A Step Away From Paradise Quotes

“Don’t listen to anybody. Decide by yourself and practice madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“Our language is older than theirs. The Lepcha language is older than Hebrew. It is older than Sanskrit, Tibetan and even your English. Lepcha is the original language of the world. It was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden! In 1987 our written language was 5675 years old.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“As William Blake wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“To contradict him or to bring in logical thinking or prudence at the very moment he was finding and preparing to pass through a crack in the logic that keeps the world in a seamless web is the greatest sin a disciple can make. A moment of doubt can crush a lifetime of faith.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“Don’t listen to anybody. Decide by yourself and practice madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place.’
~from Tulshuk Lingpa’s Guidebook to the Hidden Land”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“It was because of him I had the most beautiful time of my life. There is no way to describe what it is like to give up everything. I was never so high in my life. When I came back after Tulshuk Lingpa died I had no sense of regret at all. I’d do it all again.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“You were lucky to be born in Tashiding,’ I said. ‘I was born outside Boston.’ ‘You were born in the richest country,’ Rigzin said. ‘Here in India, and in Sikkim, we are the poorest country but the holiest.’ ‘Which would you choose?’ ‘For the next life,’ he said, ‘our world is better. For this life, your world is better.’ ‘Having been in both countries,’ I said, ‘what I see is that people are happier here.’ ‘Really?’ Rigzin said. ‘That is the blessing of Padmasambhava.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“By the end of the interview while the investigators felt more secure, they were in fact more confused. They had had a better understanding of Tulshuk Lingpa, his motives and his intentions before they ever laid eyes on him. Tulshuk Lingpa had that ability. Fact and fiction, truth and its opposite were not to be held in the hands and weighed as much as juggled.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“In higher circles of Sikkimese—and mostly any—society, courtly decorum often prevails at the expense of truth. Where open disagreement is a breach of the social fabric there are sure to be intrigues. That is the price paid for maintaining social norms.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“it suddenly struck me that it didn’t matter whether the king thought Tulshuk Lingpa held the key or was a madman, whether there was an issue with his being Tibetan or whether the queen was out to get him because he was a Nyingma lama—all of these might have been factors, or not. By simply saying the beyul was yet to be opened, Tulshuk Lingpa was striking a blow at the center of the founding myth of the kingdom.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“I just want to stress that religious ideas are often used for political ends,’ Saul said. ‘This is one of the main lessons of the history of the region, if not the world.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“On the third day they were there, Tenzing Norgay came to see Chatral Rinpoche. It was Tenzing Norgay who, a few years earlier, together with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, was the first to scale the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“The disfigured despise themselves; the horror of someone else’s leprosy gets turned on oneself when one wakes up one day and it is one’s own nose that is vanishing in an open wound. A face without a nose is no less horrific if it is one’s neighbor’s than if it is one’s own face in the mirror. We had forgotten how to love ourselves.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“The people of Lahaul lived such isolated lives that people in neighboring villages, sometimes a kilometer away, often spoke languages that could not be mutually understood.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“While the lama would be quite capable of understanding the physical role of microbes in disease, he wouldn’t see the microbe as its root cause. He would ask a further question: Why was this particular person or community being affected at this particular time?”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“How extraordinary it is to actually meet someone with the courage not only to believe in a land of dreams but to leave everything behind for it.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
― K Shor Thomas, A Step Away From Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a land of Immortality

“Once when Kunsang was trying to explain to me his father’s nature and the meaning of tulshuk, he said, ‘My father was just like the eighth emanation of Padmasambhava, Guru Nyima Odser. Nyima Odser was like a sadhu, a wandering holy man, never staying in one place. He was not a stable type of person. He was a crazy yogi like my father. And like my father, he drank a lot.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“The first time I met Kunsang, I asked him the meaning of his father’s name. Kunsang told me that to understand the name Tulshuk Lingpa we had to go right back to Padmasambhava, the eighth-century visionary and mystic wizard often credited with bringing the dharma, or Buddhist teachings, to Tibet. Padmasambhava established the teachings by travelling through the high central Asian plateau, subduing the local deities belonging to the Bonpo (the indigenous religion of Tibet with strong shamanic elements), and turning them into protectors of the dharma.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“I meditated upon the fact that gods and spirits are nothing but the creations of one’s own mind; and while thinking thus, the so-called spirits disappeared without a trace.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“Tibetan refugees”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“winter used to be the time of almost endless local festivals and religious celebrations, which brought villagers together. Most villages in Lahaul now have only a few people staying in them for the winter, rendering life there even more isolated. Electricity has entered the valley and along with it television satellite dishes.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“His compassion enabled us to have compassion for ourselves.”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“When I asked Géshipa, one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s closest disciples in Sikkim, if the Hidden Land might actually not be found ‘out there’ but reside in the human heart, he responded with an incredulous look that spoke volumes about the gap in world views. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘If the Chinese army marched in here and shot me in the heart, they’d be killing the Hidden Land?”
― Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away From Paradise

“the sky seem more immediate, not entirely disconnected from where I stood. The firmament of stars seemed almost close enough to touch.”
― K Shor Thomas, A Step Away From Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a land of Immortality

“Perhaps it was the altitude or maybe the lowness of the clouds that somehow made”
― K Shor Thomas, A Step Away From Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a land of Immortality