pain and suffering. However, if we can
36165 transform our attitude, adopt an attitude that allows us greater tolerance of
36166 it, this can do much to help counteract feelings of mental unhappiness,
36167 dissatisfaction and discontent. (p.92)
36168 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by
36171 Why should we want to help our enemies or to give them happiness? Here are
36172 various useful ideas to consider. One approach is to think that the harm they
36173 have done us is, in fact, the result of our own past negative actions through
36174 which we have set ourselves up as a target for their harm. We could also
36175 consider how those who harm us are totally driven by their disturbing
36177 If someone in our family, someone we love dearly, becomes insane and tries
36178 to harm us, we wouldn't think of taking revenge but would try to help them
36179 regain a normal state of mind. Living beings, our mothers, are crazed by
36180 their disturbing emotions. Those who harm us are in particular need of our
36181 love and compassion. (p.52)
36182 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, "The Bodhisattva Vow", translated and edited by
36183 Ruth Sonam, published by Snow Lion Publications
36185 If you are totally concerned and preoccupied with the affairs of this
36186 lifetime, there is a great danger of causing your own downfall. If by such
36187 concern you were able to achieve the desired happiness, that is okay, but this
36189 We all let ourselves be caught in this web of preoccupation with the
36190 activities and confusion of this lifetime. Having too much worldly
36191 involvement ends in confusion. We spend our whole lives thinking that this
36192 might be better than that, I should do this, or perhaps something else is
36193 better and I should do that. If you reflect upon the underlying
36194 dissatisfaction, then you will be able to find that, well, after all, whatever
36195 they might be, the affairs of this lifetime are not that important, because
36196 they yield a limited benefit. This does not mean that you should not work for
36197 your own livelihood, but it does indicate that you should not be preoccupied
36198 with that alone. (p.107)
36199 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Bliss", translated by Geshe Thupten
36200 Jinpa, edited by Christine Cox, published by Snow Lion Publications
36202 Do you understand who the enemy is? You do not need to beat anyone up, and
36203 you do not need a weapon to kill your enemy. You do not need money to buy a
36204 weapon. It is all very easy.
36205 How is liberation accomplished? The offering of liberation is accomplished
36206 by abandoning the dualistic mind of discursive thoughts. The sharp weapon of
36207 primordial wisdom, which completely annihilates the dualistic mind, is the
36208 means for achieving this separation. This "weapon" has been part of your
36209 continuum for a long time now. With this weapon you can completely devastate
36210 the dualistic mind, leaving not even a trace behind, thus liberating the mind
36211 into the sphere of unborn truth. The enemy will never return. This is called
36213 I must emphasize that primordial wisdom is not something you can buy, get
36214 from your best friend or have handed to you by a buddha in heaven. It is not
36215 something that someone else has but you do not. Abandon such concepts.
36216 Primordial wisdom does not come from an external source. It is simply your
36217 true nature. It is something that you and everyone else have as the very
36218 essence of your mind.
36219 You should know what your qualities and capabilities are. (p.79)
36220 -- Gyatrul Rinpoche, "The Generation Stage in Buddhist Tantra", published
36221 by Snow Lion Publications
36223 With regard to ordinary study, except for the fact that there is a limit to
36224 our lifetime, it is not that you arrive at a point where there is no more room
36225 in your brain. No matter how much you study, even if you study a hundred
36226 thousand million words, the mind can still retain them. This indicates that
36227 the basis of these qualities, consciousness, is stable and continuous.
36228 The other day, I made a joke to someone who was asking about the brain. I
36229 said that if, like a computer, you needed a cell for each moment of memory,
36230 then as you become more and more educated, your head would have to get bigger
36232 Because of these reasons--that compassion, wisdom, and so forth are
36233 qualities that depend on the mind, and the mind is stable and continuous--they
36234 can be developed to a limitless degree.
36235 It is from this point of view that it is said that the conception of
36236 inherent existence can be extinguished. When one removes the conception of
36237 inherent existence, one thereby also ceases the afflictive emotions generated
36238 in dependence upon that ignorance. Also, since the ignorance that drives
36239 contaminated actions has ceased, this class of actions ceases. Once the
36240 motivator of the action and the actions cease, the results of those actions
36241 will cease. That is how the third noble truth--true cessation--comes to be.
36243 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, "The Dalai Lama at
36244 Harvard: Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and
36245 edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
36247 "Accumulating merit" can be approached from a psychological perspective that
36248 lends itself to experiential verification or from a spiritual dimension that
36249 requires some faith. "Merit" can be understood as "spiritual power" that
36250 manifests in day-to-day experience. When merit, or spiritual power, is
36251 strong, there is little resistance to practicing Dharma and practice itself is
36253 Tibetans explain that people who make rapid progress in Dharma, gaining one
36254 insight after another, enter practice already having a lot of merit. By the
36255 same theory, it is possible to strive diligently and make little progress.
36256 Tibetans explain this problem as being due to too little merit. Merit is the
36257 fuel that empowers spiritual practice.
36258 How do you accumulate merit? Engaging in virtue of any sort, with your
36259 mind, your speech, or your body results in merit. Just as merit can be
36260 accumulated, it can also be dissipated by doing harm. In general, mental
36261 afflictions dissipate merit. The mental affliction that is like a black hole
36262 sucking up merit, worse than all the others, is anger. Attachment or sensual
36263 craving can get you in a lot of trouble, but it doesn't have the debilitating
36264 impact upon spiritual practice that anger does. Remember the warrior
36265 metaphor--standing at the gateway of the mind, vigilant, spear ready. The
36266 spear is for mental afflictions, especially anger. Nip anger in the bud. (p.208)
36267 -- B. Alan Wallace, "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind
36268 Training", published by Snow Lion Publications
36270 It is necessary to alternate stabilising meditation and analytical
36271 meditation... by merely cultivating non-conceptuality and non-analysis it is
36272 impossible to enter into the yoga of signlessness.
36273 Even after emptiness has been realised, powerful and repeated analysis is
36274 needed. Merely to set one's mind on the meaning of emptiness is the mode of
36275 cultivating calm abiding observing emptiness; in order to cultivate special
36276 insight it is necessary to analyse again and again. These two modes of
36277 meditation--stabilising and analytical--are alternated until analysis itself
36278 induces even greater stablisation, at which point stabilisation and wisdom are
36279 of equal strength, this being a union of calm abiding and special insight.
36280 In Performance as well as in Action Tantra the meditative stabilisation
36281 which is a union of calm abiding and special insight is used to gain feats for
36282 the sake of aiding sentient beings and accumulating merit quickly. (p.42)
36283 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Deity
36284 Yoga in Action and Performance Tantra", published by Snow Lion Pub.
36286 Seeking a Place of Refuge.
36288 A spiritual aspirant requires a model, something he or she can look up to as
36289 an ideal and thus find guidance and inspiration. In Buddhism this is the
36290 Triple Gem, or the Three Jewels of Refuge: the Buddhas, Dharma and Sangha.
36291 When we think of the fully enlightened Buddhas--the beings who have purified
36292 their minds of all stains and obscurations and who have expanded their wisdom
36293 to the limits of existence--we feel very attracted and awed; but somehow there
36294 always seems to be a great distance between the Buddhas and us. Therefore,
36295 there is the refuge of Sangha, the community of spiritual aspirants, the
36296 assembly of practitioners dwelling in the various stages of practice and
36298 These beings provide us with a perspective on the path. We have to look up
36299 to the Sangha, but not as far as to the Buddhas. The Sangha make us think,
36300 "This person is not that far ahead of me. If I just make a bit more
36301 effort...." They give us confidence for spiritual practice. Sometimes they
36302 make us feel like we can even race them to enlightenment. These are the
36303 Sangha of spiritual friends.
36304 Thoughts of the Buddhas make us numb with admiration; thoughts of the Sangha
36305 cause us to jump to it and to apply ourselves with zeal to the spiritual path.
36306 This path and the methods for traversing it are the third Jewel of Refuge, the
36307 Dharma. This is the collection of teachings to be practiced and the
36308 realizations to be attained. (p.97)
36309 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
36310 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
36312 Suppose there is this religious group building thousands of childcare
36313 facilities and hospices.... Although these religious workers are doing a lot
36314 of caring work, there is no wish to enlighten sentient beings. Their aim is
36315 just to provide food and education. At the same time, imagine there is one
36316 hermit living somewhere in the mountains of the Himalayas who is doing none of
36317 this. In fact, within close range of him, there are a lot of babies dying,
36318 yet outwardly he is doing nothing about it. Inwardly, however, he is actually
36319 meditating, "May all sentient beings be enlightened!" and he continues to do
36320 this every day. Purely because of the enlightenment aspect, this person is
36321 worthier of homage than the first group. Why? Because it is so difficult to
36322 truly and genuinely wish for the enlightenment of others. It is much easier
36323 to give people food and educate them.
36324 Most of us don't really appreciate this fact. We have never before
36325 genuinely wished for someone else to achieve enlightenment. Likewise, if
36326 someone were to come over and say to us: "Here you go, you have a ticket for
36327 enlightenment. There is only one ticket." I don't think we would even think
36328 about giving it to someone else! We'd grab it and go for it. Enlightenment
36329 is such a valuable thing.
36330 Actually, enlightenment is much too large a subject, so let's not take that
36331 as an example. Instead, let's say someone comes along with a potion that
36332 promises you clairvoyance or omniscience. We would drink it ourselves, not
36333 even sharing half of it with others!
36334 Just think how often we are jealous when someone is a better practitioner.
36335 How often do we get jealous when someone receives a better or a higher
36336 teaching than we do? If you have genuine bodhichitta, you should be happy,
36337 shouldn't you? After all, isn't that what you wished for? Their getting
36338 enlightenment means your wish is at last coming true. Their receiving higher
36339 teachings, or becoming better practitioners, means that your aspiration is
36340 finally being fulfilled! But we don't feel this way, instead we feel jealous
36341 or envious. Some of us may be so-so Dharma practitioners, so we don't really
36342 feel jealous or envious, but we still feel left behind. Who cares? If you
36343 are a genuine bodhisattva, you shouldn't care about these things. (p.123)
36344 -- "Entrance to the Great Perfection: A Guide to the Dzogchen Preliminary
36345 Practices", compiled, translated, and introduced by Cortland Dahl,
36346 published by Snow Lion Publications
36348 It is very difficult to help somebody overcome his or her problems when the
36349 problems are unstructured, when in a certain way this person does not have any
36350 problems, though deep inside all the problems are there. It is very difficult
36351 for a human being whose problem is confused, whose ego is ill-defined and
36352 without foundation, to really purify, clarify, and develop anything.
36353 The same principle applies to praying. As long as we have our self, our
36354 ego, we pray to the Buddha: "Please bless me so that my prayers for the
36355 benefit of all sentient beings be fulfilled." Otherwise our prayer does not
36356 follow any line or direction. It would be like going to a big five-star hotel
36357 with five hundred rooms and not knowing your room number, or taking an
36358 elevator without knowing which floor to go to--this would be a big problem.
36359 This is the reason for calling upon the great compassion of the Buddha and
36360 asking him to consider our prayers. The reason is not that the Buddha only
36361 listens to someone who prays to him; rather, without praying to the Buddha we
36362 are not developed enough to have the condition necessary to receive his
36363 blessing. Rain might be falling for ten thousand years, yet if our cup is
36364 upside down it will remain empty. Through praying we open up, we turn our cup
36365 to let the water get inside. (p.48)
36366 -- XII Khentin Tai Situpa Rinpoche, "The Third Karmapa's Mahamudra Prayer",
36367 translated and edited by Rosemarie Fuchs, published by Snow Lion Pub
36369 Catproof is an oxymoron, childproof nearly so. -- unknown
36371 In Tibetan there is no word for "emotion."
36372 Bearing in mind that the fundamental goal of Buddhist practice is the
36373 achievement of nirvana, when you study the mind what you're really concerned
36374 with is what specific mental states impede the accomplishment of that end.
36375 That's what the six primary states and twenty derivative states (the
36376 unwholesome mental factors) all have in common. Some are emotions and some
36377 are not, but it doesn't really matter. What's important is they all share
36378 that common factor of being impediments.
36379 In contrast, modern psychology does not have the aim of nirvana. My
36380 conjecture, in terms of trying to understand why the West places such a strong
36381 emphasis on identifying emotion, is that, going back to the Enlightenment,
36382 even as far back as Aquinas, there is an enormous priority placed on reason
36383 and intelligence. What can impede reason? Emotion.
36384 You have two categories that are set in opposition to each other. The fact
36385 that there is a specific term for emotion in Western thought does not
36386 necessarily imply that there was a special emphasis placed on understanding
36387 the nature of emotion. Perhaps initially the motive for labeling something as
36388 emotion was to enhance reason by identifying something that is unreasonable,
36389 something that is irrational. (p.159)
36390 -- "Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue
36391 with the Dalai Lama", narrated by Daniel Goleman, foreword by the Dalai
36394 The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.
36395 -- Standard textbook cookie
36398 Your Holiness and other teachers tell us to be sincerely joyful about
36399 others' worldly achievements, happiness, and acquisitions. But if we know
36400 with certainty that a person has acquired or achieved something through
36401 unskillful or non-virtuous means, such as lying, stealing, cheating, harming,
36402 in what manner should that happiness for them be experienced and expressed?
36405 One's attitude toward superficial successes that are achieved through wrong
36406 means of livelihood such as lying, stealing, cheating, and so on, should not
36407 be the same as for achievements and happiness which are genuine. However,
36408 here you must bear in mind that if you examine this carefully, you will find
36409 that although the immediate circumstances that gave rise to a person's joy and
36410 happiness may be a wrong means of livelihood, that is merely the immediate
36411 circumstance: the actual cause of that happiness is the individual's merit in
36413 So one has to see the difference between immediate circumstances and long-
36414 term causes. One of the characteristics of karmic theory is that there is a
36415 definite, commensurate relationship between cause and effect. There is no way
36416 that negative actions or unwholesome deeds can result in joy and happiness.
36417 Joy and happiness, by definition, are the results or fruits of wholesome
36418 actions. So, from that point of view, it is possible for us to admire not so
36419 much the immediate action, but the real causes of joy. (p.119)
36420 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
36421 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by
36422 Snow Lion Publications
36424 At all times, do not lose courage in your inner awareness; uplift yourself,
36425 while assuming a humble position in your outer demeanor. Follow the example
36426 of the life and complete liberation of previous accomplished masters (siddha).
36427 Do not blame your past karma; instead, be someone who purely and flawlessly
36428 practices the Dharma. Do not blame temporary negative circumstances; instead,
36429 be someone who remains steadfast in the face of whatever circumstances may
36431 In brief, taking your own mind as witness, make your life and practice one,
36432 and at the time of death, with no thought of anything left undone, do not be
36433 ashamed of yourself. This itself is the pith instruction of all practices.
36434 Eventually, when the time of death arrives, completely give up whatever
36435 wealth you possess, and do not cling to even one needle. Moreover, at death,
36436 practitioners of highest faculty will be joyful; practitioners of middling
36437 faculty will be without apprehension; and practitioners of the lowest faculty
36438 will have no regrets. When realization's clear light becomes continuous day
36439 and night, there is no intermediate state (bardo): death is just breaking the
36440 enclosure of the body.
36441 If this is not the case, but if you have confidence that you will be
36442 liberated in the intermediate state, whatever you have done in preparation for
36443 death will suffice. Without such confidence, when death arrives, you can send
36444 your consciousness to whichever pure land you wish and there traverse the
36445 remaining paths and stages to become enlightened. (p.58)
36446 -- "Wisdom Nectar: Dudjom Rinpoche's Heart Advice", translated by Ron Garry,
36447 a Tsadra Foundation Series book, published by Snow Lion Publications
36449 There are many different forms of bodywork that can purify and heal in the
36450 context of preparing for tantric practice. Trauma held in the body from early
36451 experiences is cleared only when we are able to work therapeutically in the
36452 body. Whether it is body-centered therapy or the various practices of
36453 acupuncture, osteopathy, homeopathy, and so on, if the practice releases and
36454 transforms trauma, then it is beneficial as a preliminary to any further
36455 tantric practice. I often suggest to people I teach that they follow some
36456 form of body-energy healing in order to further their release of trauma.
36457 Also, after trauma has been released, it is often extremely useful to then
36458 explore some form of psychotherapy.
36459 We should not assume that the traditional practices will do it all for us.
36460 It is simply idealistic and naive to think that all our ills can be resolved
36461 by doing the traditional preliminary practices or, indeed, by classical
36462 "dharma practice" alone. We should consider a healthy body-mind-life
36463 relationship as a necessary part of our practice. When we get this balance
36464 right, we create the basis for a sound dharma practice.
36465 The practice of tantra in particular needs this healthy, balanced basis
36466 because when we work with tantric practices, we stimulate processes in the
36467 body that are often very powerful. If we have a sound base for practice and
36468 have a level of emotional and energetic maturity, then the effects of tantra
36469 can be held and grounded without creating the potential for problems to arise.
36470 Without a sound relationship to the body, the practice of tantra has no real
36471 base from which to unfold.(p.53)
36472 -- Rob Preece, "Preparing for Tantra: Creating the Psychological Ground
36473 for Practice", published by Snow Lion Publications
36475 During a visit to America, Winston Churchill was invited to a buffet luncheon
36476 at which cold fried chicken was served. Returning for a second helping, he
36477 asked politely, "May I have some breast?" "Mr. Churchill," replied the
36478 hostess, "in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat." Churchill
36479 apologized profusely. The following morning, the lady received a magnificent
36480 orchid from her guest of honor. The accompanying card read: "I would be most
36481 obliged if you would pin this on your white meat."
36485 What are the methods for causing one's own mind to become the practices?
36486 Initially, one should take refuge and think about actions and their effects.
36487 The refuge is the Three Jewels: Buddha, his Doctrine and the Spiritual
36490 [Buddha] When a sentient being purifies the taints of his own mind as well
36491 as their latent predispositions, he is free of all defects that act as
36492 obstructions. Thus, he simultaneously and directly knows all phenomena. Such
36493 a being is called a Buddha, and he is a teacher of refuge, like a physician.
36495 [Dharma] The Doctrine jewel is the superior paths--the chief right paths
36496 which remove the taints as well as their latent predispositions--and the
36497 absences which are states of having removed what is to be removed. The
36498 Doctrine is the actual refuge, like medicine.
36500 [Sangha] The Spiritual Community jewel is all persons, whether lay or
36501 ordained, who have generated a superior path in their continuum. They are
36502 friends helping one to achieve refuge, like nurses.
36504 The three refuges that have been achieved and presently exist in other
36505 beings' continuums are one's own causal refuge; one relies on a protector just
36506 as a weak person takes refuge in a stronger person. The three refuges that
36507 one will attain in the future are one's own effect refuge. One who relies on
36508 the Three Jewels from the point of view of knowing that he is to attain them,
36509 must cause them to be generated in his own continuum.(p.35)
36510 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Buddhism of Tibet", translated and edited by
36511 Jeffrey Hopkins, with Anne Klein, published by Snow Lion Publications
36513 Buddhism was extremely helpful to me during the process of my sister's
36514 lingering death two years ago. She was forty-five years old and had very few
36515 spiritual aspirations. She was actually fearful and closed to any suggestions
36516 that she might find comfort in expanding her degree of awareness and
36517 understanding. At first I was extremely upset by her attitude, but then I
36518 realized it was not for me to decide what she should or should not do with the
36519 last few months of her life. I was with her for support and comfort and not
36520 to force her to view her life in a way which was foreign and threatening to
36522 Enabling a person to accomplish a sense of having lived purposefully and
36523 with significance is a major goal of caregivers and loved ones. Being able to
36524 support someone during their dying trajectory, regardless of what they are
36525 thinking or feeling is probably one of the most valuable services one person
36526 can offer to another. But, it is difficult to stay close to someone who is
36527 dying. Not trying to evade an open encounter with the intense psychic pain
36528 that usually accompanies the recognition of impending death is one of the most
36529 valuable contributions that a nurse or any other caregiver or loved one can
36530 make to the patient who wishes to discuss his or her circumstances. Facing
36531 forthrightly the situation of dying, however, requires feeling comfortable
36532 with one's own feelings about death and the frailty of being human.
36533 Buddhism has taught me that death need not be approached only as a tragedy;
36534 it is also an event from which a profound understanding can unfold. (p.44)
36535 -- "Buddhism through American Women's Eyes", edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo,
36536 published by Snow Lion Publications
36538 Offerings should not be influenced by fluctuations of motivation and they
36539 should not be procured by devious means--offerings procured through wrong
36540 means are not good offerings. They should be arranged with proper motivation.
36541 As explained in the precepts of refuge, you should make offerings of the first
36542 portion of your food or drink of the day, whether it be food, milk or tea.
36543 Offerings should be made of what is edible; it is not helpful to arrange a
36544 torma that could not be eaten and then to say OM AH HUM, OM AH HUM. If you
36545 can in reality transform something into delicious food just by reciting OM AH
36546 HUM three times, then it is alright! On the other hand, if your offerings
36547 remain as mere tsampa (roasted barley flour) after having repeated OM AH HUM a
36548 thousand times, it will not help much. The offerings should be the best you
36549 can afford. At least you can offer the first portion of your daily food, as
36550 no one can live without food! Our offerings should be something which is
36551 edible.... [Even] if you make water offerings in a proper manner, you can
36552 generate great merit.(p.35)
36553 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Union of Bliss and Emptiness: Teachings on the
36554 Practice of Guru Yoga", translated by Thupten Jinpa, published by Snow
36557 Hundreds of people may be more popular, powerful, and wealthy than we are,
36558 but from the point of view of the Dharma, no one is more fortunate. We have a
36559 very precious opportunity to make the best of our lives by working toward the
36560 attainment of buddhahood. We have obtained this precious human birth and have
36561 come in contact with the teachings and spiritual friends. All the favorable
36562 conditions are available--we could not ask for more. Yet this is only for a
36563 very short period of time. Within this very short time, the best thing we can
36564 do for ourselves is commit ourselves fully and wholeheartedly to practicing
36565 the disciplines, which are an essential part of the practice of the teachings.
36566 ...The practice of discipline is very profound. In terms of the
36567 effectiveness of the practice of the Dharma, there is a hundredfold difference
36568 between someone who follows some level of discipline and someone who does not.
36569 Whether visualizing a deity, practicing basic meditation, or reciting mantras,
36570 the benefit is a hundredfold greater when we have the ground of discipline.
36571 The teachings of the Buddha say that if we take dust from the footprint of a
36572 person who embodies discipline and put it on our heads, it is a blessing.
36573 Even the king of the devas would do that, because of the sacredness of
36574 discipline. There is a tradition, followed to this day in India, of touching
36575 the feet of a holy person or touching the doorstep before entering his or her
36576 door, and then touching our foreheads. This is not merely a cultural
36577 tradition, but is acknowledging something very profound.(p.73)
36578 -- Khenpo Karthar, "Dharma Paths" 2nd Edition, translated by Ngödup Burkhar
36579 and Chöjor Radha, edited by Laura M. Roth, published by Snow Lion
36582 According to the lower schools of Buddhist thought, when a being, like
36583 Sakyamuni Buddha, attains mahaparinirvana and passes away, he ceases to exist,
36584 there is no further continuity of consciousness. Therefore, according to the
36585 Vaibhasika school, for example, after this point there is no more being, no
36586 more consciousness. Only the name remains. And yet, they believe that this
36587 being who has now disappeared can influence the course of those who follow him
36588 due to the virtues that he created in the past.
36589 This is not accepted by the higher schools of thought, however, that instead
36590 believe that there are two kinds of bodies, those that are pure in nature and
36591 those that are impure. The latter is more gross, whereas a body that has been
36592 purified is more subtle. Now, for example, when Sakyamuni Buddha gave up his
36593 body, there still remained the more subtle one. So, according to these
36594 schools of thought, at the stage of Buddhahood, there are two bodies: a mental
36595 body and a physical one. I don't know whether the English word "body" is the
36596 most appropriate one. In Sanskrit, the words used to signify these two bodies
36597 of the Buddha are dharmakaya and rupakaya. The first is of the nature of
36598 mind, whereas the latter is material. So when the Buddha passes away, there
36599 is still this more subtle body, which is of the nature of mind, and since the
36600 mental continuum is also present, we can say that the personality is still
36601 there. Even today, the Buddha remains as a living being. I think this is
36602 better, don't you?(p.91)
36603 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists",
36604 edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, published by Snow Lion Publications
36606 Blame everything on one thing. It simplifies life incredibly, and yet it
36607 truly is not simplistic. If we believe from our hearts that all of our
36608 misfortunes can be attributed to self-centeredness, this must radically
36609 transform our lives.
36610 Do we have reservations? Isn't there some part of the mind that says,
36611 "Self-centeredness is not such a bad idea. It got me my job, a good salary,
36612 my house and car. How can this be my enemy?" On the surface self-centeredness
36613 may seem like an aide who looks after our interests. There is one powerful
36614 answer to this: insofar as self-centeredness dominates our lives, it brings us
36615 into conflict with virtually everyone else. Because most people are dominated
36616 by self-centeredness, their interests are at odds with our own. There is
36617 bound to be conflict, and conflict gives rise to suffering.
36618 Imagine what life would be like without self-centeredness. Would we give
36619 away all our possessions, waste away from malnutrition, and die prematurely of
36620 disease? No. This would be a partial lack of self-centeredness combined with
36621 a large part of stupidity. If we are to serve others effectively, we must
36622 take care of ourselves. A bodhisattva has no self-centeredness, but there
36623 have been people in all stations of life, including kings, who are
36624 bodhisattvas. If we free ourselves of self-centeredness and really concern
36625 ourselves with the cherishing of others, then our own welfare comes as a kind
36627 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Seven-Point Mind Training", edited by Zara
36628 Houshmand, published by Snow Lion Publications
36630 When we achieve a mind focused on mind with the perfect placement of
36631 absorbed concentration, free from all faults of dullness or flightiness, we
36632 increasingly experience an element of bliss accompanying our meditation. When
36633 we experience serene joy, on both a physical and mental level, brought on by
36634 the force of total absorption of mind on mind, we achieve a meditational state
36635 that fulfills the definition of shamata.
36636 Our ordinary mind is like raw iron ore that needs to be made into a steel
36637 sword. Progressing through the stages for attaining shamata is like forging
36638 the iron into steel. All the materials are there at our disposal. But since
36639 the mind wanders after external objects, then although it is the material for
36640 attaining shamata, it cannot yet be used as this product. We have to forge
36641 our mind through a meditational process. It is like putting the iron ore into
36643 To fashion the steel into a sword, or in this analogy to fashion the mind
36644 into an instrument that understands voidness, our serenely stilled and settled
36645 mind needs to come to decisive realization of voidness as its object. Without
36646 such a weapon of mind, we have no opponent with which to destroy the
36647 disturbing emotions and attitudes.(p.142)
36648 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
36649 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
36651 Focusing the mind on the object of meditation is like planting a seed for
36652 the arisal of the realization.... Even in the beginning stages one might
36653 become impatient, thinking, "I really want to get this done quickly." One
36654 might think that by exerting more effort, by adding more and more stuff, by
36655 changing things this way or that way the process can be made to go faster.
36656 The good gardener knows that too much water or fertilizer is harmful, not
36657 helpful. The mature meditator must understand this as well. The Kadampa
36658 masters of old gave this counsel: First, pay great heed to getting the proper
36659 causes and conditions together. Next, engage in the practice without
36660 agitation and without anxiety. Then, with the mind at ease, carry on to the
36662 --Gen Lamrimpa, "How to Practice Shamatha Meditation: The Cultivation of
36663 Meditative Quiescence", translated by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow
36666 The Need for Reasoning
36668 All Buddhist schools agree that the analytical reasoning process which leads
36669 to an inference (a conceptual realization) derives from basic, shared, direct
36670 perception. As an example let us consider the following reasoning:
36672 A plant does not inherently exist because of being a dependent-arising.
36674 You begin by reflecting on the fact that a plant is a dependent-arising
36675 because its production depends on certain causes and conditions (such as a
36676 seed, soil, sunlight, and water), but eventually the reasoning process must be
36677 supported by direct perception, or it cannot stand. We can see with our eyes
36678 that plants change; they grow; mature, and finally dry up. In this sense,
36679 inference is blind, since it must eventually rely on direct perception.
36680 Inference depends on reasoning, which in turn rests on basic, shared,
36681 indisputable experience through direct perception. (p.153)
36682 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
36683 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
36685 The root of all qualities of the Bodhisattva vehicle is caring for sentient
36686 beings. We admire and respect the Buddha because he has reached the state
36687 free of all faults and possessing all good qualities, knows the method to
36688 reach that state, and teaches it to us. If we do as the Buddha did, by
36689 meditating on love and compassion for all sentient beings, not harming or
36690 getting angry with them, we too can become a Buddha.
36691 Our enlightenment depends on the Buddhas and on sentient beings, and from
36692 this point of view, they are equally important to us. Thus when we look at
36693 any sentient being, we should recognize that she is indispensable to our
36694 attainment of enlightenment. Our enlightenment comes from cherishing sentient
36695 beings; it does not come from cherishing only ourselves. Understanding this,
36696 whenever we encounter people in our lives, it becomes easy to feel, "May this
36697 person be happy and free from suffering."
36698 Caring for sentient beings means freeing them from the suffering of
36699 unfortunate rebirths and of cyclic existence in general, teaching the Dharma
36700 to those who want to hear it, providing the means for them to eliminate the
36701 causes which bring suffering temporarily and ultimately, not harming them, not
36702 lying to them, not creating discord among them, not speaking harshly to them,
36703 and so on. Through caring about them now, excellent results will follow, for
36704 us and for them.(p.179)
36705 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage: An
36706 Explanation of the Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", edited by
36707 Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
36709 The term 'karma' literally means 'action', and more specifically refers to
36710 the process of cause and effect, where the intention of an agent or being is
36711 involved. So here karma means an intentional act committed or carried out by
36712 a being who possesses a sentient nature and who is also capable of having a
36713 sentient experience.
36714 ...Buddhist texts state that only a buddha's omniscient mind can penetrate
36715 the subtlest aspects of the workings of karma, and know at the most
36716 microscopic level which specific causes and conditions give rise to which
36717 specific consequences. At our level, we can only recognise that an intimate
36718 relationship exists between the external elements of the material world and
36719 the internal elements of our mental world; and, based on that, we can learn to
36720 detect varying levels of subtlety within our mental and emotional experiences.
36722 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
36723 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
36725 All attachment and aversion come from what we have mentally created. We
36726 have made an image and that is our mind as we normally experience it. In
36727 order to solve this problem in a more profound and permanent way, we have to
36728 look at our mind and see its true nature. In our innate, unfabricated nature,
36729 which is the basic state of our mind, there is no problem. We make all our
36730 problems by creating concepts and all kinds of mental conditioning.
36731 Seeing the true nature of mind means experiencing the way the mind is when
36732 we do not fabricate and contrive anything. We need to look at our mind when
36733 it is devoid of our creations and free from mental elaborations. If we can
36734 see this state of mind, there is no grasping, no grasped object, and no
36735 subject doing the grasping. There is simply perception or seeing, which in
36736 itself does not cause a problem.
36737 When the true nature of mind is seen, there are just appearances without any
36738 evaluation. One thing arises in the mind and then another thing arises. The
36739 arising that is pleasant is no better than the one that is unpleasant. They
36740 are simply different manifestations of the mind. There is no need to grasp
36741 one and reject the other. Once this is seen clearly, we see the true nature
36742 of mind. This is something that we need to experience directly. When we see
36743 the truth, we become liberated from our struggle within the nets of aversion
36744 and attachment.(p.97)
36745 --Ringu Tulku, "Daring Steps: Traversing the Path of the Buddha", edited and
36746 translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, published by Snow Lion Publications
36748 In general, most non-Buddhist religions meditate on the deity as being
36749 outside the physical body. In these cases the deity takes the form of a
36750 refuge, or of a protector or messenger. Thus do they meditate, and of course
36751 this is fine. In the Buddhist tradition, however, the deity is not meditated
36752 on as being outside the physical body. One meditates on the deity as being
36753 one's own essence expressing itself through oneself arising as the deity. One
36754 therefore thinks, "I am the deity," and with this conviction one meditates.
36755 Why is it justifiable to meditate in this manner? As previously seen, the
36756 five afflictions are actually self-expressions of the five kinds of primordial
36757 awareness; thus our own mind is in essence exactly the same as the mind of a
36758 Buddha. In the philosophical treatises this is sometimes referred to as
36759 'sugatagarbha' or 'buddha-nature'.
36760 Because all beings possess this innately pure buddha-nature, they are pure
36761 by nature and not at all impure. Being pure by nature it is perfectly
36762 justified to meditate that you are the deity, because this is exactly how it
36764 --Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "Everyday Consciousness and Primordial
36765 Awareness", translated and edited by Susanne Schefczyk, published by Snow
36768 In day to day life if you lead a good life, honestly, with love, with
36769 compassion, with less selfishness, then automatically it will lead to
36770 nirvana....We must implement these good teachings in daily life. Whether you
36771 believe in God or not does not matter so much; whether you believe in Buddha
36772 or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in
36773 reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.
36774 And a good life does not mean just good food, good clothes, good shelter.
36775 These are not sufficient. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion,
36776 without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that
36777 others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their rights and human
36778 dignity. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human
36779 capacities. We must share in other peoples' suffering; even if you cannot
36780 help with money, to show concern, to give moral support and express sympathy
36781 are themselves valuable. This is what should be the basis of activities;
36782 whether one calls it religion or not does not matter.... In my simple
36783 religion, love is the key motivation.(p.20)
36784 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, "Kindness,
36785 Clarity, and Insight 25th Anniversary Edition", edited and translated by
36786 Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, published by Snow Lion
36788 All beings suffer in the same way as we do, and some are even more deeply
36789 immersed in sorrow. Yet all of these beings wish to experience only happiness
36790 and to avoid all suffering, frustration, and pain. They wish lasting
36791 happiness but do not know how to cultivate its causes, and they wish to avoid
36792 misery but automatically collect only causes of further misery. As Shantideva
36793 said, "Although seeking happiness, they destroy their own causes of happiness
36794 as they would an enemy. And although seeking to avoid misery, they treat its
36795 causes as they would a close friend."
36796 Were the countless sentient beings unrelated to us, or were they not to mind
36797 their sufferings, perhaps there would be no need for us to bother with their
36798 welfare. In reality, however, all are related to us and not one of them
36799 wishes to suffer. Over the billions of lifetimes that we have experienced
36800 since beginningless time, we have known all the living beings again and again.
36801 Sometimes they have been parents to us, sometimes friends or mates, sometimes
36802 enemies. Without exception, each of them has been even a mother to us again
36803 and again, performing all the kindnesses of a mother. How can we be
36804 indifferent to them?
36805 Wishing them to have only happiness and its causes and to be free of
36806 suffering and its causes, we ourselves should generate a sense of
36807 responsibility for their well-being. Finally, as only an omniscient
36808 Enlightened One is effectively able to benefit beings in deep, lasting, and
36809 ultimate ways, we must quickly attain enlightenment. This is the wishing
36810 bodhimind, the inner basis of Mahayana practice.(p.136)
36811 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
36812 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
36814 Recalling our interconnectedness, we begin to recognize our total
36815 interdependence and that whatever we enjoy in our life comes through others--
36816 through their efforts, their work, their hardships.
36817 It does not necessarily require that others had a specific intention to
36818 enable us to enjoy the things of our life. If we think of this in terms of
36819 the obvious examples like food and clothing, we can immediately see the global
36820 meaning of this contemplation. Our food comes from all over the world and if
36821 we consider the people and other creatures involved in its production,
36822 picking, packaging, transportation, and selling so that we can enjoy it, the
36823 numbers are vast. It is through their labor, their efforts, their struggles
36824 that we enjoy what we eat. Often their lives are terribly hard, and to feed a
36825 family they must work for very little--yet we enjoy the fruits of their labor.
36826 This is something to feel a huge gratitude for.
36827 If we begin to look more closely at our Western life, we can see how much we
36828 are dependent upon people in considerably poorer circumstances all over the
36829 world for what we consume. What we often don't consider is the impact of this
36830 consumption on those who produce it. In this meditation, it can be very
36831 useful to spend some time dwelling upon this so that we really feel the
36832 profound depth of appreciation for our interdependence upon others for our
36833 lives. This can counter the tendency to take our good fortune for granted and
36834 can open up a sense of gratitude for the kindness of those around. If guilt
36835 arises, it can be used to increase our awareness of the responsibility we have
36837 Gradually, we may begin to see the complete interdependent nature of our
36838 relationship with the countless other beings around us. We cannot overlook
36839 this connectedness to others and the kindness and benefit we have gained
36840 through them. When we come to feel this deeply, we will be able to hold
36841 others dear and automatically respond to others with a greater sense of care
36843 -- Rob Preece, "The Courage to Feel: Buddhist Practices for Opening to
36844 Others", published by Snow Lion Publications
36846 If you cannot stop worrying over something in the past or what might happen in
36847 the future, shift your focus to the inhalation and exhalation of your breath.
36848 Or recite this mantra: om mani padme hum (pronounced "om mani padmay hum").
36849 Since the mind cannot concentrate on two things simultaneously, either of
36850 these meditations causes the former worry to fade.(p.133)
36851 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful
36852 Life", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
36854 When serving society or others in general, it is very important to set a
36855 proper motivation at the start of each day. When we wake up each morning, we
36856 reflect, 'Today I am not going to come under the power of either attachment or
36857 hostility. Today I am going to be of benefit and help to others.' Thus we
36858 consciously set the tone for the entire day so that we go through it within
36859 the context of a pure, altruistic motivation and attitude.
36860 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, excerpted from "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of
36861 Mahamudra", published by Snow Lion Publications
36863 We all have a certain style for doing things--how we drive, how we cook, how
36864 we dress. Some of us are shy or cautious, others assertive or flamboyant.
36865 We've refined that style over the years based on how successful it is, but
36866 it's not usually something of which we're completely aware. As long as it
36867 gets the job done, as long as we get the appropriate feedback from others, our
36868 style goes unnoticed, and when questioned we'll say, "That's just the way I
36870 When we begin meditation, it is inevitable that we will meditate with the
36871 same style with which we do everything else, because it's who we think we are.
36872 Furthermore, this style has proven to be reasonably successful in our other
36873 activities. However, in this case, it is not at all appropriate. If there is
36874 any style, there is a hidden agenda and an implicit judgment of the various
36875 phenomena of meditation. There is not the true detachment or choiceless
36876 awareness of real meditation. Our style contains our unacknowledged attitudes
36878 ...What's the problem in meditating with an attitude? First, a large amount
36879 of energy goes into maintaining the attitude. To make this clearer, if we are
36880 trying to be aware of our breathing, 100 percent of our attention should be on
36881 our breathing. If we're thinking, "I'm a shy person and I'm a little afraid
36882 of what's going on here," even if we're not consciously aware of that thought,
36883 it will be taking our energy away from the breathing and keeping it tied up in
36884 the world of ego. Consequently, this energy is not available for our
36885 practice. And your evaluation of your practice and progress will be based on
36886 your agenda rather than on the Buddha's teaching.
36887 Of course, no one is a perfect meditator. It's not like we have to wait
36888 until we have a perfect attitude before we begin. If that were the case, we
36889 would never start..With time, the purity of your attitude will grow...refining
36890 one's approach is a lifetime's work and is at the same time the practice
36892 -- Bruce Newman, "A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism", published by
36893 Snow Lion Publications
36895 Developing a sense of good cheer in the face of adversity, you can
36896 specifically use adversity as the support for refuge and true spiritual
36897 development. I am discussing how you relate to your suffering, how you relate
36898 to your adversity, as it affects you in life and on the path.
36899 Now, as you know, whenever you are suffering by way of the body, speech, and
36900 mind, be it physical illness or a mental affliction, this is a very big deal
36901 to you. Usually it appears as something major. Even if it's minor, you make
36902 it into some great distress. If you lose a little money or if someone speaks
36903 nastily to you, it invokes a strong reaction. This is called "appearances
36904 arising as the enemy." When your habituation to adversity reaches such a
36905 point that you actually fall prey to appearances arising as the enemy, it
36906 means that you no longer have patience for suffering.
36907 ...If you can't bear the minor aspects of adversity in this, the best
36908 rebirth in cyclic existence, the precious human rebirth, what will you do when
36909 you're reborn in the three lower realms? Samsara is so vast, so deep and
36910 limitless, and the number of sentient beings within samsara are equal to that.
36911 All of them want to be free; all of them desire liberation. You should
36912 consider then how unnecessary or pointless it is to think that your small
36913 problems in this fortunate life are so great, when in fact they really are
36915 Any rebirth in this ocean of cyclic existence will by nature bring this type
36916 of discontent or suffering. Since you've been in this cycle of rebirths from
36917 beginningless time until now and you are still not free, it points out the
36918 fact that help is needed. Refuge is necessary. Adversity then becomes the
36919 support for training in refuge, which demonstrates that adversity is used to
36920 your advantage.(p.44)
36921 -- Ven. Gyatrul Rinpoche, "Meditation, Transformation, and Dream Yoga",
36922 trans. by B. Alan Wallace and Sangye Khandro, published by Snow Lion Pub.
36924 The practice of Dharma is to pacify the afflictions and concepts that fill
36925 our minds. When we blend the teachings with our minds, the power of the
36926 Dharma can act upon and pacify afflictions and concepts. If on the outside we
36927 look like Dharma practitioners while on the inside our Dharma practice has not
36928 diminished our afflictions or concepts, we merely call ourselves practitioners
36929 without actually being one. This is not to say that outer behavior, our
36930 reflection in the world, is not important, but what is crucial is to train in
36932 What we tame are the three main afflictions: ignorance, attachment, and
36933 aversion. Ignorance, the root of the two others, is defined as the continual
36934 fixation on our self that we assume to be permanent and independent. This
36935 ego-clinging is the main cause for our cycling in samsara. We wish to be in
36936 paradise for our own advantage; we wish to erase all suffering for our own
36937 advantage. We cling to this "I" of ours, thinking that it is so special that
36938 we should not be bothered with problems but enjoy wealth, power, and charisma.
36939 If we honestly look into our minds, it is quite easy to see this kind of
36940 coarse and obvious grasping to a self.
36941 There are also subtle forms of fixating on the self ("I") and what belongs
36942 to it ("mine"), like the quick thought of ourselves before another one comes.
36943 When practicing Dharma, we are taming this coarse and subtle clinging to an
36944 ego. If this does not happen, we will merely be able to suppress the
36945 afflictions temporarily, distancing ourselves for the time being. To cut
36946 through them completely, we must steadily apply ourselves to practice.(p.187)
36947 -- "Music in the Sky: The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth
36948 Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje", by Michele Martin, published by Snow
36951 "The mantra of the perfection of wisdom--the mantra of great knowledge,
36952 the unexcelled mantra, the mantra equal to the unequalled, the mantra
36953 that quells all suffering--is true because it is not deceptive."
36956 The perfection of wisdom is called "the mantra of great knowledge" because
36957 thoroughly understanding its meaning eliminates the three poisons of craving,
36958 hatred, and delusion. It is called the "unexcelled mantra" because there is
36959 no greater method than the perfection of wisdom for saving one from the
36960 extremes of cyclic existence and the isolated peace of individual nirvana. It
36961 is called the mantra "equal to the unequalled" because the Buddha's
36962 enlightened state is unequalled, and, through the deepest realization of this
36963 mantra, one attains a state equal to that state. Finally, the perfection of
36964 wisdom is known as the "mantra that quells all suffering" because it quells
36965 manifest sufferings and also removes all propensities for future suffering.
36966 The perfection of wisdom is the ultimate truth, thus the statement "it is
36967 true." In the realm of the ultimate truth, there is no disparity, as there is
36968 in conventional reality, between appearance and reality, and thus this
36969 manifest ultimate truth is "not deceptive." This nondeceptiveness also
36970 suggests that, through actualization of this mantra, the perfection of wisdom
36971 can enable one to attain total freedom from suffering and its causes. From
36972 this perspective too, we can say that it is the truth.
36973 "The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is proclaimed: tadyatha gate gate
36974 paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha! Shariputra, the bodhisattvas, the great
36975 beings, should train in the perfection of wisdom in this way."
36976 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama's Heart
36977 of Wisdom Teachings", translated & edited by Geshe Thupten Jinpa
36979 For as long as space endures
36980 And for as long as sentient beings remain,
36981 Until then may I too abide,
36982 To dispel the misery of the world.
36983 -- Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
36985 Global Responsibility
36987 Occasionally I notice that people are making a convenient distinction
36988 between ethics on the personal level and ethics on the wider social level. To
36989 me, such attitudes are fundamentally flawed, as they overlook the
36990 interdependence of our world.
36991 That individual ethics--or rather their absence--can have an impact on the
36992 lives of many is powerfully demonstrated by the global financial crisis that
36993 began in 2008, the repercussions of which are still being felt around the
36994 world. It revealed the way unbridled greed on the part of a few can adversely
36995 affect the lives of millions. So, just as in the wake of the 9/11 attacks we
36996 started to take the dangers of religious extremism and intolerance seriously,
36997 so too, in the wake of the financial crisis, should we take the dangers of
36998 greed and dishonesty seriously. When greed is seen as acceptable, even
36999 praiseworthy, there is clearly something wrong with our collective value
37001 In this age of globalization, the time has come for us to acknowledge that
37002 our lives are deeply interconnected and to recognize that our behavior has a
37003 global dimension. When we do so, we will see that our own interests are best
37004 served by what is in the best interests of the wider human community. By
37005 contrast, if we concentrate exclusively on our inner development and neglect
37006 the wider problems of the world, or if, having recognized these, we are
37007 apathetic about trying to solve them, then we have overlooked something
37008 fundamental. Apathy, in my view, is itself a form of selfishness. For our
37009 approach to ethics to be truly meaningful, we must of course care about the
37010 world. This is what I mean by the principle of global responsibility, which
37011 is a key part of my approach to secular ethics.(p.84)
37012 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole
37013 World", trans. by Thupten Jinpa Langri
37015 Speech that is not harmful is the meaning of "right speech." It is wise
37016 speech. Wise people can still be quite firm and decisive when that is what is
37017 needed. It means finding generous and productive ways of saying things.
37018 There are times when we need to be strict, but we do not have to denigrate or
37019 harm the person or child who is out of line. Firm speech can also be wise
37021 Wise speech is another tool that can be practiced. We can begin by
37022 practicing wise speech to ourselves--replacing the inner voice of guilt that
37023 is putting us down and opening a space to listen to our deeper needs.
37024 What can I say which will be helpful to someone? What tone of voice will I
37025 use? And when is it wise to say nothing? Imagine yourself actually saying
37026 something helpful and supportive. Imagine the difference it would make in
37027 your life if you could say just one helpful thing to one person. Imagine your
37028 life if your speech always came from wisdom.(p.136)
37029 -- Chonyi Taylor, "Enough! A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release from
37030 Addictive Patterns", published by Snow Lion Publications
37032 The famous nineteenth-century dzogchen master Paltrul Rinpoche explained self-
37033 liberation concretely and precisely:
37035 The practitioner of self-liberation is like an ordinary person as far as
37036 the way in which the thoughts of pleasure and pain, hope and fear,
37037 manifest themselves as creative energy. However, the ordinary person,
37038 taking these really seriously and judging them as acceptable or rejecting
37039 them, continues to get caught up in situations and becomes conditioned by
37040 attachment and aversion.
37042 Not doing this, a practitioner, when such thoughts arise, experiences
37043 freedom: initially, by recognizing the thought for what it is, it is freed
37044 just like meeting a previous acquaintance; then it is freed in and of
37045 itself, like a snake shedding its skin; and finally, thought is freed in
37046 being unable to be of benefit or harm, like a thief entering an empty
37049 ...Freeing or liberating thought does not mean ignoring, letting go of, being
37050 indifferent to, observing, or even not having thoughts. It means being
37051 present in hope and fear, pain and pleasure, not as objects before us, but as
37052 the radiant clarity of our natural state. Thus anger, for example, when
37053 experienced dualistically, is an irritation which we may indulge in or reject,
37054 depending on our conditioning. Either way we are caught up in it and act out
37055 of it. But when aware of anger as a manifestation of clarity, its energy is a
37056 very fresh awareness of the particulars of the situation. However, these
37057 particulars are no longer irritating.(p.77)
37059 -- Longchenpa, "You Are the Eyes of the World", translated by Kennard Lipman
37060 and Merrill Peterson, introduction by Namkhai Norbu, published by Snow
37063 In this practice one recollects negativity, contemplates its nature,
37064 generates apprehension of its karmic implications, and resolves to purify
37065 one's mind of the negative traces. On the basis of this resolve one takes
37066 refuge, develops the bodhimind and enters the Vajrasattva meditation or
37067 whatever method is being used. One can also do exercises such as prostrations
37068 and so forth. This concentration of purifying energies destroys the potency
37069 of negative karmic imprints like the germ of a barley seed roasted in a fire.
37070 Here it is important to begin the meditation session with a contemplative
37071 meditation and then to transform this into settled meditation for a prolonged
37072 period of time. One abides in the settled meditation until it begins to lose
37073 intensity, and then temporarily reverts to contemplative meditation in order
37074 to invigorate the mind, returning to fixed meditation once a contemplative
37075 atmosphere has been restored.
37076 Generally our mind is habituated to directing all of our energies into
37077 things that benefit this life alone, things of no spiritual consequence. By
37078 performing these types of meditations, our natural attachment to the
37079 meaningless activities of this life subsides and we begin to experience an
37080 inner appreciation for spiritual values. When spontaneously one's mind
37081 appreciates spiritual rather than mundane goals one has become an active
37082 practitioner of initial perspective.(p.117)
37083 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
37084 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
37086 When doing lamrim meditations, it is important to know clearly the state of
37087 mind you want to reach as a conclusion to the meditation. Lamrim texts
37088 describe the purpose of each meditation, and we want to make sure that our
37089 mind arrives at that conclusion and not at an incorrect or irrelevant
37090 conclusion. For example, when meditating on the disadvantages of the self-
37091 centered thought, our mind may twist that meditation and conclude, "I'm a
37092 horrible person because I'm so selfish." This is the wrong conclusion to reach
37093 from that meditation. The Buddha didn't teach the disadvantages of self-
37094 centeredness so that we would deride ourselves.
37095 If you meditate on a lam rim topic and arrive at an incorrect conclusion,
37096 the meditation hasn't been done correctly. In the above case, thinking, "I'm
37097 a bad person because I'm so selfish," indicates that we have misunderstood the
37098 purpose of the meditation and probably have fallen into an old pattern of
37099 putting ourselves down. Stop and ask yourself,
37100 "What conclusion does the Buddha want me to reach from this meditation? He
37101 wants me to ascertain that the self-centered mind is the actual 'enemy' that
37102 destroys my happiness. Self-centeredness is not an intrinsic part of me; it
37103 is not who I am. It's an incorrect, but deeply entrenched, thought that
37104 creates problems for me. I can free myself from it. Since I want to be
37105 happy, I will realize this selfish attitude for what it is and will stop
37106 following it! Instead, I will cultivate love and compassion for all beings."
37107 This is the conclusion you want to reach.(p.58)
37108 -- Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "Guided Meditations on the Stages of the
37109 Path", foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion
37111 Greed is a form of desire. However, it is an exaggerated form of desire,
37112 based on overexpectation. The true antidote of greed is contentment.
37113 For a practicing Buddhist, for a Dharma practitioner, many practices can act
37114 as a kind of counterforce to greed: the realization of the value of seeking
37115 liberation or freedom from suffering, recognizing the underlying
37116 unsatisfactory nature of one's existence, and so on. These views also help an
37117 individual to counteract greed. But in terms of an immediate response to
37118 greed, one way is to reflect upon the excesses of greed, what it does to one
37119 as an individual, where it leads. Greed leads one to a feeling of
37120 frustration, disappointment, a lot of confusion, and a lot of problems.
37121 When it comes to dealing with greed, one thing which is quite characteristic
37122 is that although it arises from the desire to obtain something, it is not
37123 satisfied by obtaining it. Therefore, it becomes limitless or boundless, and
37124 that leads to trouble. The interesting thing about greed is that although the
37125 underlying motive is to seek satisfaction, as I pointed out, even after
37126 obtaining the object of one's desire, one is still not satisfied. On the
37127 other hand, if one has a strong sense of contentment, it doesn't matter
37128 whether one obtains the object or not; either way, one is still content.(p.32)
37129 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
37130 Buddhist Perspective", translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, published by
37131 Snow Lion Publications
37133 We will hereby start scouring the net for people who say git is hard to
37134 understand and use, and just kill them. They clearly are just polluting
37140 What is the Bodhisattva's Way of life? It is the way of life that follows
37141 naturally from having cultivated the awakening mind of bodhicitta.
37142 Omniscience is achieved only through the process of purifying the disturbing
37143 emotions within your mind. It cannot be achieved merely through wishes and
37144 prayers. We have to train in eliminating all the specific disturbing emotions
37145 within your mind. We have to train in eliminating all the specific disturbing
37146 emotions by relying on specific antidotes.
37147 All the activities of a Bodhisattva can be included in two major categories:
37148 the practice of skillful means and the practice of wisdom. If the practices
37149 of giving, ethics, and so forth are to be perfected, they should be supported
37150 and influenced by the practice of wisdom. Without the practice of wisdom, the
37151 first five of the six perfections cannot actually become practices of
37152 perfection. In order to cultivate such wisdom, you must first cultivate the
37153 genuine unmistaken philosophical view that is known as the view of the Middle
37154 Way, or Madhyamika.
37155 ...even when you have understood the wisdom realizing emptiness, that alone
37156 will not become a powerful antidote to ignorance if it is not supported by
37157 other practices such as giving, ethics, patience, and so forth. Mere
37158 understanding of selflessness is not sufficient to defeat the disturbing
37160 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Stages of Meditation", root text by Kamalashila,
37161 translated by Geshe Lobsang Jordhen, Losang Choephel Ganchenpa, and
37162 Jeremy Russell, published by Snow Lion Publications
37164 The many tantras of both the Ancient and New traditions unanimously agree
37165 that these, and others, are the consequences of violating the pledges.
37167 Means of Restoration
37168 The proclaimers' vows, like a clay pot, once broken cannot be repaired;
37169 The awakening mind commitments, like gold or silver, can be restored;
37170 The tantric pledges, like a dented vessel, are restored by the
37171 practitioner's strength.
37174 When is it possible to restore a vow that has been transgressed? All the
37175 tantras and transmissions state that if a monk has incurred a defeat with
37176 concealment, the transgressed vow, like a broken clay pot, cannot be repaired.
37177 An awakening mind commitment that has been transgressed is like a cracked gold
37178 or silver vase which can still be soldered by a blacksmith. A violated vow or
37179 pledge in this Secret Mantra system is likened to a dented golden vessel,
37180 which can be straightened out by the practitioner's own strength.
37181 Pledges are restored through action, precious substances, earnest desire,
37182 contemplation, and reality.
37183 The Great Cleansing can purify all transgressions.(p.296)
37184 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, "Treasury of Knowledge--Book Five: Buddhist
37185 Ethics", trans. by the Kalu Rinpoche Translation Group, under the
37186 direction of Ven. Bokar Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications
37188 How to Become a Receptacle Suitable for Cultivating the Paths.
You are
37189 made into a vessel suitable for cultivating the path through entering a
37190 mandala such as that of the Vajra Element, receiving initiation, and receiving
37191 the pledges and vows.
37192 Concerning this, there are two types: those who merely enter a mandala and
37193 those who enter and receive initiation, of which there are two types. The
37194 former are those who cannot hold the vows of the five lineages but who hold
37195 the Bodhisattva vows; only the initiation of a student is granted to them.
37196 However, to those who can hold both Bodhisattva and mantra vows the full
37197 initiation of a vajra master is granted.(p.78)
37198 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
37199 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by
37200 Snow Lion Publications
37202 Awareness as virtue. Beyond choosing more virtuous forms of speech, you can
37203 also try to cultivate awareness of the subtle vibration underlying your speech
37204 and of how your speech manifests from there. Is your voice creating the right
37206 In dzogchen the concept of virtuous speech is taken to its highest level.
37207 For example, the A-Tri system of dzogchen offers a group of successive
37208 practices in which one learns to maintain awareness while engaging in various
37209 virtuous, neutral, and nonvirtuous activities.
37210 One initially tries to stay present amid virtuous activity such as praying
37211 or chanting mantras. Once that experience is stabilized, one integrates
37212 presence with neutral speech, such as conversing casually with a friend about
37213 cooking or gardening. Finally, one tries to integrate with negative speech
37214 such as lying, arguing, or giving insults. It is easier if you can establish
37215 your intent for self-awareness before you get drawn into an angry argument.
37216 For example, think of how courtroom lawyers argue a case: although they may
37217 use strong, sharp language, they are never driven by their emotions--every
37218 word is carefully chosen for its impact and is guided by intent, if not
37220 From this perspective "nonvirtuous speech" might be defined as speech that
37221 is driven and not guided and through which you lose connection with your self.
37222 In dzogchen practice you aim to arrive at a place where all activity of body,
37223 speech, and mind becomes an expression of contemplative awareness and an aid
37224 to spiritual development--therefore virtuous in the truest sense of the word.
37226 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "Tibetan Yogas of Body, Speech, and Mind",
37227 edited by Polly Turner, published by Snow Lion Publications
37229 Bodhisattvas give solely out of concern for others, without a self-
37230 cherishing attitude. That is the proper way of giving. Courageous
37231 Bodhisattvas risk even their lives to help others, and so, when we are in
37232 relatively better, more comfortable situations, we must certainly practice
37233 giving. Even if they are threatened, the courageous ones will not engage in
37234 improper actions. Instead, after examining the situation carefully, when they
37235 find that certain actions are correct and justified, on the basis of reason,
37236 they engage in them even at the risk of their lives. That is the way of the
37237 decent, civilized and courageous ones, who do not follow misleading paths.(p.20)
37238 -- H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries by H.H. the
37239 Dalai Lama XIV on the Jatakamala, Garland of Birth Stories", translated
37240 by Tenzin Dorjee, edited by Dexter Roberts
37242 Merely understanding the mind is not good enough. Recognizing it as the
37243 source of happiness and suffering is good, but great results come only from
37244 looking inward and meditating on the nature of the mind. Once you recognize
37245 its nature, then you need to meditate with joyful effort. Joyful meditation
37246 will actualize the true nature of the mind, and maintaining the mind in this
37247 natural state will bring enlightenment. This type of meditation reveals the
37248 innermost, profound wisdom that is inherent in the mind.
37249 Meditation can transform your body into wisdom light, into what is known as
37250 the rainbow body of wisdom. Many masters in the history of the Nyingma
37251 lineage have achieved this, as can anyone who practices these methods of
37252 meditation. The wisdom aspect of our nature exists at all times in each of
37253 us. You have always had this nature and it can be revealed through
37254 meditation. When you maintain the mind in its natural state, wonderful
37255 qualities shine out like light from the sun. Among these qualities are
37256 limitless compassion, limitless loving-kindness, and limitless wisdom.
37257 -- Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche,
37258 "The Buddhist Path: A Practical Guide from the Nyingma Tradition of
37259 Tibetan Buddhism", published by Snow Lion Publications
37261 In order for the wisdom of special insight to remove impediments to proper
37262 understanding, and to remove faulty mental states at their very roots, we need
37263 concentrated meditation, a state of complete single-mindedness in which all
37264 internal distractions have been removed.
37265 Single-minded meditation involves removing subtle internal distractions such
37266 as the mind's being either too relaxed or too tight. To do so we must first
37267 stop external distractions through training in the morality of maintaining
37268 mindfulness and conscientiousness with regard to physical and verbal
37269 activities--being constantly aware of what you are doing with your body and
37270 your speech. Without overcoming these obvious distractions, it is impossible
37271 to overcome subtler internal distractions. Since it is through sustaining
37272 mindfulness that you achieve a calm abiding of the mind, the practice of
37273 morality must precede the practice of concentrated meditation.(p.23)
37274 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life",
37275 translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
37277 Buddha means one who is fully enlightened. In other words, a buddha has
37278 fully awakened from the sleep of delusion. He is free from all obscurations,
37279 both gross and subtle, and has revealed the two intrinsic wisdom awarenesses.
37280 Buddhahood is the spontaneously established, uncompounded nature that does not
37281 depend on any other conditions. A buddha has perfect wisdom, has perfectly
37282 accomplished the nature of compassion, and has every ability to manifest all
37283 excellent activities.
37284 There are many buddhas in the past, present, and future. In fact, there are
37285 as many buddhas as there are particles of dust. Basically, the term buddha
37286 refers to anyone whose mind is fully awakened and who is free from all
37287 suffering and its causes. When we point to Buddha Shakyamuni as a buddha, he
37288 is an example of this. A buddha has four forms, all of which emanate from the
37290 1. Nirmanakaya is a buddha who has emanated in a physical form. A
37291 nirmanakaya can emanate anywhere as anything animate or inanimate--as a human
37292 being, an animal, or even a bridge, if necessary...
37293 2. Sambhogakaya is the expression of the complete, perfect manifestation
37294 of the Buddha's excellent, infinite qualities, called the enjoyment body--
37295 splendid and glorious. All the buddhas appear and manifest in the limitless
37296 buddha fields in this form...
37297 3. Dharmakaya is one's own perfection, fully free from all delusion and
37298 suffering. It is infinite and transcends all boundaries...
37299 4. Svabhavikakaya is the indivisible nature of the other three forms.(p.165)
37300 -- Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, "A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path",
37301 edited by Khenmo Trinlay Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications
37303 Boundless joy is the joy you should feel when you see gifted and learned
37304 beings who are happy, famous or influential. Instead of feeling uneasy and
37305 envious of their good fortune, rejoice sincerely, thinking, "May they continue
37306 to be happy and enjoy even more happiness!" Pray too that they may use their
37307 wealth and power to help others, to serve the Dharma and the Sangha, making
37308 offerings, building monasteries, propagating the teachings and performing
37309 other worthwhile deeds. Rejoice and make a wish: "May they never lost all
37310 their happiness and privileges. May their happiness increase more and more,
37311 and may they use it to benefit others and to further the teachings."
37312 Pray that your mind may be filled with boundless equanimity, loving-
37313 kindness, compassion and joy--as boundless as a Bodhisattva's. If you do so,
37314 genuine bodhichitta will certainly grow within you.
37315 The reason these four qualities are boundless, or immeasurable, is that
37316 their object--the totality of sentient beings--is boundless; their benefit--
37317 the welfare of all beings--is boundless; and also their fruit--the qualities
37318 of enlightenment--is boundless. They are immeasurable like the sky, and they
37319 are the true root of enlightenment.(p.49)
37320 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, "The Excellent Path to Enlightenment",
37321 translated and edited by The Padmakara Translation Group, published by
37322 Snow Lion Publications
37324 Regarding an online merchant... I think I have bought a couple things from
37325 them before, and my "cornholio sense" is not tingling (a power I got from
37326 being bitten by a radioactive asshole), so I don't think they were jerks when
37327 I used them last time.
37330 External circumstances are not what draw us into suffering. Suffering is
37331 caused and permitted by an untamed mind. The appearance of self-defeating
37332 emotions in our minds leads us to faulty actions. The naturally pure mind is
37333 covered over by these emotions and troubling conceptions. The force of their
37334 deceit pushes us into faulty actions, which leads inevitably to suffering.
37335 We need, with great awareness and care, to extinguish these problematic
37336 attitudes, the way gathering clouds dissolve back into the sphere of the sky.
37337 When our self-defeating attitudes, emotions, and conceptions cease, so will
37338 the harmful actions arising from them.
37339 As the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa says, "When arising, arising within space
37340 itself; when dissolving, dissolving back into space." We need to become
37341 familiar with the state of our own minds to understand how to dissolve ill-
37342 founded ideas and impulses back into the deeper sphere of reality. The sky
37343 was there before the clouds gathered, and it will be after they have gone. It
37344 is also present when the clouds seem to cover every inch of the sky we can
37346 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving
37347 Relationships", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
37349 Usually the reason that we can't experience transcendent bliss is because
37350 our consciousness is actually chained by the illusion called "I." It is
37351 chained because this concept literally ties our consciousness to the prison of
37352 duality, the prison of concepts and ideas. What most people experience is
37353 that their consciousness is chained by that illusion.
37354 But now and then there are people who find the so-called spiritual path.
37355 This is another quite strange and sneaky way that ego can actually keep
37356 binding our consciousness once again to another form of prison, the prison of
37357 duality, the prison of concepts and ideas. Transcendent bliss comes from
37358 breaking every chain.
37359 Breaking all chains, losing every concept, every idea, sounds very
37360 frightening to the ego's mind. But actually when we let go of every concept,
37361 we land on this infinite ground of eternal bliss, and that bliss is not some
37362 kind of religious or mystical experience, some altered state of consciousness.
37363 That bliss is not the result of doing something to our consciousness, rather
37364 it is the pure state of our consciousness.(p.74)
37365 -- Anam Thubten, "The Magic of Awareness", edited by Sharon Roe, published
37366 by Snow Lion Publications
37368 The all-base consciousness* works like a savings bank. Continuously money
37369 is paid into the bank and continuously it is taken out again. In the same way
37370 karmic imprints are absorbed by the all-base, are stored there, and can
37371 therefore be brought forth again.
37372 Learning, for example, occurs through the mind consciousness. The mind
37373 consciousness itself vanishes. Nevertheless, on the next day we have a memory
37374 of what we learned. At this time of remembrance, the mind consciousness of
37375 what we learned is no longer actually present, since it has ceased to exist.
37376 Yet, still we did not forget what we learned previously. What we learned was
37377 seized by the all-base in the form of karmic imprints, and stored. Due to the
37378 'all-base of complete ripening' these imprints can be re-awakened, so that the
37379 mind consciousness perceives them afresh. This is why we learn things. It is
37380 similar with strong mental afflictions.
37381 ...The example of the savings bank is particularly effective, especially in
37382 the context of karmic actions. Whoever puts money into the bank can get it
37383 out again later, often including interest!(p.37)
37385 * The all-base consciousness is the general basis for the whole mind, all
37386 aspects of the mind.
37388 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, "Everyday Consciousness and Primordial
37389 Awareness", translated and edited by Susanne Schefczyk, published by
37390 Snow Lion Publications
37392 Q: How can Dzogchen help us in our daily jobs and careers?
37394 HHDL: In the first place, it is quite difficult to have an experience of
37395 Dzogchen. But once you do have that experience, it can be extremely
37396 beneficial in dealing with your day to day life, your job, and your career.
37397 This is because that kind of experience will give you the ability to prevent
37398 yourself from being overwhelmed by circumstances, good or bad. You will not
37399 fall into extreme states of mind: you will not get over-excited or depressed.
37400 Your attitude toward circumstances and events will be as if you were someone
37401 observing the mind, without being drawn away by circumstances.
37402 For example, when you see a reflection of a form in a mirror, the reflection
37403 appears within the mirror but it is not projected from within. In the same
37404 way, when you confront the situations of life, or deal with others, your
37405 attitude too will be mirror-like.
37406 Also, when a reflection appears in the mirror, the mirror does not have to
37407 go after the object that is reflected: it simply reflects, spontaneously, on
37408 the surface. The same with you: since there is no attachment or agitation at
37409 having these 'reflections' in your mind, you will feel tremendous ease and
37410 relief. You are not preoccupied by what arises in the mind, nor does it cause
37411 you any distress. You are free from conceptuality or any form of
37412 objectifying. And so it really does help you, in allowing you to be free from
37413 being caught up in the play of emotions like hatred, attachment, and the like.
37415 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great
37416 Perfection", translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, foreword by
37417 Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion Pub.
37419 The quality of one's rebirth in the next life is determined by the quality
37420 of one's mental activity in this life. Generally speaking, we have no power
37421 to choose how we are born; it is dependent on karmic forces. However, the
37422 period near the time of death is very influential in terms of activating one
37423 from among the many karmas that a person has already accumulated, and,
37424 therefore, if one makes particular effort at generating a virtuous attitude at
37425 that time, there is an opportunity to strengthen and activate a virtuous
37426 karma. Moreover, when one has developed high realization and has gained
37427 control over how one will be reborn, it is possible to take what is called
37428 "reincarnation" rather than mere rebirth.(p.42)
37429 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, "The Dalai Lama at Harvard:
37430 Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace", translated and edited by Jeffrey
37431 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
37433 Without an acute awareness of our personal suffering and a deep, heartfelt
37434 determination to be completely rid of both this suffering and its causes,
37435 there is no way to begin the spiritual quest authentically. For just as
37436 Prince Siddhartha's sudden and unexpected visions of old age, sickness and
37437 death shocked him out of mistaking the world to be a pleasure palace, so too
37438 must all spiritual seekers confront the unsatisfactory nature of their lives
37439 so directly that they become thoroughly disenchanted with the ordinary human
37441 If we do not take a long, hard look at the uncomfortable truths of our
37442 impermanent existence, we can easily waste the time between now and our
37443 inevitable death in essentially worthless pursuits, never taking advantage of
37444 this precious opportunity to do something truly meaningful with our life.
37445 Like the foolish prisoner who becomes so accustomed to the confines of his
37446 cell that he turns a blind eye to all chances of escape, we shall be
37447 condemning ourselves to spiritual stagnation and the endlessly recurring
37448 miseries of cyclic existence.
37449 Yet it is not enough merely to become discontent with our present condition;
37450 everyone experiences discontent at one time or another but very few do
37451 anything of real significance about it. In fact, the usual ways of dealing
37452 with problems and disappointment--blaming them on someone else or drowning
37453 them in forgetfulness--only bind us tighter to the wheel of suffering. What
37454 we must do is recognize that the true causes of all our misery lie rooted in
37455 our own ignorant misconceptions and that these can only be eradicated through
37456 the development of a clear, penetrating insight into the nature of reality.
37457 Only through the continued cultivation of such penetrating wisdom will it
37458 eventually be possible to attain liberation from all states of existence
37459 conditioned by ignorance and be free of suffering.(p.45)
37460 -- "Images of Enlightenment: Tibetan Art in Practice", by Jonathan Landaw
37461 and Andy Weber, published by Snow Lion Publications
37463 We must distinguish between pride and self-confidence. Self-confidence is
37464 necessary. It is what enables us, in certain situations, not to lose courage
37465 and to think with some justification, 'I am capable of succeeding.' Self-
37466 confidence is quite different from excessive self-assurance based on a false
37467 appreciation of our capacities or circumstances.
37468 If you feel able to accomplish a task that other people cannot manage, then
37469 you cannot be called proud as long as your assessment is well founded. It is
37470 as if someone tall came across a group of short people who wanted to get
37471 something too high for them to reach, and said to them, 'Don't exert
37472 yourselves, I can do it.' This would simply mean that he was more qualified
37473 than the others to carry out a particular task, but not that he is superior to
37474 them or that he wants to crush them.(p.259)
37475 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "365 Dalai Lama: Daily Advice from the
37476 Heart", edited by Matthieu Ricard, translated by Christian Bruyat,
37477 published by Snow Lion Publications
37479 What is progress? How do we recognize it? The teachings are like a mirror
37480 before which we should hold our activities of body, speech, and mind. Think
37481 back to a year ago and compare the stream of activities of your body, speech,
37482 and mind at that time with their present condition. If we practice well, then
37483 the traces of some improvement should be reflected in the mirror of Dharma.
37484 The problem with having expectations is that we usually do not expect the
37485 right things. Not knowing what spiritual progress is, we search for signs of
37486 it in the wrong areas of our being. What can we hope for but frustration? It
37487 would be far better to examine any practice with full reasoning before
37488 adopting it, and then to practice it steadily and consistently while observing
37489 the inner changes one undergoes, rather than expecting this or that fantasy to
37491 The mind is an evolving organism, not a machine that goes on and off with
37492 the flip of a switch. The forces that bind and limit the mind, hurling it
37493 into unsatisfactory states of being, are impermanent and transient agents.
37494 When we persistently apply the practices to them, they have no option but to
37495 fade away and disappear.
37496 Ignorance and the "I"-grasping syndrome have been with us since
37497 beginningless time, and the instincts of attachments, aversion, anger,
37498 jealousy and so forth are very deeply rooted in our mindstreams. Eliminating
37499 them is not as simple as turning on a light to chase away the darkness of a
37500 room. When we practice steadily, the forces of darkness are undermined, and
37501 the spiritual qualities that counteract them and illuminate the mind are
37502 strengthened and made firm. Therefore, we should strive by means of both
37503 contemplative and settled meditation to gain stability in the various Lam Rim
37505 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Path to Enlightenment", edited and translated
37506 by Glenn H. Mullin, published by Snow Lion Publications
37508 We are beings of the Desire Realm, and thus our minds are also included
37509 within Desire Realm minds. If we cultivate great compassion, our own minds
37510 are the basis for great compassion. By contemplating countless sentient
37511 beings and meditating to develop great compassion, one eventually achieves
37512 great compassion. At that point, the mental basis--one's own mind--has become
37513 of the entity of great compassion. There is no distinguishing the two at that
37514 time. Meditating on great compassion does not mean taking compassion as an
37515 object and looking at it; it means taking sentient beings as one's object and
37516 developing compassion for them such that the mind comes to be of the nature of
37518 The texts frequently speak of different mental bases: the basis for calm
37519 abiding, the basis for meditative absorption, the basis for achieving a path.
37520 The way of understanding all of these is the same. You may wonder whether,
37521 when one cultivates a certain path, the mind becomes of the entity of that
37522 path. It is important to understand this question because that is, in fact,
37523 what occurs when one cultivates calm abiding. The mental basis becomes of the
37524 nature of calm abiding.
37525 -- Geshe Gedun Lodro, "Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving Spiritual
37526 Transformation Through Meditation", translated and edited by Jeffrey
37527 Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications
37529 Nature's law dictates that, in order to survive, bees must work together.
37530 As a result, they instinctively possess a sense of social responsibility.
37531 They have no constitution, no law, no police, no religion or moral training,
37532 but because of their nature, they labor faithfully together. Occasionally,
37533 they may fight, but in general, based on cooperation, the whole colony
37535 We human beings have a constitution, laws and a police force. We have
37536 religion, remarkable intelligence and a heart with a great capacity for love.
37537 We have many extraordinary qualities, but in actual practice, I think we are
37538 lagging behind those small insects. In some respects I feel we are poorer
37540 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", compiled and edited by
37543 Nagarjuna offers us encouragement in terms of someone of modest potential
37544 accomplishing the practice, in verse 116:
37546 And even those who realized the truth
37547 Did not fall from the heavens, nor emerge
37548 Like crops of corn from earth's dark depths, but once
37549 Were ruled by kleshas and were ordinary men.
37551 Not one of all the sublime beings who have appeared--individuals who had
37552 direct realization of the Dharma of the four truths--was already a sublime
37553 being right from the beginning: they did not fall from the sky, nor did they
37554 emerge from the darkness of the earth like a crop. In the past they were
37555 subject to afflictive emotions ['kleshas']--they were ordinary people
37556 dominated by the afflictive emotions. They are therefore worth following as
37557 an example for accomplishing the path.(p.150)
37558 -- Nagarjuna, "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend: with Commentary by Kangyur
37559 Rinpoche", with commentary by Longchen Yeshe Dorje, Kyabje Kangyur
37560 Rinpoche, translated by The Padmakara Translation Group, published by
37561 Snow Lion Publications
37565 As long as we cling to some notion of objective existence--the idea that
37566 something actually exists in a concrete, identifiable way--emotions such as
37567 desire and aversion will follow. When we see something we like--a beautiful
37568 watch, for example--we perceive it as having some real quality of existence
37569 among its parts. We see the watch not as a collection of parts, but as an
37570 existing entity with a specific quality of watch-ness to it. And if it's a
37571 fine mechanical timepiece, our perception is enhanced by qualities that are
37572 seen to exist definitely as part of the nature of the watch. It is as a
37573 result of this misperception of the watch that our desire to possess it
37575 In a similar manner, our aversion to someone we dislike arises as a result
37576 of attributing inherent negative qualities to the person. When we relate this
37577 process to how we experience our own sense of existence--how the thought "I"
37578 or "I am" arises--we notice that it invariably does so in relation to some
37579 aspect of our physical or mental aggregates.
37580 Our notion of ourselves is based upon a sense of our physical and emotional
37581 selves. What's more, we feel that these physical and mental aspects of
37582 ourselves exist inherently. My body is not something of which I doubt the
37583 specificity. There is a body-ness as well as a me-ness about it that very
37584 evidently exists. It seems to be a natural basis for my identifying my body
37585 as "me." Our emotions such as fear are similarly experienced as having a valid
37586 existence and as being natural bases for our identifying ourselves as "me."
37587 Both our loves and our hates serve to deepen the self sense. Even the mere
37588 feeling "I'm cold" contributes to our sense of being a solid and legitimate
37590 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "A Profound Mind: Cultivating Wisdom in Everyday
37591 Life", edited by Nicholas Vreeland, afterword by Richard Gere
37593 In the Mahayana, there exist the vows of the Bodhisattva... but in Dzogchen,
37594 there exist no such rules or vows.
37595 When the Indian Buddhist master Atisa came to Tibet in the eleventh century,
37596 he met the famous Tibetan translator Rinchen Zangpo. Atisa asked him how he
37597 practiced the Tantras which he had translated, and he replied that he
37598 practiced them meticulously one after the other. But Atisa told him that this
37599 was not the correct way. He pointed out to the translator that all of the
37600 Tantras could be condensed and integrated into a single Upadesa and one need
37601 only practise that in order to maintain all of the transmissions which he had
37603 The same is true with Dzogchen. If we really understand this single
37604 teaching here which comes directly from Guru Padmasambhava, we can attain
37605 liberation. But we must grasp this vital core of the teaching. No matter
37606 what we are doing, which ever among the four modes of behavior--walking,
37607 sitting, lying down, or eating, we must always hold to awareness, never
37608 forgetting, never losing this awareness. This is the real meaning of Rigdzin,
37609 one who is totally aware. In Dzogchen, there is only one rule--always be
37610 aware in whatever we do, never be distracted!(p.68)
37611 -- "Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness", translation and
37612 commentary by John Myrdhin Reynolds, foreword by Namkhai Norbu,
37613 published by Snow Lion Publications
37615 Our mind needs to stretch to encompass emptiness. Our minds are so stuck in
37616 the idea, "Things exist the way they appear to me. What I see is reality. It
37617 is 100 percent true. There's nothing to doubt. Things exist exactly as they
37618 appear to my senses, exactly as they appear to my mental consciousness." We
37619 hardly ever doubt that. Not only do we have the appearance of inherent
37620 existence to our sense consciousnesses and mental consciousness, but also our
37621 mental consciousness grasps on to that appearance and says, "Yes! Everything
37622 really exists in this findable, independent way. Everything is real as it
37624 When we believe there's a real "me," then we have to protect that self and
37625 bring it happiness. Thus, we are attached to things that are pleasurable and
37626 become angry at anything unpleasant. Pride, jealousy, laziness, and the whole
37627 gamut of negative emotions follow. Motivated by these, we act physically,
37628 verbally, and mentally. These actions, or karma, leave seeds on our
37629 mindstream, and when these ripen, they influence what we experience. We again
37630 relate to these experiences ignorantly, so more emotions arise, motivating us
37631 to create more karma. As a result, cyclic existence with all its difficulties
37632 continues on and on, created by our mind, dependent on the ignorance that
37633 misconceives the nature of ourselves and all other phenomena.
37634 ...However, when we investigate more deeply and look beyond appearances, we
37635 realize that it's impossible for things to exist in the way they appear.
37636 Seeing this gives us a kind of spaciousness and freedom because, if samsara
37637 were inherently existent and everything really did exist the way it appears to
37638 us, then transformation and change could not occur...and the best we could
37639 ever have is what we have right now. Thinking about the emptiness of inherent
37640 existence shows us the possibility for change. Beauty can come forth because
37641 nothing is inherently concrete, fixed, or findable.(p.105)
37642 -- Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga Method of
37643 Chenrezig", foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama, published by Snow Lion Pub.
37647 If one does not sow the seed
37648 Of appreciation for a perfect guru,
37649 The tree of spiritual power is not born.
37650 With undivided mind entrust yourself.
37652 Human life is rare and precious,
37653 Yet if not inspired by thoughts of death,
37654 One wastes it on materialism:
37655 Be ready to die at any moment.
37657 All living beings have been our mothers,
37658 Three circles of suffering always binding them.
37659 Ignoble it would be not to repay them,
37660 Not to strive to attain enlightenment. (p.100)
37662 The colophon [inscription] for this poem reads, "Written at the request of
37663 Ritropa Samdrub, an Amdo monk from Dechen Monastery, who begged for a short
37664 teaching...." The Seventh Dalai Lama advises him to establish three central
37665 pillars in his spiritual practice: (1) a disciplined spiritual connection with
37666 his teacher; (2) awareness of the preciousness of life, and the uncertainty of
37667 the time of death; and (3) the mind of love and compassion for all living
37668 beings, coupled with the aspiration to enlightenment as the best means of
37669 fulfilling that love and compassion.
37670 -- The Seventh Dalai Lama, "Meditations to Transform the Mind", translated,
37671 edited, and introduced by Glenn Mullin, published by Snow Lion Pub.
37673 Courageous Bodhisattvas risk their lives to help others, and so, when we are
37674 in relatively better, more comfortable situations, we must certainly practice
37675 giving. Even if they are threatened, the courageous ones will not engage in
37676 improper actions. Instead, after examining the situation carefully, when they
37677 find that certain actions are correct and justified, on the basis of reason,
37678 they engage in them even at the risk of their lives. That is the way of the
37679 decent, civilized and courageous ones, who do not follow misleading paths.(p.20)
37680 -- H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, "Generous Wisdom: Commentaries by H.H. the
37681 Dalai Lama XIV on the Jatakamala, Garland of Birth Stories", translated
37682 by Tenzin Dorjee, edited by Dexter Roberts
37684 One day, when a very learned scholar or geshe and I were discussing the fact
37685 that the self is an elusive phenomenon, that it is unfindable in either body
37686 or mind, he remarked: 'If the self did not exist at all, in a sense that would
37687 make things very simple. There would be no experience of suffering and pain,
37688 because there would be no subject to undergo such experiences. However, that
37689 is not the case. Regardless of whether we can actually find it or not, there
37690 is an individual being who undergoes the experience of pain and pleasure, who
37691 is the subject of experiences, who perceives things and so on. Based on our
37692 own experience we do know that there is something--whatever we may call it--
37693 that makes it possible for us to undergo these experiences. We have something
37694 called discernment or the ability to perceive things.'
37695 In fact, when we examine the experience of suffering, although some
37696 sufferings are at the sensory or bodily level, such as physical pain, even the
37697 very experience of pain is intimately connected with consciousness or mind and
37698 therefore is part of our mental world. This is what distinguishes sentient
37699 beings from other biological organisms, such as plants, trees and so on.
37700 Sentient beings have a subjective dimension, which we may choose to call
37701 experience, consciousness or the mental world.
37702 ....One thing we can understand, both through scientific analysis and also
37703 from our own personal experience or perception, is that whatever experiences
37704 we have now are consequences of preceding conditions. Nothing comes into
37705 being without a cause. Just as everything in the material world must have a
37706 cause or condition that gives rise to it, so must all experiences in the
37707 mental world also have causes and conditions.(p.74)
37708 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Lighting the Way", translated by Geshe Thupten
37709 Jinpa, published by Snow Lion Publications
37711 Meditation, when learned skillfully, can enable a return to awareness of the
37712 body, our sensations, and feelings. When we are not given specific guidance
37713 to ground our meditation within the body, however, meditation can easily
37714 perpetuate a disembodied spiritual practice. This is accentuated if our view
37715 of spirituality sees the body as some kind of problem to be transcended.
37716 Unfortunately, this view can prevail even within the Buddhist world, despite
37717 being counter to the essential principle of mindfulness and presence. When,
37718 however, we cultivate the capacity to remain present in our felt experience
37719 within the body, our relationship to ourselves changes. We can begin to feel
37720 more grounded in our life and more stable in our identity.
37721 Engaging in a disembodied spirituality is no solution to our life demands.
37722 It may be a way of experiencing states of mind that can be very seductive,
37723 even addictive. Seldom does it address the roots of our emotional problems.
37724 Transformation comes when we are willing and able to restore or develop a
37725 sound relationship to our body in a healthy way. With many Buddhist
37726 practices, such as Tantra, this is essential, for the body contains the
37727 vitality that is the heart of our innate creative potential.
37728 Embodiment therefore implies a full engagement in life with all of its
37729 trials and tribulations, rather than avoidance through disembodied spiritual
37730 flight. The value of meditation is that it can enable this engagement because
37731 it cultivates the capacity to be present and remain open, not grasping at or
37732 rejecting what arises. When meditation emphasizes presence rather than
37733 transcendence, this openness is a natural outcome.(p.143)
37734 -- Rob Preece, "The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of Individuation
37735 in Buddhist Life", published by Snow Lion Publications
37737 Those training in great love should forsake self-centeredness and engage in
37738 the Buddha's practice, the root of which is compassion. You may be thinking,
37739 Love is indeed very profound, but I do not have the skill to practice it; I
37740 will focus my efforts on practices aimed at getting myself out of cyclic
37741 existence instead. On one hand, this is true, because you should choose a
37742 path of development appropriate to your ability. On the other hand, there is
37743 great advantage in attempting the highest degree of love you can.
37744 Even if you cannot actually implement the practices of love and compassion,
37745 merely hearing about them establishes powerful predispositions for future
37746 success. This can be amplified by planting prayer-wishes aspiring to
37747 altruism. Do not be discouraged; it is difficult to absorb such a profound
37748 perspective. Be courageous and think of your future potential. It is
37749 particularly important to do the best you can.(p.82)
37750 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving
37751 Relationships", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
37753 What is very important for us to recognise is our own falsity. This is not
37754 a judgement that sometimes we are authentic and sometimes we are false. It
37755 means that everything about us in our ordinary sense of self is false because
37756 it is grounded on a misapprehension of the nature of reality.... It is like
37757 somebody in University who is having their final examinations. They go into
37758 the wrong examination room and not reading the questions very clearly they
37759 write very long answers on their own subject that is unfortunately not the one
37760 they are being examined on. It does not matter how good the answer is they
37761 will fail, for they are not addressing the question.
37762 The basic question is always: "Who are you?", "Who am I?" but we do not
37763 understand it and so we answer with a ceaseless narrative of self definition.
37764 This covers over the freshness of the question, the possibility of looking and
37765 seeing, and so all our answers are stale, the reworking of self-protective
37766 versions constructed out of unexamined elements. We have many, many, many
37767 answers and all of them are false. That's why it is very important when you
37768 do meditations, to put your full energy one-pointedly into the practice, to
37769 try to repair the initial basic fault that has torn subject and object apart.
37770 It is very important to stop being ashamed of being false. For we have to
37771 see how falsity arises, how obscuration develops. We want to look directly at
37772 our falsity and learn its tricks so that we will not be caught by them. This
37773 helps to open the space in which we can recognise our own nature.
37774 "When you understand the falsity of your confusion remain unartificially,
37775 effortlessly in the natural mode (dharmakaya)."(p.90)
37776 -- "Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text of Nuden Dorje entitled 'The
37777 Mirror of Clear Meaning' with commentary by James Low", published by Snow
37781 this is an event that can be caused by strong intoxication of various sorts.
37782 the sufferer passes out while seated at a table, such that he or she then has
37783 their head thud down onto the table. after a brief rest, the unlucky person
37784 wakes up again, and starts to rise off the table. when the head rises to a
37785 certain point, where blood pressure starts to increase, the effect of the
37786 intoxication takes over again, and they pass out once more. bam. hence, the
37787 head repeatedly banging into the table: a groundhog daze.
37788 i have seen this happen. it's not fun to watch. well, maybe a little.
37791 We are the source of healing and happiness. Our generosity and concern
37792 pacify every negative situation. As we send out kindness, we grow accustomed
37793 to being strong and kind. In this way, our positive feelings are constantly
37794 renewed and can never be exhausted.
37795 Perhaps you know the story about the man who arrived in heaven and when
37796 asked by God where he wanted to go replied that he wanted to see both heaven
37797 and hell. First, he went to hell. There was a large table with all the
37798 inhabitants of hell sitting around it. The center of the table was full of
37799 delicious food. Each person had two very long chopsticks. They could reach
37800 the food but they could not get it into their mouths because their chopsticks
37801 were too long. They were miserable. No one was eating and everyone went
37802 hungry. Next he was taken to visit heaven. All the inhabitants of heaven
37803 were also sitting around a big table full of delicious food but they were
37804 happy. They too had very long chopsticks but they were eating and enjoying
37805 themselves. They used the chopsticks to feed each other across the table.
37806 The people in heaven had discovered that it was in their interest to
37807 collaborate unselfishly.(p.69)
37808 -- Ringu Tulku, "Mind Training", published by Snow Lion Publications
37810 When you are in a fluctuating state of mind, like when you are angry or have
37811 lost your temper, then it is good to bring back calmness by concentrating on
37812 breathing. Just count the breaths, completely forgetting about anger.
37813 Concentrate on breathing and count in/out "one, two, three," up to twenty.
37814 At that moment when your mind concentrates fully on breathing, the breath
37815 coming and going, the passions subside. Afterwards it is easier to think
37817 Since all activities, including meditation, depend very much on the force of
37818 intention or motivation, it is important that, before you begin to meditate,
37819 you cultivate a correct motivation... The correct motivation is the
37820 altruistic attitude.(p.69)
37821 -- Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Cultivating a Daily
37822 Meditation", published by Snow Lion Publications
37824 The crazy elephant of the mind behaving wildly
37825 Is tied to the pillar of an object of observation
37826 With the rope of mindfulness.
37827 By degrees it is brought under control with the hook of wisdom.
37830 "Wisdom" here is introspection. Hence, the example of taming an elephant
37831 indicates the achievement of a serviceable mind by way of the two--mindfulness
37832 and introspection. The subtle vajra that is the base on which the mind is
37833 being set is like a stable pillar to which an elephant is tied. The
37834 unserviceable mind is like an untamed elephant. Causing the mind not to be
37835 distracted from its object of observation through relying on mindfulness is
37836 like using a rope to tie an elephant. Setting the mind free from fault--when
37837 it does not hold the object of observation as originally set--through
37838 immediately recognizing such by means of introspection is like a herder's
37839 hitting an elephant with a hook and correcting it when it strays from the tie-
37842 Hence, there are two important factors with regard to holding the mind:
37843 + From the beginning, stay on the object of observation without being
37844 distracted to anything other than it.
37845 + Then if distracted, immediately recognize such, and again focus the mind
37847 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dzong-ka-ba and Jeffrey Hopkins, "Yoga Tantra: Paths
37848 to Magical Feats", translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by
37849 Snow Lion Publications
37851 Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor
37852 technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or
37853 defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this
37854 you will awaken from your dreams.
37855 -- Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo
37857 LEEEEEEEROYYYY JENNNNNKINZZZ!!!
37858 -- To be yelled before irrationally throwing away all plans and jumping into
37859 the worst possible situation.
37861 what is an inference?
37862 someone says, "my hand stinks because my butt stinks."
37863 an inference you could draw:
37864 that hand has probably been too close to that butt.
37866 What Do We Mean by Bodhisattva?
37868 Bodhi means enlightenment, the state devoid of all defects and endowed with
37869 all good qualities. Sattva refers to someone who has courage and confidence
37870 and who strives to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings. Those who
37871 have this spontaneous, sincere wish to attain enlightenment for the ultimate
37872 benefit of all beings are called bodhisattvas. Through wisdom, they direct
37873 their minds to enlightenment, and through their compassion, they have concern
37874 for beings. This wish for perfect enlightenment for the sake of others is
37875 what we call bodhichitta, and it is the starting point on the path.
37879 When we talk about the notion of self in Buddhism, it is important to bear
37880 in mind that there are different degrees or types. There are some types of
37881 sense of self which are not only to be cultivated but also to be reinforced
37882 and enhanced. For instance, in order to have a strong determination to seek
37883 buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings, one needs a very strong
37884 sense of confidence, which is based upon a sense of commitment and courage.
37885 This requires a strong sense of self. Unless one has that identity or sense
37886 of self, one will not be able to develop the confidence and courage to
37887 strongly seek this aim.
37888 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37890 Genuine peace of mind is rooted in affection and compassion. There is a very
37891 high level of sensitivity and feeling involved. So long as we lack inner
37892 discipline, an inner calmness of mind, then no matter what external facilities
37893 or conditions we may have, they will never give us the feeling of joy and
37894 happiness that we seek. On the other hand, if we possess this inner
37895 quality--that is, calmness of mind, a degree of stability within--then even
37896 if we lack various external facilities that are normally considered necessary
37897 for a happy and joyful life, it is still possible to live a happy and joyful
37899 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37901 Complicated Simplicity
37903 Emptiness is the simplest and most unelaborated thing we could imagine, but
37904 then there is this whole literature about all these very discursive details
37905 with all their subpoints. There are five paths and ten bhumis, and each path
37906 is divided into a number of stages, with certain numbers of obscurations
37907 having to be relinquished on each one of those subpaths. Most people just
37908 think, "Who wants or needs to know all that? Don't we have too many
37909 thoughts already? I thought this was about letting go of all reference
37911 Of course nobody really wants to know all those details and in a sense we
37912 all know them already, because they are the details of the many reference
37913 points that we already have in our mind. The fact that these sutras and their
37914 commentaries talk about our obscurations is precisely the point why they seem
37915 so endless and complicated--because our minds are complicated. Emptiness is
37916 extremely simple, but our convoluted minds that do not get this simplicity are
37917 very complicated. It is not that the Buddha and the other speakers in the
37918 sutras and the commentaries really like to, but they need to address each one
37919 of those knots in our minds, which are like knots in space.
37921 If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have
37922 to be a horrible warning.
37925 The mind of clear light
37927 Is spiritual practice really worthwhile? Is it really possible to eliminate
37928 from within ourselves the forces that give rise to suffering? As is said,
37929 "The ultimate nature of mind is clear light." Consciousness has many
37930 levels, and although the coarser levels are affected by the defiling forces,
37931 the most subtle level remains free of gross negativities. In the Vajrayana
37932 this subtle level of consciousness is called the mind of clear light.
37933 The delusions and emotional afflictions as well as the dualistic mind of
37934 right and wrong, love and hatred, etc., are associated only with the coarse
37935 levels of consciousness. At the moment, we are totally absorbed in the
37936 interplay of these coarse states, so we must begin our practice by working
37937 within them. This means consciously encouraging love over hate, patience in
37938 place of anger, emotional freedom rather than attachment, kindness over
37939 violence, and so forth. Doing this brings immediate peace and calm to the
37940 mind, thus making higher meditation possible.
37941 Then, because grasping at a self and at phenomena as being truly existent is
37942 the cause of all the vast range of distorted states of mind, one cultivates
37943 the wisdom that eliminates this ego-grasping. To overcome ego-grasping is to
37944 overcome the entire host of mental distortions.
37945 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37947 It is the general Buddhist procedure that one's own pleasure and pain are
37948 acheived by oneself and not from the outside, and that, therefore, sentient
37949 beings themselves must understand and implement practices to bring about their
37950 own happiness. Thus, the most efficacious way to help others is through
37951 teaching what should be adopted in practice and what should be discarded from
37952 among current behavior. There is no way to do this unless you come to know
37953 all of the topics involved in what should be adopted in practice and what
37954 should be discarded--you must become omniscient. As mentioned earlier, there
37955 is no way to accomplish this except by removing the obstructions to
37956 omniscience, and one who has overcome, utterly and forever, the obstructions
37957 to omniscience is a Buddha.
