Dzigar Kongtrul Quotes

#1. It smelled something like a keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician's storage room on a hot summer's day.

Scott Lynch

#2. Self-reflection is the gateway to freedom. It also brings greater appreciation and enjoyment. We begin to enjoy spending time with our own mind, and we enjoy reflecting on our experience of the teachings. Like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, the teachings of the dharma become clear.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#3. What good are thoughts and emotions-in fact all of our experiences-if not to increase our realization?

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#4. When we trust our creativity we encounter a supreme kind of enjoyment - an amazement at the natural unfolding of life beyond our ordinary way of looking at things.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#5. A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that - every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#6. By approaching everything with a sense of suspicion and struggle, we like to think we're in control of things. But in truth our past karma is simply playing itself out. Instead of struggling with it, however, we can choose to dance.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#7. You really have to love the work. You can't look for stardom. That's a by-product.

Donna Mills

#8. The experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#9. Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#10. A mantra is like meeting the Buddha or Bodhisattva himself.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#11. You as a salt-being, made of salt, go to fathom the depth of the ocean, and in the process you yourself dissolve. A great maharishi once said that true meditation is like this.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#12. The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#13. Melting our attachment to self is the most powerful medication for bringing mental and emotional imbalances in check.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#14. Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.

Randy Pausch

#15. Thoughts and emotions will always arise.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#16. When we look in the mirror, the one thing we don't want to see is an ordinary human being.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#17. We cannot be fearful all the time; we have to rise above our fear, whatever is to happen to us, however our conditions may challenge us. To be fearless is a decision that one must make. And this fearlessness becomes the fundamental ground of nonviolence.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#18. The longing for happiness and freedom from suffering
expresses the great natural potential of mind.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

#19. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

Nicole Krauss

#20. Seeing that nothing is solid or permanent you begin to make yourself at home in the unknown.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche