11 Quotes & Sayings By Sogyal Rinpoche

Sogyal Rinpoche is a lama, author, and meditation master. He was born in Tibet in 1935 and trained as a Buddhist monk at the age of 14. He was appointed by the Dalai Lama to be his personal translator for six years. In 1979, he founded Rigpa, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (www.rigpa.org), offering programs of study, retreats, and teaching around the world Read more

Sogyal Rinpoche is one of the most popular teachers in North America today. His books include The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1979) and The Tibetan Book of the Dead(1994).

1
Don't you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly. Sogyal Rinpoche
What we have to learn, in both meditation and in...
2
What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free ofattachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones. Sogyal Rinpoche
3
How many of us are swept away by what I have come to call an 'active laziness'? It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues. Sogyal Rinpoche
There would be no chance to get to know death...
4
There would be no chance to get to know death at all ...if it happened only once. Sogyal Rinpoche
5
We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don´t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home. Sogyal Rinpoche
6
Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity. Sogyal Rinpoche
7
The act of meditation is being spacious. Sogyal Rinpoche
8
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. Sogyal Rinpoche
9
What is a great spiritual practitioner? A person who lives always in the presence of his or her own true self, someone who has found and who uses continually the springs and sources of profound inspiration. As the modern English writer Lewis Thompson wrote: 'Christ, supreme poet, lived truth so passionately that every gesture of his, at once pure Act and perfect Symbol, embodies the transcendent.' To embody the transcendent is why we are here. Sogyal Rinpoche
10
When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings. Sogyal Rinpoche