37958 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37960 In meditation, imagine that in front of you are three persons--an enemy, a
37961 friend, and a neutral person. At that time, in our minds we have (1) a sense
37962 of closeness for one of them, thinking, "This is my friend"; (2) a sense
37963 of dislike even when imagining the enemy; and (3) a sense of ignoring the
37964 neutral person. Now, we have to think about the reasons why we generate these
37965 feelings--the reasons being that temporarily one of them helped us whereas
37966 the other temporarily harmed us, and the third did neither. However, when we
37967 think in terms of the long course of beginningless rebirth, none of us could
37968 decide that someone who has helped or harmed us in this life has been doing so
37970 When you contemplate this way, eventually you arrive at a point where a
37971 strong generation of desire or hatred appears to you to be just senseless.
37972 Gradually, such a bias weakens, and you decide that one-sided classification
37973 of persons as friends and enemies has been a mistake.
37974 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37976 Generally speaking, even if money brings us happiness, it tends to be the
37977 kind that money can buy: material things and sensory experiences. And these,
37978 we discover, become a source of suffering themselves. As far as actual
37979 possessions are concerned, we must admit that they often cause us more, not
37980 less, difficulty in life. The car breaks down, we lose our money, our most
37981 precious belongings are stolen, our house is damaged by fire. Or we worry
37982 about these things happening.
37983 The problem is not materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying
37984 assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone.
37985 Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the
37986 immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity
37987 to experience happiness at a deeper level, which, when achieved, can overwhelm
37988 unhappy experiences.
37989 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
37991 We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of
37992 others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like
37993 it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives in which we do not benefit
37994 from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most
37995 of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others. Nor
37996 is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by
37997 concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic
37998 actions bring about happiness, but they also lessen our experience of
37999 suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are
38000 motivated by the wish to bring others happiness necessarily meets with less
38001 misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort
38002 or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our
38003 internal peace--anxiety, doubt, disappointment--these are definitely less.
38004 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38006 If we view the world's religions from the widest possible viewpoint and
38007 examine their ultimate goal, we find that all of the major world religions,
38008 whether Christianity or Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism, are dedicated to the
38009 achievement of permanent human happiness. They are all directed toward that
38010 goal. All religions emphasize the fact that the true follower must be honest
38011 and gentle, in other words, that a truly religious person must always strive
38012 to be a better human being. To this end, the different world religions teach
38013 different doctrines which will help transform the person. In this regard, all
38014 religions are the same, there is no conflict. This is something we must
38015 emphasize. We must consider the question of religious diversity from this
38016 viewpoint. And when we do, we find no conflict.
38017 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38019 Emptiness vs. Non-Existence
38021 The doctrines of emptiness and selflessness do not imply the non-existence of
38022 things. Things do exist. When we say that all phenomena are void of self-
38023 existence, it does not mean that we are advocating non-existence, that we are
38024 repudiating that things exist. Then what is it we are negating? We are
38025 negating, or denying, that anything exists from its own side without depending
38026 on other things. Hence, it is because things depend for their existence upon
38027 other causes and conditions that they are said to lack independent self-
38029 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38031 If we view the world's religions from the widest possible viewpoint and
38032 examine their ultimate goal, we find that all of the major world religions,
38033 whether Christianity or Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism, are dedicated to the
38034 achievement of permanent human happiness. They are all directed toward that
38035 goal. All religions emphasize the fact that the true follower must be honest
38036 and gentle, in other words, that a truly religious person must always strive
38037 to be a better human being. To this end, the different world religions teach
38038 different doctrines which will help transform the person. In this regard, all
38039 religions are the same, there is no conflict. This is something we must
38040 emphasize. We must consider the question of religious diversity from this
38041 viewpoint. And when we do, we find no conflict.
38042 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38044 The process of overcoming our defilements goes in conjunction with gaining
38045 higher levels of realisation. In fact, when we speak of gaining higher levels
38046 of realisation in Buddhism we are speaking primarily of the processes through
38047 which our wisdom and insight deepen. It is actually the wisdom aspect that
38048 enables the practitioner to move from one level to the next on the path.
38049 The attainment of the levels of the path is explained in condensed form in
38050 the Heart Sutra, where we find the mantra tadyatha om gate gate paragate
38051 parasamgate bodhi svaha. Tadyatha means It is thus; gate gate means go, go;
38052 paragate means go beyond and transcend; parasamgate means go utterly beyond,
38053 go thoroughly beyond; and bodhi svaha means firmly rooted in enlightenment.
38054 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38058 It is often seen that human beings can endure problems quite well, but
38059 cannot endure success. When we are successful and have everything we desire,
38060 it can easily go to our heads. There is a great danger of losing our common
38061 sense and becoming careless and arrogant. As it is said, "Nothing corrupts a
38062 person more than power." Very powerful people sometimes become so proud that
38063 they no longer care about their actions or about the effect they have on
38064 others. Losing any sense of right and wrong, they create severe problems for
38065 themselves and everyone else.
38066 Even if we have all the success we could dream of--fame, wealth, and so
38067 on--we must understand that these things have no real substance. Attachment
38068 does not come from having things, but from the way our mind reacts to them.
38069 It is fine to participate in good circumstances, provided we can see that they
38070 have no real essence. They may come and they may go. When seeing this, we
38071 will not become so attached. Even if we lose our wealth we will not be badly
38072 affected, and while it is there we will enjoy it without being senseless and
38074 -- Ringu Tulku, from "Daring Steps: Traversing the Path of the Buddha",
38075 edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, page 92.
38077 The role of other sentient beings
38079 In relation to the attainment of liberation from cylic existence, which is
38080 known also as "definite goodness," the role of other sentient beings is
38081 indispensable. In the Buddhist understanding, the key spiritual practices
38082 that lead to the attainment of liberation are the Three Higher
38083 Trainings--higher training in morality, in meditation, and in wisdom. The
38084 last two are based upon the foundation of the first, namely the training in
38085 morality. As I said before, the presence of other sentience beings is
38086 indispensable for this training. This is how we come to the powerful
38087 realisation that the role of other sentient beings is essential in all areas
38088 of our mundane and spiritual activities.
38089 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38091 To avoid being hurt by thorns and brambles, we might consider covering all
38092 the mountains with leather. That would be impossible, but putting on shoes
38093 would serve the same purpose. Similarly, if we tried to subdue all our outer
38094 enemies, we would never succeed. Once one was eliminated, another would rise
38095 against us. While doing this, our anger would continue to breed new foes.
38096 The only way to overcome our enemies is to turn inward and kill the real one,
38097 which is our own hatred.
38098 -- Ringu Tulku, from "Daring Steps: Traversing the Path of the Buddha",
38099 edited and translated by Rosemarie Fuchs.
38101 One should not view one's dharma practice as being something decorative,
38102 regarding statues and images as material possessions or as furnishings for
38103 one's house, or thinking that because there is an empty space on a wall one
38104 might as well put up a thangka for decoration. That kind of attitude should
38105 not be cultivated. When you arrange the statues or thangkas, you should do so
38106 out of a deep respect from the mind, moved by your faith and conviction. If
38107 you can arrange these physical representations--statues and so forth--out of
38108 deep respect and faith, that's all right. On the other hand, the attitude
38109 that they are merely material possessions is dangerous and destructive. I
38110 think that some people who have a cupboard or the like in which they keep all
38111 their precious possessions may arrange an altar on it just for the sake of
38112 decoration. This is very wrong.
38113 Having such motivations is not the proper way to become a Buddhist; the
38114 proper way to become a Buddhist is to bring about some positive change within
38115 the mind. Any practice that can give you more courage when you are undergoing
38116 a very difficult time and that can provide you with some kind of solace and
38117 calmness of mind is a true practice of the dharma.
38118 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38120 The environment where you are doing the meditation should be properly cleaned.
38121 While cleaning, you should cultivate the motivation that since you are engaged
38122 in the task of accumulating great stores of merit by inviting the hosts of
38123 buddhas and bodhisattvas to this environment, it is important to have a clean
38124 place. You should see that all external dirt and dust around you is basically
38125 a manifestation of the faults and stains within your own mind. You should see
38126 that the most important aim is to purge these stains and faults from within
38127 your mind. Therefore, as you cleanse the environment, think that you are also
38128 purifying your mind. Develop the very strong thought that by cleaning this
38129 place you are inviting the hosts of buddhas and bodhisattvas who are the most
38130 supreme merit field, and that you will subsequently engage in a path that will
38131 enable you to purge your mind of the stains and delusions.
38132 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38134 From the point of view of one who seeks enlightenment, it is far better to
38135 be a human being than to be born even in the heavens of the gods, where there
38136 is nectar to live on and all wishes are granted by the wish-fulfilling tree;
38137 where there is neither fatigue nor difficulty, neither sickness nor old age.
38138 It is as humans, possessed of the eight freedoms and the ten endowments, and
38139 not as gods, that every one of the thousand Buddhas of this age has attained,
38140 or will attain, enlightenment. This human existence, moreover, is not to be
38141 achieved by force or mere chance; it is the result of positive actions. And
38142 because it is rare for beings to accomplish positive actions, a precious human
38143 existence is indeed difficult to obtain.
38144 Nevertheless, we have now managed to be born into such a state; we have
38145 encountered the Buddadharma, have entered the path and are now receiving
38146 teachings. But if we are unable to practise them, simply listening to the
38147 teachings will not in itself liberate us from samsara, and will be of no help
38148 to us when we are confronted by the hardships of birth, disease, old age and
38149 death. If we do not follow the doctor's prescription when we are sick, then
38150 even if the doctor sits constantly by our side, the pain will not go away.
38151 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, from "Enlightened Courage: An Explanation of the
38152 Seven-Point Mind Training", translated by Padmakara Translation Group.
38154 The realization of the nature of the mind is not something we can find by
38155 searching for it from afar. It is present within the essence of the mind
38156 itself. If we do not alter or change that in any way, that is enough. It is
38157 not as if we were lacking something before, so we need to make something new
38158 through our meditation. It is not as if we are bad and have to go through all
38159 sorts of efforts to make ourselves good. Goodness is something we all have.
38160 It has always been with us, but we have just not looked for it or seen it yet,
38161 so we have become confused. Therefore all we need to do is to just rest
38162 within it without changing it. We see where it stays and rest there, so we
38163 are like a kusulu. This means that we rest free and easy with nothing to do,
38164 very simply. We do not need to think that we are making something good or
38165 that we need to meditate properly. It is enough just to know what we already
38167 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, from "Vivid Awareness", in "The Best Buddhist
38168 Writing 2012", edited by Melvin McLeod and the editors of the Shambhala
38169 Sun, pages 196–197.
38171 We all have to recognize the tremendous opportunity that we have. As humans
38172 we have this rare intelligence, but there is a real danger that we will waste
38173 it. Death is certain, but when we will die is totally unpredictable. We
38174 could lose our precious human existence at any moment. With such reflections,
38175 we must motivate ourselves to do something meaningful right now. The best way
38176 to make your human existence meaningful is to really engage in the practice of
38177 Dharma. During formal sitting meditation and in between sessions, in
38178 different ways, be mindful and introspectively vigilant. Keep constant watch
38180 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38182 In order to carry out a practice--such as constantly watching the mind--you
38183 should form a determination, make a pledge, right when you wake up: "Now, for
38184 the rest of this day, I will put into practice what I believe just as much as
38185 I can." It is very important that, at the start of the day, we should set out
38186 to shape what will happen later. Then, at the end of every day, check what
38187 happened. Review the day. And if you carried through for that whole day your
38188 morning's determination, then rejoice. Reinforce further your motivation to
38189 continue in the same line. However, when you do your reviewing, you may
38190 discover that you did things during the day that are contrary to your
38191 religious values and beliefs. You should then acknowledge this and cultivate
38192 a deep sense of remorse. Strengthen your resolve not to indulge in these
38193 actions in the future.
38194 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38196 There are two different ways in which we can understand the term "ordinary
38197 mind." One way is to not take control over anything and end up following our
38198 afflictions. When a thought of anger arises, we follow it; when greed arises,
38199 we lose control of ourselves to it. Similarly, we lose control of ourselves
38200 to our pride and jealousy. Although we might think of this as our ordinary
38201 state of mind, it is not what we mean here. Here it does not mean losing
38202 control of ourselves to negative emotions. Instead, it means that we do not
38203 need to do anything at all to the essence of the mind itself.
38204 We do not need to alter this essence in any way. We do not have to worry
38205 about what we are thinking, what is pleasant, or what is painful. We can
38206 leave this mind as it is. If we try to alter the mind in any way, thoughts
38207 will arise. But if we do not do anything to it and let it rest easily, then
38208 it is unaltered. The Kagyu masters of the past called this the ordinary mind,
38209 or the natural state. They called it this out of their experience. This
38210 ordinary mind itself is the dharma expanse and the essence of the buddhas; it
38211 is our buddha-nature.
38212 -- Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, from "Vivid Awareness" in "The Best Buddhist
38213 Writing 2012", edited by Melvin McLeod and the editors of the Shambhala
38216 If your engagement with others is tainted by strong attachment, craving,
38217 aversion, anger, and so forth, then that form of grasping is undesirable. But
38218 on the other hand, when you are interacting with other living beings and
38219 become aware of their needs or suffering or pain, then you need to fully
38220 engage with that and be compassionate. So there can be positive attachment in
38221 this sense of active engagement.
38222 Buddhist masters have long used the term attachment to describe the quality
38223 of compassion for others. For example, a verse from Haribhadra's Clear
38224 Meaning Commentary refers to compassion that is attached to other living
38225 beings. And as we have seen, Nagarjuna teaches that attachment for other
38226 living beings will arise spontaneously in the person who realizes emptiness.
38227 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38229 Kongtrul Rinpoche suggested we pray to the guru, buddhas, and bodhisattvas and
38230 ask them to grant their blessings, "So I may give birth to the heart of
38231 sadness." But what is a "heart of sadness"? Imagine one night you have
38232 a dream. Although it is a good dream, deep down you know that eventually you
38233 will have to wake up and it will be over. In life, too, sooner or later,
38234 whatever the state of our relationships, or our health, our jobs and every
38235 aspect of our lives, everything, absolutely everything, will change. And the
38236 little bell ringing in the back of your head to remind you of this
38237 inevitability is what is called the "heart of sadness." Life, you realise,
38238 is a race against time, and you should never put off dharma practice until
38239 next year, next month, or tomorrow, because the future may never happen.
38240 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, from "Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-
38241 Called Preliminary Practices"
38243 What we want to eliminate is grasping that is grounded upon falsification of
38244 the object, distortions that arise as afflictions grasp at the apparent
38245 substantial existence of an object. Some texts say that mental states such as
38246 compassion and faith are, by their very nature, virtuous and thus cannot at
38247 the same time be afflicted mental states. Yet there are other texts that
38248 refer to "afflicted compassion" or "afflicted faith." For those of us
38249 who have not realized emptiness, when we generate strong devotion toward the
38250 Buddha perhaps there is within that faith, within that devotion, an element of
38251 grasping at the Buddha as substantially real. This makes it an instance of
38252 so-called "afflicted devotion."
38253 Still, it is important to distinguish grasping rooted in falsification and
38254 distortion from the attachment, focus, or holding that we associate with
38255 compassion. In our immediate experience, these two forms of grasping may seem
38256 the same, but in terms of the overall mental environment they are quite
38257 different. Compassion is fact-based, while distorted grasping is not.
38258 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38260 By and large, human beings tend to prefer to fit in to society by following
38261 accepted rules of etiquette and being gentle, polite, and respectful. The
38262 irony is that this is also how most people imagine a spiritual person should
38263 behave. When a so-called dharma practitioner is seen to behave badly, we
38264 shake our heads over her audacity at presenting herself as a follower of the
38265 Buddha. Yet such judgments are better avoided, because to "fit in" is not
38266 what a genuine dharma practitioner strives for.
38267 Think of Tilopa, for example. He looked so outlandish that if he turned up
38268 on your doorstep today, odds are you would refuse to let him in. And you
38269 would have a point. He would most likely be almost completely naked; if you
38270 were lucky, he might be sporting some kind of G-string; his hair would never
38271 have been introduced to shampoo; and protruding from his mouth would quiver
38272 the tail of a live fish. What would your moral judgment be of such a being?
38273 "Him! A Buddhist?" This is how our theistic, moralistic, and judgmental
38274 minds work. Of course, there is nothing wrong with morality, but the point of
38275 spiritual practice, according to the vajrayana teachings, is to go beyond all
38276 our concepts, including those of morality.
38277 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, from "Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-
38278 Called Preliminary Practices".
38280 Because it is a reality that we are by nature social animals, bound to depend
38281 on each other, we need to cultivate affection and concern for other people if
38282 we really desire peace and happiness. Look at wild animals and birds. Even
38283 they travel together, flock together, and help each other. Bees do not have a
38284 particular legal system, they do not follow any spiritual practice, but for
38285 their livelihood and survival they depend on each other--that is their
38286 natural way of existence. Even though we intelligent human beings must also
38287 depend on each other, we sometimes misuse our intelligence and try to exploit
38288 each other. That goes against human nature. For those of us who profess to
38289 believe in a particular religious practice, it is extremely important that we
38290 try to help each other and cultivate a feeling of affection for each other.
38291 That is the source of happiness in our life.
38292 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38294 It's important to differentiate a thought from an emotion. We say things
38295 such as, "I feel like they don't accept me." Actually, that is a thought.
38296 We may feel hurt or frustrated, and it's because we're thinking that others
38297 don't accept us. How do we know they don't accept us? We don't. We
38298 haven't asked them. Instead, on the basis of how they looked at us or a
38299 comment they made, our mind constructs a story that we believe.
38300 As soon as you hear yourself saying, "I feel like...," stop and recognize
38301 that you can't "feel like" something. You are thinking. After you have
38302 identified the thought, ask yourself, "Is that true? How do I know it's true?
38303 What evidence do I have to prove the validity of that thought?" It's really
38304 startling to see how often we assume our interpretation of a situation is true
38305 when in fact it is based on flimsy evidence.
38306 -- Thubten Chodron, from "Don't Believe Everything You Think: Living with
38307 Wisdom and Compassion"
38309 We are all human beings, and from this point of view, we are the same. We all
38310 want happiness and we do not want suffering. If we consider this point, we
38311 will find that there are no differences between people of different faiths,
38312 races, colors, or cultures. We all have this common wish for happiness.
38313 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38315 Enlightenment is not anything new or something we create or bring into
38316 existence. It is simply discovering within us what is already there. It is
38317 the full realization of our intrinsic nature. In Tibetan, buddha is sang
38318 gyay. Sang means that all of the faults have been cleared away, while gyay
38319 means "full realization"; just as from darkness, the moon waxes, likewise
38320 from ignorance, the qualities of the mind's intrinsic nature emerge.
38321 -- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
38323 The fundamental teaching of the Buddha is that we should view others as being
38324 more important than we are. Of course, you cannot completely ignore yourself.
38325 But neither can you neglect the welfare of other people and other sentient
38326 beings, particularly when there is a clash of interest between your own
38327 welfare and the welfare of other people. At such a time you should consider
38328 other people's welfare as more important than your own personal well-being.
38329 Compare yourself to the rest of sentient beings. All other sentient beings
38330 are countless, while you are just one person. Your suffering and happiness
38331 may be very important, but it is just the suffering and happiness of one
38332 individual, whereas the happiness and suffering of all other sentient beings
38333 is immeasurable and countless. So, it is the way of the wise to sacrifice one
38334 for the benefit of the majority and it is the way of the foolish to sacrifice
38335 the majority on behalf of just one single individual. Even from the point of
38336 view of your personal well-being, you must cultivate a compassionate
38337 mind--that is that source of happiness in your life.
38338 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38340 Attachment and love are similar in that both of them draw us to the other
38341 person. But in fact, these two emotions are quite different. When we're
38342 attached we're drawn to someone because he or she meets our needs. In
38343 addition, there are lots of strings attached to our affection that we may or
38344 may not realize are there. For example, I 'love' you because you make me feel
38345 good. I 'love' you as long as you do things that I approve of. I 'love' you
38346 because you're mine. You're my spouse or my child or my parent or my friend.
38347 With attachment, we go up and down like a yo-yo, depending on how the other
38348 person treats us. We obsess, "What do they think of me? Do they love me?
38349 Have I offended them? How can I become what they want me to be so that they
38350 love me even more?" It's not very peaceful, is it? We're definitely stirred
38352 On the other hand, the love we're generating on the Dharma path is
38353 unconditional. We simply want other to have happiness and the causes of
38354 happiness without any strings attached, without any expectations of what these
38355 people will do for us or how good they'll make us feel.
38356 -- Thubten Chodron, "Don't Believe Everything You Think: Living with Wisdom
38359 Because we don't recognize our essential nature--we don't realize that
38360 although appearances arise unceasingly, nothing is really there--we invest
38361 with solidity and reality the seeming truth of self, other, and actions
38362 between self and others. This intellectual obscuration gives rise to
38363 attachment and aversion, followed by actions and reactions that create karma,
38364 solidify into habit, and perpetuate the cycles of suffering. This entire
38365 process needs to be purified.
38366 -- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, from "In the Presence of Masters: Wisdom from 30
38367 Contemporary Tibetan Buddhist Teachers", edited by Reginald A. Ray.
38369 Effort is crucial in the beginning for generating a strong will. We all
38370 have the Buddha nature and thus already have within us the substances through
38371 which, when we meet with the proper conditions, we can turn into a fully
38372 enlightened being having all beneficial attributes and devoid of all faults.
38373 The very root of failure in our lives is to think, "Oh, how useless and
38374 powerless I am!" It is important to have a strong force of mind thinking,
38375 "I can do it," this not being mixed with pride or any other afflictive
38377 Moderate effort over a long period of time is important, no matter what you
38378 are trying to do. One brings failure on oneself by working extremely hard at
38379 the beginning, attempting to do too much, and then giving it all up after a
38380 short time. A constant stream of moderate effort is needed. Similarly, when
38381 meditating, you need to be skillful by having frequent, short sessions; it is
38382 more important that the session be of good quality than that it be long.
38383 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Kindness, Clarity, and Insight"
38385 We Buddhists are supposed to save all sentient beings, but practically
38386 speaking, this may be too broad a notion for most people. In any case, we
38387 must at least think in terms of helping all human beings. This is very
38388 important. Even if we cannot think in terms of sentient beings inhabiting
38389 different worlds, we should nonetheless think in terms of the human beings on
38390 our own planet. To do this is to take a practical approach to the problem.
38391 It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily
38392 lives. If we find we cannot help another, the least we can do is to desist
38393 from harming them. We must not cheat others or lie to them. We must be
38394 honest human beings, sincere human beings.
38395 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38397 How things appear and how they actually exist differ greatly. A person
38398 engaging in practice of the perfection of wisdom does this kind of analysis
38399 and then examines how things appear in ordinary experience, alternating
38400 analysis and comparison with the usual mode of appearance in order to notice
38401 the discrepancy between the actual mode of subsistence of phenomena and their
38403 In this way the inherent existence which is the object of negation will
38404 become clearer and clearer. As much as the object of negation becomes
38405 clearer, so much deeper will your understanding of emptiness become. Finally,
38406 you will ascertain a mere vacuity that is a negative of inherent existence.
38407 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38409 Three attitudes prevent us from receiving a continual flow of blessings.
38410 They are compared to three "pots": a full pot, a pot with poison in it,
38411 and a pot with a hole in the bottom.
38412 The pot that's filled to the brim is like a mind full of opinions and
38413 preconceptions. We already know it all. We have so many fixed ideas that
38414 nothing new can affect us or cause us to question our assumptions.
38415 The pot containing poison is like a mind that's so cynical, critical, and
38416 judgmental that everything is poisoned by this harshness. It allows for no
38417 openness and no willingness to explore the teachings or anything else that
38418 challenges our righteous stance.
38419 The pot with a hole is like a distracted mind: our body is present but
38420 we're lost in thought. We're so busy thinking about our dream vacation or
38421 what's for dinner that we're completely deaf to what's being said.
38422 Knowing how sad it is to receive blessings and not be able to benefit,
38423 Shantideva wants to save himself grief by remaining open and attentive.
38424 Nothing will improve, he says, unless we become more intelligent about cause
38425 and effect. This is a message worth considering seriously.
38426 -- Pema Chödrön, from "No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the
38429 Shantideva cites three benefits of pain. First, it is valuable because
38430 through sorrow, pride is driven out. No matter how arrogant and condescending
38431 we've been, great suffering can humble us. The pain of a serious illness or
38432 loss of a loved one can be transformative, softening us and making us less
38434 The second benefit of pain is empathy: the compassion felt for those who
38435 wander in samsara. Our personal suffering brings compassion for others in the
38436 same situation. A young woman was telling me that when her baby died, she
38437 felt a deep connection to all the other parents who had lost children. This
38438 was, as she put it, the unexpected blessing of her sorrow.
38439 The third value of suffering is that evil is avoided and goodness seems
38440 delightful. When we practice according to Shantideva's instructions, we can
38441 get smarter about cause and result. Based on this understanding, we'll have
38442 less inclination to cause harm, and more desire to gather virtue and benefit
38444 -- Pema Chödrön, from "No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the
38447 Since emptiness, from between positive and negative phenomena, is a negative
38448 phenomenon and, from between affirming negatives and non-affirming negatives,
38449 is a non-affirming negative, when it appears to the mind, nothing will appear
38450 except an absence of such inherent existence--a mere elimination of the
38451 object of negation. Thus, for the mind of a person realizing emptiness there
38452 is no sense of, "I am ascertaining emptiness," and there is no thought,
38453 "This is emptiness." If you had such a sense, emptiness would become
38454 distant. Nevertheless, the emptiness of inherent existence is ascertained and
38456 After such realization, even though whatever phenomena appear appear to
38457 exist in their own right, you understand that they do not exist that way. You
38458 have a sense that they are like a magician's illusions in that there is a
38459 combination of their appearing one way but actually existing another way.
38460 Though they appear to exist inherently, you understand that they are empty of
38461 inherent existence.
38462 When phenomena are seen this way, the conceptions that superimpose a sense
38463 of goodness or badness on phenomena beyond what is actually there and serve as
38464 a basis for generating desire and hatred lessen; this is because they are
38465 based on the misconception that phenomena are established in their own right.
38466 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38468 Rely on timeless awareness, which is free of elaboration, without
38469 identity, and the very essence of being;
38470 do not rely on ordinary consciousness, which is a mind fixated
38471 on characteristics and concepts.
38473 Timeless awareness entails (a) understanding that the way in which phenomena
38474 actually abide is, from the ultimate perspective, free of all limitations
38475 imposed by elaborations of origination, cessation, and so forth; (b)
38476 realization of the nonexistence of the two kinds of identity; and (c) unerring
38477 knowledge of sugatagarbha as utter lucidity, the way in which things actually
38478 abide, beyond any context of speculative value judgments. It is on this
38479 awareness that one should rely.
38480 Ordinary consciousness entails (a) belief that what one immediately
38481 perceives constitutes something truly existent; (b) conceptualization in terms
38482 of characteristics, such as the sense of personal identity and the mind-body
38483 aggregates; and (c) mental states that are conditioned, for example, by
38484 attitudes of naively fixating on the pleasures of the senses. One should not
38485 rely on such consciousness.
38486 -- Jamgön Kongtrül Lodro Taye, from "The Treasury of Knowledge: Book Seven
38487 and Book Eight, Parts One and Two"
38489 Such is the process of karma: it is ineluctable; its results are greatly
38490 magnified; actions not committed have no effect; and the effects of actions
38491 committed never expire on their own.
38492 Generally speaking, whether you are an ordinary mortal individual or a
38493 spiritually advanced being, all positive experiences that carry with them any
38494 pleasant sensation--down to even the slightest pleasure caused by a cool
38495 breeze for beings reborn in a hell realm--occur due to positive karma
38496 reinforced in the past; it is not in accord with the nature of things that
38497 happiness be due to negative karma. And all negative experiences that carry
38498 with them any unpleasant sensation--down to even the slightest suffering that
38499 could occur in the experience of an arhat--occur due to negative karma one
38500 has reinforced in the past; for it is not in accord with the nature of things
38501 that suffering be due to positive karma.
38502 -- Jamgön Kongtrül Lodro Taye, from "The Treasury of Knowledge: Book Seven
38503 and Book Eight, Parts One and Two"
38505 "That which is seen and that which is touched are of a dream-like and
38506 illusion-like nature. Because feeling arises together with the mind,
38507 it is not [ultimately] perceived." --Shantideva
38509 There is nothing whatever that has a true mode of existence. Nevertheless,
38510 this does not suggest that a person who experiences feelings and the feelings
38511 themselves--pleasant and unpleasant--are utterly non-existent. They do
38512 exist, but in an untrue fashion. Thus, the things that we see and touch have
38513 a dream-like and illusion-like quality.
38514 In the second line the author refutes the true existence of the mind that
38515 experiences feelings. Since feelings arise in conjunction with the mind,
38516 feelings are not perceived by the mind that is simultaneous with them. There
38517 must be a causal relationship between the experienced object and the
38518 experiencing subject. If two entities are substantially distinct and exist
38519 simultaneously, there could be neither a causal relationship nor an identity
38520 relationship between them.
38521 For this reason the author denies that either [intrinsic] relationship could
38522 hold for the feelings and the awareness that is simultaneous with them. Two
38523 mental events that arise in conjunction with each other are not able to
38524 apprehend one another. This holds true for all states of awareness. Thus,
38525 feelings are not observed by the awareness that arises in conjunction with
38526 them and that exists simultaneously with them.
38527 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38529 Any happiness there is in the world ultimately turns to pain. Why? Consider
38530 the two sides of a coin: just because what we desire is to be seen on the
38531 front does not mean that dislike won't soon appear on the back. Likewise,
38532 hope and fear are a single coin, one entity with two faces--on the other side
38533 of a moment in which we hope for more happiness will be our fear of more
38534 suffering. Until attachment is eliminated, we can be certain of having both
38535 hope and fear. As long as there is hope and fear, the delusions of samsara
38536 will be perpetuated and there will be constant suffering. Thus attachment is
38537 the nature of both hope and fear: looking at the ultimate emptiness of the
38538 self-envisioned magical illusion of hope and fear, we should hang loosely in
38540 --Tulku Pema Rigtsal, "The Great Secret of Mind: Special Instructions on the
38541 Nonduality of Dzogchen", translated by Keith Dowman
38543 The feelings of joy and sorrow do not exist from their own side. Although
38544 they exist as conceptual imputations, you cling to them as existing from their
38545 own side. Feelings do not exist by their own intrinsic nature; rather, they
38546 are identified on the basis of contributing circumstances.
38547 Therefore, this analysis is cultivated as an antidote for that [false
38548 conception of intrinsic existence]. The meditative absorption that arises
38549 from the field of discriminative investigation is the food of the
38550 contemplative.--Shantideva
38551 Feelings do not truly exist; they are not found when sought through
38552 analysis; they do not exist independently, but exist by the power of
38553 convention. Thus, the means for overcoming the misconception of the true
38554 existence of feelings is meditation on their lack of such existence. This
38555 entails analyzing the mode of existence of feelings.
38556 Such investigation is an aid to meditative absorption and leads to the
38557 integration of meditative quiescence and insight. That increases the physical
38558 vitality of the contemplative and enhances the power of his [or her] spiritual
38559 practice. Thus it is called the nourishment of the contemplative.
38560 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Transcendent Wisdom".
38562 It is not enough merely to look into the space of happiness or sadness; it is
38563 important to have pure presence constant in that flow. If the power of
38564 meditation is not constant, it is impossible to remain long in the place of
38565 nondual perception. Thoughts that arise intermittently will break the
38566 continuity, and radiating out from this, like ripples on a pond, the poisonous
38567 taste of emotion will arise to obstruct the meditation. As gross thoughts
38568 increase, ripples become rough waves that intensify the emotion. Until subtle
38569 emotions are left behind, we cannot eradicate suffering, so it is crucially
38570 important to sustain the state of meditation. When we gain strong familiarity
38571 by staying in that space for a long time, then no matter what thoughts arise,
38572 whether gross or subtle, they will not be able to dislodge us: upon
38573 recognizing the first thought, whatever thought it may be, in that very
38574 moment, we realize it to be the play of the spontaneous creativity of
38575 dharmakaya. Like a wave falling back into the ocean, the thought vanishes
38576 into the dharmakaya. In that space of naked empty pure presence that is the
38577 view, always cherishing thoughts of the five poisonous emotions and all the
38578 movements of body, speech, and mind, and the acts of eating, sleeping, moving,
38579 and sitting, we are known as the yogins and yoginis who stand guard over the
38580 shifting dharmakaya display. This is the supreme method of sustaining the
38581 essence of meditation. According to Dzogchen teaching, this is unadulterated
38582 by any kind of focus; it is called "the great meditation that is
38584 --Tulku Pema Rigtsal, "The Great Secret of Mind: Special Instructions on the
38585 Nonduality of Dzogchen", translated by Keith Dowman.
38587 Who is more shameless in this world,
38588 Than one who abandons to samsara's ocean of suffering
38589 All the mothers who have tenderly cared for him since beginningless time
38590 And instead strives toward the peace of a solitary nirvana?
38591 --Shechen Gyaltsap Pema Namgyal
38593 In each of our lives since beginningless time, our mother carried us within
38594 her body for nine months. She took care of us when we were helpless babies;
38595 she gave us food, education, and protection. In return, we feel love and
38596 gratitude for her kindness.
38597 Why not extend our respect and appreciation for our mother to everyone else?
38598 If we take a broader perspective, we can consider that, within the countless
38599 existences we have lived, every being has been our mother at one time or
38600 another. Don't they also deserve our kindness now? We can extend the same
38601 debt of gratitude that we owe our present mother to all sentient beings. By
38602 doing so, we naturally begin to develop a deep concern for the happiness of
38603 others, and this feeling makes sense to us.
38604 We take the refuge vow not just for our own sake, but also for the sake of
38605 all sentient beings. This is bodhichitta, or the altruistic mind, which aims
38606 for the enlightenment of all sentient beings.
38607 --Shechen Rabjam, "The Great Medicine That Conquers Clinging to the Notion
38608 of Reality: Steps in Meditation on the Enlightened Mind"
38610 Direct perfect enlightenment [with regard to] all aspects,
38611 and abandonment of the stains along with their imprints
38612 [are called] buddha and nirvana respectively.
38613 In truth, these are not two different things.
38616 All aspects of the knowable--all absolute and relative phenomena--are
38617 directly known. Through this knowledge one is immediately and perfectly
38618 enlightened. This is the aspect of realization. All the adventitious
38619 defilements--the two veils along with their remaining imprints--are
38620 abandoned without any exception. This is the aspect of abandonment. These
38621 two qualities have been led to ultimate perfection. They are therefore named
38622 "perfect buddha" ["perfectly awakened and expanded"] from the
38623 viewpoint of the former aspect, and "nirvana" ["gone beyond any torment
38624 and pain"] from the viewpoint of the latter aspect. These two aspects are
38625 contained in one and the same meaning, the meaning of the tathagatagarbha,
38626 whereas a difference only lies in the convention of the different terms. In
38627 the sense of the absolute field of experience of the noble ones' primordial
38628 wisdom the qualities of realization and abandonment are therefore completely
38629 inseparable and do not exist as two different things.
38630 -- Arya Maitreya, "Buddha Nature: The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra with
38631 Commentary", with commentary by Jamgön Kongtrül Lodro Thaye
38633 "Vehicle" (yana) has two meanings: the means by which one progresses and
38634 the destination to which one is progressing. Mahayana in the sense of the
38635 vehicle by which one progresses means to be motivated by the mind of
38636 enlightenment--wishing to attain highest enlightenment for the sake of all
38637 sentient beings, one's objects of intent--and means to engage in the six
38639 Seeing reason and need, Buddha set forth many systems and vehicles, but
38640 these did not arise due to his being intimate with some and alien to others.
38641 The trainees who were listening to his teaching had various dispositions,
38642 interests, and abilities, and thus he taught methods that were suitable for
38643 each of them. For those who temporarily did not have the courage to strive
38644 for Buddhahood or who did not at all have the capacity of obtaining Buddhahood
38645 at that time, Buddha did not say, "You can attain Buddhahood." Rather, he
38646 set forth a path appropriate to the trainees' abilities. Buddha spoke in
38647 terms of their situation, and everything that he spoke was a means of
38648 eventually attaining highest enlightenment even though he did not always say
38649 that these were means for attaining Buddhahood.
38650 Since the purpose of a Buddha's coming is others' realization of the
38651 wisdom of Buddhahood, the methods for actualizing this wisdom are one vehicle,
38652 not two. A Buddha does not lead beings by a vehicle that does not proceed to
38653 Buddhahood; he establishes beings in his own level. A variety of vehicles are
38654 set forth in accordance with temporary needs.
38655 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38657 You do not have to seek out loneliness--it is always there. Egolessness is a
38658 concept, a philosophy, but loneliness is a reality that you experience. A
38659 feeling of loneliness is part of the journey. As for me, I feel that way
38660 constantly, and I think it's a very healthy feeling, a very real feeling.
38661 When you sense that you are not you anymore and that nothing can replace that
38662 state, you begin to make discoveries. You discover devotion, and you discover
38663 a quality of richness and artistic expression that is very special. Being
38664 you, but not being you, is very resourceful. You become a complete mountain
38665 man: you know how to make fire and cook food. But it doesn't mean anything.
38666 You are still nobody. That is the inspiration.
38667 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma, Volume
38668 One: The Individual Path of Liberation"
38670 Interdependence is our reality, whether we accept it or not. In order to
38671 live productively within such a reality, it is better to acknowledge and work
38672 with interdependence, wholeheartedly and without resistance. This is where
38673 love and compassion come in. It is love that leads us to embrace our
38674 connectedness to others, and to participate willingly in the relations created
38675 by our interdependence. Love can melt away our defenses and our painful sense
38676 of separation. The warmth of friendship and love makes it easy for us to
38677 accept that our happiness is intimately linked to that of others. The more
38678 widely we are able to love others, the happier and more content we can feel
38679 within the relations of interdependence that are a natural part of our life.
38680 Love is possible in all our relationships because all people want happiness.
38681 No one wants to suffer. This is true of the people we love. It is also true
38682 of those we dislike. We are all absolutely identical in this respect. I
38683 think this universal wish for happiness is something we can easily grasp
38684 intellectually. When we learn to also feel and respect this in our heart,
38685 love naturally flourishes within us.
38686 -- The Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, "The Heart is Noble: Changing the World
38687 from the Inside Out"
38689 Day and night, night and day we spend our lives in the company of the
38690 afflictions, generating desire for the pleasant and anger at the unpleasant,
38691 and continue thus even when dreaming, unable to remain relaxed, our minds
38692 completely and utterly mixed with thoughts of desire and hatred without
38694 To what refuge should we go? A source of refuge must have completely
38695 overcome all defects forever; it must be free of all faults. It must also
38696 have all the attributes of altruism--those attainments which are necessary
38697 for achieving others' welfare. For it is doubtful that anyone lacking these
38698 two prerequisites can bestow refuge; it would be like falling into a ditch and
38699 asking another who is in it to help you out. You need to ask someone who is
38700 standing outside the ditch for help; it is senseless to ask another who is in
38701 the same predicament. A refuge capable of protecting from the frights of
38702 manifold sufferings cannot also be bound in this suffering but must be free
38703 and unflawed. Furthermore, the complete attainments are necessary, for if you
38704 have fallen into a ditch, it is useless to seek help from someone standing
38705 outside it who does not wish to help or who wishes to help but has no means to
38707 Only a Buddha has extinguished all faults and gained all attainments.
38708 Therefore, one should mentally go for refuge to a Buddha, praise him with
38709 speech, and respect him physically. One should enter the teaching of such a
38711 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38713 All that is has me--universal creativity,
38714 pure and total presence--as its root.
38715 How things appear is my being.
38716 How things arise is my manifestation.
38717 Sounds and words heard are my messages
38718 expressed in sounds and words.
38719 All the capacities, forms, and pristine
38720 awareness of the buddhas;
38721 The bodies of sentient beings, their
38722 habituations, and so forth;
38723 All environments and their inhabitants,
38724 life forms, and experiences;
38725 Are the primordial state of pure and total
38728 Without understanding me, the creativity of
38730 But investigating the phenomena that I
38732 You perceive everything dualistically due
38733 to your attachment and longing.
38734 Impermanent, apparitional things will fade
38736 They are aimless, like a blind man.
38738 All that is experienced and
38739 Your own mind are the unique primary reality.
38740 They cannot be conceptualized according to
38741 the cause and effect systems of thought.
38742 Investigate your mind's real nature
38743 So that your pure and total presence will
38744 actually shine forth.
38746 -- Longchenpa, "You Are the Eyes of the World"
38748 Devotion, or mögü in Tibetan, can be divided into two aspects: möpa and
38749 küpa. Möpa means "longing" or "wanting," and küpa means "humility,"
38750 "respect," or "being without arrogance." With küpa, you are not pretending
38751 to be somebody who has reached a higher level of wisdom. So in devotion,
38752 longing and humbleness are put together. That state of mind brings openness
38753 to the teacher and to the dharma.
38754 With küpa, the longing of möpa does not become purely an emotional
38755 indulgence or demand on the part of either the student or the teacher. The
38756 devotion of küpa is the respect or sacredness that comes from that experience
38757 of aah [the space before first thought]! Küpa arises because every highlight
38758 in your life has always been touched by the sacredness of vajrayana, even
38759 before you knew it.
38760 -- Chogyam Trungpa, from "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma,
38761 Volume Three: The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness"
38763 All suffering in this life and others is created by the unsubdued mind.
38764 Similarly, the basis of all the practices of the six paramitas, such as
38765 generosity, moral discipline, and so on, is the mind.
38767 Nothing is more important than guarding the mind. Let us constantly keep
38768 watch over the wild elephant of the mind, curbing it with mindfulness and
38769 vigilance. This is how to avoid being influenced by different external
38770 conditions. But even in retreat in a very secluded place, if the mind is not
38771 kept under control, it will wander all over the place. Even completely alone,
38772 we can have an enormous amount of negative emotions.
38774 How are we to guard the mind? We should use attentiveness to watch our
38775 thoughts and use mindfulness to judge whether we are acting correctly. With
38776 these two we have the means to annihilate all adverse conditions. But without
38777 them, we will not see whether our thoughts are positive or negative or whether
38778 we are doing right or wrong, nor will we then be able to use antidotes as
38780 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38782 The great yogi Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol replies to a Losar Day request from
38783 his disciple Depa Wangpo on what to adopt and what to reject regarding
38784 attitude and conduct...
38786 Don't harm your friends and neighbors; help them.
38787 Don't be stingy; use your wealth for offerings and charity.
38788 Don't let your body be idle; do prostrations and circumambulations.
38789 Don't let your mouth be idle; recite the mani mantra.
38790 Always have pure thoughts towards others.
38792 In brief, keeping Death in mind, practice the sacred Dharma.
38793 Give up doing wrong, and do what is wholesome.
38794 Whatever happiness and sufferings you undergo,
38795 Regard them as the result of previous actions.
38796 Always act in accord with the Dharma.
38797 Even though I may be far away,
38798 These instructions will remain like my very presence.
38801 -- Shabkar Natshok Rangdrol, in "The Life of Shabkar"
38803 On the very night of Dodrupchen's death, his spiritual testament was
38804 received by his principal disciple, Do Khyentse. Dodrupchen appeared in the
38805 sky in a radiant light body and an attire of lights. He was floating on a
38806 carpet of light, which was held up by four dakinis. In a very enchanting
38807 voice he sang the verses of his testament, which include the following lines:
38809 I am going into the expanse of the Wisdom of the Ultimate Sphere,
38810 Which is the state that transcends thoughts and expressions.
38811 I am going into the state of Mirrorlike Wisdom,
38812 Which is the ceaseless clear glow, fresh and open.
38813 I am going into the expanse of the Wisdom of Evenness,
38814 In which all the thoughts of grasping and grasper have vanished into the
38816 I am going into the Wisdom of Discriminative Awareness,
38817 Which is the clarity, the dawn of six kinds of foreknowledge.
38818 I am going into the state of the Wisdom of Accomplishment,
38819 Which emanates various manifestations in accordance with [the needs of]
38822 Son, please stay healthy.
38823 Now you have won over the obstructions of your life.
38824 Until all the phenomenal existents are liberated as the signs and
38825 teachings [of Dharma],
38826 [You should be] aware of samsara and nirvana as dreams and illusions.
38827 Dedicate yourself to the meditation where there is no reference point.
38828 This is the empowerment of total entrustment and aspiration.
38829 This is the supreme empowerment of empowerments.
38831 -- from "Masters of Meditation and Miracles", by Tulku Thondup.
38833 The view of interdependence makes for a great openness of mind. In general,
38834 instead of realizing that what we experience arises from a complicated network
38835 of causes, we tend to attribute happiness or sadness, for example, to single,
38836 individual sources. But if this were so, as soon as we came into contact with
38837 what we consider to be good, we would be automatically happy, and conversely,
38838 in the case of bad things, invariably sad. The causes of joy and sorrow would
38839 be easy to identify and target. It would all be very simple, and there would
38840 be good reason for our anger and attachment. When, on the other hand, we
38841 consider that everything we experience results from a complex interplay of
38842 causes and conditions, we find that there is no single thing to desire or
38843 resent, and it is more difficult for the afflictions of attachment or anger to
38844 arise. In this way, the view of interdependence makes our minds more relaxed
38846 By training our minds and getting used to this view, we change our way of
38847 seeing things, and as a result we gradually change our behavior and do less
38848 harm to others. As it says in the sutras:
38851 Practice virtue well;
38853 This is the Buddha's teaching.
38855 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "For the Benefit of All Beings"
38857 In the avadhuti, the main path of enlightenment,
38858 Prana and mind, bliss and warmth, are united,
38859 Becoming unconditioned great bliss.
38860 The wisdom of unobscured insight dawns.
38862 "This is unsurpassable," the guru has said.
38863 The darkness of ignorance is purified in space.
38864 One is free from the two obscurations of grasping and fixation.
38865 Therefore bliss and luminosity dawn in simplicity.
38867 This appearance of collective coincidence
38868 Is a reflection without self-nature.
38869 All appearances are realized like that,
38870 And just like appearances in a dream,
38871 All dharmas arise as illusions...
38873 When thoughts arise, rest naturally.
38874 When dreaming, be mindful without corrupting it.
38875 When in the pardo, don't control, but be aware.
38876 When there is fruition, let it arise without obscuration.
38878 -- from "The Life of Marpa the Translator" translated by Chögyam Trungpa
38879 and the Nalanda Translation Committee.
38881 The Four Seals in Buddhism are:
38883 All products are impermanent.
38884 (or all compounded phenomena are impermanent?)
38885 ('du byed thams cad mi rtag pa)
38887 All contaminated objects are miserable.
38888 (zag bcas thams cad sdug bsngal ba)
38890 All phenomena are selfless.
38891 (chos thams cad bdag med pa)
38894 (mya ngan las 'das ba zhi ba)
38896 --from "Meditation on Emptiness" (London: Wisdom, 1983), by Jeffrey Hopkins
38898 When you pass away, nothing will do you any good except for the pure Dharma.
38899 You will not simply disappear when you die. Rather, what happens next will be
38900 dictated by your previous actions.
38901 For these reasons, you should exert yourself by whatever means necessary to
38902 free yourself from samsara, which is nothing but a vast ocean of suffering!
38903 Practice your teacher's guidance concerning what to do and what to give up
38904 to the letter, without falling under the influence of immature friends or bad
38905 influences. To the best of your ability, incorporate this genuine teaching on
38906 the certainty of death into each and every day.
38907 Keeping all this in mind, arouse faith in the Three Jewels so that you will
38908 be able to practice in this manner, thinking to yourself, "Think of me,
38909 Three Jewels!" At the same time, be sure to generate an intense sense of
38910 renunciation and subdue your mind stream.
38911 -- from "Entrance to the Great Perfection: A Guide to the Dzogchen
38912 Preliminary Practices", edited and translated by Cortland Dahl
38914 I would like to mention my visit to Lourdes as a pilgrim. There, in front of
38915 the cave, I experienced something very special. I felt a spiritual vibration,
38916 a kind of spiritual presence there. And then, in front of the image of the
38917 Virgin Mary, I prayed. I expressed my admiration for this holy place that has
38918 long been a source of inspiration and strength, that has provided spiritual
38919 solace, comfort and healing to millions of people. And I prayed that this may
38920 continue for a long time to come. My prayer there was not directed to any
38921 clearly defined object, like Buddha or Jesus Christ or a bodhisattva, but was
38922 simply directed to all great beings who have infinite compassion towards all
38924 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama
38926 The Buddhist teaching is superior in four ways: view, meditation, behavior,
38929 1. The "four seals" that distinguish the [Buddhist] view are as follows: all
38930 composed phenomena are impermanent, all contaminated things are miserable, all
38931 phenomena are selfless, and nirvana is peace.
38933 2. Buddhist meditation serves as an antidote to all cyclic existence within
38936 3. Buddhist behavior is free from the two extremes, having abandoned both the
38937 extreme of overindulgence of desire, which is a case of being desirous and
38938 wanting good and great quantities of food and clothing, and the extreme of
38939 being too tired and worn out in body and mind.
38941 4. The fruits are the true cessations, which are abandonments such that the
38942 obstruction that is removed does not arise again [and which comes about]
38943 through analyzing individually the nonexistence of the referent object of the
38944 conception of self.
38946 These four [view, meditation, behavior, and fruit] are the distinguishing
38947 features of Buddhist doctrine.
38948 -- Jamyang Shayba, from "Buddhist Philosophy: Losang Gonchok's Short
38949 Commentary to Jamyang Shayba's Root Text on Tenets", by Daniel Cozort
38950 and Craig Preston, page 88.
38952 When you are busy and preoccupied, you feel hassled by your own existence.
38953 You are so busy that you think that you do not have any time to spare for your
38954 practice. Such torment and busyness seem to be monumental or historic, but
38955 that is not the case. As far as we are concerned, that kind of torment is
38956 absolutely ordinary. As you begin to work on that, you realize that the
38957 inconvenience, discomfort, and anguish that you experience is no more than
38958 anybody else experiences. So your experience is no longer regarded as
38959 monumental--no more than if you step on a cat's tail, and the cat cries
38960 out, "Wooaaaoow!" However, it is still a problematic situation. Therefore
38961 you need to practice the paramita of discipline, which overcomes that type of
38962 preoccupation altogether. You begin to realize that preoccupations are
38963 garbage; they are worth flushing out so that something real could come up.
38964 Then paramita activity begins to make sense, and you begin to act in a more
38966 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma.
38967 Volume Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion"
38969 If we unbalance nature, humankind will suffer. Furthermore, we must consider
38970 future generations: a clean environment is a human right like any other. It
38971 is therefore part of our responsibility toward others to ensure that the world
38972 we pass on is as healthy as, if not healthier than, we found it. This is not
38973 quite such a difficult proposition as it might sound. For although there is a
38974 limit to what we as individuals can do, there is no limit to what a universal
38975 response might achieve. It is up to us as individuals to do what we can,
38976 however little that may be. Just because switching off the light on leaving
38977 the room seems inconsequential, it does not mean we shouldn't do it.
38978 -- His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Pocket Dalai Lama"
38980 Basically we are trying to put a stop to frivolity of any kind. Frivolity is
38981 an interesting word. It can mean being crazy and indulging unnecessarily in a
38982 very crude fashion, but it could also mean indulging in something in the name
38983 of humor and overdoing it slightly. If you are embarrassed to deal with a
38984 particular subject, you find another subject to discuss. If you are tired of
38985 drinking vodka, you switch to sake. If you are bored with talking to one
38986 person, you switch to somebody else. Frivolity is anything that creates
38987 further confusion, or the longing for further confusion. Confusion may seem
38988 luxurious: when you no longer have it, you begin to miss that confusion, and
38989 you would like to re-create it. It is like going back to an adult bookshop
38990 and getting more magazines. But with discipline, you control any form of
38991 potential escape from reality.
38992 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma.
38993 Volume Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion"
38995 The essence of all the songs can be epitomized by the four dharmas of
38996 Gampopa. These are: (1) one's mind becomes dharmic; (2) that dharma
38997 practice becomes path; (3) in following that path, confusion is removed; (4)
38998 having removed confusion, everything dawns as wisdom.
38999 The first dharma is the ground, where our mind becomes dharmic so that we
39000 and the dharma are no longer separate entities. We develop true renunciation
39001 and have a sense of revulsion towards samsara. The second dharma is the path.
39002 When our mind goes along with the dharma, the dharma becomes the path, and any
39003 obstacles, whether extreme or ordinary, become a part of our journey. The
39004 third dharma is the fruition. As the journey is taking place, the process of
39005 the journey liberates us from confusion and anxiety. We are delighted by our
39006 journey and we feel it is good. The fourth dharma is the total vision. When
39007 we are able to overcome confusion and anxiety, even our anxiety is not
39008 regarded as anti-dharma or anti-path. Cosmic wakefulness takes place.
39009 -- Chögyam Trungpa's in the foreword to "The Rain of Wisdom: The Essence of
39010 the Ocean of True Meaning"
39012 Scrutinize Apperances
39014 No matter what our mind makes appear as an object of one of our six
39015 collections of consciousness--sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile or
39016 bodily sensations, or mental objects or events--we thoroughly scrutinize its
39017 mode of appearance. Our mind is making it appear as though its existence were
39018 established by virtue of itself, empowered by some truly and inherently
39019 existent self-nature--and not by virtue simply of mental labeling
39020 establishing its existence as what can be labeled "this" or "that"
39021 from this side. We thoroughly scrutinize this mode of appearance and the mode
39022 of existence it implies. There does appear to be something solidly there, not
39023 existing as what it is by virtue simply of mental labeling, but by virtue of
39024 itself, independently of anything else. But, by reminding ourselves that it
39025 does not exist as it appears to exist--by being mindful that its existence
39026 and identity are not established through its own power--we automatically
39027 reconfirm and become even stronger in our conviction in its bare mode of
39028 existence. In other words, as the text [the First Panchen Lama's A Root
39029 Text for the Precious Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra] says, "[You
39030 experience] their bare mode of existence dawning in an exposed, resplendent
39032 -- His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition
39035 The dakini principle must not be oversimplified, as it carries many levels of
39036 meaning. On an outer level, accomplished female practitioners were called
39037 dakinis.... But ultimately, though she appears in female form, a dakini
39038 defies gender definitions. "To really meet the dakini, you have to go
39039 beyond duality," Khandro Rinpoche teaches, referring to an essential
39040 understanding in Vajrayana that the absolute reality cannot be grasped
39041 intellectually. The Tibetan word for dakini, khandro, means "sky-goer" or
39042 "space-dancer," which indicates that these ethereal awakened ones have
39043 left the confinements of solid earth and have the vastness of open space to
39045 -- Michaela Haas, from "Dakini Power: Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the
39046 Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West"
39048 Drawing from Longchenpa, Jamgon Kongtrul explains the method of awakening in
39049 the Dzog-chen system, calling it the "Liberation as Ever-Perfect," as the
39050 primordial buddha Samantabhadra... Liberation as Ever-Perfect does not refer
39051 to the liberation of a buddha that has occurred in the past, such as that of
39052 Buddha Sakyamuni, but to the way in which countless beings are liberated right
39053 now and will continue to be liberated in the future simply by realizing their
39054 primordial purity. The basis, the path, and the ultimate result in this
39055 system are all of a singular, undifferentiated nature: total, pure awareness.
39056 Thus, the primordial freedom that one seeks to attain by practicing the
39057 spiritual path is something that one already possesses. Intrinsic freedom is
39058 itself the path that leads to the actualization of the goal.
39059 -- from the Translator's Introduction, "The Treasury of Knowledge: Book One,
39060 Myriad Worlds", by Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye
39062 If we realize, "I am a human being. A human being can do anything,"
39063 this determination, courage, and self-confidence are important sources of
39064 victory and success. Without will power and determination, even something
39065 that you might have achieved easily cannot be achieved. If you have will
39066 power and reasonable courage--not blind courage but courage without
39067 pride--even things that seemed impossible at a certain stage turn into being
39068 possible because of continuing effort inspired by that courage. Thus,
39069 determination is important.
39070 How can this be developed? Not through machines, not by money, but by our
39071 own inner strength based on clear realization of the value of human beings, of
39072 human dignity. For, once we realize that a human being is much more than just
39073 material, much more than just money, we can feel the importance of human life,
39074 from which we can feel the importance of compassion and kindness.
39075 Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that
39076 feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering,
39077 and everyone has the basic right to do this. In this way, all here are the
39078 same, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Easterner or Westerner,
39079 believer or nonbeliever, and within believers whether Buddhist, Christian,
39080 Jewish, Muslim, and so on. Basically, from the viewpoint of real human value
39081 we are all the same.
39082 -- His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "Kindness, Clarity, and Insight"
39086 Racoon dead six weeks.
39091 Through aspiration prayers and arousing bodhicitta, for the noble families the
39092 time had come to tame the māras and cannibal demons of Tibet, and resounding
39093 as self-arising formless sound from the sky was this song, which invokes the
39094 enlightened mindstreams [of all the sages]:
39097 Unborn primordially empty dharmadhatu,
39098 Unobstructed ground for the arising of phenomena,
39099 The strength of emptiness free from the extremes of existing or not,
39100 Listen to this song, a self-arising spontaneously present song.
39102 Without considering the six grains of the three months of autumn,
39103 Why toil in the fields in the three months of spring?
39104 Without considering the abundance of the plunder,
39105 Why wave your arms to summon enemies and disputes?
39106 Without considering the benefit of others,
39107 Why single-pointedly practice to try to accomplish enlightenment?
39109 Failing to know the minds of those to be tamed, one is not a buddha.
39110 Failing to fulfill the welfare of others is not the sacred dharma.
39111 Failing to lead others to liberation is not the sangha.
39113 -- from The Epic of Gesar of Ling, "Gesar's Birth and Childhood"
39115 When we meditate I encourage all of us to have the attitude that we are
39116 meditating to dissolve the self. That's why we meditate. Hold this
39117 perspective in your awareness and let your dualistic mind dissolve for at
39118 least a half hour, or at least for ten minutes every day. When you allow
39119 yourself to witness that unexpected glimpse of the truth, where the self is
39120 dissolved, it's like drinking nectar. It's inexpressible. We often use
39121 the word bliss to describe that state. Bliss is a good word, but it can be
39122 misunderstood. The bliss that I am speaking about has nothing to do with
39123 ordinary bliss. It's not like the bliss of having great food or other
39124 sensual pleasure. This is nonconceptual bliss that is not based on emotions
39125 but is based on awareness. We often say that realizing the true nature of who
39126 we are is like drinking the nectar of ultimate bliss. The more we drink, the
39127 more we are going to be addicted, which is very good.
39128 -- Anam Thubten, "No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature"
39130 Why is a man condemned to death not fortunate
39131 If he is released after having his hand cut off?
39132 Why am I who am experiencing human misery not fortunate
39133 If by that I am spared from (the agonies of) hell?
39135 If I am unable to endure
39136 Even the mere sufferings of the present,
39137 Then why do I not restrain myself from being angry,
39138 Which will be the source of hellish misery?
39140 In these two verses [from The Way of the Bodhisattva], Shantideva explains
39141 that by not being angry and developing hatred in response to harm caused by
39142 others, what one is gaining is protection from potential undesirable
39143 consequences that might otherwise come about. Because if one responds to such
39144 situations with anger and hatred, not only does it not protect one from the
39145 injury that has already been done, but on top of that one creates an
39146 additional cause for one's own suffering in the future. However, if one
39147 responds without anger and hatred and develops patience and tolerance, then
39148 although one many face temporary discomfort or injury, that temporary
39149 suffering will protect one from potentially dangerous consequences in the
39150 future. If this is the case, then by sacrificing small things, by putting up
39151 with small problems or hardships, one will be able to forgo experiences of
39152 much greater suffering in the future.
39153 An example Shantideva uses here is that if a convicted prisoner can save his
39154 life by sacrificing his arm as a punishment, wouldn't that person feel
39155 grateful for that opportunity? By accepting the pain and suffering of having
39156 his arm cut off, that person will be saving himself from death, which is a
39157 greater suffering. Shantideva adds that there is another advantage: not only
39158 will one be protected from potentially dangerous consequences in the future,
39159 but also by experiencing the pain and suffering which has been caused
39160 temporarily by others, one is exhausting the karmic potentials of negative
39161 karma which one has accumulated in the past. So it serves two purposes.
39162 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a
39163 Buddhist Perspective"
39165 The Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682) was perhaps the most mystical of all the
39166 Dalai Lamas in that he seemed to spend much of his time in a state of trance.
39167 During these trances many gurus of past ages, as well as mandala deities,
39168 buddhas, and bodhisattvas, would appear directly to him and give him secret
39169 transmissions, initiations, and teachings. As the Thirteenth Dalai Lama says
39170 of the Great Fifth later in this chapter, he "was continually absorbed in
39171 the wisdom dance that experiences all appearances as pure vision."
39172 -- Glenn H. Mullin, from "From the Heart of Chenrezig: The Dalai Lamas on
39175 Wishing others to be happy doesn't mean we give them everything they want,
39176 because sometimes what they want can be harmful. Wishing them to be happy
39177 entails wanting them to be free from pain and loneliness. Wouldn't it be
39178 wonderful if they were free from these and all other miseries? In order to
39179 love others, we have to be able to overcome our anger and hatred toward them.
39180 We have to be able to forgive them for the wrongs they've done. To do that,
39181 we have to get "me" out of the way and see that when people create harm,
39182 it is a reflection of their own pain, confusion, and misery. We just happened
39183 to walk across their path. We may even have done something to antagonize
39184 them, either deliberately or accidentally, but the reason that they got so
39185 upset is because of what is going on inside of them. We might also look at
39186 how we made ourselves into a target or accidentally became a target onto which
39187 they projected their confusion. Maybe we weren't very considerate of them.
39188 Maybe we have certain bad habits of which we're not aware and to which
39190 -- Thubten Chodron, "How to Free Your Mind: The Practice of Tara the
39193 We humans are actually not that far from enlightenment. Our five senses are
39194 like the Emanation Body of a Buddha; our dream body, which is similar to the
39195 after-death form, is like a Buddha's Beatific Form; and the basis of both of
39196 these is the subtle mind of clear light which shares the nature of a
39197 Buddha's Wisdom Body. All we have to do is learn to transform these
39198 ordinary elements into their pure natures. Then buddhahood naturally comes
39200 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "The Path to Enlightenment"
39202 There are three kinds of people [who practice Buddhism]. Like all other
39203 beings, the lowest person wants happiness and not suffering or rebirth in the
39204 lower realms of existence, so he practices Buddhism to create the causes of
39205 rebirth in the human realm or in the heavenly realms of the gods. He does not
39206 have the power or the courage to leave worldly existence completely. He only
39207 wants the best parts of worldly existence; he wants to avoid the worst parts,
39208 and that is why he practices the Buddhist religion--to gain a higher rebirth.
39209 The middling sort of person understands that the whole of worldly existence,
39210 no matter where one is born, is suffering by its nature, just as fire is hot
39211 by its nature. He wants to get out of it altogether and attain nirvana, the
39212 state that is entirely away from suffering.
39213 The highest person realizes that just as he himself does not want to suffer
39214 and does want happiness, so also do all living beings have the same fears and
39215 wishes. He knows that since we have been born again and again from
39216 beginningless time in worldly existence, there is not a single sentient being
39217 who has not been our mother and father at one time or another. Since we are
39218 that close to all sentient beings, the best person is one who practices
39219 Buddhism in order to remove all these countless beings from suffering.
39220 -- H.H. Sakya Trinzin, from "Treasures of the Sakya Lineage: Teachings from
39221 the Masters", by Migmar Tseten
39223 To take refuge in the Buddha means to take refuge in the dharmas that
39224 constitute a buddha (a nonlearner). These consist of a buddha's knowledge
39225 of the termination and nonarising [of the obscurations]. Together with the
39226 associated factors [of this knowledge], they consist of the five
39227 uncontaminated skandhas.
39228 To take refuge in the sangha means [to take refuge] in the dharmas that
39229 constitute the sangha, which consists of [all] learners and nonlearners except
39230 for buddhas. It is by virtue of having attained their respective [dharmas]
39231 that the eight persons* are not separated from the path by [anyone], including
39232 gods. Therefore, they are called "sangha." In other words, [the sangha]
39233 is represented by the five uncontaminated skandhas in the mind streams of said
39235 To take refuge in the dharma means [to take refuge] in the analytical
39236 cessation that is nirvana, that is, the two nirvanas [with and without
39237 remainder] of the noble ones.
39239 *The eight persons are also known as "the four pairs of persons"--stream-
39240 enterers, once-returners, nonreturners, and arhats, each divided into
39241 approachers to, and abiders in, these states.
39243 --from "Groundless Paths: The Prajnaparamita Sutras, The Ornament of Clear
39244 Realization, and Its Commentaries in the Tibetan Nyingma Tradition",
39245 translated by Karl Brunnholzl, from Shambhala Publications
39247 Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
39248 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
39249 -- Benjamin Franklin
39251 We need a clear mind-training map to keep us from missing the correct path.
39252 If we want to go to New York we need to know the roads and directions. Just
39253 jumping in the car and starting to drive may get us there, but most likely we
39254 will end up in another place or take much longer than is necessary.
39255 I have seen this happen with students who tell me of doing years of
39256 meditation without seeing any changes. They may blame themselves, meditation,
39257 or the Dharma, yet most often the problem is not knowing or applying the
39258 correct techniques or methods. Meditation is both easy and not easy. With
39259 the correct techniques and methods, applied with diligence, meditation can
39260 become a swift path to clearing confusion and unhelpful habits. Without them,
39261 we may wander in fogginess or agitation, never having engaged in true
39262 meditation even after years of "sitting."
39263 At Namdroling Monastery we practiced both resting and analytical meditation.
39264 The renowned teacher Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche believed that both types of
39265 meditation were important, but he thought it was best to begin with analytical
39266 meditation, because gaining familiarity with the true nature of reality would
39267 naturally lead to a clearer understanding of resting meditation and how to
39268 engage our mind constructively.
39269 -- Khenpo Gawang, "Your Mind Is Your Teacher: Self-Awakening through
39270 Contemplative Meditation", Shambhala Publications
39272 Never think, "Even though I have confidence in the Three Jewels, it is not
39273 really certain that this work will be accomplished." Instead, one should
39274 know that the Enlightened One is surely able to protect those who surrender
39275 and act in accord with his words, because the Enlightened One is endowed with
39276 the transcendental wisdom which knows all the paths of practice that are in
39277 harmony with the intelligence and nature of all living beings, because he has
39278 the compassionate desire to establish his disciples on the right path after
39279 turning them from wrong ways, and because he has accomplished the two
39280 accumulations of merit and transcendental wisdom and has accomplished the
39281 resolve to help beings. So even though one has not yet attained liberation
39282 from worldly existence, it is one's fault for not having trusted and not
39283 having acted in accord with the words of the Three Jewels, not because the
39284 Three Jewels have no compassion.
39285 In brief, those who do not entrust themselves to the Precious Jewels, who
39286 are arrogant and who assume they are intelligent have no certainty in
39287 accomplishing their schemes. Even if they are accomplished, it is not certain
39288 whether those schemes will turn out well in the long run. So it is important
39289 to entrust oneself always to the Precious Jewels.
39290 -- Ngorchen Konchog Lhundrub, "Three Visions: Fundamental Teachings of the
39291 Sakya Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism"
39293 Setting out on a spiritual path is a little like planning a trip--to Machu
39294 Picchu, for example. Some travellers will approach the project by investing a
39295 lot of time in reading travel books or Googling Internet sites about the best
39296 route to take and where to stay--a method that works, but only to a certain
39297 extent. Other travellers prefer a much simpler and safer method: to ask
39298 someone they know and trust who has already been to Machu Picchu to go with
39299 them and show them the way. Similarly, those wishing to follow the Buddhist
39300 path to enlightenment should rely on what are called in the teachings the
39301 "four authentics": the authentic words of the Buddha (his teachings); the
39302 authentic clarification of the teachings that can be found in the shastras
39303 (commentaries) written by great masters of the past; the further clarification
39304 that is the result of authentic personal experience; and for this experience
39305 to find expression, an authentic guru.
39306 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, "Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called
39307 Preliminary Practices", Shambhala Publications
39309 With regard to selflessness, it is necessary to know what "self" is--to
39310 identify the self that does not exist. Then one can understand its opposite,
39311 selflessness. Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the
39312 past becoming non-existent; rather, this sort of "self" is something that
39313 never did exist. What is needed is to identify as non-existent something that
39314 always was nonexistent, for due to not having made such identification, we are
39315 drawn into the afflictive emotions of desire and hatred as well as all the
39316 problems these bring.
39317 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "Kindness, Clarity, and Insight", Shambhala
39320 The essence of mind is somewhat difficult to explain, so we look at it from
39321 the negative point of view, that is, what mind is not. First of all, we see
39322 that it is not something which arises or ceases or abides. It is free of
39323 these three things. From beginningless time, there is no arising, no
39324 cessation and no abiding in terms of staying in one place, not moving, or not
39325 changing. It is completely free of all three of these.
39326 It is also free of being a thing or a substance composed of particles. The
39327 essential entity, or substance, of mind is not something that can be defiled
39328 or stained by grasping at subject and object. It is completely free of the
39329 stains from those activities.
39330 Further, when we look at the essential substance of mind, we find that no
39331 matter how much we search for it, no matter how much we analyze it, there is
39332 no thing there to be found. There is no entity that we can come up with by
39333 searching, evaluating, and analyzing. No matter how much we seek for its
39334 essential substance, we cannot find it. The searcher, the one who does the
39335 search for essential substance of mind, cannot find it. Therefore it is said
39336 that the essential substance of mind itself is emptiness.
39337 -- Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, "The Practice of Mahamudra", published
39338 by Shambhala Publications
39340 "Like a cloud." This is a simile for how the wisdom mind benefits sentient
39341 beings without conceptual thought. For example, in the summer, clouds gather
39342 in the sky without effort, causing crops and so forth to grow perfectly
39343 through the rain falling on the ground without conceptual thought.
39344 Likewise, the activities of the wisdom mind ripen the trainees' crop of
39345 virtue through the rainfall of Dharma without conceptual thought.
39346 -- Gampopa, from "The Jewel Ornament of Liberation: The Wish-fulfilling Gem
39347 of the Noble Teachings"
39349 Psychologists tell us that a strong sense of self is essential to be
39350 psychologically healthy. But it seems Buddhism says there is no self. How
39351 can we reconcile these two views?
39352 When psychologists speak of a sense of "self" they are referring to the
39353 feeling that oneself is an efficacious person, someone who is self-confident
39354 and can act in the world. Buddhists agree that such a sense of self is both
39355 realistic and necessary. However, the sense of self that Buddhism says is
39356 unrealistic is that of a very solid, unchanging, independent "I." Such a
39357 self never has and never will exist. To understand this is to realize
39359 Strange though it may sound, someone may have a psychologically weak sense
39360 of self that in Buddhist parlance would be considered strong self-grasping.
39361 For example, a person with poor self-esteem may focus a lot on himself and
39362 have a strong feeling of the existence of an independent self that is
39363 inferior, unlovable, and a failure. From a Buddhist viewpoint, such an
39364 independent self does not exist, although a conventional self does.
39365 --Thubten Chodron, "Buddhism for Beginners"
39367 We all depend on one another. For this reason, whenever we act according to
39368 self-interest, sooner or later our selfish aims are bound to clash with the
39369 aims of the people we rely upon to accomplish our own goals. When that
39370 happens, conflicts will inevitably arise. As we learn to be more balanced in
39371 valuing others' concerns with our own, we will naturally find ourselves
39372 involved in fewer and fewer conflicts. In the meantime, it is helpful to
39373 acknowledge that conflicts are the logical outcome of this combination of
39374 self-interest and interdependence. Once we recognize this, we can see that
39375 conflicts are nothing to feel shocked or offended by. Rather, we can address
39376 them calmly and with wisdom.
39377 -- Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, in "Beyond Anger: How to Hold On to Your
39378 Heart and Your Humanity in the Midst of Injustice", Shambhala Publications
39380 Cyclic existence continues to evolve through the power of the unbroken
39381 relationship of the twelve links of dependent origination. What are these
39382 twelve? They are (1) ignorance, which afflicts wandering beings by keeping
39383 them from seeing true reality. In obscuring the perception of true reality,
39384 ignorance also functions as the source for the subsequent links, such as
39385 karmic formation, by grasping as if there were an "I" and "mine." (2)
39386 Formation afflicts wandering beings by implanting the seeds of subsequent
39387 existence in the consciousness. In this way, when the root text states:
39388 "Wandering beings are afflicted due to…," it should be understood to
39389 apply to all the remaining links as well, from consciousness on. Accordingly,
39390 (3) consciousness becomes infused with habitual tendencies and leads sentient
39391 beings to the place of their birth. (4) Name and form take hold of the body
39392 of one's coming existence. (5) The six sense sources bring the state of
39393 name and form to completion. (6) Contact determines the experience of an
39394 object based on the coming together of three factors: object, faculty, and
39395 cognition. (7) Sensation experiences the various types of enjoyable and
39396 painful karmic ripening. (8) Craving creates the cohesion necessary for a
39397 future existence. (9) Grasping totally binds one to such an existence. (10)
39398 Becoming brings about the actual acquisition of this birth. (11) Birth serves
39399 as the support for the suffering of old age and so on. (12) Aging and death
39400 is the essence of suffering.
39401 -- Khenpo Shenga and Ju Mipham, "Middle Beyond Extremes: Maitreya's
39402 Madhyantavibhaga with Commentaries"
39404 Compassion and generosity must be accompanied by detachment. Expecting
39405 something in return for them is like doing business. If the owner of a
39406 restaurant is all smiles with his customers, it is not because he loves them
39407 but because he wants to increase his turnover. When we love and help others,
39408 it should not be because we find a particular individual likable but because
39409 we see that all beings, whether we think of them as friends or enemies, want
39410 to be happy and have the right to happiness.
39411 -- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, in "On the Path to
39412 Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters",
39413 Shambhala Publications
39415 Examining the understanding of heat in Vajrayana gives insight into tantra's
39416 somewhat different embrace of classical Buddhist imagery. From this
39417 perspective, the experience of mental burning is indeed the central suffering
39418 of our lives. It is the experiential dimension of the intensity of our
39419 obscurations, whether emotional, conceptual, or habitual. But rather than
39420 attempting to put out the flames with meditation methods, it is important to
39421 allow the burning to occur during practice. Certainly in the foundational
39422 stages of the path we must learn not to become engulfed in the flames, to tame
39423 the wild mind and emotions, and to train ourselves to open further to
39424 experience. Finally, however, through Vajrayana practice under the guidance
39425 of a guru, the burning we experience becomes a great teacher and a great
39427 -- Judith Simmer-Brown, "Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in
39428 Tibetan Buddhism", Shambhala Publications
39430 Life is mainly froth and bubble,
39431 Two things stand like stone--
39432 Kindness in another's trouble,
39433 Courage in your own.
39434 -- Adam Lindsay Gordon
39436 With regard to one's behavior, one must relinquish all the limitations
39437 implied in subject-object duality (gzung 'dzin gyi la dor ba). One should
39438 abandon all ordinary ways of assessing outer and inner phenomena, and the
39439 engagement or withdrawal of the mind with regard to "good" and "bad."
39440 One must not, through mindless clinging to sense objects, stray into the five
39441 ordinary mental poisons. For when approached with skillful means, all are but
39442 the display of the great and perfect equality.
39443 -- Jigme Lingpa, from "Treasury of Precious Qualities: Book Two: Vajrayana
39444 and the Great Perfection", by Shambhala Publications
39446 Recollection is the path of meditating on
39447 The nature that was seen with awareness.
39448 Constituted by the aspects of enlightenment,
39449 This serves to eliminate the stains.
39451 Recollection involves repeatedly recalling and realizing, in the context of
39452 the path of cultivation, what was realized when the intrinsic nature was
39453 directly seen with individual self-awareness at the prior stage. In this way,
39454 the term recollection refers to all that constitutes the factors of
39455 enlightenment. The path of cultivation is [referred to as such] because it
39456 involves eradicating those stains that are eliminated through cultivation.
39457 -- from "Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Intrinsic Nature: Maitreya's
39458 Dharmadharmatavibhanga with Commentaries by Khenpo Shenga and Ju Mipham",
39459 Shambhala Publications
39461 The Capable One spoke of the following attributes as the seven noble riches,
39462 for they are the causes of untainted happiness and are not in any way
39463 ordinary. Faith--that is, the three kinds of faith in the Three Jewels and
39464 confidence in the law of actions and their effects. Discipline, the avoidance
39465 of harmful actions. Learning that comes from listening to the holy Dharma
39466 that leads to liberation, with the intention of gaining complete knowledge.
39467 Being generous--with a desire to make offerings and to help beings, to give
39468 away all one's possessions without expecting anything in return or any
39469 karmic reward. A sense of shame with respect to oneself that prevents one
39470 from indulging in negative actions, and that is unstained by such things as
39471 jealousy or seeking veneration. A sense of decency with regard to others that
39472 stops one from engaging in unvirtuous practices. And wisdom, that is,
39473 knowledge of the particular and general characteristics of phenomena.
39474 You should realize that other common things that the world calls
39475 riches--gold, for instance--are of no value in obtaining untainted
39476 qualities; they are worthless, hollow, and without essence.
39477 -- from "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend With Commentary by Kyabje Kangyur
39478 Rinpoche", Shambhala Publications
39480 All apparent phenomena are nothing but delusion, and there is, moreover, no
39481 freedom from delusion to be achieved by dispelling delusion. Delusion is, by
39482 its own essence, completely pure and, hence, enlightened. All phenomena are,
39483 in this way, primordially, fully, and completely enlightened. Phenomena
39484 appearing as various attributes are, therefore, indeed the mandala of vajra
39485 body, speech, and mind. They are like the Buddhas of the three times, never
39486 transcending the essence of complete purity. Sentient beings and Buddhas are
39487 not differentiated in terms of their essence. Just like distinct causes and
39488 results appearing in a dream, they are nothing but perceptions of individual
39489 minds brought forth by the power of imputation.
39490 -- Heidi I. Köppl, "Establishing Appearances as Divine: Rongzom Chökyi
39491 Zangpo on Reasoning, Madhyamaka, and Purity", Shambhala and Snow Lion
39494 "Emptiness" is a rough translation of the Sanskrit term shunyata and the
39495 Tibetan term tongpa-nyi. The basic meaning of the Sanskrit word shunya is
39496 "zero," while the Tibetan word tongpa means "empty"--not in the sense
39497 of a vacuum or a void, but rather in the sense that the basis of experience is
39498 beyond our ability to perceive with our senses and or to capture in a nice,
39499 tidy concept. Maybe a better understanding of the deep sense of the word may
39500 be "inconceivable" or "unnameable."
39501 So when Buddhists talk about emptiness as the basis of our being, we don't
39502 mean that who or what we are is nothing, a zero, a point of view that can give
39503 way to a kind of cynicism. The actual teachings on emptiness imply an
39504 infinitely open space that allows for anything to appear, change, disappear,
39505 and reappear. The basic meaning of emptiness, in other words, is openness, or
39506 potential. At the basic level of our being, we are "empty" of definable
39508 -- Tsoknyi Rinpoche, from "The Best Buddhist Writing 2013", published by
39509 Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion Publications
39511 The Lama is the ecstatic, wild, and gentle figure who short-circuits your
39512 systems of self-referencing. The Lama is the only person in your life who
39513 cannot be manipulated. The Lama is the invasion of unpredictability you allow
39514 into your life, to enable you to cut through the convolutions of interminable
39515 psychological and emotional processes. The Lama is the terrifyingly
39516 compassionate gamester who reshuffles the deck of your carefully arranged
39517 rationale. To enter into vajra commitment is to leap from the perfect
39518 precipice. To find yourself in the radiant space of this choiceless choice is
39519 the very heart of Tantra. To leap open-eyed into the shining emptiness of the
39520 Lama's wisdom display and to experience the ecstatic impact of each dynamic
39521 gesture of the Lama's method display is the essential luminosity and power
39523 -- Ngak'chang Rinpoche, quoted in "Dangerous Friend: The Teacher-Student
39524 Relationship in Vajrayana Buddhism", Shambhala Publications
39526 When clouds cover the sky, we cannot see the pure nature of space.
39527 Likewise, when conceptual thoughts occupy the mind, we cannot see the pure
39528 nature of the mind. To see whether this is true, we can meditate so that the
39529 mind becomes relaxed and peaceful, and then there is room to develop
39530 compassion, love, and bodhicitta. But when our mind is occupied by conceptual
39531 thoughts and negative thoughts, there is no space to develop good qualities.
39532 Our mind becomes full of suffering and we cannot disentangle ourselves from
39534 When our mind emphasizes positive, calming, and relaxing thoughts, it leaves
39535 no space for negative thoughts to arise. Then we can maintain a peaceful,
39536 harmonious mind regardless of external conditions. This becomes a matter of
39537 how much we habituate ourselves to the Dharma teachings.
39538 -- from "Opening the Treasure of the Profound: Teachings on the Songs of
39539 Jigten Sumgön and Milarepa", by Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen Rinpoche,
39540 Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion Publications
39542 What is true patience and how can we develop it? Patience is imperturbability
39543 in the face of harm and hardship. Responding to these difficulties with anger
39544 is extremely destructive because it creates unpleasant consequences and
39545 destroys positive energy. There is no austere practice to equal the practice
39546 of patience, which calms the turbulence of the disturbing emotions. It is
39547 cultivated in meditation and implemented in everyday life. There are three
39548 main kinds of patience: the patience of taking no account of those who inflict
39549 harm, the patience of willingly accepting adversity and the patience of
39550 gaining certainty with regard to the teachings. Their opposites are
39551 animosity, discouragement and reluctance to engage with the teachings.
39552 -- from "The Six Perfections: An Oral Teaching by Geshe Sonam Rinchen",
39553 Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion Publications
39555 Bodhichitta can be understood as a quality of intention, sometimes called a
39556 "great will." This great will does not come from the ego; it is
39557 paradoxically an intention that arises through the surrender of the ego. As
39558 the ego lets go of its assumption that it has a real understanding of what is
39559 needed in the path of awakening, it surrenders to a deeper quality of will and
39560 wisdom. The shift from the ego's center of will to the intention of our
39561 buddha nature to awaken us for the welfare of others aligns us with a source
39562 of will far beyond our limited sense of self. I have often described this
39563 will as a river of intention, which once stepped into becomes an undercurrent
39564 in all we do in our life.
39565 -- Rob Preece, "Preparing for Tantra: Creating the Psychological Ground for
39566 Practice", published by Shambhala and Snow Lion Publications
39568 In fact, one of the things that I hope all of us have learned these past few
39569 weeks is that it turns out smart, effective government is important. It
39570 matters. I think the American people during this shutdown had a chance to get
39571 some idea of all the things, large and small, that government does that make a
39572 difference in people's lives.
39573 We hear all the time about how government is the problem. Well, it turns
39574 out we rely on it in a whole lot of ways. Not only does it keep us strong
39575 through our military and our law enforcement, it plays a vital role in caring
39576 for our seniors and our veterans, educating our kids, making sure our workers
39577 are trained for the jobs that are being created, arming our businesses with
39578 the best science and technology so they can compete with companies from other
39579 countries. It plays a key role in keeping our food and our toys and our
39580 workplaces safe. It helps folks rebuild after a storm. It conserves our
39581 natural resources. It finances startups. It helps to sell our products
39582 overseas. It provides security to our diplomats abroad.
39583 So let's work together to make government work better, instead of treating
39584 it like an enemy or purposely making it work worse. That's not what the
39585 founders of this nation envisioned when they gave us the gift of self-
39586 government. You don't like a particular policy or a particular president,
39587 then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to
39588 change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent
39589 over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country
39591 -- Barack Obama, after the US government shutdown of 2013 had ended.
39593 When the teachings say we need to reduce our fascination with the things of
39594 this life, it does not mean that we should abandon them completely. It means
39595 avoiding the natural tendency to go from elation to depression in reaction to
39596 life's ups and downs, jumping for joy when you have some success, or wanting
39597 to jump out the window if you do not get what you want. Being less concerned
39598 about the affairs of this life means assuming its ups and downs with a broad
39600 -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in "On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart
39601 Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters", from Shambhala Publications and
39602 Snow Lion Publications
39604 Critical Thinking as Defined by the National Council for Excellence in
39605 Critical Thinking, 1987
39607 Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and
39608 skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or
39609 evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation,
39610 experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and
39611 action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values
39612 that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision,
39613 consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and
39615 It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought
39616 implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue;
39617 assumptions; concepts; empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions;
39618 implications and consequences; objections from alternative viewpoints; and
39619 frame of reference. Critical thinking--in being responsive to variable
39620 subject matter, issues, and purposes--is incorporated in a family of
39621 interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical
39622 thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking,
39623 moral thinking, and philosophical thinking.
39624 Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of
39625 information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit,
39626 based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behavior. It
39627 is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of
39628 information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information
39629 is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it
39630 involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as
39631 an exercise") without acceptance of their results.
39632 Critical thinking varies according to the motivation underlying it. When
39633 grounded in selfish motives, it is often manifested in the skillful
39634 manipulation of ideas in service of one's own, or one's groups', vested
39635 interest. As such it is typically intellectually flawed, however
39636 pragmatically successful it might be. When grounded in fairmindedness and
39637 intellectual integrity, it is typically of a higher order intellectually,
39638 though subject to the charge of "idealism" by those habituated to its selfish
39640 Critical thinking of any kind is never universal in any individual; everyone
39641 is subject to episodes of undisciplined or irrational thought. Its quality is
39642 therefore typically a matter of degree and dependent on, among other things,
39643 the quality and depth of experience in a given domain of thinking or with
39644 respect to a particular class of questions. No one is a critical thinker
39645 through-and-through, but only to such-and-such a degree, with such-and-such
39646 insights and blind spots, subject to such-and-such tendencies towards self-
39647 delusion. For this reason, the development of critical thinking skills and
39648 dispositions is a life-long endeavor.
39649 -- from a statement by Michael Scriven & Richard Paul, presented at the 8th
39650 Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education
39651 Reform, Summer 1987.
39653 Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to
39654 reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. People who think
39655 critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably, empathically.
39656 They are keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when
39657 left unchecked. They strive to diminish the power of their egocentric and
39658 sociocentric tendencies. They use the intellectual tools that critical
39659 thinking offers--concepts and principles that enable them to analyze,
39660 assess, and improve thinking. They work diligently to develop the
39661 intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility,
39662 intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and
39663 confidence in reason. They realize that no matter how skilled they are as
39664 thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at
39665 times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices,
39666 biases, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-
39667 interest, and vested interest. They strive to improve the world in whatever
39668 ways they can and contribute to a more rational, civilized society. At the
39669 same time, they recognize the complexities often inherent in doing so. They
39670 avoid thinking simplistically about complicated issues and strive to
39671 appropriately consider the rights and needs of relevant others. They
39672 recognize the complexities in developing as thinkers, and commit themselves to
39673 life-long practice toward self-improvement. They embody the Socratic
39674 principle: The unexamined life is not worth living, because they realize that
39675 many unexamined lives together result in an uncritical, unjust, dangerous
39677 -- Linda Elder, September, 2007
39679 In philosophical terms, Tibetan scriptures refer to neurotic mind as the
39680 impure or afflicted mind. But within the context of wind energy, neurotic
39681 mind is not just caused by self-attachment. The mind is also propelled by the
39682 movement of wind energy. The Tibetan language describes this relationship
39683 between the wind and the mind as the wind-mind (Tib. rlung sems). This
39684 compound word describes the wind energy and the conceptual mind as always
39685 intertwined and moving together--a singular motion. Again, a metaphor is
39686 helpful to understand how the mind and the wind work together. The Tibetan
39687 Buddhist teachings compare the mind and the breath to a rider and its mount.
39688 In this metaphor, the wind energy is the mount and the mind is the rider.
39689 This metaphor illustrates how it is the wind energy that carries the mind and
39690 that influences and shapes the mind's energy. The wind energy is the root
39691 of all of our experience, since it provides energy for the mind's movement.
39692 So, wind energy training is a powerful tool for purifying, calming, taming,
39693 and relaxing the wind energy to impact the expression of neurotic mind.
39694 -- Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo, from "The Tibetan Yoga of
39695 Breath: Breathing Practices for Healing the Body and Cultivating Wisdom",
39696 published by Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion Publications
39698 Imagination relies on empty perception. Painting relies on empty planes.
39699 Sculpture relies on empty space. Music relies on empty time. Literature
39700 relies on empty concepts. If we are to realize the art of freedom, if we are
39701 to discover our creative potential, we need to rely on the experience of our
39702 intrinsic vibrant emptiness--the beginningless ground of what we are.
39703 -- Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, from "Roaring Silence: Discovering
39704 the Mind of Dzogchen", published by Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion
39707 Detachment doesn't mean "throw it away" or "don't have feelings
39708 about it." It definitely does not mean denying or obstructing the mind's
39709 natural tendency to project. Imagine you are about to go into a cotton
39710 factory. Before entering you pour glue all over your body, and then you
39711 demand, "I don't want any cotton balls to stick to my body, but I won't
39712 remove the glue from my body either." Then you enter the cotton factory.
39713 Of course the glue, by its nature, makes cotton balls stick to you. In
39714 meditative language, that kind of stickiness is called deliberation or
39715 fabrication, and here we call it the state of nondetachment. The state of
39716 nondetachment is when you get entangled and you make the story line similar to
39717 that of a daytime soap opera in which four characters go on for twenty years.
39718 It keeps on multiplying and you exaggerate the situation. You create a state
39719 in your mind that is full of grasping, clinging, and attachment.
39720 -- Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche from "The Healing Power of Meditation: Leading
39721 Experts on Buddhism, Psychology, and Medicine Explore the Health Benefits
39722 of Contemplative Practice", edited by Andy Fraser, published by Shambhala
39723 Publications and Snow Lion Publications
39725 According to Sthiramati, though samsara has the nature of nirvana, in
39726 ordinary beings true reality is obscured by their tendencies of clinging to a
39727 self and really existing phenomena. Thus, they do not see emptiness, which
39728 actually exists, but they naturally perceive the actually nonexistent
39729 phenomena of apprehender and apprehended, just as when mistakenly not seeing
39730 an existent rope, but seeing it as a nonexistent snake.
39731 Bodhisattvas lack the clinging to a self and phenomena and thus they
39732 naturally see true reality--emptiness--while not seeing any duality, just as
39733 correctly seeing an existent rope, while not seeing it as a nonexistent snake.
39734 When existent emptiness--true reality--is seen and the nonexistent
39735 characteristics of apprehender and apprehended are not seen anymore, the
39736 alaya-consciousness--the dependent nature--has undergone the fundamental
39737 change. This fundamental change is liberation and nirvana.
39738 Just as people liberated from bondage can do what they please, once this
39739 fundamental change occurs, bodhisattvas are liberated because they have gained
39740 mastery over their minds, which abide like space without any appearance of
39741 characteristics. Thus, no matter what they encounter, they are able to act as
39742 they please without being bound by any attachment or aversion.
39743 -- Karl Brunnhölzl, from "Mining for Wisdom within Delusion: Maitreya's
39744 Distinction between Phenomena and the Nature of Phenomena and Its Indian
39745 and Tibetan Commentaries", published by Shambhala Publications and Snow
39748 Our awareness of feelings in the body and mind ranges from simple frustration
39749 and malaise to anguish, despair, and white-hot physical pain, and from simple
39750 pleasures to extraordinary ecstasy. As we become clearly cognizant of the
39751 bandwidth of our own feelings, we direct our awareness externally. We become
39752 vividly aware that myriad sentient beings around us are not simply objects of
39753 our pleasure, displeasure, or indifference, but have feelings just like ours.
39754 By turning our awareness outward and closely applying mindfulness to other
39755 sentient beings, we can empathize with their feelings. When we empathize with
39756 another's suffering and we attend closely, compassion arises. The suffering
39757 of unpleasant feelings is the very source of the experience of compassion.
39758 -- B. Alan Wallace, in "Minding Closely: The Four Applications of
39759 Mindfulness", works published by Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion
39762 It is our aim to have genuine loving-kindness toward all sentient beings
39763 because we see them suffering. In the Mahayana tradition, it says that
39764 through our innumerable lifetimes, at some time or other, every single
39765 sentient being has been in the relation to us of our mother, our friends, or
39766 someone who has helped us. We look at all sentient beings in this way. We
39767 feel a deep yearning to help them because they have helped us. When we
39768 contemplate in this way, we find that some kind of compassion begins to take
39770 -- Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in "The Tibetan Buddhism Reader", published by
39771 Shambhala Publications
39773 If there is one constant tendency of our fickle and ever-changing minds, it is
39774 our strong predilection for ordinary distractions. Until we learn to master
39775 our thoughts and attain true stability of mind, our commitment is bound to be
39776 hesitant, and we run the risk of being distracted by activities with little
39777 true meaning, wasting our life and the precious opportunities for the Dharma
39778 it has brought us. To postpone the practice of Dharma until tomorrow is
39779 tantamount to postponing it till we die.
39780 -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Padampa Sangye, in "The Hundred Verses of
39781 Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most", published by
39782 Shambhala Publications
39784 The dharma is based on honesty, on not having self-deception of any kind.
39785 When the dharma says blue, it is blue; when it says red, it is red. Dharma is
39786 like saying fire is hot, or the sky is blue: it is speaking the truth. The
39787 difference is that dharma is the truth of the reality of the journey toward
39788 freedom. Saying that red is red does not particularly liberate you from
39789 seeing green or yellow. But when dharma speaks about reality, we see that it
39790 is worth stepping out of our little world of habitual patterns, our little
39791 nest. In that way, the dharma brings greater vision.
39792 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Path of Individual Liberation, Volume One of
39793 The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma", published by Shambhala
39796 So, what makes you a Buddhist? You may not have been born in a Buddhist
39797 country or to a Buddhist family, you may not wear robes or shave your head,
39798 you may eat meat and idolize Eminem and Paris Hilton. That doesn't mean you
39799 cannot be a Buddhist. In order to be a Buddhist, you must accept that all
39800 compounded phenomena are impermanent, all emotions are pain, all things have
39801 no inherent existence, and enlightenment is beyond concepts.
39802 It's not necessary to be constantly and endlessly mindful of these four
39803 truths. But they must reside in your mind. You don't walk around
39804 persistently remembering your own name, but when someone asks your name, you
39805 remember it instantly. There is no doubt. Anyone who accepts these four
39806 seals, even independently of Buddha's teachings, even never having heard the
39807 name Shakyamuni Buddha, can be considered to be on the same path as he.
39808 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, from "What Makes You Not a Buddhist",
39809 published by Shambhala Publications
39811 The self-centered thought is not who we are. The self-centered thought is
39812 different from the mind that wants to be happy because we're sentient
39813 beings. Everybody wants to be happy. There's no problem with wanting to be
39814 happy. The problem is the way the self-centered thought goes about thinking
39815 of our happiness and the way it goes about getting happiness. It is a
39816 distorted mental state that can be eliminated by seeing its disadvantages,
39817 applying the antidotes, and cultivating the mind that cherishes others.
39818 - Thubten Chodron, from "Don't Believe Everything You Think: Living with
39819 Wisdom and Compassion", published by Shambhala Publications
39821 According to the sutras, numerous eons ago, when the Buddha was an ordinary
39822 being, he took rebirth in a hell realm. He suffered gravely there as a result
39823 of his past negative karma.
39824 He and a companion were forced to pull a wheel of fire on which a wrathful
39825 hell-guard was sitting, holding a burning club with which to beat them. His
39826 companion was so weak that he couldn't pull the wheel anymore. The hell-
39827 guard stabbed his companion with a burning trident. His companion kept crying
39828 loudly and bleeding profusely. At that moment, with strong love and
39829 compassion, the Buddha developed enlightened aspiration, a vow to take
39830 responsibility for helping his companion and all the suffering beings from the
39831 depth of his heart, and he became a bodhisattva for the first time.
