Great Throughts Treasury

"Behold I am the heir of eternity, to whom hath been given everlastingness."

"The heir of eternity, self-begotten and self-born."

"Let life rise out of death."

"In thus choosing the womb door, there is always danger of erring. Under the influence of evolution, you might see an excellent womb door as bad. You might see a bad womb door as excellent. So here the key instruction for choosing is important; do as follows: Even if a womb door appears to be excellent, do not become attached to it. Even if it appears bad, do not become averse to it. Enter it within the experience of the universal loving equanimity, free of lust and hate and compulsive choosing between good and bad. This is the authentic profound key instruction."

"Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home."

"To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life."

"The Good Spirit, who was born simultaneously with you, will come now and count out your good deeds with white pebbles, and the Evil Spirit, who was born simultaneously with you, will come and count out your evil deeds with black pebbles. Thereupon you will be greatly frightened, awed, and terrified, and will tremble; and you will attempt to tell lies, saying, "I have not committed any evil deed." Then the Lord of Death will say, "I will consult the Mirror of karma." He will look in the Mirror, wherein every good and evil act is vividly reflected. Lying will be of no avail. Then one of the executive furies of the Lord of Death will place a rope around your neck and drag you along; he will cut off your head, extract your heart, pull out your intestines, lick up your brain, drink your blood, eat your flesh, and gnaw your bones; but you will be incapable of dying. Although your body be hacked to pieces, it will revive again. The repeated hacking [symbolizing the pangs of the deceased's conscience] will cause intense pain and torture. Even at the time that the pebbles are being counted out, be not frightened; tell no lies; and fear not the Lord of Death. Your body being a mental body is incapable of dying even though beheaded and quartered. In reality, your body is of the nature of voidness; you need not be afraid. The Lords of Death are your own hallucinations. Your desire-body is a body of propensities, and void. Voidness cannot injure voidness; the qualityless cannot injure the qualityless. Apart from one's own hallucinations, in reality there are no such things existing outside oneself as Lord of Death, or god, or demon. Act so as to recognize this."

"The self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all."

"With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming.""

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest?a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in"

"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."

"As a Buddhist, I view death as a normal process, a reality that I accept will occur as long as I remain in this earthly existence. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it. I tend to think of death as being like changing your clothes when they are old and worn out, rather than as some final end. Yet death is unpredictable: We do not know when or how it will take place. So it is only sensible to take certain precautions before it actually happens."

"As long as you cultivate stillness, you may enjoy peace, but whenever your mind is a little bit disturbed, deluded thoughts will set in again."

"At the time of death, whatever you have focused on the most will determine your next life."

"Don?t let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or philosophical, but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen."

"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."

"For the person who has prepared and practiced, death comes not as a defeat but as a triumph, the more glorious the time that crowns a lifetime."

"Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other?and this is very important?than its self-radiance, the manifestation of its very energy."

"Eternity manifests itself in endless ways on endless planes of existence that they call lokas, other dimensions ? worlds within worlds."

"How hollow and futile life can be when it's founded on a false belief in continuity and permanence."

"In the Tibetan Rebirth Process, we're not so much concerned with changing physical bodies but with changing personality structures in fields of awareness, and in order to do this we need not die physically."

"How often attachment is mistaken for love! Even when the relationship is a good one, love is spoiled by attachment, with its insecurity, possessiveness, and pride; and then when love is gone, all you have left to show for it are the souvenirs of love, the scars of attachment."

"In other words, you're already dead. You're passing through the bardo right now."

"It is the Buddhist belief that at every moment the universe is not only dying but being reborn."

"Infinite awareness is everything. This is the bardo. All possibilities are open to you right now. You can move into any field of attention, once you know how."

"Meditation is the study of making the mind still. As your mind becomes still, a power enters you. This power transmogrifies your mind, it escalates your evolution and you begin to cycle through many incarnations in one lifetime."

"Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about"

"Keep your mind, through all sensual experiences in the bardo of duality, on the clear light of reality, on truth, kindness, brightness, inspiration - anything that brings you above the realm of the senses."

"Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me, I will abandon laziness for which life has no time, Enter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing, reflection and contemplation, and meditation, Making perceptions and mind the path, and realize the three kayas: the enlightened mind;4 Now that I have once attained a human body, There is no time on the path for the mind to wander."

"Our knowledge, experience, and wisdom can also assist us during the intermediate stage of the bardo plane when we are between death and rebirth, in between all things."

"Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity ? but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our biography, our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards? It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?"

"Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent."

"Say you find yourself in a deep state of stillness; often it does not last very long and a thought or a movement always arises, like a wave in the ocean. Don?t reject the movement or particulary embrace the stillness, but continue the flow of your pure presence. The pervasive, peaceful state of your meditation is the Rigpa itself, and all risings are none other than this Rigpa?s self-radiance. This is the heart and the basis of Dzogchen practice. One way to imagine this is as if you were riding on the sun?s rays back to the sun... Of course there are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or obstacle, but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted, but also that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. The great secret of Dzogchen is to see right through them as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean. The practitioner discovers?and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated?that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into the whirlpools of your own neuroses, they can actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate, and strengthen the Rigpa. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of Rigpa. The stronger and more flaming the emotion, the more Rigpa is strengthened."

"Planning for the future is like going fishing in a dry gulch; nothing ever works out as you wanted, so give up all your schemes and ambitions. If you have got to think about something? Make it the uncertainty of the hour of your death."

"So one moment you have lost something precious, and then, in the very next moment, you find your mind is resting in a deep state of peace."

"So the Book of the Dead prepares you for the bardo, but that's not really the purpose of the Book of the Dead. That's the popular use that it's fallen into."

"The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present."

"The bardo is not a place that you go to at the time of death. The bardo, or the bardos, are the levels of awareness, fields of attention that we pass through, and we're in them right now."

"Spiritual truth is not something elaborate and esoteric, it is in fact profound common sense. When you realize the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don?t actually become a buddha, you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being."

"The disembodied being stays in the same state of mind that it was in when it was embodied, unless it does something to change that while it is out of the body."

"The idea that death changes anything is laughed at by the enlightened teachers. Life is the bardo. This is the bardo. The bardo is not something that you experience after death."

"The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points: When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn?t there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair?s breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is! Yet it doesn?t stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn?t it? This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa. However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the chain of delusion, and is the root of samsara. If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated. Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen."

"The secret is not to think about thoughts, but to allow them to flow through the mind, while keeping your mind free of afterthoughts."

"The mere fact that you have a body is not discontinuous at all with being in the bardo. That's just an objectification that our mind produces or our thoughts produce."

"This scripture . . . was traditionally read aloud to the dying to help them attain liberation. It guides a person to use the moment of death to recognize the nature of mind and attain liberation. 'It teaches that awareness once freed from the body, creates its own reality like that of a dream. This dream projection unfolds in predictable ways in ways both frightening and beautiful. Peaceful and wrathful visions appear, and these visions can be overwhelming. Since the awareness is still in shock of no longer being attached to and shielded by a body, it needs guidance and forewarning so that key decisions that lead to enlightenment are made. The Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches how one can attain heavenly realms by recognizing the enlightened realms as opposed to being drawn into the realms of seduction that pull incorporeal awareness into cyclic suffering."

"The Tibetan Rebirth Process becomes of interest because within one given lifetime, we can dissolve our form and reunite it into something higher, something purer, something more conscious of its own eternality."

"What is born will die, what has been gathered will be dispersed, what has been accumulated will be exhausted, what has been built up will collapse, and what has been high will be brought low."

"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."

"What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences and free of aversion to the negative ones."

"You have thousands of selves inside you. Meditation is a process of peeling back the layers of the self. We start with peeling back the personality from this lifetime."