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the most outstanding quality was an unmistakable luminosity. The woman virtually glowed.
To my mind worldly life is an escape,’
In a cave, however, you have no one to turn to but yourself. When problems arise and things get tough you have no choice but to go through with them, and come out the other side.
a profound stillness, an immense inner calm as though nothing could, or would, disrupt her, no matter how galvanic.
‘I had this intense feeling that I was in the wrong place. Even now I never feel “right" in England,’she said.
She was an introspective and reclusive child, having friends but never wanting to bring them home.
‘I just really liked being by myself. I was very happy just to sit and read.
’I was very confused by being a female,’ she explained. ‘It just didn’t feel right.
I felt that somehow our perfection had become obscured and that we had to uncover it, to find out who we really were. And that was what we were here for.
‘The homesickness for the East was agonizing at times,’
‘To me, it was astonishing. Everything I had ever believed in, there it was! Much better stated than anything I could haveformulated for myself,
“Why are you still looking for happiness in Samsara?
on a very deep level we think in pictures. If you are using pictures which have arisen in an Enlightened mind, somehow that unlocks very deep levels in our own minds.
‘It’s not what you gain but what you lose. It’s like unpeeling the layers of an onion, that’s what you have to do. My quest was to understand what perfection meant. Now, I realize that on one level we have never moved away from it. It is only our deluded perception which prevents our seeing what we already have. The more you realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize. The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion. Who is there to attain it anyway?’
‘I think I have two sides to my nature – one is this basic need to be alone, the love of isolation, the other is a sociability and friendliness. I don’t know if I am particularly warm towards others but I do know that whoever I am with I feel they are the most important person in the world at that time. Internally there is always this feeling of wishing them well. So although I love to be alone, when I’m with others that’s fine too.’
no amount of retreat could have been said to have worked unless there was a fundamental shift, a turning around of your old, habitual ways of seeing and being.
when you come out you see that people are so caught up in their life – we identify so totally with what we’ve created. We believe in it so completely. That’s why we suffer – because there’s no space for us.’
‘It’s not a cold emptiness,’ she stated emphatically, ‘it’s a warm spaciousness.
It is very difficult to understand others while one is still caught up in the turmoil of one’s emotional involvement – because we’re always interpreting others from the standpoint of our own needs.
You know that their love for you is totally without judgement because it doesn’t rely on who you are or what you are doing, or how you treat them. It’s totally impartial. It’s just love. It’s like the sun – it shines on everyone.
Whatever you did they’d still love you because they understand your predicament and in that understanding naturally arises love and compassion.
Sentimental love is very unstable, because it’s based on feed-back and how good it makes you feel. T...
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the difficult choice was always the one that offered the more growth.
‘Our minds are like junk yards. What we put into them is mostly rubbish! The conversations, the newspapers, the entertainment, we just pile it all in. There’s a jam session going on in there. And the problem is it makes us very tired,’
‘When we normally think of resting we switch on the TV, or go out, or have a drink. But that does not give us real rest. It’s just putting more stuff in. Even sleep is not true rest for the mind. To get genuine relaxation we need to give ourselves some inner space. We need to clear out the junk yard, quieten the inner noise. And the way to do that is to keep the mind in the moment.
‘You can meditate walking down the corridor, waiting for the computer to change, at the traffic lights, standing in a queue, going to the bathroom, combing your hair. Just be there in the present, without the mental commentary.
It’s all habit. At the moment we’ve got the habit of being unaware. We have to develop the habit of being present.
‘Ultimately the Buddha dharma is about transforming the mind,
The transformation of the heart/mind cannot be achieved if we only sit in meditation and ignore the dharma of our everyday life,’
The baby sees the colours and shapes without judgement, its mind is fresh. That’s the state of mind we have to bring into our everyday life.
‘It doesn’t mean you no longer feel, that you’re emotionally flat. One still has one’s identity, one’s personality – it’s just that one no longer believes in it.
The Buddha’s mind is not a blank nothing - it’s filled with compassion, joy and humour. It’s wonderfully light. It’s also extremely sensitive and very deeply intelligent,’
“The greater the disturbance, the greater the joy,’ because he was riding on top of it, skilful and balanced.
’There is the thought, and then there is the knowing of the thought. And the difference between being aware of the thought and just thinking is immense. It’s enormous
As long as we are in the realm of duality, there is “I” and “other”. This is our basic delusion – it’s what causes all our problems,’
‘Once we realize that the nature of our existence is beyond thought and emotions, that it is incredibly vast and interconnected with all other beings, then the sense of isolation, separation, fear and hopes fall away. It’s a tremendous relief!’
‘The reason we are not Enlightened is because we are lazy,’
‘There’s no other reason. We do not bother to bring ourselves back to the present because we’re too fascinated by the games the mind is playing.
Genuine renunciation is giving up our fond thoughts, all our delight in memories, hopes and daydreams, our mental chatter. To renounce that and stay naked in the present, that is renunciation,’
’The thing is we say we want to be Enlightened, but we don’t really. Only bits of us want to be Enlightened. The ego which thinks how nice, comfortable and pleasant it would be. But to really drop everything and go for it! We could do it in a moment but we don’t do it. And the reason is we are too lazy. We are stopped by fear and lethargy – the great inertia of the mind. The practice is there. Anyone on the Buddhist path certainly knows these things. So how is it we’re not Enlightened? We have no one to blame but ourselves. This is why we stay in Samsara because we always find excuses. Instead
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‘I walk in and the atmosphere is very heavy, quite cold. I mean, they talk enormously about compassion and Bodhicitta but they have no real kindness in their hearts, even towards each other. Something’s going wrong. The dharma isn’t working as it should. I see people who have been sincerely studying and practising Buddhism for years and they still have the same hang-ups.’
When we indicate “me” we point to our heart, not to our head. It’s instinctual.
The problem is that we don’t make that leap into becoming the meditation. That is why we don’t transform. Loving kindness should be so spontaneous that we don’t have to think about it. It’s not a theory, an idea. It’s something you feel.
the new luxuries were cited as silence, space, time and an intact ecology.
the great need for spiritual values in an increasingly materialistic society.
Westerners’ thirst for spiritual leadership, any leadership, was immense.
The Dalai Lama had his own recipe for distinguishing between an authentic guru and a fake: ‘You should “spy” on him or her for at least ten years. You should listen, examine, watch, until you are convinced that the person is sincere. In the meantime you should treat him or her as an ordinary human being and receiving their teaching as “just information”. In the end the authority of a guru is bestowed by the disciple. The guru doesn’t go out looking for students. It is the student who has to ask the guru to teach and guide,’
I am not nearly as serious as I used to be
‘But these are very early days. The dharma took hundreds of years to get rooted in Tibet. There’s no Western Buddhism yet. Buddhism will not be rooted in the West until some Western people have gone and taken the dharma and eaten it and digested it and then given it back in a form which is right for Westerners.
‘We do different things in different lifetimes,’