39832 The bodhisattva begged the hell-guard, "Please have a little mercy on my
39833 suffering companion." At that, in a rage the hellguard hit him with a
39834 burning trident. Because of the power of his strong compassion, the
39835 bodhisattva died and was liberated from the hell-realm. His evil deeds of
39836 many eons were purified instantly by the power of such enlightened aspiration.
39837 Thereafter, he started his journey toward the fully enlightened state of
39839 -- Tulku Thondup, from "Incarnation: The History and Mysticism of the Tulku
39840 Tradition of Tibet", published by Shambhala Publications
39842 Below rocky cliffs,
39843 a vivid sense of impermanence and disenchantment dawns,
39844 clear and inspired, helping us to achieve
39845 the union of calm abiding and penetrating insight.
39846 -- Longchenpa, from "The Life of Longchenpa: The Omniscient Dharma King of
39847 the Vast Expanse", by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, published by Shambhala
39850 From one point of view, personal liberation without freeing others is selfish
39851 and unfair, because all sentient beings also have the natural right and desire
39852 to be free of suffering. Therefore, it is important for practitioners to
39853 engage in the practice of the stages of the path of the highest scope,
39854 starting with the generation of bodhichitta, the altruistic aspiration to
39855 achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Once one has
39856 cultivated bodhichitta, all the meritorious actions that are supported by and
39857 complemented with this altruism--even the slightest form of positive
39858 action--become causes for the achievement of omniscience.
39859 -- H. H. the Dalai Lama, from "The Fourteenth Dalai Lama in A Beginner's
39860 Guide to Meditation: Practical Advice and Inspiration from Contemporary
39861 Buddhist Teachers", published by Shambhala Publications
39863 Note that all dualistic concepts and emotions--even positive ones such as
39864 caring, compassion, and wishing others well--are accompanied by grasping at
39865 "self." So although positive emotions are good, they still fall short of
39866 perfection, which is the primordial wisdom beyond dualistic thinking and
39867 emotional sensations. Grasping at positive qualities is nonetheless a
39868 stepping-stone to perfection, helping us eventually to loosen the grip of
39869 grasping at "self" and to experience sensations of peace and joy. So,
39870 transforming from negative to positive, and then from positive to perfection,
39871 is the ideal way to move toward buddhahood, or full perfection.
39872 -- Tulku Thondup, from "Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth: A Tibetan Buddhist
39873 Guidebook", published by Shambhala Publications
39875 In the final stanza of his salutation, Tsong-kha-pa (1: 34) calls upon
39876 readers who may benefit from this approach, asking them to listen well. Such
39877 readers will be those with minds unclouded by biased thinking, the mental
39878 capacity to distinguish right from wrong, and an interest in finding real
39879 meaning in their human existence of leisure and opportunity. He asks those of
39880 us with such good fortune, "Please listen to what I have to say with a
39881 single-pointed mind."
39882 Again, this is strikingly similar to Aryadeva's Four Hundred, which says
39883 that a practitioner of the Dharma who is listening to the teachings needs
39884 three qualities: objectivity, critical intelligence, and a real interest in
39885 what is being taught.
39886 -- H. H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in "From Here to Enlightenment: An
39887 Introduction to Tsong-kha-pa's Classic Text The Great Treatise on the
39888 Stages of the Path to Enlightenment", published by Shambhala Publications
39890 When we look back, at the time of death, the experience of this life will seem
39891 like a dream. And--just as with our nighttime dreams--it will seem useless
39892 to have put so much effort into it. The fear we experience in a dream is gone
39893 when we wake up; feeling afraid was just an unnecessary exertion of effort
39894 causing us to lose sleep! When we look back on our lives at death, the amount
39895 of time we spent in hesitation, aggression, ignorance, selfishness, jealousy,
39896 hatred, self-preservation, and arrogance will seem like an equally useless
39897 exertion of energy. So be able to regard all of these illusory thoughts and
39898 concepts as dreams. Within this illusory existence, what, if anything, is the
39899 logic behind any stubbornness, distraction, hesitation, or habitual emotions
39900 of aggression, desire, selfishness, and jealousy? What is the use of holding
39901 on to these useless emotions within impermanence? Impermanence is the nature
39903 -- Khandro Rinpoche, from "Buddha's Daughters: Teachings from Women Who
39904 Are Shaping Buddhism in the West", published by Shambhala Publications
39906 Please listen without your minds wandering.
39907 Though I am not skilled in composing songs,
39908 This is the way to understand the true oral instructions.
39909 Keep this in mind and ponder it.
39911 The three worlds are primordially pure.
39912 Ultimately, there is nothing more to understand.
39913 Not negation, unceasing continuity,
39914 Unchanging--such is the view.
39916 The innate essence is naturally luminous.
39917 Unconditioned, meditation is unceasing.
39918 Not negation, beyond losing and gaining,
39919 Without desire or attachment--such is the meditation.
39921 Arising from the natural occurrence of various coincidences,
39922 The play of illusion is unobstructed.
39924 Things are unpredictable, abrupt--such is the action.
39926 Mind shines as bodhicitta.
39927 There is no attainment of the three kayas of buddha.
39928 Not negation, beyond hope and fear,
39929 Without ground or root--such is the fruition.
39930 - from "The Life of Marpa the Translator", translated by Chögyam Trungpa
39931 and the Nalanda Translation Committee, published by Shambhala Publications
39933 FDR's Economic Bill of Rights
39935 It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy
39936 for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American
39937 standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no
39938 matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of
39939 our people--whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth--is ill-fed,
39940 ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
39941 This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under
39942 the protection of certain inalienable political rights--among them the right
39943 of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from
39944 unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
39945 As our nation has grown in size and stature, however--as our industrial
39946 economy expanded--these political rights proved inadequate to assure us
39947 equality in the pursuit of happiness.
39948 We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual
39949 freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
39950 "Necessitous men are not free men."[3] People who are hungry and out of a
39951 job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
39952 In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We
39953 have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of
39954 security and prosperity can be established for all--regardless of station,
39959 The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or
39960 farms or mines of the nation;
39962 The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and
39965 The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which
39966 will give him and his family a decent living;
39968 The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere
39969 of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or
39972 The right of every family to a decent home;
39974 The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and
39977 The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age,
39978 sickness, accident, and unemployment;
39980 The right to a good education.
39982 All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be
39983 prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals
39984 of human happiness and well-being.
39985 America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how
39986 fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our
39988 For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in
39990 -- Excerpt from President Roosevelt's January 11, 1944 message to the
39991 Congress of the United States on the State of the Union
39993 Whatever arises in our mind--whether it's a thought, an emotion, a
39994 sensation, or a perception--is the arising of coemergent wisdom. It is the
39995 radiation of the mind's emptiness and clarity. Every arising is a temporary
39996 arising--one thought comes and goes, then another thought comes and goes.
39997 All our thoughts and emotions just appear and disappear.
39998 This is very important, because we usually grasp at whatever occurs. For
39999 instance, when sadness arises, we hold on to this feeling and think, "I am
40000 so sad, I am so depressed." But from the Mahamudra point of view, what has
40001 happened? A feeling has arisen in the mind, like a cloud. Like a cloud, it
40002 appears and then it disappears, and that's all there is to it. This time it
40003 is sadness arising, the next time it may be happiness, the next time it may be
40004 anger, and later it may be kindness. All sorts of things arise, like
40005 wildflowers in a spring meadow. All sorts of flowers grow; all sorts of
40006 thoughts and emotions arise. They are all okay; they're nothing special.
40007 When we understand what our thoughts and feelings are, and we experience them
40008 in this way, we are able to let them come and let them go.
40009 -- Ringu Tulku, from "Confusion Arises as Wisdom: Gampopa's Heart Advice on
40010 the Path of Mahamudra", published by Shambhala Publications
40012 The second quality of devotion is absence of arrogance. The arrogant
40013 approach is to be so passionately involved with our teacher that we become
40014 devotional chauvinists and cease to see the rest of the world properly. In
40015 fact, we become passionately involved with our own arrogance. We indulge our
40016 "devotion" by collecting information, techniques, stories, little words of
40017 wisdom--all to confirm our chauvinistic view. It actually reaches a point
40018 that the teacher upon whom our arrogance is based himself becomes a threat.
40019 The absurdity is that we even end up wanting to use our collection of
40020 ammunition against our teacher when he begins giving our "devotion" a hard
40022 If our devotion is without arrogance there is not this resentment toward the
40023 world or the guru. Absence of such arrogance is absolutely necessary. When
40024 courting a teacher, students frequently make a sort of detailed application,
40025 listing all their insights and spiritual credentials. That is too arrogant;
40026 it is phony, out of the question altogether. It is fine to offer our
40027 particular skills or neuroses to the guru as a gift or an opening gesture.
40028 But if we begin to dress up our neuroses as virtues, like a person writing a
40029 resumé, that is unacceptable. Devotion without arrogance demands that we
40030 stop clinging to our particular case history, that we relate to the teacher
40031 and to the world in a naked and direct way, without hiding behind credentials.
40032 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Heart of the Buddha: Entering the Tibetan
40033 Buddhist Path", published by Shambhala Publications
40035 To study and to contemplate what one has learned is very important, but these
40036 two can only progress if one engages in meditation practice. Thus, the
40037 importance of each of these three--moral conduct, study, and
40038 meditation--cannot be underestimated. If one practices these free of
40039 attachment to this life, the benefits are enormous. But to pursue these while
40040 seeking worldly attainments means one will not receive the benefits that would
40041 be gained by a genuine spiritual practitioner. For this reason, it will be
40042 best if you abandon any inauthentic approaches to ethical discipline, study,
40044 -- Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, in "Parting from the Four Attachments: A
40045 Commentary on Jetsun Drakpa Gyaltsen's Song of Experience on Mind
40046 Training and the View", published by Shambhala Publications
40048 If what appears to be apprehended does not exist by its very own essence apart
40049 from that which apprehends it, then what appears to be the apprehender does
40050 not exist either. The reason, here, is that the apprehender exists in
40051 relation to the apprehended, not in isolation. Therefore, awareness is devoid
40052 of both apprehender and apprehended, in all their various forms. Free from
40053 subject and object, by its very own nature awareness is a mere indescribable
40055 -- from "Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Intrinsic Nature: Maitreya's
40056 Dharmadharmatavibhanga with Commentaries by Khenpo Shenga and Ju Mipham",
40057 published by Shambhala Publications
40059 "Immediately join whatever you meet with meditation"
40061 This slogan refers to the practice of transforming adverse circumstances
40062 and situations into the path of awakening. It is a reminder not to respond to
40063 things in a habitual way, but rather to respond with understanding, openness,
40064 and courage by maintaining a sense of awareness. We shouldn't think of
40065 meditation as something we only do if we're sitting on a cushion, but should
40066 treat everyday situations as meditations by focusing our mind on whatever
40067 arises. There's nothing we can't utilize for our own and others'
40068 benefit if we use both fortunate and unfortunate circumstances to train the
40070 -- Traleg Kyabgon, "The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through
40071 Training the Mind", published by Shambhala Publications
40073 O monks, you should focus on four things. What are these four? To focus on
40074 the teachings and not focus on the individual; to focus on the meaning and not
40075 focus on the words; to focus on timeless awareness and not focus on ordinary
40076 consciousness; and to focus on the definitive meaning and not focus on the
40077 meaning that guides. These four things are things to be realized; they are
40078 not four kinds of spiritual individuals.
40079 -- Jamgön Kongtrul, from "The Treasury of Knowledge: Book Seven and Book
40080 Eight, Parts One and Two: Foundations of Buddhist Study and Practice",
40081 published by Shambhala Publications
40083 One way to prevent mental suffering is to observe ourselves and figure out
40084 what triggers our problem. If we can identify what makes our blood pressure
40085 rise and causes us to feel upset, then we have taken a big step toward seeing
40086 the larger picture. With this wider perspective, there is less chance that we
40087 will jump back into an old habitual pattern that only makes us feel bad.
40088 It is not that we have to stop going to all family holidays, but that we
40089 figure out ways to enjoy the parts that are enjoyable, like the delicious food
40090 and the chance to connect with people, and to feel more neutral and detached
40091 about the annoying or hurtful moments. We often place too many expectations
40092 and requirements on ourselves and those around us. We could give the
40093 situation a little space and see what develops. The kindest thing we can do
40094 in these situations is to remain calm and refrain from causing more
40096 -- Khenpo Gawang, from "Your Mind Is Your Teacher: Self-Awakening through
40097 Contemplative Meditation", published by Shambhala Publications
40099 Those who wish to protect their practice should zealously guard the mind.
40100 The practice cannot be protected without guarding the unsteady mind.
40101 Tigers, lions, elephants, bears, snakes, all enemies, all guardians of
40102 hells, evil spirits, and demons become controlled by controlling the mind
40103 alone. By subduing the mind alone, they all become subdued.
40104 For the Propounder of the Truth said that all fears and immeasurable
40105 sufferings arise from the mind only.
40106 -- Shantideva, "A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life", published by
40107 Shambhala Publications
40109 Products are specially designed to catch the eye and captivate the mind.
40110 Because we focus on what else there is to acquire, rather than what we already
40111 have, we fall into the endless upgrade game. "The functions you need are
40112 coming in the next version! The new design is so much more attractive! And
40113 it comes in your favorite color!" These products may be mass-produced, but
40114 they are custom-made to suit our greed and grasping. They are exactly
40115 tailored to deceive us with their appearances.
40116 As I see it, however, the bigger problem is the gullibility of our mind.
40117 This is what really leaves us vulnerable to the deceptive allure of things.
40118 In other words, we ourselves are the bigger problem. Sometimes we are like
40119 small children; when it comes to assessing our own needs, we often show no
40120 sign of maturity. Just think about it: When a little child cries, the easy
40121 way to stop him is to give him a toy. We dangle it in front of him and wave
40122 it around to catch his attention until he reaches out to grab it. When we
40123 finally hand over the toy, he quiets down. Our goal was just to stop his
40124 crying. We did not try to address the child's underlying needs. We gave
40125 him something else to desire, and tricked him into falling silent for the time
40127 -- H.H. the Seventeenth Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, "The Heart Is Noble:
40128 Changing the World from the Inside Out", published by Shambhala Publications
40130 Vajrayana is very different from the New Age approach. The difference is that
40131 the Vajrayana teachings are controlled by the lineage. I know we don't like
40132 the word control, but the Vajrayana teachings are actually held by the
40133 authority of the lineage. I know we also don't like the word authority, but
40134 we have it in Vajrayana. When we have this pure lineage, this genuine
40135 lineage, there is no space for our egocentric interpretation of dharma. We
40136 cannot interpret dharma like the New Age gurus. We cannot invent a new
40137 lineage because a lineage must be received. It must be received by
40138 transmission. It is not something we can just create here. That would be New
40139 Age, probably from California.
40140 -- Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, from "Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of
40141 Samantabhadra", published by Shambhala Publications
40143 Even when it is practiced, accomplishing shamata is rare. One of the very
40144 common problems is that people try too hard. Both Tibetans and Westerners
40145 could learn a lot about relaxing more deeply and letting the stability arise
40146 from that relaxation. Although it is mentioned in the texts, the Tibetans
40147 sometimes do not emphasize this point, but they do emphasize tight attention,
40148 not letting your object drop for even a second. If you are coming from a very
40149 serene space, and your mind is already very spacious, then that is probably
40150 good advice. But otherwise, such attention can be a big problem. You can
40151 exhaust yourself and cause nervous fatigue, and if you push it, you can really
40152 do yourself some damage.
40153 -- B. Alan Wallace, from "The Four Immeasurables: Practices to Open the Heart"
40155 If you want good health, you must insure that your diet is well-balanced and
40156 complete. You wouldn't just gobble up anything edible that comes your way.
40157 Spiritual food should be approached with equal care. The practices you choose
40158 should be genuine and complete. Sakyapandita said that when we're buying a
40159 jewel or a horse--and the same would apply these days to buying a car or a
40160 house--we shop around and ask others for advice, but a wise or unwise
40161 purchase can only affect our fortunes in this life. The spiritual practices
40162 we undertake can assure or jeopardize our well-being throughout many future
40163 lifetimes, and so it is essential to make a wise choice. Milarepa said that
40164 unless the teachings we practice are free from errors and have come down to us
40165 through a living and uninterrupted tradition, time spent meditating in a
40166 mountain retreat will just be self-inflicted misery.
40167 -- Geshe Sonam Rinchen, in "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path",
40168 published by Shambhala Publications
40170 Hark! In order to be of maximum benefit to the countless living beings,
40171 whose number is as vast as the extent of the skies, one must first gain the
40172 state of peerless, complete, perfect buddhahood. It is with this thought in
40173 mind that one receives initiation, the root of the Vajrayana path, and then
40174 engages in the various Tantric yogas.
40175 Contemplate this theme, and by means of it generate the sublime bodhi-mind
40176 as the motivating factor. Also, cultivate the correct attitudes that are to
40177 be maintained when listening to the Dharma, as is explained in the many sutras
40178 and tantras, and thus listen correctly.
40179 The Buddha, who himself achieved complete enlightenment and who possessed
40180 profound skill and great compassion, taught the nectarlike Dharma in
40181 accordance with the mental tendencies, capacities, and karmic predispositions
40182 of those to be trained.
40183 -- Glenn H. Mullin, "From the Heart of Chenrezig: The Dalai Lamas on Tantra"
40184 published by Shambhala Publications
40186 You might say, "Don't pleasurable experiences give rise to happiness?"
40187 Although for ordinary people pleasures may appear to be related to happiness
40188 at the time they are enjoyed, in the end they are their undoing. They are,
40189 the Sovereign of the Conquerors said, like the fruit of the kimba tree, which
40190 grows in the western continent of Aparagodaniya: its skin is attractive but it
40191 is unpleasant inside; or it tastes delicious when one first eats it, but later
40192 it makes one ill. So, advises Nagarjuna, give up these pleasures, for it is
40193 the chains--the afflictive emotions--of attachment to pleasure that tightly
40194 bind the worldly in the prison of samsara.
40195 -- Nagarjuna, from "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend with Commentary by
40196 Kyabje Kangyur Rinpoche", published by Shambhala Publications
40198 The wish to understand the true nature of mind by relying on technology is
40199 due to the fault of not having awakened one's Buddha nature, and because of
40200 that, the absolute and relative nature of one's uncompounded mind just as it
40201 is cannot be recognized even slightly, which is the reason for relying only on
40202 the compounded gross material substance of technology. While examining the
40203 qualities of one's own and others' practice by bringing together a machine
40204 and the one who uses the machine, if any special conception arises about its
40205 being good, bad, high, or low, it will only be a fragmented, deluded
40206 interdependent conception that momentarily appears, and not nonconceptual
40207 enlightened body and wisdom, which are inconceivable. It will just be like
40208 children blowing bubbles in the air and trying to catch these rainbow-colored
40209 bubbles with their hands. As Santideva says about the dream of a barren
40211 For example, a barren woman dreams her son is dead. When she awakens, she
40212 thinks that she has no son. That conception of not having a son comes from
40213 the conception of having a son. So, both of these conceptions are obstacles
40215 -- Thinley Norbu, from "The Sole Panacea: A Brief Commentary on the Seven-
40216 Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche That Cures the Suffering of the Sickness of
40217 Karma and Defilement", published by Shambhala Publications
40219 The nature of mind is primordially the identity of the three bodies of
40220 enlightenment. Its essence is empty, the dharma body. Its nature is lucid,
40221 the enjoyment body. Freed upon arising, with no clinging, it is the emanation
40222 body. Manifesting as its expression are the male aspect of relative
40223 appearance, method, and the female aspect of ultimate emptiness, knowledge.
40224 The circle of the Magical Web is the unity of these, a wisdom manifestation of
40225 indivisible appearance and emptiness.
40226 -- Kunkyen Tenpe Nyima and Shechen Gyaltsap IV, in "Vajra Wisdom: Deity
40227 Practice in Tibetan Buddhism", published by Shambhala Publications
40229 Whatever sensory experiences we go through, if we go through them with
40230 mindfulness and awareness, there is no limit to how far we can go. The limit
40231 is mindfulness and awareness. Even if we don't enjoy the experience, that
40232 itself becomes a trip. The nonenjoyment becomes a cause of suffering.
40233 That's why, if we don't practice mindfulness and awareness, asceticism
40234 just becomes pain rather than a cause for liberation. That's why Buddha
40235 said to forget about asceticism. That's what Buddha did. He left
40236 asceticism, became very mindful in every step, and achieved enlightenment.
40237 -- Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, from "Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of
40238 Samantabhadra", published by Shambhala Publications
40240 When we turn away from samsara, we stop blaming external situations for the
40241 state of our mind, and we begin to use the Buddha's teachings in order to
40242 take responsibility for our own well-being. We reorient the mind away from
40243 causes and conditions that create suffering. This does not mean that we turn
40244 away from the suffering that humans create, such as warfare, poverty,
40245 prejudice, slaughter, or environmental destruction. We do not turn away or
40246 become passive, impartial spectators. However, we need to assess our
40247 strategies for engagement. Many well-meaning people assume that inflaming
40248 passions, especially anger, is a justifiable, necessary, even beneficial
40249 response to injustice. They often assume that anger is an automatic and
40250 inherent response to injustice, in the same way that exasperation is an
40251 inherent response to waiting at the airport. But it is not. Anger does not
40252 allow us to see clearly, so the good intentions of people engaged in trying to
40253 help others can actually be hindered by their own negativity. Anger does not
40254 allow us to act with true compassion, because the mind of anger keeps us
40255 trapped inside ourselves. Turning away from samsara means figuring out how to
40256 function with an open, clear mind, not a mind shut down and incapacitated by
40257 destructive emotions.
40258 -- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, "Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the
40259 Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism", published by Shambhala
40262 The key to understanding the Mahayana and Vajrayana views lies in
40263 Nagarjuna's reasonings. This is because the reason the aggregates and
40264 suffering can be described as being pure by nature is that they are empty by
40265 nature--they are unborn. They never actually come into existence. Something
40266 that never really comes into existence cannot possibly be impure, for what is
40267 there to be impure in the first place? It is like getting covered with filth
40268 in a dream--no matter how dirty you might seem to be, since not a single
40269 particle of the filth is real, in fact there is no impurity at all. Since
40270 there is no impurity, there cannot actually be any purity either, just as when
40271 you take a bath in the dream after having gotten so filthy, your cleanliness
40272 after the bath is just as lacking in reality as the dirtiness that preceded
40273 it. Therefore, the true nature of the dream transcends both purity and
40274 impurity, and this is given the name "original purity." We have to
40275 understand that what original purity refers to is the freedom from all
40276 fabrications, the emptiness in which we can gain certainty by using
40277 Nagarjuna's reasonings.
40278 -- Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, from "The Sun of Wisdom: Teachings on the Noble
40279 Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way", published by Shambhala
40282 Beginning and end depend on nothing but imagination.
40283 Through windlike formation,
40284 Karma and afflictions are created.
40285 Through these, the skandhas, dhatus, and ayatanas--
40286 All dualistically appearing phenomena--are displayed.
40288 The one who adopts and rejects these is mistakenness.
40289 Through rejecting [mind's] own appearances, where should they cease?
40290 Through adopting [mind's] own appearances, what should come about?
40291 Is clinging to duality not delusive?
40293 Understanding this is indeed said to be the remedy,
40294 But the thought of nonduality is not real [either],
40295 For the lack of thought [just] turns into a thought.
40296 You thought about emptiness, dissecting form and so on into parts,
40297 Are you not mistaken yourself?
40298 Nevertheless, this was taught in order to stop the clinging to reality.
40300 All is neither real nor delusive--
40301 Held to be like [a reflection of] the moon in water by the learned.
40302 Just this ordinary mind
40303 Is called "dharmadhatu" and "Heart of the victors."
40304 It is neither to be improved by the noble ones
40305 Nor made worse by sentient beings.
40306 -- from "Luminous Heart: The Third Karmapa on Consciousness, Wisdom, and
40307 Buddha Nature", translated by Karl Brunnhölzl, published by Shambhala
40310 It is possible to mistake attachment for loving-kindness and compassion.
40311 Love and compassion are distinguished from attachment in that they apply
40312 equally to your friends and your enemies. Genuine love and compassion make no
40313 distinction based on your relationship to the object of compassion. They are
40314 the wish that all sentient beings without exception have happiness and the
40315 causes of happiness, and the wish that all sentient beings without exception
40316 be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. The keynote of those two
40317 attitudes is that there is no hope involved of any kind of return or any sort
40318 of personal satisfaction as a result of the happiness of others.
40319 In the case of attachment to someone, you wish that person well but it is
40320 based on an identification with him or her as "my friend, my son, my
40321 daughter." This identification and this feeling of ownership or
40322 territoriality is related to wanting some kind of return. You enjoy the
40323 happiness of that person because you have identified with him or her, and
40324 therefore in essence it is just wishing for your own benefit. Such attachment
40325 can very easily turn to aversion, anger, and hatred. That is the difference
40326 between compassion and attachment.
40327 -- Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, from "The Instructions of Gampopa: A Precious
40328 Garland of the Supreme Path", published by Shambhala Publications
40330 Sometimes it seems as if the mind is outside someplace. We see all these
40331 things outside. We see mountains or we hear echoes off of cliffs. We have
40332 all these different thoughts of different places, and the mind seems to go to
40333 those places when we think about them. But it only seems that way; the mind
40334 is not really outside of us either. It dwells neither in external objects nor
40335 someplace in the body--we cannot find any place in the body where it is. You
40336 might then think that since it is not in the body and it is not outside the
40337 body, it must be in the empty space in between. But if you look, you cannot
40338 find it. We need to look and become certain that the mind has no dwelling
40339 place--we must be certain that there is no real place that we can we can
40340 point to and say, "Aha! That's where it is!"
40341 -- Khenchen Thrangu, "Vivid Awareness: The Mind Instructions of Khenpo
40342 Gangshar", published by Shambhala Publications
40344 Not only are our adverse experiences beneficial for our own path, but they are
40345 the best way for us to connect with others. Suffering is a universal
40346 experience. This is why the Buddha chose suffering as the first topic of his
40347 teachings. So when we connect with our own suffering, we can also recall that
40348 many beings all over the world are having similar experiences. This helps us
40349 develop understanding, love, and compassion for others.
40350 -- Rose Taylor Goldfield, in "Training the Wisdom Body: Buddhist Yogic
40351 Exercise", published by Shambhala Publications
40353 Once we recognize that other sentient beings--people, animals, and even
40354 insects--are just like us, that their basic motivation is to experience peace
40355 and to avoid suffering, then when someone acts in some way or says something
40356 that is against our wishes, we're able to have some basis for understanding:
40357 "Oh, well, this person (or whatever) is coming from this position because,
40358 just like me, they want to be happy and they want to avoid suffering.
40359 That's their basic purpose. They're not out to get me; they're only
40360 doing what they think they need to do."
40361 Compassion is the spontaneous wisdom of the heart. It's always with us.
40362 It always has been and always will be. When it arises in us, we've simply
40363 learned to see how strong and safe we really are.
40364 -- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche from "All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and
40365 Acceptance", published by Shambhala Publications
40367 Who knows the true nature of things? The actual knower--the empty, cognizant
40368 aspect of mind--is the primordial Buddha, Samantabhadra, the personification
40369 of one's own rigpa. Rigpa, the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, is very,
40370 very important. It is the clear light, luminous buddha-nature, that which
40371 knows. Innate awareness-wisdom, rigpa, is functioning through us even now, if
40373 -- Nyoshul Khenpo and Lama Surya Das, "Natural Great Perfection: Dzogchen
40374 Teachings and Vajra Songs", published by Shambhala Publications
40376 I recognize that this wish to create a better society, end all the suffering
40377 of all beings everywhere, and protect the entire planet may not seem
40378 particularly feasible. But whether or not we accomplish such goals in our
40379 lifetime, it is nevertheless deeply meaningful to cultivate such a vast sense
40380 of responsibility, and the wholehearted wish to be able to benefit others.
40381 This outlook is so wholesome and noble that it is worth developing, regardless
40382 of the probability of actually accomplishing such a vast vision.
40383 -- H.H. the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, "The Heart Is Noble:
40384 Changing the World from the Inside Out", published by Shambhala
40387 Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
40390 We might feel terrible, utterly hopeless, but if we look at ourselves fully
40391 and thoroughly, we will find fundamental goodness. There is something that
40392 makes us look up at the blue sky or the clouds or the sun, something that
40393 allows us to polish our shoes and press our clothes. When we wake up in the
40394 morning, there is something that allows us to brush our teeth, comb our hair,
40395 or use a bar of soap. Such actions may seem rather ordinary, but they come
40396 from a very powerful instinct. That sense of workability comes from ultimate
40398 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma. Volume
40399 Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion", published by
40400 Shambhala Publications
40402 Respect and develop pure perception and devotion toward
40403 Those who are practicing Dharma as the noble sangha.
40404 If you see faults in others, think that they're the reflections
40405 of your own delusions.
40406 If you see good qualities in others, meditate on rejoicing
40408 Disclose and expel your own faults.
40409 Generate virtuous qualities and act with astonishing perserverance.
40410 Be with holy people and abandon evil friends.
40411 Stay in solitary places and promise to pursue meditation.
40412 Make sure that whatever you do is consonant with Dharma practice.
40413 -- Longchen Rabjam, "Counsel for Liberation", published by Shambhala
40416 The key point of the mahayana approach is the commitment to dedicate yourself
40417 to helping other sentient beings. Building yourself up or perpetuating your
40418 own existence is regarded as neurosis. Instead of building yourself up, you
40419 should continue with your pursuit of helping others. Instead of being
40420 selfish, you should empty yourself. The basic definition of ego is holding on
40421 to one's existence--and paramita practices are techniques that allow you
40422 not to grasp onto or propagate the notion of me-ness, or "I am." Experiencing
40423 egolessness is a process of letting go. But you do not regard the ego as an
40424 enemy or obstacle, you regard it as a brussels sprout that you cook and eat.
40425 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma. Volume
40426 Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion", published by
40427 Shambhala Publications
40429 Sentient beings are brought to maturation through three forms of generosity:
40430 giving all, giving equally, and giving tirelessly. Bodhisattvas do not have
40431 even one iota of their own body or enjoyments that they are not willing to
40432 give to others if they see that it would help the other person to do so. They
40433 give all that they possess.
40434 Moreover, their generosity does not simply benefit others by supplying them
40435 with the particular thing that is given. It benefits others in this life by
40436 completely fulfilling their wishes, and, as it also matures them and
40437 establishes them in virtue, which is the cause of the fulfillment of one's
40438 wishes, it benefits them in future lives as well. Thus, bodhisattvas
40439 establish these beings in lasting happiness by planting the seed of
40440 liberation. In this way, generosity matures sentient beings by helping them
40441 in two ways, insofar as there are both temporary and lasting benefits.
40442 Moreover, this generosity is practiced with equal regard for all. Since
40443 there are no biases in terms of the recipients' moral standing, social
40444 position, or relation to oneself, they characteristically practice giving
40446 Finally, not content with giving a confined number of material things for a
40447 certain number of years or eons, a bodhisattva never knows enough of the
40448 qualities of generosity, even were he or she to continue giving until the end
40449 of cyclic existence.
40450 -- from "Ornament of the Great Vehicle Sutras: Maitreya's
40451 Mahayanasutralamkara", with Commentaries by Khenpo Shenga and Ju Mipham,
40452 published by Shambhala Publications.
40454 Something I find worthy of meditation is how in the dialectic between Samsara
40455 and Nirvana, the dreamworld of Samsara is logically prior to and quite
40456 necessary for the awakening to Nirvana. When discussing Tantric Buddhism,
40457 Gunapala Dharmasiri says in the spirit of Nagarjuna, "We make a Samsara out of
40458 Nirvana through our conceptual projections. Tantrics maintain that the world
40459 is there for two purposes. One is to help us to attain enlightenment. As the
40460 world is, in fact, Nirvana, the means of the world can be utilized to realize
40461 Nirvana, when used in the correct way."
40462 -- Charles Johnson, "Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on
40463 Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice", published by Shambhala
40466 Basically speaking, when you say "I am," you begin to ask yourself the
40467 question, "Who said that?" You might say, "I said that." But then you
40468 ask, "Who are you?" And when you look, you find it is very difficult to
40469 find out who that actually is. You might timidly come back to saying your
40470 name, thinking that this is who is speaking, but beyond the name that was
40471 given to you, nothing really exists. You may think that you exist because
40472 your name is so-and-so, or because your driver's license says so-and-so.
40473 But if you look beyond such things, and beyond beyond, you find that there is
40474 no substance. That is ultimate prajna: it is the discovery of egolessness,
40475 which frees you from fixation.
40476 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma.
40477 Volume Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion", published by
40478 Shambhala Publications
40480 The appearances of this life--all the various appearances of forms, sounds,
40481 smells, tastes, and bodily sensations we perceive--seem to truly exist. But
40482 life's appearances do not say to us, "I am real." They only seem to be real
40483 from our confused thoughts' perspective when we think, "Those things really
40484 exist out there." That is like what we do in a dream when we do not know we
40486 Similarly, we mistakenly believe that aging, sickness, and death are truly
40487 existent... but this is just confused consciousness at work. The buddhas'
40488 perfect wisdom does not view this life, or the aging, sickness, and death that
40489 occur within it, as truly existent. The noble buddhas and bodhisattvas with
40490 wisdom that sees genuine reality do not see these events as real. Training in
40491 the view of the Mind-Only school that all phenomena are mind, and in the
40492 Middle Way view that all phenomena are emptiness, helps us transform our
40493 confused consciousness into perfect wisdom.
40494 -- Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso, in "Stars of Wisdom", published by Shambhala
40497 Egolessness is not the same as self-extinction. We do not cease to exist,
40498 but we come to know more about ourselves. Realizing that there is no
40499 unchanging self can in fact be an enriching experience. The path consists of
40500 working with ourselves so that gradually, by overcoming the various
40501 inhibitions, confusions, and delusions of the mind, we start to develop more
40502 insight into our own nature.
40503 When we look at ourselves in the present moment, we see all kinds of
40504 confusions and defilements in our mind. Yet the possibility of overcoming all
40505 that and becoming enlightened is a reality. Our own lives become enriched
40506 from having undertaken this journey. So it's important not to mistranslate
40507 this concept of selflessness or nonexistence of ego. To say that we do not
40508 exist at all is the nihilistic view, which the Buddha rejected completely.
40509 -- Traleg Kyabgon, from "The Essence of Buddhism: An Introduction to Its
40510 Philosophy and Practice", published by Shambhala Publications
40511 ##Karma is basically habit. It's the momentum of repeated actions that
40512 become habitual. It's in our best interest to develop as many positive
40513 habits as we can. In the Mahanama Sutta, the Buddha said, "Just as oil
40514 rises to the top of a pot submerged in water, your virtue, your goodness, your
40515 faith, or generosity will rise to the top, and that is what will carry you to
40516 your next destination."
40518 Karma is basically habit. It's the momentum of repeated actions that
40519 become habitual. It's in our best interest to develop as many positive
40520 habits as we can. In the Mahanama Sutta, the Buddha said, "Just as oil
40521 rises to the top of a pot submerged in water, your virtue, your goodness, your
40522 faith, or generosity will rise to the top, and that is what will carry you to
40523 your next destination."
40524 Try to get to the point where your emotional default is into bodhichitta.
40525 In other words, what is your automatic reflex to life situations, especially
40526 difficult ones? Do you think about yourself, and how you might profit or
40527 escape from a situation? Or do you think about others, and how you can help?
40528 Progress on the path, and a sign that you're well prepared for death, is
40529 when the former changes into the latter, when you default not into selfishness
40530 but into selflessness. If you're uncertain about what to do in a situation,
40531 just open your heart and love. This is training in bodhichitta.
40532 -- Andrew Holecek, from "Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual
40533 Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition", published by Shambhala
40536 When you explain or hear the teachings, if your mind and the teachings remain
40537 separate, then whatever is explained will be inconsequential. Hence, listen
40538 in such a way that you determine how these teachings apply to your mind. For
40539 example, when you want to find out whether or not there is some smudge, dirt,
40540 or whatever, on your face, you look in a mirror and then remove whatever is
40541 there. Similarly, when you listen to the teachings, your faults such as
40542 misconduct and attachment appear in the mirror of the teachings. At that
40543 time, you regret that your mind has become like this, and you then work to
40544 clear away those faults and establish good qualities.
40545 -- Tsong-kha-pa, from "The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to
40546 Enlightenment, Volume 1", published by Shambhala Publications
40548 We work hard to bring happiness and peace into our lives, but there is no way
40549 to achieve real peace through material goods alone. Perhaps we can accomplish
40550 a little artificial joy and happiness, but these don't last long. Truly
40551 substantial and lasting happiness and peace can be established only by
40552 exercising our inner mind with the precious Dharma teachings. This is the
40553 purpose of our meditation practice, and this is what Jigten Sumgön taught.
40554 Mental afflictions and neuroses can be pacified only through the Dharma.
40555 Dharma is the ultimate remedy for confusion.
40556 -- Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, "Opening the Treasure of the Profound",
40557 published by Shambhala Publications
40559 The purpose of practice is to habituate ourselves to openness. This means
40560 we need to understand reactive mind. How do we experience the difference
40561 between reacting and staying open?
40562 At what point do we decide to go with the habitual tendencies of
40563 exaggeration and denial or try something new? Where is the fork in the road?
40564 We need to explore these two experiences: reacting... staying open...
40565 reacting... staying open... reacting... staying open again. We begin to see
40566 the difference. It's a process of refinement. Our investigation cultivates
40567 a discerning intelligence that guides us in a positive direction.
40568 We need to ask ourselves: "If our confusion finds its genesis in our
40569 habit of turning away from the open state, what would happen if we habituated
40570 ourselves to staying open?"
40571 -- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, "The Power of an Open Question: The Buddha's
40572 Path to Freedom", published by Shambhala Publications
40574 Recognizing the instability of causes and conditions leads us to understand
40575 our own power to transform obstacles and make the impossible possible. This
40576 is true in every area of life. If you don't have a Ferrari, you very well
40577 may create the conditions to have one. As long as there is a Ferrari, there
40578 is the opportunity for you to own one. Likewise if you want to live longer,
40579 you can choose to stop smoking and exercise more. There is reasonable hope.
40580 Hopelessness--just like its opposite, blind hope--is the result of a belief
40582 You can transform not only your physical world but your emotional world,
40583 for example, turning agitation into peace of mind by letting go of ambition or
40584 turning low self-respect into confidence by acting out of kindness and
40585 philanthropy. If we all condition ourselves to put our feet in other
40586 people's shoes, we will cultivate peace in our homes, with our neighbors,
40587 and with other countries.
40588 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, "What Makes You Not a Buddhist", published by
40589 Shambhala Publications
40591 On the path of seeing there is (1) mindfulness whereby one does not forget the
40592 object, the truth; (2) the wisdom of perfect discernment with regard to the
40593 object; (3) diligence, delight in virtue, being assiduous in undertaking what
40594 is right and avoiding what is wrong in accordance with the path; (4) joy or
40595 mental happiness regarding the latter; (5) flexibility, in which mind and body
40596 function appropriately; (6) concentration; and (7) evenness, in which the mind
40597 enters the natural state, free from the conditions of lack of clarity and
40598 wildness. These seven are elements of the path of seeing, the essence of
40599 enlightenment. They will make one accumulate or accomplish the positive
40600 actions that help one attain nirvana.
40601 -- Nagarjuna, "Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend"
40603 What is the relationship between bodhichitta and love? When you are in
40604 love, your heart and mind are naturally open and awake to life. When you
40605 cultivate bodhichitta by opening and awakening your heart and mind, love can
40607 Bodhichitta is like opening the curtains, and love is like the sun shining
40608 through, bringing light and warmth into the room. Or we could say that
40609 bodhichitta is like opening the window, and love is the cool breeze that
40610 refreshes the stuffiness and stagnation of living inside a personal fortress.
40611 Bodhichitta is like discovering an inexhaustible treasure, and love is its
40612 enjoyment. Bodhichitta is our direct connection with basic goodness.
40613 -- Moh Hardin, from "A Little Book of Love", published by Shambhala Pub.
40615 Use mindfulness to become aware of these negative thoughts as they arise.
40616 For example, when the first thought of anger arises, notice it and don't let
40617 it multiply. Instead, remember what happened in the past when you were
40618 overwhelmed by anger. Based on your direct experience, see the suffering and
40619 problems anger caused you and recognize its defects. You can crush anger
40620 using antidotes once you clearly see it as something destructive.
40621 You can find a particular antidote to destroy each afflictive emotion. To
40622 conquer desire, you can meditate on the unappealing aspects of the object; for
40623 hatred, meditate on loving-kindness; for jealousy, joy; and so on. This is
40624 how you discard negative mental factors.
40625 -- Shechen Rabjam, from "The Great Medicine That Conquers Clinging to the
40626 Notion of Reality", published by Shambhala Publications
40628 During my first trip to France, we didn't speak the same language, so we
40629 often communicated with gestures. Sometimes I think it is better not to know
40630 a language. Rather than talking, it is better to reserve energy through
40631 silence. But most Westerners try to look intelligent through talking and
40632 think silence is uncomfortable, so it is better to be talkative if you want to
40633 spend time in the West. Of course, since human beings have dualistic tongue,
40634 everything that is said is an impetuous expression of incurable, contagious
40635 blurting. We who have ordinary limited qualities incessantly chatter, while
40636 those with limitless wisdom qualities remain silent. It is like the
40637 difference between the movement of shallow water and the stillness of the
40638 deepest sea. Western people have many fine qualities, like the rapid waters
40639 of mountain rivers, but they cannot put out the blazing fire of their mouth.
40640 -- Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, "A Brief Fantasy History of a Himalayan",
40641 published by Shambhala Publications
40643 Every moment of our lives, things are both perishing and arising. Some of
40644 our cells are dying while others are revitalized or reborn. We get old, and
40645 at the same time we get young. We get polluted physically, emotionally, and
40646 mentally, and simultaneously we get purified. Things decrease and increase.
40647 We forget, learn, and remember many things.
40648 The Heart Sutra claims that in the midst of phenomena where all things are
40649 changing, the reality of boundless interactions continues, and that this fact
40650 itself will not change. After all, the ultimate reality both encompasses and
40651 is free of change in all manifestations.
40652 -- Kazuaki Tanahashi, "The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic
40653 of Mahayana Buddhism", published by Shambhala Publications
40655 In the state of mindfulness, your mind should look at both its going and
40656 staying. Other than that there is nothing else to cultivate. It suffices if
40657 awareness recognizes the nature of everything that arises. Apart from this
40658 you do not need to search somewhere else for more quality or clarity...
40659 Don't put aside what you have and look elsewhere for what you don't have.
40660 Just watch the identity of awareness, no matter what it thinks or where it
40661 goes. Don't give importance to whether the awareness is clear or not.
40662 Avoid stopping thought movement and pursuing stillness. Whatever stillness
40663 there is and no matter what arises, just sustain their natural flow at their
40664 own pace, without tainting it with alterations. Without allowing yourself to
40665 forget undistracted mindfulness even for a moment, persevere in maintaining
40667 -- Khamtrul Rinpoche III, from "The Royal Seal of Mahamudra, Volume One: A
40668 Guidebook for the Realization of Coemergence", published by Shambhala
40671 As your true view, look into the changeless, empty cognizance.
40672 As your true meditation, let your mind nature be as it is.
40673 As your true conduct, let the delusion of dualistic fixation collapse.
40674 As your true fruition, don't seek the result that is spontaneously present.
40675 -- from "The Life of Longchenpa: The Omniscient Dharma King of the Vast
40676 Expanse", by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, published by Shambhala Publications
40678 If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered
40679 as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded,
40680 that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers
40681 against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious
40683 -- George Washington, letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia (1789)
40685 Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one,
40686 he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
40687 -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr (1787)
40689 In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof
40690 is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practiced, and both by
40691 precept and example inculcated on mankind.
40692 -- Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists (1771)
40694 Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the
40695 strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. Take away the
40696 law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity.
40697 -- Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)
40699 Congress has no power to make any religious establishments.
40700 -- Roger Sherman, Congress (1789)
40702 The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
40703 -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1758)
40705 I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
40706 build a wall of separation between Church & State.
40707 -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802)
40709 To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering
40710 medicine to the dead.
40711 -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. V (1776)
40713 Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than
40714 our opinions in physics or geometry.
40715 -- Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779)
40717 Christian establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which
40718 facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.
40719 -- James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr. (1774)
40721 There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of
40722 science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of
40724 -- George Washington, address to Congress (1790)
40726 During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity
40727 been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride
40728 and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both,
40729 superstition, bigotry and persecution.
40730 -- James Madison, General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1785)
40732 Being civil often has an element of acting. However, in the hinayana, you are
40733 behaving rather than acting. Acting is trying to manifest yourself for the
40734 sake of display, whereas behaving is how you feel. Acting is the way you
40735 dance, and behaving is the way you sneeze or hiccup. You know if you are
40736 being genuine. You are the first person who knows. When you are acting, you
40737 are concerned with other people's possible reactions; but when you are
40738 behaving, you are just behaving. It's like sitting on the toilet seat and
40739 doing your duty: nobody is watching. It's your private concern, so there is
40740 a quality of genuineness. In the hinayana, you behave decently because the
40741 dharma is actually a part of you. That is the meaning of taming yourself...
40742 Becoming a dharmic person means that in your everyday life from morning to
40743 morning, around the clock, you are not trying to kid anybody.
40744 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "The Path of Individual Liberation: Volume One of
40745 The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma", published by Shambhala
40748 Today's world requires us to accept the oneness of humanity. In the past,
40749 isolated communities could afford to think of one another as fundamentally
40750 separate. Some could even exist in total isolation. But nowadays, whatever
40751 happens in one region eventually affects many other areas. Within the context
40752 of our inter-dependence, self-interest clearly lies in considering the
40753 interest of others.
40754 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "The Pocket Dalai Lama", published by
40755 Shambhala Publications
40757 Compassion is an internal attitude that may manifest in our behavior.
40758 However, compassion is not the behavior itself, for one behavior can be done
40759 with different motivations. For example, we may take care of a sick relative
40760 because we have genuine affection for him. Conversely, we may care for him
40761 because we want to inherit his estate. The action is the same, but the
40762 motivations differ. The first motivation is prompted by genuine compassion,
40763 the second by self-concern.
40764 Acting with compassion entails being creative and knowing that one
40765 behavior is not suitable for all occasions. In some circumstances, we may be
40766 compassionate by sharing our possessions; while in others, we may show it by
40767 saying, "no." In this way, compassion must be combined with good judgment to
40769 -- Russell Kolts and Thubten Chodron, "An Open-Hearted Life", published by
40770 Shambhala Publications
40772 Since the very beginning, the mind streams of all sentient beings possess the
40773 way of being of the inseparability of being lucid and being empty in an
40774 intrinsic manner. No matter how it may be obscured by adventitious stains, in
40775 terms of its nature, it is never tainted by stains, while the stains exist in
40776 the manner of being separable from it. This mind that is the inseparability
40777 of being lucid and being empty has the nature of being permanent and being
40778 free from change, decrease, and increase. It is ever undeceiving, changeless,
40779 and genuinely stable. Throughout all three phases of ground, path, and
40780 fruition, it is this nature of the mind that is certain to be solely the
40781 object of the genuine meditative equipoise within the qualities that are the
40782 nature of phenomena. This is what needs to be manifested through the practice
40783 of superior insight.
40784 -- from "When the Clouds Part: The Uttaratantra and Its Meditative Tradition
40785 as a Bridge between Sutra and Tantra", translated by Karl Brunnholzl,
40786 published by Shambhala Publications
40788 Whatever obstacles we experience, if we can take them the right way, they
40789 won't obstruct our spiritual path. Rather, they will become a tool to
40790 stimulate our advancement toward our destination: unconditional love and
40792 So try to feel joy when facing difficulties, for they provide the chance
40793 to purify unvirtuous past deeds, the cause of ills, and infuse us with the
40794 inspiration to generate yet greater virtuous deeds, the cause of healing and
40796 -- Tulku Thondup, from "The Heart of Unconditional Love: A Powerful New
40797 Approach to Loving-Kindness Meditation", published by Shambhala
40800 Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics,
40801 its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who
40802 glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about
40804 -- Mike Godwin, on "Godwin's Law", originated in 1990, which (paraphrasing)
40805 states that any online discussion will eventually devolve into a
40806 comparison with Hitler or Nazism. At that point, the person who brought
40807 either topic up has lost the argument and their basic credibility.
40809 Your mind, the primordial buddha,
40810 Searches elsewhere due to the power of desire.
40811 Doesn't it notice that it is wandering in samsara?
40813 Now that you have obtained the precious human body,
40814 You continuously get carried away by mundane actions.
40815 Don't you notice that your life is running out?
40818 The key to understanding the truth of suffering is what the Buddha called
40819 the "three marks" of everything that exists. All conditioned phenomena,
40820 he said, are pervaded by these three marks: impermanence (anitya),
40821 dissatisfaction or suffering (duhkha), and insubstantiality (anatman,
40823 According to the Buddha, if we do not understand how conditioned phenomena
40824 are marked by these three aspects, then we will not be able to understand the
40825 first Noble Truth. We may do all we can in order to avoid facing the fact
40826 that everything is contingent and transient--we may try to hide ourselves
40827 from it, and we may even spin out all kinds of metaphysical theories of an
40828 unchanging, permanent, substantial reality to avoid this all-pervasive nature
40829 of ephemerality. Also, if we do not understand that conditioned phenomena are
40830 unsatisfactory, we will not think about restraining ourselves from
40831 overindulgence in sensory gratifications, which makes us lose our center and
40832 become immersed in worldly concerns, so that our life is governed by greed,
40833 craving, and attachment. All of these things disturb the mind.
40834 If we do not understand that everything is insubstantial--anatman--then
40835 we may believe that there is some kind of enduring essence or substance in
40836 things, or in the personality, and because of this belief we generate delusion
40837 and confusion in the mind.
40838 -- Traleg Kyabgon, from "The Essence of Buddhism", published by Shambhala
40841 When we grasp a self, how can we possibly practice self-reflection?
40842 Everything becomes personal: our pain, our anger, our shortcomings. When we
40843 take thoughts and emotions personally, they torture us. Looking at our
40844 thoughts and emotions in this way is like rubbing our nose in something
40845 unpleasant--what purpose does it serve other than to create more pain? This
40846 is not the kind of looking we are speaking of here.
40847 With the view of selflessness, we can enjoy whatever arises in our
40848 awareness. We can accept that everything that arises is a result of our past
40849 actions, or karma, but it is not who we are.
40850 -- Dzigar Kongtrul, from "It's Up to You", published by Shambhala
40853 As with attaining any goal, you can't go about putting an end to suffering
40854 and arriving at enlightenment just any old way. If we throw a stone up into
40855 the air, we should not be surprised if it falls on our head. In the same way,
40856 when we commit any act, whatever it may be, we can only expect that sooner or
40857 later it will produce an effect. Thus it is logical that if we want to free
40858 ourselves from suffering, we have to perform certain actions and refrain from
40859 certain others. The law of the causality of actions is the very foundation of
40860 the teaching of the Buddha, who proclaimed:
40862 Avoid the least harmful act,
40863 Perfectly accomplish the good,
40864 And master your mind.
40865 That is the teaching of the Buddha.
40867 -- Tenzin Wangmo, from "The Prince and the Zombie: Tibetan Tales of Karma",
40868 with foreword by Matthieu Ricard, published by Shambhala Publications
40870 I am very pleased to be a human being, yet I know that I can make what I have
40871 been given even better. I know I am not perfect, yet I also know I have the
40872 ability to transform my imperfections. Remembering this when I begin to
40873 practice or study makes any effort needed during the session much more freely
40874 available. Resting meditation is not just sitting on a cushion and zoning
40875 out. Contemplative Meditation is not just thinking about whatever arises in
40876 the mind. Practicing either form of meditation takes joyful exertion and
40878 -- Khenpo Gawang, "Your Mind is Your Teacher", published by Shambhala
40881 Not acting on our habitual patterns is only the first step toward not harming
40882 others or ourselves. The transformative process begins at a deeper level when
40883 we contact the rawness we're left with whenever we refrain. As a way of
40884 working with our aggressive tendencies, Dzigar Kongtrül teaches the
40885 nonviolent practice of simmering. He says that rather than "boil in our
40886 aggression like a piece of meat cooking in a soup," we simmer in it. We
40887 allow ourselves to wait, to sit patiently with the urge to act or speak in our
40888 usual ways and feel the full force of that urge without turning away or giving
40889 in. This is the journey of developing a kindhearted and courageous tolerance
40891 -- Pema Chödrön, "Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change",
40892 published by Shambhala Publications
40894 During lifetimes spent wandering in the round of rebirth without beginning or
40895 end, your present enemies were once extremely beneficial friends and your
40896 present friends were once harmful enemies. Moreover, if you do not consider
40897 present enemies as such, but treat them helpfully as friends, it is possible
40898 that they will prove even more helpful than friends. Therefore, rest in
40899 equanimity toward others: give up attachment to friends and reject hatred
40901 -- Choying Tobden Dorje, from "The Complete Nyingma Tradition from Sutra to
40902 Tantra, Books 1 to 10", published by Shambhala Publications
40904 Compassion is not logical. It's basically spacious and generous. A
40905 compassionate person might not be sure whether he is being compassionate to
40906 you or whether you are being compassionate to him, because compassion creates
40907 a total environment of generosity. Generosity is implied; it just happens,
40908 rather than you making it happen. It's just there, without direction,
40909 without me, without "for them." It's full of joy, a spontaneously
40910 existing grin of joy, constant joy.
40911 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with
40912 Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness", published by
40913 Shambhala Publications
40915 We have a Buddhist prayer in which we ourselves aspire to become like [the
40918 May I be like the earth,
40919 Providing the air, the ground, water,
40920 And everything she provides
40921 That is our sacred source of life.
40923 Inspired by the example of the earth, this prayer encourages us to aspire to
40924 be an unconditional source of all well-being and life for others. This is a
40925 supreme aspiration. We do not just have a great deal to learn about the
40926 environment--we also have a lot to learn from it.
40927 -- H.H. the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, "The Heart Is Noble",
40928 published by Shambhala Publications
40930 Many people wish to be healthy, to be free from disease, and to remain forever
40931 young, but these are not very meaningful goals. If you can tame your mind,
40932 the value of this will far surpass anything in the world. Patrul Rinpoche
40933 said, "Tame the mind, tame the mind, use bodhichitta to tame the mind. Even
40934 if we do not cultivate any good deeds in body and speech, taming our mind in
40935 fact benefits ourselves and all beings."
40936 -- Jigme Phuntsok, from "Always Present", published by Shambhala Publications
40938 Transcendent knowledge is beyond thought, word, or description. It neither
40939 arises nor ceases, like the identity of space. It is the domain of
40940 individual, self-knowing wakefulness. I salute this mother of the buddhas of
40942 -- Shantarakshita, in praise of Prajnaparamita, from "Jewels of
40943 Enlightenment", by Erik Pema Kunsang, published by Shambhala Publications
40945 To rejoice in others' happiness without any preferences of our own shows
40946 that we understand that the longing for happiness is the same for all beings.
40947 We can rejoice in their temporal happiness, which has come from their
40948 accumulation of merit. When we recognize the quality of happiness in
40949 others--when we see someone genuinely smile or laugh or see a glimmer of
40950 brightness in their eyes--we can rejoice. When they obtain something they
40951 want or need, whatever it may be, we have an opportunity to practice
40952 rejoicing. Beings long for all kinds of things, some of which we might not
40953 want ourselves--but that doesn't matter. The important thing is that, if
40954 only for a single moment, it has brought them some happiness.
40955 -- Dzigar Kongtrul, from "Light Comes Through", published by Shambhala
40958 Even if we think we have found the origin of phenomena, we are only being
40959 deluded by the karmic seeds of new discoveries which are constantly ripening,
40960 becoming exhausted, and being replaced through the ripening of other karmic
40961 seeds. Yet we continue to be fascinated by trying to define substance,
40962 constantly trying to catch it, thinking that we have caught it but then losing
40963 it. We are endlessly lured by the material creations of our conceptions.
40964 Sublime beings, knowing the characteristics of each phenomenon and the nature
40965 of all phenomena, are never lured by anything. They abide in the infinite
40966 display of enlightenment's empty appearance without trying to catch anything
40967 or being able to be caught.
40968 -- Thinley Norbu, from "White Sail", published by Shambhala Publications
40970 When there is never any fear or despair no matter what adversity or suffering
40971 is encountered, when difficulty is taken as an aid to mind training and you
40972 always have the help of a joyful mind, then you have acquired proficiency in
40973 mind training. When adverse conditions come, meditate joyfully and, in
40974 addition, learn to take joyfully all the adversity others experience.
40975 -- Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, from "The Great Path of Awakening", published
40976 by Shambhala Publications
40978 The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of
40979 all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather
40980 than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge
40982 -- William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
40984 Not only are there two different categories of phenomena, the person and the
40985 external phenomena, there are also two different types of misconceptions with
40986 respect to the nature of phenomena: misconceptions with respect to the nature
40987 of the person and with respect to the external phenomena. This means to
40988 overcome these two types of misconception is to realize selflessness, which is
40989 the ultimate nature of these two types of phenomena. Therefore there are two
40990 selflessnesses, selflessness of person and selflessness of phenomena.
40991 Generally speaking, comparing the two, the realization of the selflessness of
40992 the person is said to be easier than realization of the selflessness of
40993 phenomena because of long familiarity with the actual self, the person.
40994 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the
40995 Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind", edited by Jeremy Hayward and
40996 Francisco J. Varela, published by Shambhala Publications
40998 The Tibetan term for renunciation is ngepar jungwa; nges par 'byung ba,
40999 which literally means "certainty of release." Ngepar is short for ngepar
41000 shepa, meaning to have certain, decisive knowledge from within; in this case,
41001 it refers to having certainty that the nature of worldly existence is
41002 suffering. In addition to this certainty, there is the heartfelt wish to be
41003 released, jungwa, from this suffering. One must gain confidence in the fact
41004 that the nature of cyclic existence in samsara is suffering, together with
41005 having the powerful wish and intention to be free of this suffering. This is
41006 what is known as the thought of renunciation.
41007 -- Nyoshul Khenpo, "The Fearless Lion's Roar: Profound Instructions on
41008 Dzogchen, the Great Perfection", published by Shambhala Publications
41010 "Karma" basically means action. When we talk about karma, we talk about
41011 action, which in Buddhism entails thinking in terms of cause and effect.
41012 Actions are performed because there are certain preexisting causes and
41013 conditions giving rise to the impulse to engage in particular actions, and
41014 from this the karmic effect issues. In the performance of actions, there is
41015 usually a propelling factor. We feel compelled by something to do certain
41016 things, and when we engage in those actions, based on those impulses, the
41017 actions then produce relevant effects. As we have seen though, this does not
41018 mean that every action performed has a particular cause and a particular
41019 effect. Nevertheless, the Buddhist theory of karma is irrevocably tied to
41020 this mechanism, for want of a better word, and hence to the responsibility of
41021 the individual, as opposed to a divine governance of sorts.
41022 -- Traleg Kyabgon, "Karma: What It Is, What It Isn't, Why It Matters",
41023 published by Shambhala Publications
41025 Nondistraction means not being lost in subtle undercurrents of delusion or
41026 indifferent stupor; it is immaculate, unending mindfulness. Not understanding
41027 this, if one is fearful and cautious about being distracted and is bound by a
41028 repressed, constricted mind, this is an error.
41029 Natural, ordinary mind means this present mind unstained by either faults
41030 or good qualities. This self-nature is usustained by the continuity of
41031 awareness. Not nderstanding this, if one grasps at the substantiality of the
41032 rigid concepts of worldly, ordinary mind, this is an error.
41033 To be meditationless means to enter profound, unconditioned natural space,
41034 detached from meditating and non-meditating, without any contrivance or aim,
41035 stabilizing the expansive fortress of mindfulness. Not understanding this, if
41036 one remains in ordinary, careless neutrality, or is lost in meaningless
41037 indifference, this is an error.
41038 -- "Sunlight Speech That Dispels the Darkness of Doubt", translated by
41039 Thinley Norbu, published by Shambhala Publications
41041 When Milarepa meditated in the mountains, he was alone for a long time. In
41042 spite of this, he always felt that he was inseparable from Marpa because his
41043 devotion was so powerful. Milarepa sang his vajra songs in solitude but,
41044 through devotion, was always connected to his lama. Devotion to the lama is a
41045 powerful protection from negative thoughts and nonvirtuous actions. It is
41046 also a special protection that allows us to properly practice meditation. Our
41047 awareness of enlightened beings and our knowledge of how to take care of our
41048 mind protect the mind so that it doesn't flow in a wrong direction. Through
41049 these joyous practices we develop a feeling of appreciation of how fortunate
41050 we are, and we cease feeling lonely or depressed.
41051 -- "Opening the Treasure of the Profound", by Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen
41052 Rinpoche, published by Shambhala Publications
41054 We need to make our preparations now, and we need to be diligent about it.
41055 We may think, "I really want to practice the Dharma, but right now I'm
41056 really busy, and I have a lot of things to do. I'll get to the Dharma when
41057 my work is done." This way of thinking is an obstacle that will prevent us
41058 from practicing the Dharma. If we are busy doing something right now, then
41059 when we are done, something else will come up that will keep us busy, and when
41060 that's done, there will be something else, and something else after that.
41061 It's just one thing after another that we have to do. We end up with no
41062 opportunity to practice the Dharma at all.
41063 Padampa Sangye says, "Now while it's in mind, make haste to practice."
41064 When we think, "I've got to practice the Dharma," we need to go and
41065 practice diligently right away. Otherwise, all kinds of things will come up
41066 that we think we need to do first, and we'll never get around to practicing.
41067 -- Khenchen Thrangu and Padampa Sangye, from "Advice from a Yogi", published
41068 by Shambhala Publications
41070 The ultimate mode of being, the ground wherein both we and Guru Rinpoche are
41071 primordially inseparable--namely, the selfarisen primordial wisdom, which is
41072 subject to no movement of discursive thought--is referred to as Guru.
41073 Because deluded perceptions are themselves primordially pure, the path is free
41074 from all striving and the fruit is present spontaneously like a lotus in full
41075 flower. Therefore [the path itself] is referred to as Padma, or lotus. For
41076 the fruit is not something that occurs at a later stage as a result of the
41077 practice. In the ultimate expanse, which is selfarisen and spontaneously
41078 present, the primordial wisdom of selfawareness is clearly [and already]
41079 manifest. This is referred to as Siddhi, or accomplishment. And, although in
41080 terms of conceptual distinctions the self-arisen primordial wisdom may be
41081 classified as ground, path, and fruit, these three are not different in
41082 nature. This is directly perceived by self-cognizing awareness and is
41083 indicated by the syllable Hung.
41084 -- Jamgon Mipham, "White Lotus: An Explanation of the Seven-Line Prayer to
41085 Guru Padmasambhava", published by Shambhala Publications
41087 While dreaming, all kinds of things may come to mind, but these are nothing
41088 more than appearances. Likewise, a magician may create a variety of illusory
41089 appearances, but they do not exist objectively. Likewise, oneself, others,
41090 the cycle of existence, and liberation--in short, all entities--exist merely
41091 by the power of mind and convention.
41092 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "Transcendent Wisdom", published by
41093 Shambhala Publications
41095 From our deluded samsaric standpoint, it may seem that certain traits are
41096 necessary for our well-being, self-esteem, and self-worth. Talking about
41097 others' defects may make us appear more desirable, or gossiping about
41098 others' misfortunes may make our own misery seem less, but we have to
41099 examine these tendencies much more closely to see that this is a completely
41100 mistaken aspect of our lives.
41101 Despite having a good motivation and the best intentions, our mind
41102 training will have little success if we can't commit ourselves strongly
41103 enough to undermining these traits. These tendencies don't bring us any
41104 self-confidence or happiness. In fact, they undermine our personal autonomy
41105 and well-being and obstruct our spiritual progress. It's important to put
41106 an end to these negative and paranoid tendencies and replace them with love,
41107 compassion, and the development of a kind heart.
41108 -- Traleg Kyabgon, in "The Practice of Lojong", published by Shambhala
41111 Awareness of the thought process at the moment of an impulse arising is what
41112 makes freedom from thought possible, because when the mind is only at the
41113 stage of an impulse arising, the energies haven't fully engaged. There is
41114 an almost impartial quality about the energy of the impulse. When it is
41115 driven into specific thought, the situation changes and it becomes "my
41116 thought with my feeling, therefore me." This is what is meant by being
41117 caught in the thought. The inner energy has transmuted from being something
41118 relatively neutral and therefore not very important or compelling into
41119 something entirely personal and therefore extremely important and compelling.
41120 -- Rob Nairn, in "Living, Dreaming, Dying", published by Shambhala Publications
41122 The Buddha, radically, interpreted the individual as a compound of many
41123 different elements, physical and mental--a psychophysical complex. Therefore
41124 our feelings, thoughts, emotions, memories, dispositions; our perceptual
41125 capability, our cognitive capacities, and our physical conditions--all are
41126 constantly interacting and impacting each other.
41127 And agents themselves are also continually interacting with other agents.
41128 Logically, then, we need not feel compelled to identify ourselves with a
41129 single thing, a core element to our psyche, as it is really a matter of being
41130 in a constant state of flux. In this sense, karma could be said to operate as
41131 streams of networking karmic processes, where all kinds of living, breathing
41132 individuals are involved. The really important principle to grasp about this
41133 approach is to look closely at things, for things in their nature are complex.
41134 Acknowledging this will bring us great reward in fact. Doing the opposite,
41135 looking at things in a very simple way, keeps us trapped in ignorance.
41136 -- Traleg Kyabgon, from "Karma: What It Is, What It Isn't, Why It Matters",
41137 published by Shambhala Publications
41139 There is magic in vajrayana practice and in vajrayana altogether. People
41140 often think that magic is the ability to do things like change fire into
41141 water, or float up toward the ceiling and then come down again, or make tomato
41142 ketchup into cream cheese. But we have a better understanding of magic than
41143 that; what is actually happening is better than those things. We are not
41144 talking about magic in the style of a conjuring magician on the stage, but we
41145 are talking about fundamental magic. This magic is always based on the
41146 profound effect that we have discovered from the hinayana discipline of one-
41147 pointedness and the mahayana discipline of openess and compassionate
41148 nonterritoriality. Out of that comes vajrayana magic, which is that we are
41149 able to cut our thoughts abruptly and directly. On the spot!
41150 -- Chögyam Trungpa, in "The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness",
41151 published by Shambhala Publications
41153 When, in the Mahayana, one goes for refuge, one cultivates an unbearably
41154 powerful compassion for beings, who have been one's mothers in the past and
41155 whose number is as boundless as the sky is vast. But it is not enough to feel
41156 compassion for them; one must be determined and decide to liberate them from
41157 their suffering. As long as one is not free oneself, however, one is
41158 powerless to bring others to freedom. Consequently, in order to free oneself
41159 and others from the perils of both samsaric existence and the peace of
41160 nirvana, one takes refuge in the Three Jewels, according to the Mahayana,
41161 until one gains enlightenment.
41162 -- Kunzang Pelden, in "Nectar of Manjushri's Speech", published by
41163 Shambhala Publications
41165 Just as a precious jewel, the sky, and water are by nature pure, likewise the
41166 tathagatagarbha or dharmadhatu is by nature always free from the defilement of
41167 the mental poisons and thus utterly pure. Whereas this is the meaning of the
41168 essence, the cause that completely purifies the adventitious defilements
41169 consists of devotion towards the Mahayana Dharma, of highest discriminative or
41170 analytical wisdom realizing the non-existence of a self, of limitless samadhi
41171 endowed with bliss, and of great compassion focusing on sentient beings as its
41172 point of reference. The realization arising from these [purifying causes] is
41173 to be known as enlightenment.
41174 -- Maitreya, in "Buddha Nature", published by Shambhala Publications
41176 Meditation means learning to control our minds, thereby protecting our minds
41177 from domination by delusion and other afflictions. We may think, "Oh, I
41178 wish my mind were not dominated by ignorance and other afflictions." But
41179 these afflictions are very powerful and very destructive; they operate despite
41180 our wishes. We have to work to develop effective countermeasures. We cannot
41181 buy such remedies from a store; even very sophisticated machines cannot
41182 produce them for us. They are obtained only through mental effort, training
41183 the mind in meditation.
41184 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "From Here to Enlightenment", published
41185 by Shambhala Publications
41187 If we were asked to be free right now, to jump into the sea of love in this
41188 very moment, we might turn our attention inward and try it, and it may not
41189 work. Why? Because of a hindrance, a block. That block is the very sense of
41190 "I am" that is the false image of who we are. It is the shell that is
41191 veiling, covering our true nature. So the goal of all spiritual endeavors is
41192 to actually realize the enlightened part of who we are, not sometime in the
41193 future, but right now.
41194 -- Anam Thubten, "The Magic of Awareness", published by Shambhala
41197 You don't need to be an "excellent meditator" to start with. All you
41198 need to do is have your heart and mind make the following agreement:
41199 "Let's rest. There's no reason right now to wander around following
41200 thoughts or worrying. Let's be relaxed and open." There's not even any
41201 need to shut down your thoughts. Just be there with them, but not overly
41202 concerned or engaged. Let there be total openness, and just relax within
41204 -- Dza Kilung Rinpoche, "The Relaxed Mind", published by Shambhala
41207 Awareness does not engage with objects of the ordinary mind. It is "self-
41208 cognizing primordial wisdom." This can be illustrated by the "light" of
41209 the new moon: a profoundly indwelling luminosity, which does not radiate
41210 outward. Therefore, despite the fact that the five primordial wisdoms are
41211 spontaneously present in awareness, the latter is without thoughts related to
41212 sense objects. By contrast, even when it is still, the ordinary mind
41213 nevertheless "moves" and follows after different objects. It is like the
41214 light of the moon on the fifteenth of the month, which radiates outward and
41215 engulfs everything.
41216 -- Longchen Yeshe Dorje, Kangyur Rinpoche, and Jigme Lingpa, in "Treasury of
41217 Precious Qualities: Book Two", published by Shambhala Publications
41219 According to Buddhism, all existents abide in loving-kindness free from
41220 concepts in their absolute nature. But the understanding and realization of
41221 that true nature have been covered over by the webs of our own mental,
41222 emotional, and intellectual obscurations.
41223 Now, in order to uncover the true nature and its qualities, we must dispel
41224 the cover--our unhealthy concepts, emotions, and actions. Through the power
41225 of devotion and contemplation, we must uncover and see the true innate
41226 enlightened qualities--loving-kindness that is free from concepts--shining
41228 -- Tulku Thondup, from "The Heart of Unconditional Love", published by
41229 Shambhala Publications
41231 The method for taking all situations as the path is to rest within the essence
41232 of the mind. Within our minds, there are three aspects: the way things
41233 appear, how they are confused, and the way they actually are. We do not take
41234 our difficulties as the path in relation to how things appear or are confused,
41235 but in relation to how they actually are. We rest naturally within their
41236 nature--the clear and empty nature of the mind that is sometimes called the
41237 union of clarity and emptiness or the union of wisdom and the expanse. We
41238 rest within this, recognizing it. When we take sickness as the path, we look
41239 at the essence of the sickness without altering it in any way and just rest
41240 naturally within that. When we take the afflictions as the path, we just look
41241 at the essence of the greed, aversion, or delusion that has occurred. We do
41242 not follow the affliction or block it. We do not try to stop our thoughts.
41243 Instead, we look at those thoughts and at the afflictions that occur, and we
41244 rest naturally within their inherently empty essence.
41245 -- Khenchen Thrangu, from "Vivid Awareness", published by Shambhala
41248 I suggest that dana--in all its wonderful, profound simplicity--is a
41249 necessary and significant part of what Dr. Buddha would prescribe for our
41250 times. It can be understood without hours of study. It liberates us from
41251 acquisitive and protectionist habits. It mitigates individualism and
41252 nourishes community. Its meaning spans the most basic levels of practice
41253 through to the ultimate. It challenges "me" and "mine," fostering letting go.
41254 A reinvigorated and updated understanding and practice of dana can serve as a
41255 powerful antidote to consumerism's ills. I see this as essential for
41256 Buddhism to stay on course as we navigate this bizarre postmodern world
41257 seeking genuine peace and liberation.
41258 -- Santikaro, from "Hooked!: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the
41259 Urge to Consume", edited by Stephanie Kaza, published by Shambhala
41260 Publications and Snow Lion Publications
41262 The teachings are for living in this world--for having fewer problems and
41263 fewer tensions. Many people speak now about world peace. What does that
41264 mean? How can we have world peace if we don't have peace in ourselves? We
41265 are each members of society--society meaning all of us together, not as
41266 individuals. Since many individuals make up society, it means that the
41267 individuals must have a kind of evolution. Although we have power and
41268 military might, and sometimes there are provisional changes, in the real sense
41270 Society is made up of individuals each having their point of view, their
41271 feelings, and their sensations. If we want to develop society so that there
41272 is more peace and happiness, each one of us must work with our condition. For
41273 example, our society is like numbers. When we count, we must always begin
41274 with the number "1." If I think about society, I must start with myself as
41276 -- Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, from "Dzogchen Teachings", published by Shambhala
41279 One of my favorite quotes from the Buddha is: "Let us rise up and be
41280 thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little,
41281 and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got
41282 sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful."
41283 Gratitude is one of the fruits of living from genuine happiness; at the
41284 same time, it arises from an inherent seed in our being, a seed that requires
41285 cultivation. There's a quote from Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, that
41286 illustrates how important this quality is: "If the only prayer you said in
41287 your whole life was 'thank you,' that would suffice." If we truly understood
41288 the depth of this teaching it would be all we'd need to know. Unfortunately,
41289 we can't just tell ourselves to be grateful and expect it to happen, yet it's
41290 a quality that certainly can be nurtured.
41291 -- Ezra Bayda, from "Beyond Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment",
41292 published by Shambhala Publications
41294 In the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) teachings, the issue is always whether or
41295 not we recognize our true nature and understand that the reflections of that
41296 nature manifest as experience. The dream is a reflection of our own mind.
41297 This is easy to believe after we wake up, just as the Buddhas know--after
41298 they are enlightened--that the entities and objects of samsara are illusory.
41299 And just as it takes practice to recognize the illusory nature of dream while
41300 asleep, we must practice to realize the illusory nature of waking life.
41302 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep",
41303 published by Shambhala Publications
41306 The jewel in the lotus is a wonderful metaphor for the essential nature of
41307 mind. It integrates two very different approaches, recognizing that there is
41308 a worthy role for striving, for engaging in methods, for growth and
41309 development; and at the same time recognizing that all these methods are
41310 fundamentally designed simply to bring to light what is already there, in all
41311 of its perfection, in all of its completeness. This is the pure fountain of
41312 loving-kindness and wisdom we are trying to cultivate.
41313 The mantra OṂ MAṆI PADME HŪṂ is associated with Avalokiteśvara,
41314 the embodiment of enlightened compassion, and the mantra is the verbal
41315 articulation of that same quality of compassion. Among the many
41316 interpretations of the mantra, here is one I find especially meaningful. Oṃ
41317 signifies the manifest body, speech, and mind. Maṇi in Sanskrit means
41318 "jewel." Padme, pronounced pémé in Tibetan, means "in the lotus."
41319 Hūṃ, pronounced by the Tibetans as hoong, is a syllable suggestive of the
41320 deepest, essential, transcendent nature of consciousness. So the mantra
41321 starts out from the manifest state of the body, speech, and mind, then through
41322 the metaphor of the jewel in the lotus, goes to the depths of consciousness.
41323 -- B. Alan Wallace, "The Four Immeasurables: Practices to Open the Heart",
41324 published by Shambhala Publications
41326 In general, people tend to minimize the importance of the ordinary sangha:
41327 Buddha is a big deal, Dharma is a big deal, and Sangha is something to put up
41328 with. Yet it's within the ordinary sangha, monastic or lay, that the
41329 roughest edges of our arrogance and pride can be smoothed down a little.
41330 Americans--with their car obsessions--have a good expression for this:
41331 "Where the rubber meets the road." Let's say there's a shiny new car
41332 on the floor. It appears to be perfect. But we still need to take it for a
41333 test–drive. The car that never leaves the shop is like a practitioner
41334 reciting nice words about compassion and selflessness, but removed from the
41335 opportunity to test–drive their intentions and aspirations. How do the
41336 bodhisattva ideals hold up when we actually interact with others?
41337 Problems within the sangha inevitably arise because we're talking about
41338 unenlightened people trying to get along with each other. Jealousy,
41339 competition, and anger inevitably erupt. Although individual practitioners
41340 have unenlightened minds and commit unenlightened activities and get ensnared
41341 in ignorant understanding, the ordinary sangha still offers the best
41342 opportunity to apply dharma.
41343 -- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, "Turning Confusion into Clarity", published by
41344 Shambhala Publications
41346 Silly beings, uninterested in this meaning,
41347 Are always carried away by the river of samsara and finished.
41349 There are some who do not have much faith in the dharmachakra of No Mental
41350 Activity, the essence-meaning of mahamudra. Here, Mahasiddha Tilopa does not
41351 mean all sentient beings in general but rather some who cling to tenet
41352 systems--those with attachment to their own system. There are quite a few
41353 such intellectual logicians. Such intransigent stubborn "silly ones" who
41354 lack the eye of wisdom
41355 -- Sangyes Nyenpa, "Tilopa's Mahamudra Upadesha", published by Shambhala
41358 Ordinary beings--even those who are kind and compassionate--are
41359 primarily motivated by self-interest and work mainly for their own benefit.
41360 All of their activities and thoughts are tinged by self-serving motivations
41361 and attitudes. Even when they perform acts of kindness, they generally do so
41362 expecting praise or personal satisfaction and not because of pure altruism.
41363 Bodhisattvas, however, are motivated by universal compassion, and they
41364 seek the ultimate goal of buddhahood in order to be of service to others.
41365 They embark on this path with the generation of the mind of awakening. Unlike
41366 ordinary beings, who think of their own advantage, bodhisattvas consider how
41367 best to benefit others.
41368 -- John Powers, A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, published by
41369 Shambhala Publications
41371 "I'm fine. My life's together. I know what I'm doing. I've
41372 got to look like a good Dharma practitioner. People shouldn't see me cry.
41373 They shouldn't know how distracted I am during meditation. I can't let on
41374 how incredibly confused I am." We think we're the only one who is confused
41375 and not wanting to lose face, we hide our turmoil and pretend to be calmly in
41376 charge of the show. But we're in cyclic existence, so how much control do
41377 we really have? How peaceful can we be when we have a samsaric body and mind?
41378 When our "garbage mind"--as Lama Yeshe used to call it--spills out,
41379 we may be alarmed and think that we're not doing the practice correctly. In
41380 fact, we are. Only by exposing the garbage mind can we identify it and free
41382 -- Thubten Chodron, "Cultivating a Compassionate Heart", published by
41383 Shambhala Publications
41385 Completely understanding his dire circumstances, the man had a strong
41386 feeling that the only way to be saved from deportation was to extend loving-
41387 kindness to Calcutta's police inspector general. He placed a photograph of
41388 the police inspector general on his desk. He then completely focused his
41389 attention on it, extending his feeling of loving-kindness toward the man. In
41390 fact, he sat up the entire night looking at the photograph and practicing his
41391 loving-kindness meditation.
41392 When the police inspector general arrived in the morning, he approached
41393 the man and looked directly into his eyes. He then said, "I will not send
41394 you to Sri Lanka, Sir, but I will instead look after you here as if you were
41396 -- Bhante Walpola Piyananda, "The Bodhi Tree Grows in L.A.", published by
41397 Shambhala Publications
41399 The scriptures say that thinking is not thinking, so do not even think about
41400 not having thoughts. There is no thinking about nonconceptualization, or
41401 about anything else. The scriptures also say that one should not think
41402 "stop thinking!" Do not think in order to clarify the meaning of
41403 nonconceptuality. This becomes more and more subtle, more and more peaceful,
41404 more and more clear, more and more equal. Once the basis has been
41405 transformed, rest in equanimity in the space of reality.
41406 -- Sam van Schaik, "Tibetan Zen: Discovering a Lost Tradition", published by
41407 Shambhala Publications
41409 According the First Noble Truth, the first step in discovering truth and
41410 relieving our own and anyone else's suffering is to acknowledge the pain and
41411 suffering that are present in our lives. Sometimes people assume that
41412 Buddhism is a pessimistic sort of tradition because of this teaching. In
41413 fact, however, recognizing that pain is simply part of being alive can be a
41414 relief. It is not a sign that we have done something wrong, stupid, or
41415 shameful. Yet I often catch myself and hear others making just that
41416 assumption--that pain and suffering are signs of some personal defect.
41417 If I tell one friend that I have a cold, for instance, she is likely to
41418 say, "Well, how did that happen? Were you out without your hat in the cold?"
41419 Even more distressing is the view we all have heard at one time or another,
41420 which blames sufferers of serious diseases for having them: "Oh, yes, cancer
41421 is a sign of unexpressed grief." Of course, as modern medical research is
41422 increasingly showing us, the mind and the body are deeply interconnected, and
41423 our attitudes, emotions, and behaviors do affect our health. Yet, even if we
41424 were able to do "everything right," if we live long enough, we will not escape
41425 old age, sickness, and death.
41426 -- Karen Kissel Wegela, "The Courage to be Present", published by Shambhala
41429 In brief, whatever is dawning, be right there with an uncontrived mind. Do
41430 not involve yourself with stopping, or starting, or with any modification
41431 whatsoever. Whatever arises, stay uncontrivedly right with that arising.
41432 Don't reel your mind in, don't cast around for an object of meditation out
41433 there. Be right there with the meditator, your very own mind. Unfound when
41434 sought, your own mind is primordially empty mindnature. Seeking also is
41435 unnecessary; the seeker--yourself--is that [which one is seeking].
41436 Unwaveringly remain right with that very seeker.
41437 -- Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, "Strand of Jewels", published by Shambhala
41440 Thus, all compounded and uncompounded phenomena--the ten directions, the
41441 three times, the three worlds, and so forth--are none other than one's own
41442 mind, as is stated in the Great Sovereign of Practices, the Victory over the
41443 Three Worlds: "If one realizes, in accordance with one's own unmistaken
41444 mind or the power of the mind, that discerning consciousness is the very
41445 nature of the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and the like, one is enlightened. If one
41446 fails to understand this, everything appears as the vessel and contents that
41447 constitute samsara. The three worlds are simply this; the great elements
41449 -- Padmasambhava, "A Garland of Views: A Guide to View, Meditation, and
41450 Result in the Nine Vehicles", from Padmasambhava's classic text with a
41451 commentary by Jamgön Mipham, published by Shambhala Publications
41453 The Hinayana counsels a life of discipline--not the onerous, punishing kind,
41454 but the kind that can actually create a life of joy. Little slips are to be
41455 avoided because they really seem to pile up. Rather than being seen as moral
41456 wrongdoings, however, they are seen as obstacles and obscurations to true
41457 wakefulness and as such are to be eschewed. To do so, tremendous precision is
41458 required. I mean, take just one of the most basic precepts, common to every
41459 religion under the sun: "don't lie." If you can read to the end of this
41460 paragraph without telling a lie, please alert the media.
41461 -- Susan Piver, "Start Here Now", published by Shambhala Publications
41463 The reason and the meaning of love in our life is very profound. It is unlike
41464 any other reason. In my own personal view, I do not think that love has to be
41465 for no reason at all. Rather, I think that the reason to love is so vast that
41466 it cannot be limited to any particular reasons.
41467 -- The Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, in "The Heart Is Noble", published by
41468 Shambhala Publications
41470 Human beings suffer birth, sickness, aging and death. We enumerate these
41471 different forms of suffering but prefer not to think about what they entail.
41472 We only need to watch a birth to know how traumatic and painful the passage
41473 through the birth canal must be for the baby. Aging is distasteful to
41474 everyone but small children, who long to be grown up. Everyone else likes to
41475 be told they don't look a day older.
41476 Even reading about diseases or hearing of others' sicknesses fills us
41477 with a dread that we might contract them. When we actually fall ill
41478 ourselves, we feel afraid and helpless. As for death, everyone avoids talking
41479 about it. Humans also experience the constant frustration of not getting what
41480 they want and getting what they don't want. When we first meet people, they
41481 may seem successful and happy, but as soon as we get to know them better, we
41482 discover they all have a tale of woe to tell.
41483 -- "Atisha's Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment", commentary by Geshe
41484 Sonam Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, published by
41485 Shambhala Publications
41487 The idea is that passion should be transmuted into compassion for yourself and
41488 others. This is possible because passion without reference point, goal
41489 orientation, or aggression is compassion. When passion is transmuted into
41490 compassion, you do not abandon your existence, but you are able to be gentle
41491 and nice. Since you are not substituting such behavior for your actual self,
41492 you do not feel particularly lost or deprived of your capabilities. Beyond
41493 that, you can expand to others as well. So you are full, but at the same
41494 time, you are empty.
41495 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom & Compassion",
41496 published by Shambhala Publications.
41498 Traditionally, many subtle distinctions are made about the various
41499 characteristics and levels of the development of bodhichitta. Chagme Rinpoche
41500 mentions these and says, "If you are studying to become a scholar, you need
41501 to know all of these distinctions. But if you are a practitioner, these
41502 distinctions are extremely unimportant." For example, I arrived here at
41503 these teachings by traveling in airplanes and automobiles. Now, I might
41504 wonder, "Who built the airplane I traveled in? How does it work?" But, in
41505 fact, I don't know the answers to any of these things because it is not
41506 important for me to know these things. What is important is that I got on an
41507 airplane and flew thousands of miles and was able to get here. In the same
41508 way, I regularly travel by automobile, and I might wonder, "How do you make
41509 an automobile? Who made this automobile? How does it work exactly?" From
41510 one point of view, of course, it is good to know these things, but from the
41511 point of view of actually getting somewhere, it is not important. What is
41512 important is that I got in a car and I came here. So, from one point of view,
41513 it might be important to know all about the various aspects and
41514 characteristics of bodhichitta, but according to Karma Chagme, it is perfectly
41516 -- Khenchen Thrangu, "Luminous Clarity: A Commentary on Karma Chagme's
41517 Union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen", published by Shambhala Publications
41519 - You are a deeply selfish person. -
41521 + You are a deeply compassionate person. +
41523 * You are a deeply deep person. *
41525 - You are a deeply selfish person. -
41526 + You are a deeply compassionate person. +
41527 * You are a deeply deep person. *
41529 Buddhism asserts that the mind can be changed. I doubt whether anyone
41530 would dispute that point although we often feel as if we are stuck with an
41531 obstinate mind that refuses to do what we want it to. In addictions this
41532 feeling of being stuck can be very powerful. But Buddha said that all this
41533 can change, no matter how bad it is.
41534 Buddha was a top psychologist. He taught methods for dealing with
41535 immediate and urgent situations as well as methods that look into long-term
41536 change. For the long term, meditation is an important method. When he was
41537 teaching about how to meditate, he suggested a number of tools from which we
41538 can benefit. We are going to use three of these tools to help us:
41539 mindfulness, introspection, and equanimity. Mindfulness keeps our mind on
41540 whatever we have decided to do. Introspection checks whether we are being
41541 mindful or not. Equanimity stops the dramatizing and catastrophizing that we
41542 get into when we do not get what we want (the craving and grasping that arise
41543 from attachment) or we get what we do not want (aversion which gives rise to
41544 hatred, jealousy, and depression).
41545 -- Chönyi Taylor, from "Enough! A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release
41546 from Addictive Patterns", published by Shambhala Publications
41548 It is said in the Supreme Continuum of the Great Vehicle:
41549 Earth is based upon water,
41550 Water on wind, and wind on space,
41551 But space is not based on anything.
41552 Similarly, the aggregates and sensory sense fields
41553 Are based on deeds and afflictive mental states.
41554 Deeds and afflictive mental states are always based on mistaken attention.
41555 Mistaken attention is based on the purity of mind.
41556 But the nature of mind is not itself based on any of these things.
41557 -- Choying Tobden Dorje, from "The Complete Nyingma Tradition from Sutra to
41558 Tantra, Books 15 to 17, Volume 1", published by Shambhala Publications
41560 First, I'll begin with self, which sometimes goes by the name ego, or
41561 more familiarly, I and me. What is this self, really? We can investigate by
41562 trying to analyze this self, to locate it or pin it down, to see if it even
41563 exists in the first place. This can be a highly illuminating contemplation,
41564 but for the purposes of this book, I would like to focus more on our everyday
41565 experience. Let's identify how having a self feels. In our mind stream,
41566 there is always some kind of feeling of having a self, which is at the center
41567 of all our thoughts and emotions. One Tibetan phrase targets this phenomenon
41568 precisely: dak che dzin. Dak means "self"; che means "important" or
41569 "dear"; dzin means "holding" or "regarding." This term has various
41570 translations, which all capture different nuances: self-centeredness, self-
41571 clinging, ego-clinging, self-absorption. I like to use all of these terms in
41572 different contexts, but my favorite translation is "self-importance."
41573 This word may make us think dak che dzin has mostly to do with being proud
41574 and arrogant, but such pride is nowhere near the whole story. Self-importance
41575 includes both self-cherishing and self-protection. It is the source of the
41576 five main types of painful emotions, known as the "five poisons":
41577 attachment, aggression, jealousy, arrogance, and stupidity. It can manifest
41578 as feeling like we're better than others, but just as easily it can manifest
41579 as low self-esteem, or even self-hatred. The bottom line is that we regard
41580 this self--whatever or wherever it is--as the most important thing in the
41582 -- Dzigar Kongtrul, from "The Intelligent Heart: A Guide to the
41583 Compassionate Life", published by Shambhala Publications.
41585 Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why
41586 people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
41589 In reality, nothing can save us from a state of chaos or confusion unless
41590 we have acknowledged it and actually experienced it. Otherwise, even though
41591 we may be in the midst of chaos, we don't even notice it, although we are
41592 subject to it. On the path of meditation, the first real glimpse of our
41593 confusion and the general chaos is when we begin to feel uncomfortable. We
41594 feel that something is a nuisance. Something is bugging us constantly.
41595 What is that? Eventually we discover that we are the nuisance. We begin
41596 to see ourselves being a nuisance to ourselves when we uncover all kinds of
41597 thought problems, emotional hang-ups, and physical problems in meditation.
41598 Before we work with anyone else, we have to deal with being a nuisance to
41599 ourselves. We have to pull ourselves together. We might get angry with
41600 ourselves, saying, "I could do better than this. What's wrong with me? I
41601 seem to be getting worse. I'm going backward." We might get angry with
41602 the whole world, including ourselves. Everything, the entire universe,
41603 becomes the expression of total insult. We have to relate to that experience
41604 rather than rejecting it. If you hope to be helpful to others, first you have
41605 to work with yourself.
41606 -- Chögyam Trungpa, from "Mindfulness in Action", published by Shambhala
41609 If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered
41610 as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded,
41611 that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers
41612 against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious
41614 -- George Washington, letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia (1789)
41616 Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one,
41617 he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
41618 -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr (1787)
41620 In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof
41621 is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practiced, and both by
41622 precept and example inculcated on mankind.
41623 -- Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists (1771)
41625 Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the
41626 strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. Take away the
41627 law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity.
41628 -- Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)
41630 Congress has no power to make any religious establishments.
41631 -- Roger Sherman, Congress (1789)
41633 The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
41634 -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1758)
41636 I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
41637 build a wall of separation between Church & State.
41638 -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802)
41640 To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering
41641 medicine to the dead.
41642 -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. V (1776)
41644 Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than
41645 our opinions in physics or geometry.
41646 -- Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779)
41648 Christian establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which
41649 facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.
41650 -- James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr. (1774)
41652 There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of
41653 science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of
41655 -- George Washington, address to Congress (1790)
41657 During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity
41658 been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride
41659 and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both,
41660 superstition, bigotry and persecution.
41661 -- James Madison, General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1785)
41663 If the present and the future
41664 Depend upon the past,
41665 Then both the present and the future
41666 Are existent in the past.
41668 If the present and the future
41669 Are not present then,
41670 How could the present and the future
41671 Be dependent on it?
41673 If they are not dependent on the past,
41674 Then both are unestablished.
41675 Thus the present and the future time
41678 To the two remaining times, it should be understood,
41679 This same procedure is applied.
41680 And likewise it applies to high and low and medium,
41681 And to the singular and so forth.
41683 Time that does not stay we cannot grasp;
41684 And time that could be grasped
41685 Does not remain. So how can time,
41686 Ungraspable, be said to be?
41688 If time depends on things,
41689 Then how can there be time if things do not exist?
41690 And since there are no things at all,
41691 How can time exist?
41692 -- Nagarjuna, from "The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way: The
41693 Mulamadhyamakakarika", published by Shambhala Publications
41695 White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane
41697 One pill makes you larger
41698 And one pill makes you small
41699 And the ones that mother gives you
41700 Don't do anything at all
41702 When she's ten feet tall
41704 And if you go chasing rabbits
41705 And you know you're going to fall
41706 Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
41707 Has given you the call
41709 When she was just small
41711 When the men on the chessboard
41712 Get up and tell you where to go
41713 And you've just had some kind of mushroom
41714 And your mind is moving low
41716 I think she'll know
41718 When logic and proportion
41719 Have fallen sloppy dead
41720 And the White Knight is talking backwards
41721 And the Red Queen's off with her head
41722 Remember what the dormouse said
41726 How can we integrate these teachings into our lives? I think that only
41727 happens when we are faced with challenges and respond to them in a new way,
41728 not according to habitual self-importance. In other words, we respond by
41729 applying the exchange of self and other. When tonglen becomes our familiar
41730 way of being, the entire path unfolds easily in front of us. This difficult
41731 modern age turns out to be the perfect setting for our spiritual practice,
41732 proving far more hospitable to our growth than past eras of idealized calm and
41733 simplicity. When we figure out for ourselves how to apply the wisdom of books
41734 to whatever difficult circumstances arise in life, then that wisdom becomes
41735 part of our mind. We become transformed. My hope for every reader--as well
41736 as for myself--is that we will apply these lojong teachings again and again
41737 until they become part of who we are.
41738 -- Dzigar Kongtrul and Joseph Waxman, in "The Intelligent Heart: A Guide
41739 to the Compassionate Life", published by Shambhala Publications
41743 Honolulu: a relaxed city, like an uncrowded bar where everyone is clean and
41746 Los Angeles: a scattered city, like a teenager's sexual curiosity.
41748 San Francisco: a clean city, like an elegant, genteel Christian graveyard.
41750 Santa Fe: a picturesque city, like a painter's bright, simple palette,
41753 Boston: a sophisticated city, like London without queens and dukes and falling
41756 New York: a no-more-nothingness city,
41757 where gentle, quiet audiences sit in theaters listening to classical concerts;
41758 where rough, noisy audiences sit in stadiums in pandemonium watching boxing;
41759 where there are clean people with dirty minds;
41760 where there are dirty people with clean minds;
41761 where hundreds of nihilist people reject spiritual teachings;
41762 where hundreds of spiritual teachers reject samsara's teachings;
41763 where poor people sleep underground on low subway platforms;
41764 where rich people sleep aboveground in high skyscraper penthouses;
41765 where many non-practitioners stay for their nightclub retreat to find pleasure;
41766 practitioners leave for their countryside retreat to find pleasure.
41767 - Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, from "A Brief Fantasy History of a Himalayan",
41768 published by Shambhala Publications
41770 As a blind man feels when he finds a pearl in a dustbin, so am I amazed by the
41771 miracle of awakening rising in my consciousness. It is the nectar of
41772 immortality that delivers us from death, the treasure that lifts us above
41773 poverty into the wealth of giving to life, the tree that gives shade to us
41774 when we roam about scorched by life, the bridge that takes us across the
41775 stormy river of life, the cool moon of compassion that calms our mind when it
41776 is agitated, the sun that dispels darkness, the butter made from the milk of
41777 kindness by churning it with the dharma. It is a feast of joy to which all
41779 -- from "Teachings of the Buddha", written by Shantideva, edited by Jack
41780 Kornfield, published by Shambhala Publications
41782 Even though we may actually recognize the nature of awareness, we should not
41783 hold on to that mindfulness tightly, thinking, "I have indeed recognized it."
41784 If we do hold on to it tightly, it will be like when a thread is twisted too
41785 taut: one cannot sew with it, because it knots up. In the same way, if one
41786 is too tense, one's mindfulness will be obscured. If mindfulness is not
41787 grasped too tightly but left in the natural flow, sometimes it will be clear
41788 and sometimes not. But we should not get caught up in whether it is clear or
41789 not. If genuine mindfulness is left without being altered, gradually we will
41790 come to know, through our own experience, "This is awareness, and this is
41791 ignorance; this is mind, and this is wisdom."
41792 -- Dilgo Khyentse, from "Primordial Purity", published by Shambhala
41795 He says Tibetans are unique because we value the practice of Buddhism. He
41796 gives the example of Tibetan mothers who in the course of a day point
41797 repeatedly toward suffering. They tell their children: don't kill the ant,
41798 it will suffer; don't pour hot water on the soil, the earthworm will feel
41799 the sting and the heat will cause it great pain; don't pull the dog's tail
41800 so hard. We are told to think for the animals and insects who cannot voice
41801 their pain but for whom suffering is as acute as it is for humans. From a
41802 young age, he says, we are reminded that nobody is free from suffering. I
41803 agree that my Tibetan friends are instinctively more likely to brush away
41804 flies or mosquitoes instead of crushing or swatting them. But why is
41805 compassion so important? What about our land, our independence? Will
41806 compassion free our land?
41807 -- Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, in "Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss,
41808 and Belonging", published by Shambhala Publications
41810 At the end of every meditation session, recognize what kind of healing
41811 experience you are feeling. You could be feeling peace, warmth, bliss,
41812 spaciousness, boundlessness, richness, sacredness, or strength. If you have
41813 multiple experiences, it can help to recognize the most prominent one.
41814 The goal is to calmly enjoy the particular experience, resting in
41815 awareness of what you are feeling, without grasping at it or analyzing it or
41816 needing to think about it in words. Just remain one with the experience, in
41817 open awareness, in silence, like water that has merged in water.
41818 Purpose: This meditation is for sowing the seed of experience of the
41819 meditation, not on the rough surface of concepts or afflicting emotions but at
41820 the deeper and calmer level of the open mind. Merging your awareness with the
41821 experience ensures the fruition of the meditation with greatest certainty.
41822 Open awareness helps unite your mind with the result of healing.
41823 This meditation could also lead to, or be, the awareness state of the
41824 enlightened nature itself.
41825 -- by Tulku Thondup, in "Boundless Healing", published by Shambhala Publications
41828 These precious freedoms and endowments are rare as a daytime star;
41829 Even when found, like a candle flame in the wind,
41830 They could vanish in an instant!
41831 Pondering this, most people seem like mad sea captains.
41833 The root of practice is renunciation.
41834 So if you don't use the key points of mind training
41835 To till the soil of your mind, hardened toward liberation,
41836 When death comes and you beat your chest with regret,
41837 it will be too late!
41839 -- Jigme Lingpa, from "Steps to the Great Perfection: The Mind-Training
41840 Tradition of the Dzogchen Masters", published by Shambhala Publications
41842 We don't have to try to surrender. That sounds too effortful. Then we will
41843 have a surrender competition. There is going to be a spiritual marathon, a
41844 spiritual Olympics, how about that? Indeed, there is a spiritual Olympics.
41845 It is not officially announced. Many people are working really hard trying to
41846 be the best meditator, the best ascetic, the most enlightened. So don't try
41847 to surrender with your personal will or deliberate effort. It sounds like too
41848 much work, trying to surrender to everything. Instead, go inside. That is
41849 all you need to do sometimes. Go inside and let yourself be in touch with
41850 your heart. You know how to be in touch with your heart. Your heart is
41851 waiting to be recognized. This is why the Tibetan masters often said there
41852 are many forms or levels of meditation. The highest level is what they call
41853 effortless meditation. When they teach how to meditate, especially the
41854 masters from the Nyingma tradition, they always say, "Don't do anything."
41855 Rest in the present moment. Relax in the natural state of your mind, because
41856 if you can relax, rest in the natural state of your own mind, then you will be
41857 in touch with your own heart, with your original heart, with your innocent
41858 heart, and then surrender is very easy because all of your heart wants it.
41859 -- Anam Thubten, from "Embracing Each Moment: A Guide to the Awakened Life",
41860 published by Shambhala Publications
41862 One day the Dalai Lama went to Ganden accompanied by his security agent
41863 Kumbula. They went in ordinary clothes on ordinary horses and left Lhasa
41864 traveling east. When they got to the ferries they met with an elderly man
41865 heading back home from Lhasa where he had taken a load of wood on a donkey.
41866 The Dalai Lama entered into a conversation with him. "Where are you off to?"
41867 he asked. "I am going back home," the man replied. "I have taken a load of
41868 wood to the Norbulinka to the kitchens there." This was when a new building
41869 called the Chensel Palace was being constructed. New taxes had been
41870 introduced to pay for it and part of the tax was the requisitioning of pack
41871 animals to transport rocks. "He already has some very beautiful palaces but
41872 still he is building a new one. People have to spend a lot of their time
41873 there and use their animals for building this new palace. It is that fellow
41874 Kumbula who decided yet another palace is needed in Norbulinka even though
41875 there are a lot there already. He is not a bad fellow, this Kumbula," the old
41876 man continued, "but he really does load up the ordinary people with his taxes
41877 and requisitions. This fellow Kumbula, he always has to be starting some new
41878 project or other, he is that sort of fellow." Now Kumbula was right there
41879 with the Dalai Lama, and a bit later the old fellow started up again. "This
41880 Kumbula is definitely too quick to start up new projects, if you ask me; but
41881 you know, he is no fool either, and he is loyal to the Dalai Lama. He is
41882 useful to the Dalai Lama, no doubt about that." The gist of his remarks was
41883 that the ordinary man like himself found the taxation burdensome. The Dalai
41884 Lama was very pleased with the conversation.
41885 "Rinpoche," the old man said, thinking the Dalai Lama was just a
41886 distinguished looking older monk, "have some tea with me." They had some tea
41887 and tsampa together and then the old fellow pulled out a bottle of barley beer
41888 and offered it to the Dalai Lama. "I am a monk, I do not drink beer," the
41889 Dalai Lama protested. "Do not be silly," he said, "a lot of the monks are
41890 drinking beer nowadays, go ahead and have a swig." "Is that so?" said the
41891 Dalai Lama. "A lot of the monks nowadays are drinking beer are they?" "Piles
41892 of them," the old fellow replied, "though I am pleased to see that you do not
41893 accept my offer." After the old man had downed his beer with some bread he
41894 was carrying, they set off in the direction of Ganden together, talking as
41895 they went. As they began to approach Ganden, at the place called Dechen, they
41896 caught sight of a large smoke offering and the monks of Ganden lined up to
41897 welcome a special guest. The old fellow said, "They are making a big welcome
41898 up there for someone today, I wonder who is coming." The Dalai Lama said, "I
41899 am not positive, but I suspect it is for me." Then the old fellow began to
41900 suspect that he was there with the Dalai Lama and he thought he had better
41901 make a run for it. As he tried to flee the Dalai Lama caught hold of him and
41902 would not let him go. He took the old man right in through the gates of
41903 Ganden Monastery and told the people there not to let him leave, but to give
41904 him a good meal and something excellent to drink. After he had been well-fed
41905 and looked after, the Dalai Lama sent word to bring him.
41906 The old man was beside himself with fear, thinking he was going to be
41907 given a terrible punishment, but the Dalai Lama treated him as a friend and
41908 told him to sit down, right opposite to where Kumbula was sitting. "Hey, old
41909 fellow," he said, "I must introduce you to Kumbula. This is Kumbula." He was
41910 overcome with embarrassment, but the Dalai Lama said that he should not be.
41911 "You spoke your heart, you spoke what you felt was true and there is no shame
41912 in that. You described faults as faults and good qualities as good qualities.
41913 Some people only complain but you did not do that. Some, again, cover up
41914 faults and say nothing but good and that is not right either. You spoke
41915 honestly and openly, and I am very happy." He gave him fifty white silver
41916 sangs as a parting gift, a large sum of money, and said that the problems
41917 would be looked into. It was from then that the levies on the people for
41918 Norbulinka building projects stopped.
41919 -- Ven. Lobsang Gyatso, translated by Ven. Dr. Gareth Sparham, "Memoirs
41920 of a Tibetan Lama", published by Shambhala Publications
41922 The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor
41923 to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and
41925 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41927 Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on
41928 the present moment.
41929 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41931 You only lose what you cling to. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41933 Pain is certain, suffering is optional. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41935 Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it
41936 at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
41937 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41939 Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to
41941 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41943 Most problems, if you give them enough time and space, will eventually wear
41945 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41947 If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved
41948 worrying will do you no good.
41949 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41951 There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates
41952 people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant
41953 relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.
41954 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41956 Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again, and you will be
41958 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41960 Happiness does not depend on what you have or who you are, it solely relies on
41962 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41964 Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to others.
41965 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41967 Wear your ego like a loose fitting garment. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41969 People with opinions just go around bothering one another.
41970 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41973 than the man who would conquer
41974 a thousand-thousand men,
41975 is he who would conquer
41978 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41980 Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except your self. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41982 With our thoughts we make the world. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41984 However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they
41985 do you if you do not act on upon them?
41986 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41988 Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.
41989 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41991 Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.
41992 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41994 A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not
41995 considered a good man because he is a good talker.
41996 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
41998 Silence is an empty space, space is the home of the awakened mind.
41999 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42001 Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and
42003 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42005 All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our
42006 thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil
42007 thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that
42008 draws the wagon... If a man speaks or acts with a good thought, happiness
42009 follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.
42010 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42012 The mind is everything. What you think you become. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42014 The fool who knows he is a fool is that much wiser. -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42016 Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.
42017 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42019 In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create
42020 distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
42021 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42023 Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun, and the Truth.
42024 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42026 Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
42027 in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe
42028 in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do
42029 not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
42030 Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many
42031 generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything
42032 agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
42033 then accept it and live up to it.
42034 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42036 If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would
42038 -- Shakyamuni Buddha
42040 brain fully charged
42043 It really seemed like every band built on the one just prior to it, so that as
42044 each day moved on, the acts just generated more and more energy and awesome
42045 music, storing it up in a celestial battery. the peak of it all for me was
42046 the phish show on the last night, which was so high energy and saturated with
42047 fun and healthy vibes that I felt like "i never need to feel fear again".
42048 that feeling lasted for days after the festival was over. hopefully memory of
42049 that thought never fades.
42051 Don't become easily discouraged. If you never try to go beyond that
42052 stage of initial discouragement because there are thoughts arising in your
42053 meditation, you are never going to have the true experiences of meditation.
42054 You need to go beyond that initial stage. You need to keep trying. If you
42055 keep making that effort to go beyond that initial discouragement, you will
42056 arrive at the experience of not getting caught up in your thoughts and mental
42058 Sometimes you may even observe an increase in the frequency of thoughts.
42059 When that happens, don't get discouraged. My enlightened master Jigme
42060 Phuntsok Rinpoche says:
42061 "One sign that your meditation is beginning to be effective is that both
42062 subtle thoughts and obvious thoughts become more noticeable than before. This
42063 is not a bad sign; it's a good sign. When water rushes in a strong river
42064 current, you don't see the fish or rocks beneath the rapids. But when the
42065 current slows and the water becomes clear, then you can see the fish, the
42066 rocks, and everything below the surface distinctly. Similarly, if you never
42067 pay attention to your mind, and your thoughts and emotions are uncontrolled,
42068 you don't even know how many thoughts go by. But when your mind becomes
42069 more stable and calm, you begin to see your thoughts more clearly. Don't be
42070 discouraged. Take heart at this sign. Don't hold yourself too loosely or
42071 too tightly. Maintain your meditation in the right way without concern and
42072 gradually your meditation experience will increase and stabilize."
42073 Remember: Do not follow the past. Do not anticipate the future. Remain
42074 in the present moment. Leave your mind alone. Those four simple,
42075 straightforward instructions give us a chance to go beyond our mental events
42076 and, eventually, to experience the natural state of mind.
42077 -- Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche, in "Our Pristine Mind", published by Shambhala
42080 Knowing full well that his aim is to achieve enlightenment, Sujata adopts
42081 a parallel program to help sustain him. Symbolically feeding Gautama with
42082 each offering to the priests, she utters the dedication prayer,
42083 May the Bodhisattva take my food and thereby truly attain perfect and
42084 completely unexcelled awakening!
42085 After six years of this, the gods notify her that Gautama has ceased his
42086 austerities and urge her to take further action. Due to her abundant good
42087 karma in past lives, she is preordained to serve him. Sujata sets to work
42088 preparing the rice milk offering in the fashion of the one thousand cows
42089 milked to feed the five hundred and so forth. In observing miracles around
42090 the cooking pot, she prays that they foretell the Bodhisattva's imminent
42091 supreme awakening. She brings the rice porridge in a golden bowl to Gautama
42092 where he is sitting along the river and offers it to him after reverentially
42093 making prostrations. According to this story, the Bodhisattva regains his
42094 former strength and splendor upon consuming Sujata's excellent food. In
42095 this version, it is his first meal after the six years of austerities and has
42096 instantly restored him to wholeness. After bathing and meditating at the
42097 river, Gautama proceeds to the tree of enlightenment. All these events have
42098 taken place within the span of one day.
42099 -- Wendy Garling, in "Stars at Dawn", published by Shambhala Publications
42101 True compassion is spacious and wise as well as resourceful. This type of
42102 compassion could be called intelligent love or intelligent affection. We know
42103 how to express our affection so that it does not destroy a person but instead
42104 helps him or her to develop. It is more like a dance than a hug. And the
42105 music behind it is that of intellect.
42106 -- " 'Intellect and Intuition,' in The Heart of the Buddha: Entering the
42107 Tibetan Buddhist Path", by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, published by
42108 Shambhala Publications
42110 Gampopa recognized in Dusum Khyenpa an exceptional being and declared that
42111 he would amply spread Buddhism throughout Tibet. He added that he would be
42112 liberated in this life from samsara, cyclic existence. Over many years the
42113 Karmapa received from this great bodhisattva the teachings that Gampopa
42114 himself had been given by his masters. First, Gampopa transmitted to him the
42115 teachings of the Kadampa tradition, including the classical scholastic studies
42116 known as the "gradual path," which emphasize the development of
42117 renunciation and altruism. They henceforth became an educational constant for
42118 the Kagyu lineage and the basis of the study of the Vajrayana. Dusum Khyenpa
42119 then received from his master the teachings and transmissions related to the
42120 tantras. One day, when Gampopa bestowed upon his disciple the Hevajra
42121 initiation, the Karmapa perceived his master in the form of the deity himself.
42122 Gampopa then urged Dusum Khyenpa to go on retreat into the neighboring
42123 caves in order to actualize what had been transmitted. After only nine days
42124 of meditation, he spontaneously experienced a strong feeling of warmth and
42125 bliss. He removed his monk robes and dressed himself in the simple attire of
42126 white cotton-repa--worn by yogis. He meditated for nine months,
42127 concentrating in particular on the practice of calm abiding (samatha), which
42128 allows practitioners to pacify and stabilize their mind. Having excelled in
42129 this, he continued his retreat for three more years, perfecting his meditative
42130 capacities on the understanding of the nature of mind through penetrating
42131 vision (vipashyana) practice. Finally Gampopa conferred upon him the ultimate
42132 instructions of the Kagyu lineage. He then considered that the realization of
42133 his disciple was henceforth stable.
42134 From then on the life of Dusum Khyenpa was divided between retreat and
42135 travel. He traveled throughout central Tibet, receiving instructions from
42136 other teachers or dispensing his own teachings. Nonetheless, until his master
42137 passed away, he often returned to Gampopa to receive other transmissions.
42138 Gampopa encouraged the Karmapa to go on retreat in the near future at Kampo
42139 Gangra in eastern Tibet, prophesying that it would be in this location that
42140 Dusum Khyenpa would attain complete enlightenment.
42141 -- from "History of the Karmapas", by Lama Kunsang, Lama Pemo, and Marie
42142 Aubèle, published by Shambhala Publications
42144 One cannot force or grasp a spiritual experience, because it is as delicate as
42145 the whisper of the wind. But one can purify one's motivation, one's body,
42146 and train oneself to cultivate it. Because we come from a culture which
42147 teaches us there is always something external to be obtained which will lead
42148 us to fulfillment, we lose contact with our innate wisdom. As the Indian
42149 Tantric Buddhist saint Saraha says in one of his dohas (poems expressing the
42150 essence of his understanding):
42151 Though the house-lamps have been lit,
42152 The blind live on in the dark.
42153 Though spontaneity is all-encompassing
42154 And close, to the deluded it remains
42156 -- Tsultrim Allione, in "Women of Wisdom", published by Shambhala Publications
42158 being royalty is nothing compared to being composed from parts of a far
42159 flung star explosion, as we all are.
42162 Six right livelihood guidelines...
42165 Eat with awareness and gratitude.
42166 Pause before buying and see if breathing is enough.
42167 Pay attention to the effects of media you consume.
42169 Pause. Breathe. Listen.
42170 When you feel compelled to speak in a meeting or conversation, pause.
42171 Breathe before entering your home, pleace of work, or school.
42172 Listen to the people you encounter. They are buddhas.
42174 Practice gratitude.
42175 Notice what you have
42176 Be equally grateful for opportunities and challenges.
42177 Share joy, not negativity.
42179 Cultivate compassion and loving kindness.
42180 Notice where help is needed and be quick to help
42181 Consider others' perspectives deeply.
42182 Work for peace at many levels.
42185 Cultivate "don't know" mind (= curiosity).
42186 Find connections between Buddhist teachings and your life.
42187 Be open to what arises in every moment.
42189 Accept constant change.
42191 -- Source: "Moon journeying through clouds", Zen Buddhist chants, sayings and recitations from the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom.
42193 never forget that the truth is always larger than you know.
42196 Roger Babson's Ten Commandments of Investing
42198 + Keep speculation and investments separate.
42199 + Don't be fooled by a name.
42200 + Be wary of new promotions.
42201 + Give due consideration to market ability.
42202 + Don't buy without proper facts.
42203 + Safeguard purchases through diversification.
42204 + Don't try to diversify by buying different securities of the same company.
42205 + Small companies should be carefully scrutinized.
42206 + Buy adequate security, not super abundance.
42207 + Choose your dealer and buy outright (i.e., don't buy on margin.)
42209 Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. -- Mark Twain
42211 All of us cherish helpful and loving friends, and wise, compassionate
42212 spiritual mentors are especially important to us to progress on the path.
42213 Being separated from the people we value or having an important relationship
42214 not work out the way we had hoped is painful, yet it is a common occurrence in
42215 cyclic existence. Because we ourselves, others, and all the conditioned
42216 things around us are impermanent by nature, whatever comes together must also
42218 -- Thubten Chodron, "Good Karma: How to Create the Causes of Happiness and
42219 Avoid the Causes of Suffering", published by Shambhala Publications
42221 There are no limits to our imagination,
42223 we can only imagine them.
42226 When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say
42227 to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
42230 Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a
42234 First, let's take a look at how physical and emotional health supports
42235 our spiritual health. What is spiritual health? One way that the Buddhist
42236 teachings define spiritual health is having a sense of interconnection with
42237 other living beings on the planet, as well as respect for the natural
42238 environment. Recognition of this interconnection with others is developed as
42239 we call to mind the things that all beings have in common: the wish to attain
42240 happiness and avoid suffering. We can reflect on this by thinking that all of
42241 the wonderful things we want for ourselves, others want them too. Just so,
42242 all of the painful things we would like to avoid, others wish to avoid those
42244 However, spiritual health is far more than a mere sense of connection.
42245 True spiritual health arises from discovering love and compassion for all
42246 sentient beings. In doing so, we cut through our own painful feelings of
42247 anger, resentment, and strong desire, which cause us so much personal
42248 unhappiness and sorrow. By bringing ourselves back into harmonious
42249 relationship with friends, family, and the larger community, even those we may
42250 dislike, we ourselves become spiritually rich.
42251 -- Anyen Rinpoche & Allison Choying Zangmo, "The Tibetan Yoga of Breath:
42252 Breathing Practices for Healing the Body and Cultivating Wisdom",
42253 published by Shambhala Publications
42255 Our worries may zoom around the state of the world. "What happens if the
42256 economy plummets? If the ozone layer keeps decreasing? If we have more
42257 anthrax attacks? If terrorists take over the country? If we lose our civil
42258 liberties fighting terrorism?" Here, our creative writing ability leads to
42259 fantastic scenarios that may or may not happen, but regardless, we manage to
42260 work ourselves into a state of unprecedented despair. This, in turn, often
42261 leads to raging anger at the powers that be or alternatively, to apathy,
42262 simply thinking that since everything is rotten, there's no use doing
42263 anything. In either case, we're so gloomy that we neglect to act
42264 constructively in ways that remedy difficulties and create goodness.
42265 -- Thubten Chodron, in "Taming the Mind", published by Shambhala Publications
42267 It really seemed like every band built on the one just prior to it, so that as
42268 each day moved on, the acts just generated more and more energy and awesome
42269 music, storing it up in a celestial battery. the peak of it all for me was
42270 the phish show on the last night, which was so high energy and saturated with
42271 fun and healthy vibes that I felt like "i never need to feel fear again".
42272 that feeling lasted for days after the concert was over. hopefully memory of
42273 that thought never fades.
42274 -- fred t. hamster, after lockn 2016
42276 The dawn of the Great Eastern Sun is based on actual experience. It is not a
42277 concept. You realize that you can uplift yourself, that you can appreciate
42278 your existence as a human being. Whether you are a gas station attendant or
42279 the president of your country doesn't really matter. When you experience
42280 the goodness of being alive, you can respect who and what you are. You need
42281 not be intimidated by lots of bills to pay, diapers to change, food to cook,
42282 or papers to be filed. Fundamentally, in spite of all those responsibilities,
42283 you begin to feel that it is a worthwhile situation to be a human being, to be
42284 alive, not afraid of death.
42285 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior", published
42286 by Shambhala Publications
42288 These deities share a freedom from passion and experience more and more
42289 subtle states of mind in each higher level. In the first level, the freedom
42290 from passion is experienced; in the second, freedom from discursive thought;
42291 in the third, the elimination of gross joy in meditation, leaving only sublime
42292 delight; in the fourth, freedom even from delight. Above these are the four
42293 levels of the realm of formlessness, whose inhabitants have transcended form
42294 altogether and have no bodies or forms at all. Here deities experience
42295 successively even more subtle states of mind: the infinity of space, the
42296 infinity of consciousness, "nothing at all," and neither perception nor
42298 These states can certainly appear enormously attractive from our human
42299 point of view. In fact, they correspond to what many think religious practice
42300 is all about--attaining some kind of heaven or some sort of tranquillity or
42301 bliss. But from the Buddhist viewpoint, the sublimity even of these states is
42302 not a worthy ultimate goal. One may ask, "What can possibly be wrong with
42304 It is important to remember that the divine states of the desire realm,
42305 the form realm, and the formless realm, like all the other states known in the
42306 other five realms, are still part of samsara and subject to karma,
42307 impermanence, and suffering. In spite of the relative exaltation of their way
42308 of being, there comes a day for every god when he or she begins to feel the
42309 signs of impending death. The intoxication of the godly state gives way to
42310 sadness, pain, fear, and finally terror, and this is followed by death and
42311 rebirth in a lower realm.
42312 In addition, the gods have one enormous liability: precisely because of
42313 their power, longevity, and intoxication, they are unable to hear the dharma
42314 with its teachings about duhkha, the first noble truth. They, like the
42315 inhabitants of all the other nonhuman realms, are victims of their karma and
42316 are unable to practice a spiritual path to gain liberation.
42317 -- Reginald A. Ray, in "Indestructible Truth", published by Shambhala Publications
42319 The Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, "I like to walk alone on country paths,
42320 rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the
42321 earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such
42322 moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually
42323 consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real
42324 miracle is to walk on earth... a miracle we don't even recognize."
42325 -- from Jan Chozen Bays, MD, "How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures
42326 in Mindfulness", published by Shambhala Publications
42328 Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself
42330 Whatever pain you feel, take it in, wishing for all beings to be free of it.
42331 Whatever pleasure you feel, send it out to others. In this way, our personal
42332 problems and delights become a stepping-stone for understanding the suffering
42333 and happiness of all beings.
42334 -- Pema Chodron's "Compassion Cards", published by Shambhala Publications
42336 Tuvaṭaka Sutta: The Discourse on Being Quick
42339 "Let them completely destroy the root
42340 Of conceptual differentiation,
42341 That is, [the idea] 'I am the thinker.'
42342 Ever mindful, they train to subdue their cravings.
42344 "They shouldn't get entrenched in any teachings they know
42345 Whether their own or that of others.
42346 Good people say that
42347 Being entrenched is not release.
42349 "They would not, because of this, think themselves
42350 Better, worse, or equal [to others].
42351 Experiencing many things,
42352 They don't take a stand in thoughts of themselves."
42354 The Buddha's first teachings in this poem are particularly important.
42355 Here he emphasizes the destruction of the root source for conceptual
42356 proliferation which he describes as being either the idea "I am the
42357 thinker" or the thought "I am." While the grammar of the Pali phrase
42358 allows for both translations into English, the two options both identify some
42359 form of conceit as the basis from which a problematic differentiation of
42360 concepts with which the world is categorized arises. When this conceit is
42361 uprooted, the conceptual proliferation stops. A sage does not categorize or
42362 conceptualize the world with any fixed reference point of existing as "I."
42363 While training to become such a sage, a monastic should avoid swelling up
42364 with conceit, which is described as thinking they are better, worse, or equal
42365 to others. The alternative to such comparative thinking is to have a mind
42366 that is still and unmoving like a calm sea. Many of the training instructions
42367 the Buddha mentions can be understood as support for having a still, peaceful
42369 -- Gil Fronsdal, "The Buddha before Buddhism: Wisdom from the Early
42370 Teachings", published by Shambhala Publications
42372 I. Path of Accumulation
42374 One who has the Mahayana family cultivates bodhicitta, receives teachings
42375 from masters, and makes effort in the virtues until the heat of wisdom is
42376 attained. During this time, progress is classified in four stages:
42377 realization, aspiration, greater aspiration, and achievement. Why is this
42378 called the path of accumulation? Because on it, one gathers the accumulations
42379 of virtue in order to become a vessel for the realization of heat and so forth.
42380 Therefore, it is called the path of accumulation.
42382 These are also called the root virtues which are similar to liberation.
42383 At this stage, twelve of the branches of enlightenment are practiced:
42385 A. the four types of mindfulness,
42386 B. the four types of perfect abandonment, and
42387 C. the four feet of miracle powers.
42389 The Four Types of Mindfulness are:
42391 1. sustaining mindfulness of the body,
42392 2. sustaining mindfulness of feelings,
42393 3. sustaining mindfulness of the mind, and
42394 4. sustaining mindfulness of phenomena.
42396 These four occur during the lesser stage of the path of accumulation.
42398 The Four Types of Perfect Abandonment are:
42400 1. abandoning nonvirtues which have been created,
42401 2. not allowing new nonvirtues to be produced,
42402 3. producing the antidotes, virtues which have not arisen, and
42403 4. allowing those virtues which have arisen to increase.
42405 These four occur during the middle stage of the path of accumulation.
42407 The Four Feet of Miracle Powers are:
42409 1. the absorption of strong aspiration,
42410 2. the absorption of perseverance,
42411 3. the absorption of the mind, and
42412 4. the absorption of investigation.
42414 These four occur during the greater stage of the path of accumulation.
42415 -- Gampopa, from "The Jewel Ornament of Liberation", published by Shambhala
42418 II. Path of Application
42420 The path of application begins after perfection of the path of
42421 accumulation. It has four stages corresponding to the realization of the Four
42422 Noble Truths: heat, maximum heat, patience, and realization of the highest
42423 worldly dharma. Why is it called the path of application? Because there, one
42424 makes an effort to directly realize truth.
42426 A. Five Powers. Furthermore, during the stages of heat and maximum heat,
42427 five powers are practiced:
42428 the power of faith,
42429 the power of perseverance,
42430 the power of mindfulness,
42431 the power of absorption, and
42432 the power of wisdom awareness.
42434 B. Five Strengths. During the stages of patience and highest worldly dharma,
42435 five strengths are practiced:
42436 the strength of faith,
42437 the strength of perseverance,
42438 the strength of mindfulness,
42439 the strength of absorption, and
42440 the strength of wisdom awareness.
42441 -- Gampopa, in "The Jewel Ornament of Liberation", published by Shambhala
42444 III. Path of Insight
42446 The path of insight begins after the highest worldly dharma and consists
42447 of calm abiding as a basis for special insight focused on the Four Noble
42448 Truths. Four insights correspond to each of the Four Noble Truths, making a
42449 total of sixteen-eight patient acceptances and eight cognitions: the patient
42450 acceptance of the cognition of the dharma with respect to suffering, the
42451 cognition of the dharma with respect to suffering, the patient acceptance of
42452 the cognition that is the subsequent realization with respect to suffering,
42453 the cognition that is the subsequent realization with respect to suffering,
42455 Why is it called the path of insight? Because there, one realizes the
42456 Four Noble Truths which were not seen before. At this stage there are seven
42457 of the branches of enlightenment:
42458 the perfect mindfulness branch,
42459 the perfect discrimination branch,
42460 the perfect perseverance branch,
42461 the perfect joy branch,
42462 the perfect relaxation branch,
42463 the perfect absorption branch, and
42464 the perfect equanimity branch.
42465 -- The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, by Gampopa, published by Shambhala
42468 IV. Path of Meditation
42470 The path of meditation practice begins after the realization of special
42471 insight. It has two paths:
42472 A. the path of worldly meditation practice and
42473 B. the path of meditation practice beyond the world.
42475 Worldly Meditation Practice consists of the first, second, third, and
42476 fourth meditative stages, and the formless stages of increasing the infinite
42477 nature of space, increasing the infinity of consciousness, increasing the
42478 nothing-whatsoever-ness, and increasing neither perception nor non-perception.
42479 There are three purposes to practicing this meditation:
42481 + suppressing the afflicting emotions which are the subject of
42482 abandonment in the path of meditation;
42483 + establishing the special qualities of the Four Immeasurables and so
42485 + creating the foundation for the path beyond the world.
42488 Meditation Practice Beyond the World consists of the furthering of calm
42489 abiding and special insight, focused on the two types of wisdom. During the
42490 path of insight there were two "patient acceptances" and two
42491 "awarenesses" corresponding to each of the Four Noble Truths, making a
42492 total of sixteen. The eight patient acceptances were completed in the path of
42493 insight. One becomes familiarized with the eight awarenesses in the path of
42494 meditation through the calm abiding and special insight related to the four
42495 meditative concentrations and three of the formless absorptions. Furthermore,
42496 part of the awareness of phenomena is to familiarize oneself with all the
42497 realization of dharma-as-such. Part of the continuity awareness is to
42498 familiarize oneself with all the realization of primordial wisdom. The state
42499 of neither perception nor non-perception is merely worldly meditation because
42500 the movement of sensation is so unclear.
42501 Why is this called the path of meditation? Because there, one becomes
42502 familiar with the realizations that one achieved in the path of insight. At
42503 this stage, there are eight of the thirty-seven branches of enlightenment:
42506 + perfect conception, perfect speech, perfect action,
42507 + perfect livelihood,
42509 + perfect mindfulness, and
42510 + perfect absorption.
42511 -- Gampopa, from "The Jewel Ornament of Liberation", published by Shambhala
42514 Your eggnog to rum ratio should be 23% to 77%. I would then spice the
42515 eggnog with nutmeg and use more than you're comfortable with because sailors
42516 used to use it as [a] hallucinogen...
42517 Also, enter on a reindeer. And if you enter on a reindeer, stay on the
42518 reindeer. And if you can't reach something because you're too high up
42519 sitting on the reindeer, just ask for help. That goes for life, too. Don't
42520 be afraid to ask for help and stay on that reindeer.
42521 -- T.J. Miller's recipe for the perfect holiday party
42523 if you can't beat them, join them, and subvert them from the inside.
42526 regarding christmas cards...
42527 "i would create my own as a desktop publishing activity, with all new current
42528 stuff. but it's way too much effort. basically, i can either give you a
42529 present or make you a card. which do you prefer?"
42530 -- thus spake slackathustra.
42532 Hope is not a strategy.
42533 Luck is not a factor.
42534 Fear is not an option.
42537 A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do,
42541 The Order of the Four Noble Truths
42543 We do analytical meditation to understand the various unsatisfactory
42544 conditions or sufferings of cyclic existence. When we gain an experience of
42545 them, we then place our mind firmly on that experience using stabilizing
42546 meditation. The more we meditate on suffering, the more we are motivated to
42547 rid ourselves of it. We will want to find out its causes and cease creating
42548 them. Thus, after contemplating true suffering, we contemplate true origin.
42549 Investigating this, we will see that suffering arises from karma, which is
42550 produced in dependence on the disturbing attitudes. These in turn are rooted
42551 in self-grasping ignorance. We will want to eliminate this ignorance, and
42552 will see that because it is a faulty attitude or misconception, it can be
42553 eliminated. Thus we will be certain that we can attain the true cessation of
42554 suffering and its origin. Through further contemplating the four noble
42555 truths, we will recognize that the way to abandon self-grasping ignorance is
42556 to meditate on the true path, since this path is principally the wisdom
42557 realizing the non-existence of the self that is adhered to by ignorance. This
42558 is the order in which the four noble truths unfold in meditation and thus is
42559 the order in which to practice them. So, although the actual order in which
42560 the four occur is first the causes and then the effects, when the Buddha
42561 taught for the purpose of practice, he explained the results first.
42562 -- Geshe Jampa Tegchok, "Transforming Adversity Into Joy and Courage: An
42563 Explanation of the Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas", published by
42564 Shambhala Publications
42566 Take Refuge in the Buddha
42568 We live in an ocean of cyclic existence whose depth and extent cannot be
42569 measured. We are troubled again and again by the afflictions of desire and
42570 hatred as if repeatedly attacked by sharks.
42571 Our mental and physical aggregates are impelled by former contaminated
42572 actions and afflictions and serve as a basis for present suffering as well as
42573 inducing future suffering. While such cyclic existence lasts, we have various
42574 thoughts of pleasure and displeasure: "If I do this, what will people think?
42575 If I do not do this, I will be too late; I won't make any profit." When we
42576 see something pleasant we think, "Oh, if I could only have that!" We see
42577 that others are prosperous, and we generate jealousy, unable to bear their
42578 prosperity. We see an attractive man or woman, and we want a relationship.
42579 We are not satisfied with a passing relationship but want it to last forever.
42580 And then, once staying together with that person, we desire someone else.
42581 When we see someone we do not like, we become angry and quarrel after a single
42582 word; we feel we cannot remain even for an hour near this hated person but
42583 must leave immediately. Day and night, night and day we spend our lives in
42584 the company of the afflictions, generating desire for the pleasant and anger
42585 at the unpleasant, and continue thus even when dreaming, unable to remain
42586 relaxed, our minds completely and utterly mixed with thoughts of desire and
42587 hatred without interruption.
42588 Only a Buddha has extinguished all defects and gained all attainments.
42589 Therefore, one should mentally go for refuge to a Buddha, praise him or her
42590 with speech, and respect him or her physically. One should enter the teaching
42592 -- from "The Essence of Tantra," by the Dalai Lama, in The Great Exposition
42593 of the Secret Mantra, Volume I: Tantra in Tibet by Tsongkhapa, published
42594 by Shambhala Publications
42596 V. Path of Perfection
42598 After the vajra-like absorption, one actualizes the nature of awareness,
42599 the awareness of exhaustion, and awareness of the unborn. The vajra-like
42600 absorption is the state at the edge of the path of meditation and is included
42601 in the preparation and unobstructed stages. This absorption is called
42602 "vajra-like" because it is unobstructed, hard, stable, of one taste, and
42604 "Unobstructed" means that it cannot be affected by the action of the
42605 world. "Hard" means it cannot be destroyed by obscurations. "Stable"
42606 means it cannot be shaken by discursive thoughts. "One taste" means
42607 everything is of one taste. "All pervasive" means that it observes the
42608 suchness of all knowledge.
42609 The "awareness of the exhaustion of causes" that arises after this
42610 absorption is the primordial wisdom awareness that observes the Four Noble
42611 Truths by the power of the exhaustion of all causes. The "awareness of the
42612 unborn" is the primordial wisdom that observes the Four Noble Truths by the
42613 power of abandoning the result, suffering. In other words, this primordial
42614 wisdom clearly observes the exhaustion of the cause and non-production of the
42615 result and is called the "awareness of the exhaustion and non-production."
42616 Why is this called the path of perfection? Because the training is
42617 perfected and one enters the city of nirvana--this is why it is called the
42618 path of perfection. At this stage, there are ten attainments of no-more-
42619 training: starting with perfect view of no-more-training through the perfect
42620 absorption of no-more-training and then the full liberation of no-more-
42621 training and the perfect primordial wisdom of no-more-training--these ten
42622 attainments of no-more-training are included in the five unafflicted skandas:
42624 perfect speech of no-more-training, perfect action, and perfect
42625 livelihood are in the heap of moral ethics;
42626 perfect mindfulness of no-more-training and perfect absorption are in
42627 the heap of absorption;
42628 perfect view of no-more-training, perfect conception, and perfect
42629 effort are in the heap of wisdom awareness;
42630 perfect, full liberation is in the heap of full liberation;
42631 perfect awareness is in the heap of seeing the primordial wisdom of
42633 -- Gampopa, from "The Jewel Ornament of Liberation", published by Shambhala
42636 i try to think of 10,008 impossible things before breakfast,
42637 and i'm near ecstatic if any of those is worth writing down.
42640 businesses or products mashed up with despots:
42646 Relaxing in the midst of chaos,
42647 learning not to panic--this is the spiritual path.
42648 -- Pema Chödrön, "When Things Fall Apart"
42650 Driving all blames into oneself applies whenever we complain about anything,
42651 even that our coffee is cold or the bathroom is dirty. We may think that we
42652 are the voice of the world, that we are speaking on behalf of others, but we
42653 are simply speaking on behalf of ourselves. According to this slogan,
42654 everything is due to our own ego fixation, which makes us very vulnerable.
42655 Consequently, we provide an ideal target. We get hit, but nobody meant to hit
42656 us--we are actually inviting the bullets.
42657 -- Chögyam Trungpa, "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma: The
42658 Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion", published by Shambhala
42661 I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
42664 Aren't surveys inherently biased, because they only include people who are
42665 willing to be surveyed? What about people who value their time?
42668 if throwing your dirty clothes at the hamper causes an avalanche,
42669 then it's time to do the laundry. #NoteToSelf
42673 "from each according to his stash, to each according to his jones."
42676 i learned everything i needed to know about the 2016 election cycle by
42677 listening to devo in the 70s. "We're pinheads now. We are not whole."
42680 "i made a sample with my organ!"
42681 "that's disgusting!"
42682 "an electronic organ, dork."
42684 "i sampled the sound of orgasm."
42688 "the universe is flat in all directions" is what an infinitely dimensional
42689 person might say as she perceives all realities simultaneously.
42692 Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one
42693 knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.
42694 -- General Burnside, of his civil war recruits
42696 music is the balm that soothes.
42697 anger is the bomb that kills.
42698 so don't listen to your anger if you want to feel right about life.
42701 don't torture yourself with overblown expectations of how much you can
42702 accomplish. stretch goals are fine, "burst" goals are not.
42705 In the gap between two thoughts,
42706 Thought-free wakefulness manifests unceasingly.
42709 After Yeshe Tsogyal had helped countless beings in Tibet with her body,
42710 speech, and mind, the naga Nanda made offerings and with tears in his eyes he
42714 Guru, mother, Yeshe Tsogyal,
42715 Key to the mysteries of Padmasambhava,
42716 With mercy taking up the pains of others.
42718 Free from concepts,
42719 "Clean" and "unclean" have no hold on you.
42720 Eager for the benefit of others,
42721 You bury underground all love of self,
42722 Mistress holder of the Teachings,
42723 Mother of Victorious Ones, I bow to you.
42725 -- Excerpted from: "Lady of the Lotus-Born: The Life and Enlightenment of
42726 Yeshe Tsogyal" (translated by the Padmakara Translation Group), published
42727 by Shambhala Publications
42729 The mind captivated by a state of craving has no clue as to what pain and
42730 pleasure really are. When we hanker after objects, do we experience peace and
42731 bliss? Are we in control? Do we feel at ease? Or do we feel restless?
42732 Stressed and worried? Insecure and desperate? The slippery thing about
42733 attachment is that, in our bewilderment, we can't tell the difference
42734 between pleasure and pain, love and desire, happiness and sorrow. The craving
42735 mind can mistake anything for pleasure--even pain! It's like an addiction.
42736 -- Dzigar Kongtrül, "Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening
42737 to Our Natural Intelligence", published by Shambhala Publications
42739 The path of dharma, its fruit, and everything included within great gnosis,
42740 too, are nothing more than the realization of the significance of the
42741 nonduality of phenomena. At this point, there is attainment of the signs of
42742 cultivating bodhicitta. When realized in this manner, there is no need for
42743 training on a multitude of paths. Therefore, the unmistaken path is simply
42744 the realization of the nature of one's own mind just as it is.
42745 -- Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo's treatise on Dzogchen as the culmination of the
42746 Mahāyāna, Entering the way of the Great Vehicle, translated by Dominic
42747 Sur, 2017, published by Shambhala Publications
42749 Lineage is not like a baton that one person passes to another person and then
42750 to another, leaving the ones behind empty-handed. It's like the flame of a
42751 lamp. If you light one lamp and then keep lighting more lamps, the first lamp
42752 still has the flame. There are no distinctions. There is a continuum.
42753 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, from "The Guru Drinks Bourbon?", published by
42754 Shambhala Publications
42756 A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with
42757 the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
42760 Even with realization, if you do not directly cut through, it is like tossing
42761 out a tempered sharp weapon: the view will not protect you, and you are bound
42762 by fear. The yoga that brings together view and conduct is like the weapons
42763 carried by warriors that vanquish all the enemy hosts.
42764 -- Machik Lapdrön, "Chöd: The Sacred Teachings on Severence", by Jamgön
42765 Kongtrul Lodrö Taye, translated by Sarah Harding, published by Shambhala
42768 The system of two truths is propounded solely for didactic purposes, as an
42769 entry to the path. On the ultimate level, the division into two truths has no
42770 place. There is only the inconceivable dharmadhātu, pure suchness, the
42771 ultimate mode of being. As it is written in the sutra,
42773 There is but one truth: absence of all origin,
42774 Yet some will crow about there being four.
42775 But in the essence of enlightenment,
42776 Not one is found--why speak of four?
42778 But whereas on the ultimate level, the two truths are not posited, on the
42779 relative level, they are. For there is certainly a difference between the way
42780 things are and the way they appear. As was said earlier, "These the two
42781 truths are declared to be."
42782 -- The Wisdom Chapter: Jamgön Mipham's Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of
42783 The Way of the Bodhisattva, translated by the Padmakara Translation
42784 Group, published by Shambhala Publications
42786 People who embark upon the path of the Mahayana, the supreme path of
42787 beings of great scope leading to omniscience, should try to acquire four
42788 circumstances. They should (1) live in solitude, in a place that has all the
42789 necessary conditions and is in harmony with the Dharma. They should (2)
42790 frequent a teacher who is learned in the Tripitaka and steeped in the practice
42791 of the three trainings. By doing this, they will avoid the inferior attitudes
42792 of ordinary folk as well as the wrong behavior that leads to suffering, and
42793 they will acquire all the good qualities deriving from the Dharma of
42794 transmission and realization. They should in addition (3) nourish an intense
42795 wish to practice in accordance with the teaching expounded by their master and
42796 should (4) zealously adopt the supreme protection afforded by the merit
42797 accumulated in their past and present existences. The venerable Nagarjuna
42798 refers to these four conditions as the "four wheels," the idea being
42799 that, just as someone riding in a (horse-drawn) chariot can cover in a short
42800 time a distance that would take many days for a cow or ox, a Bodhisattva
42801 taking advantage of these four conditions will progress speedily toward
42802 omniscience. Nagarjuna refers to them in his Suhrllekha when he says:
42804 Your dwelling place befits the task,
42805 You keep the company of holy beings.
42806 With highest aspirations and a store of merit,
42807 You have indeed the "four wheels" all complete.
42809 -- from "Treasury of Precious Qualities, Book One: Sutra Teachings", by
42810 Jigme Lingpa, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, published
42811 by Shambhala Publications
42814 We are far removed from eighth-century Tibet, where we meet her, but
42815 Yeshé Tsogyal continues to be present and available. She lives outside
42816 linear time, but visits it: her limitless emanations form a bridge from her
42817 lifetime to the present. She promised to remain accessible to any spiritual
42818 seeker wishing to follow her lead. In her own words,
42820 And so, from now until the scouring of samsara,
42821 My stream of emanations, primary and secondary,
42822 Will flow unceasing.
42823 Especially to those who in the future meditate
42824 Upon the subtle veins and energies,
42825 I'll show myself--at best directly,
42826 Else in visions, or at least in dreams,
42827 Appearing as a common person, or as the secret consort.
42828 I shall clear the obstacles of those who keep samaya,
42829 Bringing progress to their practice,
42830 Helping to attain with speed the blissful warmth and thence
42833 As promised, she continuously appears to lead and inspire the faithful in
42834 dreams, visions, and real life. As well, her human reincarnations ceaselessly
42835 return to the world, guiding others in whatever capacity is needed.
42836 -- from "The Life and Visions of Yeshe Tsogyal", by Drime Kunga and Yeshe
42837 Tsogyal, translated by Chönyi Drolma, published by Shambhala Publications
42839 It is impossible to conceive how many beings, from beginningless time in
42840 samsara, have been related to us--as parents, as enemies, or as people
42841 indifferent to us. In fact, all beings have been linked to us in these three
42842 ways innumerable times. When they were our enemies, they injured us; when
42843 they were our parents or our friends, they cherished and aided us; when they
42844 were neither, they ignored us. It would be impossible to calculate the number
42845 of relationships that we have experienced. Once when the noble Katyayana went
42846 begging for alms, he came across a group of people and, perceiving the karmic
42847 links that bound them together, commented:
42849 He strikes his mother, eats his father's flesh;
42850 His hated foe he dandles on his lap.
42851 Here is a wife that sucks her husband's bones--
42852 At this samsara how can I not laugh?
42854 -- from "Treasury of Precious Qualities, Book One: Sutra Teachings", by
42855 Jigme Lingpa, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, published
42856 by Shambhala Publications
42858 When the actual process of dying begins, you pass through eight phases--
42859 the first four involve the collapse of the four elements, and the last four
42860 involve the collapse of consciousness into the innermost level of mind, called
42861 the mind of clear light.
42862 In the final phase of dying, when all coarse consciousnesses dissolve into
42863 the all-empty, which is the fundamental innate mind of clear light, the myriad
42864 objects of the world, as well as concepts such as sameness and difference, are
42865 pacified in this subtlest mind. At that time, all appearances of environments
42866 and beings withdraw of their own accord. Even for a nonpractitioner, coarse
42867 appearances also withdraw; this withdrawal of conventional appearances,
42868 however, is not due to a perception of reality attained through meditation.
42869 When, in the last phase, the temporary winds that carry consciousness have all
42870 dissolved, the mind (whether of a practitioner or a nonpractitioner) becomes
42871 as if undifferentiated, and an immaculate openness dawns.
42872 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "The Heart of Meditation", translated and
42873 edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Shambhala Publications
42875 There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have
42876 ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain
42877 and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals
42879 A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is
42880 to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our
42881 inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet.
42882 When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual
42883 discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is
42884 a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like
42885 saying, "If I jog, I'll be a much better person." Or the scenario may be
42886 that they find fault with others; they might say, "If it weren't for my
42887 husband, I'd have a perfect marriage." And "If it weren't for my mind, my
42888 meditation would be excellent."
42889 But loving-kindness--maitri--toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid
42890 of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years.
42891 We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous
42892 or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn't about trying
42893 to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending
42894 who we are already.
42895 Perhaps we will experience what is traditionally described as the fruition
42896 of maitri--playfulness...
42897 -- Pema Chödrön, from "Awakening Loving-Kindness", published by Shambhala
42900 In texts we inherited from India, the basic principle is sometimes called
42901 the "fundamental innate mind of clear light" and the "fundamental innate
42902 wisdom of clear light"--these two terms having the same meaning. In other
42903 texts, it is called the "space-diamond pervading space," whereas in even
42904 others it is called the "jewel mind," as, for example, when it is said,
42905 "Separate from the jewel mind, there is no buddha and no sentient being."
42906 Then, in Tibet, in some texts, it is called "ordinary consciousness"
42907 and "innermost awareness." These terms are used in the context of speaking
42908 about freedom from thought, which is psychologically and experientially
42909 described as "self-release," "naked release," and "unimpeded
42910 penetration"; we will be discussing these in detail later. The innermost
42911 awareness is said to be the basis of the appearance of all of the round of
42912 suffering (called "cyclic existence") and also the basis of liberation
42913 (called "nirvana"). Everything, without exception, is complete in the
42914 continuum of innermost awareness. It is even said to be "naturally arisen,"
42915 since it has always been and always will be.
42916 -- H.H. the Dalai Lama, from "The Heart of Meditation", translated and
42917 edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Shambhala Publications
42919 When phenomena are indeed seen to be devoid of true existence, great
42920 compassion will well up effortlessly, a compassion that will never abandon
42921 living beings who circle in samsara through their clinging to true existence.
42922 For as it has been taught, it is in the nature of things that such an attitude
42924 -- from "The Wisdom Chapter: Jamgön Mipham's Commentary on the Ninth
42925 Chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva", published by Shambhala
42928 When resting evenly in meditation with the points of body,
42929 If appearances cease and you are without thoughts,
42930 These are the doings of a lethargic shamatha.
42931 But when you rouse yourself with mindfulness,
42932 It's like a candle, self-luminous and shining bright,
42933 Or like a flower that's naturally vivid and clear.
42934 Like looking with your eyes at the glow of the sky,
42935 Awareness-emptiness is naked, open, and clear.
42937 That nonconceptuality that's luminous and clear
42938 Is the arising of the shamatha experience.
42939 On the basis of that meditative experience,
42940 While supplicating the precious jewels,
42941 Gain certainty by studying and contemplating the dharma.
42942 Take the vipashyana that brings the understanding of no self
42943 And tie the sturdy rope of shamatha to that.
42944 Then that strong noble being with love and compassion
42945 Through the mighty strength of rousing bodhichitta to benefit others,
42946 Having been lifted up with a pure aspiration
42947 To the completely pure path of seeing,
42948 There, vipashyana directly realizes the purity that cannot be seen
42949 And then the faults of mind's hopes and fears will be known.
42950 Without going anywhere, you'll arrive at the Buddha's ground.
42951 Without looking at anything, you'll see dharmakaya.
42952 Without achieving anything, your aim will be spontaneously accomplished.
42953 -- from "The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa", By Tsangnyon Heruka,
42954 translated by Christopher Stagg, published by Shambhala Publications
42956 Trying to find the pain in life is the renunciation of hinayana. Trying to
42957 find the ambition in life, trying to reach higher goals, is the
42958 bodhisattva's ambition in the mahayana. Trying to find the subtleties of
42959 life is the tantric discovery of mystical experience in the vajrayana.
42960 -- Milarepa, from "Milarepa: Lessons from the Life and Songs of Tibet's
42961 Great Yogi", by Chögyam Trungpa, published by Shambhala Publications
42963 The root of our current unsatisfactory condition in a cycle of death and
42964 rebirth is our innate tendency to view the personal self in a reified manner
42965 (LRCM: 574). We also have innate tendencies to view all other phenomena in a
42966 reified manner. To achieve wisdom, or to know emptiness, means to overcome
42967 this reifying view, to realize that the self or essential being as thus
42968 conceived does not exist at all. In order reach this realization, according
42969 to Tsong kha pa, one must use reason to refute the existence, and to prove the
42970 nonexistence, of this reified self or essence. Having intellectually arrived
42971 at the correct philosophical view--that the self lacks a shred of intrinsic
42972 nature--one proceeds along the path to spiritual liberation through intense,
42973 deep, and extensive meditative familiarization with this view. At the same
42974 time, however, the practitioner also cultivates compassionate engagement with
42975 other living beings, making a commitment to help all of them reach perfect
42977 -- from "Ask a Farmer: Ultimate Analysis and Conventional Existence in
42978 Tsong kha pa's Lam rim chen mo", by Guy Newland from Changing Minds:
42979 Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibet in Honor of Jeffrey
42980 Hopkins, edited by Guy Newland, published by Shambhala Publications
42982 inexplicably ted was awoken,
42983 incredibly loud noise of the broken,
42984 his cat invaded the stash,
42985 seeking out some tasty hash,
42986 sis boom *bong* goes crash--ted won't be tokin'.
42989 shania the stony gal really dug her twerkin',
42990 slingin' her booty all around was really workin',
42991 but the other dancers looked askance,
42992 and asked "can this chick actually dance?",
42993 shania wasn't so much dancin' as berzerkin'!
42996 All art is composed of subtle and gross elements. There is no way for
42997 artists to express without elements. When people use expressions such as hot-
42998 headed, cold-hearted, dry-humored, or all wet, it shows that they naturally
42999 connect subtle element temperaments with gross element expressions. But
43000 artists must go beyond outwardly expressing the elements in an obvious way in
43001 order to gain experience with the inner subtle elements, which are the source
43002 of the outer gross elements. Then they can make art which reflects what
43004 According to the Buddhist point of view, an artist's intention is
43005 compassion. Buddhist artists create in order to make a link with other beings
43006 through their inner pure elements, and to transform their outer ordinary gross
43007 elements into enlightenment by means of that connection.
43008 -- Thinley Norbu, from "Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the
43009 Five Wisdom Dakinis", published by Shambhala Publications
43011 Never admit defeat. Just move the front.
43014 down came eddy from his heady,
43015 where he dwells often unsteady,
43016 you see he gets so high,
43017 mind expanded to sky;
43018 real world grokking just not ready.
43021 Generally speaking, when we are too desirous of something in life, we're
43022 less likely to attain it. Success seems to increase in direct proportion to
43023 the diminution of our desires. The same logic applies to our need for
43024 recognition. We might want to be appreciated and respected, but we have only
43025 a limited ability to influence how other people respond and we can't make
43026 somebody show us gratitude any more than we can force someone to love us. If
43027 we show love without expecting it to be reciprocated, we will have more chance
43028 of finding love than if we simply yearn for it. Likewise, doing something
43029 without expecting gratitude is more likely to elicit appreciation for what we
43030 do. Whether someone can acknowledge our actions or not should be no concern
43032 We simply commit ourselves to doing things to the best of our ability and
43033 in as thorough a manner as possible without sloppiness. We should never think
43034 that other people are indebted to us or obligated to help us in return. We
43035 should simply do things because we love doing them, not because we want other
43036 people to feel indebted to us. Shantideva says:
43038 The work of bringing benefit to beings
43039 Will not, then, make me proud and self-admiring.
43040 The happiness of others is itself my satisfaction;
43041 I do not expect another recompense.
43043 -- Traleg Kyabgon, from "The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion
43044 through Training the Mind", published by Shambhala Publications
43046 Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says:
43048 If you want to go sightseeing, try touring your own clear,
43049 mirrorlike mind instead.
43051 What technique can we use to effectively start our journey to realizing
43052 our natural, pristine state?
43053 The clearest instructions for doing this come from Guru Rinpoche
43054 Padmasambhava, the main architect of the Pristine Mind teachings. Guru
43055 Rinpoche has given us the essential opening instructions for practicing
43056 Pristine Mind meditation in four steps:
43058 Don't follow the past.
43059 Don't anticipate the future.
43060 Remain in the present moment.
43061 Leave your mind alone.
43063 We must understand these instructions. They are designed to help us stay
43064 in the present moment. Some other forms of meditation teachings say that
43065 remaining in the present moment is the ultimate objective of meditation.
43066 However, the present moment itself is not ultimate reality, ultimate truth, or
43067 the ultimate goal of Pristine Mind meditation. Nor is it what I mean when I
43068 refer to our fundamental nature. Instead, being in the present moment, with
43069 our mind calm and relaxed, simply creates the right conditions to begin to
43070 connect with our Pristine Mind.
43071 --Excerpted from "Our Pristine Mind: A Practical Guide to Unconditional
43072 Happiness", by Orgyen Chowang, published by Shambhala Publications
43074 Some people think that causes are not necessary. They think that things do
43075 not need causes and can exist without them. This is mistaken. Think about
43076 it. If you plant a seed in a flowerpot, a flower will grow. It will not grow
43077 from this table in front of me now. What is the reason for that? The causes
43078 for a flower are present in a flowerpot, and for that reason a flower can grow
43079 there. The causes for a flower are not present on the surface of this table,
43080 and for that reason a flower cannot grow there. If things arose in the
43081 absence of causes, a flower would have to be able to grow from the surface of
43082 this table even though the causes for a flower are not present there. Or, as
43083 we know, flowers bloom in the summer but not in the winter. What is the
43084 reason for that? In the summer, the causes and conditions for the growth of
43085 flowers are complete. In the winter, they are not. In dependence upon that,
43086 flowers grow in the summer but not in the winter. If causes were not
43087 necessary, flowers would grow in the winter also. They would grow at all
43089 -- Khenchen Thrangu, "Essential Practice: Lectures on Kamalashīla's
43090 Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School", published by Shambhala
43093 Human beings have many kinds of suffering. Some human beings are put into
43094 prisons. Some are destitute. Some are enslaved by others. Thus, they are
43095 not actually hell-beings, but their sufferings are like those of hell-beings;
43096 they are not actually hungry ghosts, but their sufferings are like those of
43097 hungry ghosts; and they are not actually animals, but their sufferings are
43098 like those of animals. We think in that way about the sufferings that human
43099 beings experience. Some human beings are wealthy and comfortable. However,
43100 that wealth and comfort does not last for a very long time. Not being able to
43101 enjoy wealth and comfort for a long time, in the end suffering comes to them
43102 too. When we think about the suffering that they experience, compassion
43104 The demigods suffer from continual jealousy of and warfare with the gods
43105 of the Desire Realm. As for the gods, though comfortable temporarily, later
43106 they fall down into painful situations and, at the time of falling, they
43107 suffer greatly. Similarly, even the gods of the Form Realm and the Formless
43108 Realm cannot just stay there. They fall down to the states of hell-beings,
43109 hungry ghosts, animals, humans, and so forth. When they fall, mentally they
43110 suffer greatly. Therefore, sentient beings born in the states of the six
43111 wanderers have nothing but suffering. If we think about that, compassion can
43113 -- Khenchen Thrangu, "Essential Practice: Lectures on Kamalashīla's
43114 Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School", published by Shambhala
43117 When they related this to Buddha, he poured water into a little vessel and
43118 asked, "Will this water remain without evaporating?" Because India is very
43119 hot, the Hearers thought, "In a few days the water will evaporate. This
43120 must mean that our virtue will not remain at all." They were extremely
43121 worried. Then Buddha asked, "If this water is poured in the ocean, how long
43122 will it stay? It will remain until the ocean itself evaporates."
43123 Therefore, if you do not just leave this virtue, but dedicate it, making a
43124 prayer petition that it become a cause of help and happiness for limitless
43125 sentient beings, then until that actually occurs, the virtue will not be lost.
43126 Like a small amount of water poured into the ocean, which will last until the
43127 ocean itself dries up, so the fruit of your virtue will remain until it has
43128 ripened. The benefit of hearing, thinking, and meditating, in terms of
43129 causing all persons to possess happiness and the causes of happiness, is
43130 inconceivable, but if it is not dedicated, then when anger arises, it will be
43131 destroyed. This benefit cannot be seen with the eye, but it is inconceivable.
43132 -- Kensur Lekden, from "Meditations of a Tibetan Tantric Abbot: The Main
43133 Practices of the Mahayana Buddhist Path", translated and edited by
43134 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Shambhala Publications
43136 Because you need to obtain the happy effects and the causes producing them,
43137 and because it is necessary for yourself and others to attain them, you must
43138 meditate. In this world there were nihilists who said that one should not
43139 meditate, doing only those activities that will bring about marvelous
43140 happiness, comfort, and prosperity in this lifetime. The nihilists said that
43141 one should gather possessions and clothing, and if one's body is sick, one
43142 should take medicine, that these activities were justified, but that nothing
43143 else was needed. Such a philosophy appeared in the world and with respect to
43144 it there is this Buddhist teaching: You need a job for your livelihood, you
43145 need to work for the sake of your country, for the sake of yourself and
43146 others, to set up factories, to plant fields; still you should act mainly for
43147 the sake of your future life, because you will not always remain in this
43148 lifetime. All persons will definitely die, and the time of death is
43149 indefinite. At the time of death, nothing helps except religious practice.
43150 This is how it is. Therefore, even though you need happiness and comfort in
43151 this life and even though it is necessary to strive for the sake of food and
43152 drink now, this lifetime is short. Our longest condition of life is our
43153 countless future lives. If you consider only this which you can see now and
43154 you do not consider all the future lives which you cannot see, you will incur
43155 immeasurable fault. You will harm yourself.
43156 -- Kensur Lekden, from "Meditations of a Tibetan Tantric Abbot: The Main
43157 Practices of the Mahayana Buddhist Path", translated and edited by
43158 Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Shambhala Publications
43160 The ground of primal wisdom
43161 Where the truth beyond all concepts is beheld
43162 Is reached more easily by humans than by gods.
43163 The essence also of the deep path of the Vajrayāna
43164 Is more easily attained by those who find a human form.
43165 The basis of the Dharma of both great and lesser vehicles
43166 Is said to be supremely noble--
43167 This human state endowed with freedoms and advantages.
43169 Just like a beggar who has chanced upon a treasure of great price,
43170 Reflect with joy upon your freedoms and advantages.
43171 In doubt and apprehension that you might be dreaming,
43172 Implement the sacred Dharma--
43173 Source of happiness and benefit in this and future lives!
43174 -- Longchenpa, from "Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind", published
43175 by Shambhala Publications
43177 This lifetime passes like the weeping clouds
43178 Where dance the lightning garlands of the Lord of Death,
43179 And from them, day and night, there falls
43180 An endless rain to bathe the shoots
43181 That grow in the three levels of existence.
43183 The world and its inhabitants will pass.
43184 The universe is formed and then destroyed
43185 By seven fires, a flood, and then the scattering wind.
43186 The all-encircling sea, the continents,
43187 And even mighty Sumeru compounded of four jewels,
43188 All girded by the rings of lesser peaks--all this will pass.
43189 The time will come when all will have dissolved
43190 Into a single space.
43191 Remember this and practice Dharma from your heart.
43192 -- Longchenpa, from "Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind", published
43193 by Shambhala Publications
43195 The most important thing is to have faith and trust in the Buddha's
43196 words. The Buddha's teachings were not taught to deceive us but to explain
43197 the way things actually are. Many people try to analyze the Buddha's
43198 teachings, but how is it possible to scrutinize a buddha's qualities? We
43199 don't even know what will happen tomorrow, or when we will die, or anything
43200 about our future lives, so how could we possibly examine the teachings of the
43201 Omniscient One? Since we are totally obscured by our strong disturbing
43202 emotions, in order to progress on the path toward enlightenment, we have no
43203 choice but to have faith in the Buddha's teachings and apply them in our own
43205 The ability to practice Dharma depends on certain conditions. For
43206 example, this is a rare time during which the teachings of the Great
43207 Perfection are said to flourish. We're very fortunate that through
43208 Padmasambhava's blessings, such teachings have appeared and we're able to
43209 receive them. We must have accumulated incredible merit and made fervent
43210 prayers very sincerely over numerous lifetimes to be able to encounter such
43211 amazing teachings now. Still, most people are just too involved in worldly
43212 activities to have time to practice the Dharma, and very few people in this
43213 world totally dedicate themselves to the teachings. Most people work for the
43214 sake of success in this life, to gain wealth, fame, power, and so on, but none
43215 of these worldly aims can liberate us from the suffering of samsara; in fact,
43216 they only create further conditions for ensuring that we remain in samsara for
43217 countless lifetimes to come.
43218 -- Penor Rinpoche, from "An Ocean of Blessings: Heart Teachings of Drubwang
43219 Penor Rinpoche", translated by Ani Jinba Palmo, published by Shambhala
43222 "When the sun comes out and illumines the world, its image is reflected in
43223 all clean vessels of water, being in all places without coming or going. If
43224 one vessel breaks, then the reflection of the sun does not appear in it. Do
43225 you think it is the fault of the sun that its reflection does not appear
43227 "No--it is just because the vessel is broken; it's no fault of the sun."
43228 "The knowledge of realization of Thusness, buddha-knowledge, is also like
43229 this, appearing throughout the cosmos, without before or after: Buddha appears
43230 in the clean mind-vessels of all sentient beings. If the mind-vessel is
43231 always clean, the embodiment of Buddha is always seen; if the mind is
43232 polluted, the vessel breaks and the Buddha cannot be seen."
43233 -- from "The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of The Avatamsaka
43234 Sutra", translated by Thomas Cleary, published by Shambhala Publications
43236 Why is endeavor necessary? If we consider material progress, we see that
43237 research started by one person can always be continued by another. But this
43238 is not possible with spiritual progress. The realization we talk about in the
43239 Buddhadharma is something that has to be accomplished by the individual. No
43240 one else can do it for us. Of course, it would be wonderful if in the future
43241 we could attain realization through some sort of new injection or by means of
43242 a new generation of computers, without having to go through any difficulties.
43243 If we could be absolutely certain that such a time would come, we could simply
43244 lie back and wait to get enlightened. But I doubt that this will ever happen.
43245 It is better to make an effort. We have to develop endeavor.
43248 Thus with patience I will strive with diligence.
43249 For in such diligence enlightenment is found.
43250 If no wind blows, then nothing stirs,
43251 And neither is there merit without diligence.
43253 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Bodhisattva Guide: A Commentary
43254 on The Way of the Bodhisattva", The Bodhisattva Guide was originally
43255 published as For the Benefit of All Beings, also published by Shambhala
43258 I am not angry with my bile and other humors--
43259 Fertile source of suffering and pain!
43260 So why should living beings give offence,
43261 They likewise are impelled by circumstance?
43263 Suffering may result from both animate and inanimate causes. We may curse
43264 inanimate things like the weather, but it is with animate beings that we most
43265 often get angry. If we analyze these animate causes that make us unhappy, we
43266 find that they are themselves influenced by other conditions. They are not
43267 making us angry simply because they want to. In this respect, because they
43268 are influenced by other conditions, they are in fact powerless. So there is
43269 no need to get angry with them.
43271 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Bodhisattva Guide: A
43272 Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva", published by Shambhala
43275 I am not contained between my hat and boots.
43278 These delightful mountain solitudes
43279 Are like the family estate to the supreme guide's heirs,
43280 And, as the best of protectors himself has said,
43281 To rely on solitude is indeed the pinnacle of joys!
43283 Forests, hermitages, and isolated dwelling places--
43284 These are the outer solitude of the Victor's heirs.
43285 Avoiding selfishness and fainthearted fears--
43286 This is the bodhisattvas' internal isolation.
43288 Keeping, therefore, to outer forms of solitude,
43289 Tame the inner afflictions through tranquility and insight
43290 And aspire to the supreme conduct of Samantabhadra--
43291 Possessing such good fortune one is truly the Buddha's heir.
43293 With sweetly cascading mountain streams,
43294 Rocky mountain shelters ascending to heaven,
43295 And gently falling dewdrops of whitest moonlight,
43296 This mountain retreat surpasses even the deva realm.
43298 The dance of the slender trees does not stir the passions,
43299 And sweet birdsong brings neither attachment nor aversion,
43300 Enveloped in nonconceptuality's gentle, cooling shade--
43301 Such youthful companionship is surely better than a silent void!
43303 Undisturbed by noisy chatter, that thorn in meditation's side,
43304 Alone in this excellent place of unattended solitude,
43305 The old monkey of the mind has nowhere left to roam
43306 And, settling down within, finds satisfaction.
43308 Under the bright, oppressive sunlight of busy, bustling crowds,
43309 Our faults and unhelpful thoughts eclipse the constellations,
43310 But when embraced by threefold solitude's cooling nectar beams,
43311 Such faults can easily be overcome through proper antidotes.
43313 When it is undisturbed by rippling thoughts of sadness,
43314 The pool-like surface of the mind is still, unmoving,
43315 And faith and compassion's reflections readily arise.
43316 In such constancy, what need is there for a companion?
43318 If the mirror of mind is wiped clean, time and again,
43319 And uncluttered with objects or circumstances,
43320 Study, reflection, and meditation present a clear impression.
43321 What is there to prevent the dawn of Dharma's light?
43323 Hunger, thirst, cold, and the like--all forms of physical affliction--
43324 Together with sadness, fear, and all such mental suffering,
43325 Can, through the teachings, enhance the purifying path
43326 And, unburdened by avoidance or indulgence, adorn the mind!
43328 -- Patrul Rinpoche, from "Beyond the Ordinary Mind: Dzogchen, Rimé, and the
43329 Path of Perfect Wisdom", translated by Adam Pearcey, published by
43330 Shambhala Publications
43332 Our endeavor is not religious, but rather a test of what we as a human
43333 being can become, the greatest unfolding of our potential.
43334 -- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
43336 Because everything leans, you belong to something much, much greater than what
43337 you may often refer to as "the world" or "my life"; you belong to something
43338 greater than your community, political party, nation, or even this magnificent
43339 planet Earth. You are a noble citizen of the boundless field of contingent
43340 relationships, pratityasamutpada.
43341 -- Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, from "The Logic of Faith", published by
43342 Shambhala Publications
43344 It is through the teacher's blessing that you see
43345 The self-arisen primal wisdom, inexpressible,
43346 Beyond both word and thought.
43347 And in the moment of its seeing,
43348 Timeless are the three times,
43349 No difference separates the future from the past.
43350 This is the Wisdom That Has Gone Beyond; the Middle Way;
43351 The Stilling (of all thought and sorrow); the Great Seal;
43352 The Great Perfection of the quintessential ultimate reality,
43353 That is, the fundamental natural state
43354 Where, from the very first,
43355 Phenomena are all exhausted.
43356 It is mind's luminosity,
43357 The self-arisen primal wisdom.
43358 Many names it has received, yet all have but one meaning:
43359 Ultimate reality, beyond the range
43360 Of speech, of thought, of explanation:
43361 The enlightened mind,
43362 The space-like nature where saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two.
43363 -- Longchenpa, from "Finding Rest in Meditation", published by Shambhala
43366 Become accustomed to the fact that all we accept or reject, dualistically
43367 affirm or deny (such as enjoyment and disgust, happiness and frustration,
43368 beauty and ugliness, fear and security, sickness and health, enemies and
43369 friends, love and hatred, or whatever), has one taste, thus judgments are
43372 Listen great being: do not create duality from the unique state.
43373 Happiness and misery are one in pure and total presence.
43374 Buddhas and beings are one in the nature of mind.
43375 Appearances and beings, the environment and its inhabitants are one in
43377 Even the duality of truth and falsehood are the same in reality.
43378 Do not latch onto happiness; do not eliminate misery.
43379 Thereby everything is accomplished.
43380 Attachment to pleasure brings misery.
43381 Total clarity, being non-conceptual,
43382 Is self-refreshing pristine awareness.
43383 -- Longchenpa, from "You Are the Eyes of the World", published by Shambhala
43386 The realizations that arise through meditating thus
43387 Are all of the same taste.
43388 They are not manifold; they are not different.
43389 It is like those who come from three directions
43390 And meet together in a single place,
43391 And like the different flowing streams
43392 That join and are as one within a single sea.
43393 Bliss, luminosity, and no-thought--
43394 Whichever of these methods one may practice--
43395 When mental movement comes to complete rest
43396 And in the nature of the mind, the unborn space, dissolves,
43397 The enlightened mind, devoid of concepts
43398 (Whether of existence or of nonexistence),
43399 The sun of fundamental nature, bright and clear,
43400 Will rise up from within.
43401 In this realization, changeless and unmoving,
43402 There is nothing to be added, nothing to remove.
43403 -- Longchenpa, from "Finding Rest in Meditation", published by Shambhala
43406 Listen! I, pure and total presence, the creative intelligence
43407 which manifests universes,
43408 Do not teach those who surround me,
43409 A reality that can be affirmed or denied.
43410 I do not teach about splitting the unique into two.
43411 I do not analyze that which is beyond analysis.
43412 I do not correct that which is naturally uncontrived.
43413 Let whatever you do or whatever appears
43414 Just be in its natural state, without premeditation.
43415 That is true freedom.
43416 -- Longchenpa, from "You Are the Eyes of the World", published by
43417 Shambhala Publications
43419 Milarepa's Song on the Way of the Yogi
43421 I am just a man, a yogi of Tibet;
43423 I've studied little but have many key instructions.
43424 Though I'm humble, I have great perseverance.
43425 I sleep little and have great endurance in meditation.
43426 I'm an expert in all by knowing one thing
43427 And I understand everything to be one:
43428 I am an expert in genuine reality.
43429 On my small seat, stretching my legs is pleasant.
43430 With thin clothes, my body is perfectly warm.
43431 With small bits of tsampa, my stomach is full.
43432 My example is that which all meditators aspire to.
43433 I'm a gathering place for those with faith.
43434 I'm an object of reliance for those fearful of birth and death.
43435 I go in no fixed direction
43436 And I stay in no one particular place.
43437 For conduct, I go without reference points.
43438 I have no attachment to material things
43439 And no notion of clean or dirty food.
43440 For me, the pain of the afflictions is small.
43441 I have little self-regard and few desires.
43442 I've little attachment to perceiver and perceived
43443 And I've loosened the knots of the state of nirvana.
43444 I'm a friend of the elderly, a shoulder to lean on,
43445 And a playmate for young children.
43446 I'm a yogi who roams the country far and wide.
43447 May you devas and humans be healthy and happy.
43448 -- Milarepa and Tsangnyon Heruka, "The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa",
43449 published by Shambhala Publications
43451 It's very important to keep examining your mind at all times and be aware of
43452 what occurs in it. We have this habit of criticizing others; we are very good
43453 at pointing out their faults, but we have a hard time being aware of our own
43454 flaws. Examining the faults of others will not benefit anyone and only leads
43455 to more disturbing emotions, blocking our path to liberation. Whatever anyone
43456 else does, let them do it. It's not your business to find other people's
43457 flaws, and even if you do point them out, there is no way for you to correct
43458 them. On the other hand, it is very important to watch your own mind and
43459 train in subduing and reducing your own disturbing emotions. Analyze your
43460 mind, constantly watch your thoughts, recognizing whether they are positive or
43461 negative, and become aware of your faults. If you constantly observe yourself
43462 and analyze your thoughts, you will eventually be able to tame your mind.
43463 Since we haven't been able to purify our karmic and emotional obscurations,
43464 our gross disturbing emotions can come up anytime, and whenever these emotions
43465 come up, we should apply the antidote by looking into our mind and trying to
43466 understand that all phenomena are emptiness. If you leave your mind in a
43467 relaxed state without contriving anything, disturbing emotions will cease.
43468 -- Drubwang Penor Rinpoche, from "An Ocean of Blessings", published by
43469 Shambhala Publications
43471 In general, all joys and sorrows that seem outside
43472 Are magical creations of one's mind alone;
43473 Reflections from inside that appear outside,
43474 Not things outside that have come near.
43476 Knowing this well, when analysis
43477 Severs the root of the basic mind,
43478 You will abide in the true sky of reality
43479 Beyond this fog of appearance.
43481 This so-called existence is a fiction.
43482 This so-called nonexistence is a fiction.
43483 Untainted by all such fictions,
43484 The nature of the mind is perfect buddhahood.
43486 Thoughts of "is" and "is not" are like ripples in water;
43487 They follow one after the other.
43488 Dissolving easily into the aimless state,
43489 They arrive at the ocean of the primordial sphere of reality.
43491 Appearances are the magical display of the mind.
43492 The mind is empty, without base, without foundation.
43493 By holding baseless phenomena to be the self
43494 You and I wander in the realm of samsara.
43496 Without pursuing perceptions,
43497 When you look directly at the perceiver itself,
43498 You will see your own inexpressible face;
43499 The path to achieve buddhahood is not far.
43501 Through the blessings of the divine three foundations,
43502 May you quickly find the emptiness of your own mind,
43503 And from the kingdom of the ever-pure great perfection,
43504 Bring about the great aims of boundless beings.
43505 -- from "Gendun Chopel: Tibet's Modern Visionary", by Donald S. Lopez
43506 Jr., published by Shambhala Publications
43508 Parallel to compassion, the Buddhist teachings emphasize loving-kindness--the
43509 wish for others to have happiness and the causes of happiness. A traditional
43510 way of generating loving-kindness begins by looking at our own constant
43511 longing for happiness and its causes. Then we contemplate how all others have
43512 this same longing, every bit as intense as our own. When we understand that
43513 we are no different from other beings in this way, we see how unreasonable it
43514 is to care so much more about ourselves than others. We do so only out of
43515 sheer habit--ignorant habit. At that point, once we've shed some light on
43516 our habit, we turn our mind toward others, wishing them happiness as much as
43517 we wish it for ourselves. Then, in our daily lives, we try to behave in
43518 accord with this wish, by being kind with our actions, in our speech, and in
43520 -- Dzigar Kongtrul, from "Training in Tenderness: Buddhist Teachings on
43521 Tsewa, the Radical Openness of Heart That Can Change the World",
43522 published by Shambhala Publications
43524 So many wonderful qualities are already present within us, just waiting to be
43525 discovered. The key lies in understanding that things are impermanent and
43526 unreal. Sadness, of course, is not an end in itself. But deep sorrow comes
43527 with realizing that everything we previously took to be lasting and real is
43528 actually just about to disappear--and it never even existed in the first
43529 place. Such sadness and disillusionment have a wonderful effect. Sorrow
43530 makes us let go. As we stop chasing futile and ultimately painful goals, we
43531 embark on the spiritual path with superior strength and resolve.
43532 -- Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, from "Sadness, Love, Openness: The Buddhist Path
43533 of Joy", published by Shambhala Publications
43535 The blind ant runs about for the sake of happiness.
43536 The legless worm crawls about for the sake of happiness.
43537 In brief, all the world is racing with each other,
43538 Running toward happiness, one faster than the next.
43540 Sometimes, seeing a goddess is revolting.
43541 Sometimes, seeing an old woman creates lust.
43542 Thinking, "This is it," something else comes along.
43543 How can the deceptions of the mind be counted?
43545 Our attitudes change so much
43546 From childhood to when we are old and decrepit.
43547 Analyze your own experience and you know this.
43548 How can you have confidence in today's thoughts?
43550 Due to the mind's insanity, we do not recognize our own face,
43551 Yet we constantly measure the secular and sacred, heaven and earth.
43552 Courageous are we who seek lasting refuge
43553 In this series of mistaken appearances.
43554 -- from "Gendun Chopel: Tibet's Modern Visionary", by Donald S. Lopez
43555 Jr., published by Shambhala Publications
43557 When people say that I have worked a lot for peace, I feel embarrassed. I
43558 feel like laughing. I don't think I have done very much for world peace.
43559 It's just that my practice is the peaceful path of kindness, love,
43560 compassion, and not harming others. This has become part of me. It is not
43561 something for which I have specially volunteered. I am simply a follower of
43562 the Buddha, and the Buddha taught that patience is the supreme means for
43563 transcending suffering. He said, "If a monk harms others, he is not a monk."
43564 I am a Buddhist monk, so I try to practice accordingly. When people think
43565 this practice is something unique and special and call me a leader of world
43566 peace, I feel almost ashamed!
43567 -- H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from "The Bodhisattva Guide", published
43568 by Shambhala Publications
43570 We have talked about impermanence and how painful it is to acknowledge that
43571 everything, including ourselves and all that we love, is going to perish. But
43572 the recognition of impermanence is also the threshold to something more,
43573 something greater. The reason we take impermanence to heart is that we need
43574 that understanding to inspire and guide us. Impermanence closes the gap
43575 between others and ourselves. When we recognize that everyone is subject to
43576 the same merciless conditions, we cannot but respond with affection. With the
43577 recognition of the impermanent world comes great compassion, genuine care.
43578 This pivotal discovery provides the circumstance for a complete opening of our
43579 minds. As compassion gains force, it enables our minds to recognize the
43580 profound nature of emptiness--the true nature of things that lies beyond all
43581 concepts. Sorrow and pain become catalysts for deep-felt loving care, and the
43582 power of universal compassion delivers the realization of the true view.
43583 That’s when we have truly become students of the Dharma.
43584 -- Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, from "Sadness, Love, Openness: The Buddhist
43585 Path of Joy", published by Shambhala Publications
43587 Buddha qualities are indivisible.
43588 The disposition is attained as it is.
43589 The true state is [always] free from any fickleness and deceit.
43590 Since beginningless time the nature has been peace itself.
43592 Direct perfect enlightenment [with regard to] all aspects,
43593 and abandonment of the stains along with their imprints
43594 [are called] buddha and nirvana respectively.
43595 In truth, these are not two different things.
43597 -- Maitreya, Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, and
43598 Asanga in "Buddha Nature: The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra with Commentary",
43599 translated by Rosemarie Fuchs, published by Shambhala Publications
43601 Like vines that wrap themselves round sandal trees,
43602 People who keep company with holy ones
43603 Become, in their turn, holy.
43605 And like kusha grass left in a fetid marsh,
43606 People who keep company with evil beings
43607 Will in their turn be evil.
43609 So keep the company of holy beings
43610 And from bad teachers strive to keep your distance.
43612 -- Longchenpa, in "Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind, The Trilogy of
43613 Rest, Volume 1", translated by Padmakara Translation Group, published by
43614 Shambhala Publications
43616 Thinking about the self as composed of "aggregates" (Skt. skandha) can
43617 help us reflect on our personal identity in new ways. Generally, we attribute
43618 characteristics to our personal identity, feeling that it is solid, permanent,
43619 and real. But here, describing the self as being composed of aggregates can
43620 help us see ourselves more accurately. The word skandha can be translated
43621 literally as "heap." This definition, when applied to ourselves, can help
43622 us see that we do not have a cohesive, real, and solid self. We are just a
43623 heap of stuff — flesh, blood, veins, nerves, bones, hair, cartilage, and so
43624 on. When we sort through this heap, what are we actually? None of the
43625 elements of the heap is actually "me." We are a mere mishmash of material
43626 conditions that we have identified with and labeled "I."
43627 -- Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo, in "Stop Biting the Tail
43628 You're Chasing: Using Buddhist Mind Training to Free Yourself from Painful
43629 Emotional Patterns" published by Shambhala Publications
43631 I once heard a Buddhist teacher say that the whole point of having a teacher
43632 was to become autonomous. I considered that for a while. I thought, "Well,
43633 yes, as a mother, I did everything I could to help my son stand on his own two
43634 feet. I get that." But is it possible for anyone to stand on their own two
43635 feet without their mother, father, or guardian to guide them? When we are
43636 born, we are completely helpless and dependent. We would never survive
43637 without the help of others. There is truly no such thing as autonomy. So if
43638 you want to live in accordance with the nature of things—which means living
43639 in grace—practically speaking, it will require some humility and gratitude
43640 for the ways in which your tradition has come down to you with so much care.
43641 -- Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, from "The Logic of Faith: The Buddhist Approach
43642 to Finding Certainty Beyond Belief and Doubt", published by Shambhala
43645 If we are attached to a thought, it becomes an obstacle to the development of
43646 our meditation or samadhi. The remedies for reducing attachments to thoughts
43647 are called "pacification" and "taming the mind," which involve what to
43648 do when we are unwilling to let go of thoughts. Normally we regard thoughts,
43649 and especially certain thoughts, as either particularly important or
43650 particularly pleasant and therefore worthwhile or entertaining. However, in
43651 meditation, thoughts are nothing other than impediments to what we are trying
43652 to do. So, when we are practicing meditation, we have to maintain the
43653 attitude, "This is my time to meditate and now I am not trying to think
43654 thoughts. If I let myself think, I am wasting this time I have to practice."
43655 -- Khenchen Thrangu, from "The Mahamudra Lineage Prayer: A Guide to
43656 Practice", published by Shambhala Publications
43658 The arrogant mind never stops searching for identity, and this identity always
43659 defines itself through attributes: "the beautiful one," "the smart one,"
43660 "the creative one," "the successful one." Sometimes we take this further by
43661 creating a more elaborate persona: "the rebel," "the maverick," "the suffering
43662 artist," "the fearless leader." We can hold onto these labels on a "good" day.
43663 But when we feel insecure about our attributes, or our lack thereof, we start
43664 to wonder how to define ourselves; we wonder who it is we really are.
43665 Regardless of whether we’re having a good day or a low self-esteem day, the
43666 point is, we haven’t found a way to relax, to be natural, unself-conscious.
43667 We don’t know how to take our seat in ordinariness and feel comfortable in
43668 our own skin. We’re always searching for something to be.
43669 -- Dzigar Kongtrul, from "Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on
43670 Awakening to Our Natural Intelligence", published by Shambhala
43674 It's time for the adults to take back the wheel
43675 WE KNOW OUR ABCS...
43676 Apple pie, Baseball, Compassion, & Science
43679 Elevate your experience and remain wide-open like the sky.
43680 Expand your mindfulness and remain pervasive like the earth.
43681 Steady your attention and remain unshakable like a mountain.
43682 Brighten your awareness and remain shining like a flame.
43683 Clear your thought-free wakefulness and remain lucid like a crystal.
43684 -- Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, "Clarifying the Natural State", from "Jewels of
43685 Enlightenment: Wisdom Teachings from the Great Tibetan Masters", compiled
43686 and translated by Erik Pema Kunsang, published by Shambhala Publications
43688 Meditation, by nature, is like tasting nectar.
43690 To meditate on the meaning of what you have heard and contemplated
43691 pacifies all the illnesses of negative emotions.
43693 You will cross the ocean of conditioned existence and arrive at the
43694 far shore--the heart essence.
43696 Please meditate in the forest from now on.
43698 -- Longchenpa, from "The Life of Longchenpa: The Omniscient Dharma King of
43699 the Vast Expanse", Compiled and edited by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart, published
43700 by Shambhala Publications
43702 Compassion has no hierarchy of worthy and unworthy suffering; it makes no
43703 distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving. Wherever there is
43704 suffering, there is a need for compassion. Finding compassion for those who
43705 cause pain is an ongoing practice requiring remarkable patience and
43706 perseverance. It is a difficult journey, but the path of bitterness and
43707 division is far more painful. The path of compassion begins with your
43708 willingness to soften and stay present in all the moments when you are prone
43709 to recoil and flinch. You learn to open your eyes and heart in all the places
43710 you have been blinded by fear or rage. You begin to dismantle the boundaries
43711 that have too long divided you from others.
43712 -- "All the Rage--Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance", Edited by Andrea
43713 Miller and the Editors of the Shambhala Sun, published by Shambhala
43716 Each and every being in this world, including animals and all other beings of
43717 the six realms, wants to be happy. Nobody wants to suffer. Even through we
43718 have no wisdom or clairvoyance, we can see that everyone in this world is
43719 afflicted with disturbing emotions and delusion based on their karma
\97not only
43720 we humans, but all beings in the six realms. Even a tiny little ant is
43721 constantly afflicted by the five poisons, and it
\92s impossible for such a being
43722 to generate bodhichitta, faith, devotion, or pure perception for an instant.
43723 It can
\92t even conceive of a path to liberation or ultimate happiness. Due to
43724 karma accumulated throughout beginningless lifetimes, all sentient beings
43725 experience various kinds of sorrow and happiness. Yet this isn
\92t just random,
43726 for all that we experience is the result of our past actions.
43727 ##--#Penor Rinpoche, from "An Ocean of Blessings: Heart Teachings of Drubwang
43728 Penor Rinpoche", translated by Ani Jinba Palmo, published by Shambhala
43731 Dreaming is a dynamic process. Unlike the static images of film that we
43732 use as a metaphor, the images of a dream are fluid: they move, beings talk,
43733 sounds vibrate, sensation is vivid. The content of dream is formed by the
43734 mind, but the basis of the vitality and animation of the dream is the prana.
43735 The literal translation of the Tibetan word for prana, lung, is "wind," but
43736 it is more descriptive to call it the vital wind force.
43737 Prana is the foundational energy of all experience, of all life.
43738 -- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and edited by Mark Dahlby, from "The Tibetan
43739 Yogas of Dream and Sleep", published by Shambhala Publications
43741 Do they know this kid likes his chemistry set a little too much?
43744 The Nine Expressions of Dance
43746 The upper part of one's body should have the demeanor of a lion.
43747 The waist should maintain the demeanor of elegance.
43748 The wrists and ankles should maintain a demeanor of dexterity.
43749 The thigh muscles should maintain a relaxed demeanor.
43750 The blood should maintain a fiery red demeanor.
43751 The countenance should maintain a handsome demeanor.
43752 The movements should maintain a slow demeanor.
43753 The knees should maintain a supple demeanor.
43754 The feet and head should maintain a demeanor of happiness.
43755 And overall [the dancer] should maintain a demeanor
43756 That is both heroic and magnificent.
43758 -- by Konchog Lhadrepa and Charlotte Davis, from "The Art of Awakening:
43759 A User's Guide to Tibetan Buddhist Art and Practice", published by
43760 Shambhala Publications
43764 Stop living a false and empty life.
43765 Drop those deceptions of your own mind
43766 And endless projects that you don't need!
43768 Don't make your head spin with the burden
43769 Of strings of ideas that never come true
43770 And endless distracting activities--
43771 They're just waves on water.
43774 -- Patrul Rinpoche, from "Enlightened Vagabond: The Life and Teachings of
43775 Patrul Rinpoche", By Matthieu Ricard, Edited by Constance Wilkinson,
43776 published by Shambhala Publications
43778 Like the vast expanse of the ocean, birthplaces of other beings are vast and
43779 multitudinous. Just as the yoke has only a single opening, human birth is
43780 small in extent and few in number. Just as the tortoise rises up only once
43781 every hundred years, so it is rare to accumulate the karma that results in
43782 human birth. Just as the tortoise is blind, so one's accumulated karma is
43783 feeble. Just as the yoke is tossed about in every direction by the wind, so
43784 there are many adverse forces obstructing the coincidence of conditions needed
43786 -- Ngorchen Konchog Lhundrub, from "Three Visions: Fundamental Teachings of
43787 the Sakya Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism", translated by Lobsang Dagpa and
43788 Jay Goldberg, published by Shambhala Publications
43790 The actual nature of things is inconceivable and inexpressible. Yet, for
43791 those fortunate individuals who seek to penetrate the profound meaning of
43792 dharmata, I shall offer here a few words by way of illustration.
43793 What we call the essence of mind is the actual face of unconditioned pure
43794 awareness, recognized through receiving the guru's blessings and
43795 instructions. If you wonder what this is like, it is empty in its essence,
43796 beyond conceptual reference; it is cognizant by nature, spontaneously present;
43797 and it is all-pervasive and unobstructed in its compassionate energy. This is
43798 the pure awareness (rigpa) in which the three kayas are inseparable.
43799 -- from "Beyond the Ordinary Mind: Dzogchen, Rime, and the Path of
43800 Perfect Wisdom", translated by Adam Pearcey, published by Shambhala Publications
43802 Being attached to your ordinary dualistic considerations is a pitfall in your
43803 way of living. No matter what appears, by applying yourself without being at
43804 all distracted from the perspective and meditation, this unobstructed,
43805 powerful way of life will come about with the six senses naturally relaxed.
43806 Apply yourself without contradicting this.
43807 -- Longchenpa, from "You Are the Eyes of the World", translated by Kennard
43808 Lipman and Merrill Peterson, published by Shambhala Publications
43811 Hear me, young and faithful girl!
43812 I, the Lotus-Born, will preach the Dharma in the land of ogres.
43813 My flawless adamantine form, surpassing change,
43814 Is not to be compared with that of beings racked by ills.
43815 The country of Tibet I filled with Dharma, within the earth and on it.
43816 If you are strong in practice and instruction,
43817 No shortage of the Dharma will there be.
43818 -- Yeshe Tsogyal, from "Lady of the Lotus-Born: The Life and Enlightenment
43819 of Yeshe Tsogyal", by Gyalwa Changchub and Namkhai Nyingpo, translated by
43820 Padmakara Translation Group, published by Shambhala Publications
43822 Ultimately, spiritual and worldly values are totally contradictory; this is
43823 something we simply have to accept. In the materialistic world, being "rich"
43824 means that you own plenty of property, run various businesses, and have a
43825 great deal of money; whereas the spiritual world defines being "rich" as
43826 perfect contentment. From a spiritual point of view, we are rich when we no
43827 longer torture our minds with thoughts about everything we lack.
43828 -- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, from "Best Foot Forward: A Pilgrim's Guide
43829 to the Sacred Sites of the Buddha", published by Shambhala Publications
43831 The cultivation of Pure Awareness does not evolve in a straight line. It is
43832 not that we have a certain realization and then it is ours and we can hang on
43833 to it and in the next practice session begin from there and move on to the
43834 next higher realization. Every time we sit down to practice, it's a brand new
43835 situation, a new journey. "Back to square one," as Trungpa Rinpoche used to
43836 say. Back to Suzuki Roshi's "beginner's mind."
43837 -- Reginald A. Ray, from "The Practice of Pure Awareness: Somatic Meditation
43838 for Awakening the Sacred", published by Shambhala Publications
43840 When the seven consciousnesses melt
43841 Into the consciousness of the universal ground,
43842 And the universal ground is purified in the ultimate expanse,
43843 There occurs primordial coemergent wisdom,
43844 Empty, luminous, and self-arisen.
43845 This is what yogis must recognize.
43846 -- Longchenpa, from "Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind: The Trilogy
43847 of Rest, Volume 1", translated by Padmakara Translation Group, published
43848 by Shambhala Publications
43850 The purpose of a knife is much like the purpose of the brain, and that is to
43851 stop being used. Just as the brain should do some computation and then desist
43852 from functioning for a while to rest and relax, so too should one stop using a
43853 knife as soon as the purpose for which the knife was picked up is achieved.
43854 If it seems like it's fun to play with a knife or if one feels that the knife
43855 is an extension of one's penis, then that is not a very good reason to pick up
43856 a knife; one should probably put the knife right back down in those degenerate
43857 (in the mathematical sense) cases. #WhatILearnedFromTheBoyScouts
43860 Full of trust you left home,
43861 and soon learned to walk the Path--
43862 making yourself a friend to everyone
43863 and making everyone a friend.
43865 When the whole world is your friend,
43866 fear will find no place to call home.
43868 And when you make the mind your friend,
43869 you'll know what trust
43874 I have followed this Path of friendship to its end.
43875 And I can say with absolute certainty--
43876 it will lead you home.
43878 -- from "The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns",
43881 If we are honest with ourselves, we know from our own experience that the more
43882 we try to find solutions to our problems through thinking about them, the more
43883 we start going around in circles, sometimes interminably. Buddhism counsels
43884 us to resist being abused by our conflicting emotions and to let go of
43885 excessive thinking. Emotions can be expressed in an unhealthy, self-
43886 destructive manner or in a healthy and constructive fashion. Similarly, we
43887 can think in a self-destructive, confused way, which reinforces our negative
43888 habits, or we can think in a constructive way. Buddhism emphasizes that
43889 overindulgence in conflicting emotions and distorted forms of thinking only
43890 reinforces our old habits, which solidifies our karmic tendencies even
43892 -- Traleg Kyabgon, from "Mind at Ease: Self-Liberation through Mahamudra
43893 Meditation", published by Shambhala Publications
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