Infinite Life Quotes

“Buddhist Psychology

You can use enlightening Buddhist practices to transform your life. Unfortunately, many people do not know it, but the Buddhist Dharma, or teaching, is actually a scientific system of psychology, developed in India and further refined in Tibet. It is a psychology that works. I call it a „joyous science of the heart“ because it is based on the idea that while unenlightened life is full of suffering, you are completely capable of escaping from that suffering. You can get well. In fact, you already are well; you just need to awaken to that fact.

And how do you do this? By analyzing your thought patterns. When you do, you realize that you are full of „misknowledge“ - misunderstandings of yourself and the world that lead to anger, discontent, and fear. The target of Buddhist practice and the constant theme of this book is the primal misconception that you are the center of the universe, that your „self“ is a fixed, constant, and bounded entity. When you meditate on enlightened insights into the true nature of reality and the boundlessness of the self, you develop new habits of thinking. You free yourself from the constraints of your habitual mind. In other words, you teach yourself to think differently. This in turn leads you to act differently. And voila! You are on the path to happiness, fulfillment, and even enlightenment.

The battle for happiness is fought and won or lost primarily within the mind. The mind is the absolute key, both to enlightenment and to life. When your mind is peaceful, aware, and under your command, you will be securely happy. When your mind is unaware of its true nature, constantly in turmoil, and in command of you, you will suffer endlessly. This is the whole secret of the Dharma. If you recognize delusion, greed, anger, envy, and pride as the main enemies of your well-being and learn to focus your mind on overcomming them, you can install wisdom, generosity, tolerance, love, and altruism in their place. This is where enlightened psychology can be most useful. Psychology and philosophy are really one entity in Buddhism. They are called the inner science, the science of the human interior. In the flow of Indian history, it is fair to say that the Buddha was a great explorer of the human interior rather than some sort of religious prophet.

He came into the world at a time when people were just beginning to experiment with self-exploration, but mostly in an escapist way, using their focus on the inner world to run away from the sufferings of life by entering a supposed realm of absolute quiet far removed from everday existence. The Buddha started out exploring that way too, but then realized the futility of escapism and discovered instead a way of being happier here and now. (pp. 32-33)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“How are you going to experience bliss and voidness, wisdom and compassion, if you are a rigid, independent self? You can't enter into the ideal universe, the „buddhaverse“ as I like to call it, of enjoyment, wisdom, and compassion, until you first detach from this world of suffering, this prison that is the fixed and absolute self-image. (p. 67)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“There is no need for you to formally promote certain doctrines: your very presence becomes a teaching example to others, a liberating art that opens their imagination to the potential freedom they also can experience. (p. 79)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“Eventually, you reach your goal of complete nondual freedom, the simultaneous nondual experience of supremely liberated cognitive dissonance, wherein you joyfully live the moment-to-moment reconciliation of all dichotomies. (p. 77)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“According to the Dharma teaching, psychology is about understanding what human beings are made of, how our world works, how reality is put together, and how our minds function. The purpose of doing this, ultimately, is not to adjust people to go back and live according to how society tells them they should live, so that they can fit into some meaningless, supposedly wealth-producing, militaristic scheme. That‘s a total waste of human life. If somebody has the good sense to be depressed, malfunctioning, hallucinating, dropping out of society because their mind-body complex is saying „no“ to the whole nonsense and looking for some better way of being, a liberating psychology should not try to stuff them back into the box. They should not be just rushed straight ahead, encouraged to wash the dishes, do their jobs, and pounce on the enemy, just because that‘s what everybody else is doing. People who have the sensitivity and insight to see through the meaninglessness should be able to find someone to help them discover freedom, which is what they are looking for. They should be supported in their endeavors.”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“Thus, once you have adopted such an attitude of infinite interconnectedness, you naturally want to liberate not just yourself but all beings from suffering. The Buddha calls this „the conception of the Spirit of Enlightenment“ it is the soul of the Bodhisattva, the person who dedicates him- or herself to helping all beings achieve total happiness. When you open to the inevitability of your infinite interconnection with other sensitive beings, you develop compassion. You learn to feel empathy for them, to love them, to want their happiness. You want to keep them from suffering, and you do so just as if they were a part of you. You don‘t think your behavior makes you special. You don‘t congratulate yourself for helping others, just as you wouldn't congratulate yourself for healing your own legs when you hurt it. It is natural for you to love your leg because it is one with you, and so it is natural for you to love others. You would certainly never harm another being. As the great Buddhist adept Shantideva (eighth-century Indian sage) wrote, „How wonderful will it be when all beings experience each other as limbs on the one body of life! (p. 27)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“I invite you to embrace a new reality. It is not a matter of religion – it is a matter of fact, a matter of science, a matter of experiment, and a matter of awareness. I invite you to awaken to the infinite life you already have, no matter what your worldview. I invite you to take up responsibility for your own evolutionary destiny. I invite you to take advantage of your priceless human opportunity to make a definitive turn toward ultimate security, complete freedom, and unbounded happiness. (p. 23, The Nature of Reality)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“Religious people, West and East, have always tended to feel that there is a mysterious power of life in everything. In most forms of religions, the appearance of darkness and pain and death is overcome by the glorious light of goodness you have tasted in the wisdom meditation that discovers the open space-like freedom concentration. What Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus call „God“, or sometimes „Godhead“, is a force of reality much like the infinite ocean-body of living joy that the great enlightened meditators experience. When a believer asserts unshakable faith in the face of the worst experience or apparent reality, she or he is reaching for connection to the deepest awareness of infinite living energy. Enlightened people do not see this boundlessness as something other than themselves. They experience themselves as one with all gods and all other beings, and they consider us all capable of becoming fully aware of our own freedom and happiness. Faith in such a possibility is a good place to begin this journey to liberation; it encourages us to set forth. But we all can move beyond faith to direct experience and full knowledge of our true state. (p. 75)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“There have been millions of persons who have awakened to their true reality, who have been called „enlightened“ in many civilizations. They have not seen the universe in the way only we moderns are taught to see it – as a vast, dark, freezing void through which galaxies are scattered, where very few stars have planets that are bathed in a green-blue film of oxygen and carbon, and perhaps just one planet supports sentient life as we know it. Ours is an impossibly paranoid, lonely, isolated vision. No wonder we feel weird. We conceive our living awareness to be such a rare exception, so fragile, so random and meaningless.

As you become more truly alive, you see an infinitude of universes, a beginningless, boundless sea of life, energy, and delight, full of goodness, aware of itself in its absolute ultimate peace and security, freedom and happiness. You see yourself and all of us, even as we struggle to stay separate, so totally incorporated within that sea of joy, nothing neglected, no one excluded. (p. 74)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“I enjoy experiencing a taste of the feeling that I am infinite. But you have to risk going into a sphere where you can‘t quite remember exactly who you are. You have to negate it anytime you feel the „I“ emerging as a fixed, independent, absolute thing, and then negate it again. It‘s not that nonexistence is your final goal, but that you want to rid yourself of your habitual sense that you exist in a static way. This practice has its thrilling moments of revelation, its unsettling moments of doubt, its quiet moments of mindfulness – all of which add up to a continuous, ever-deepening, evolving flow of liberation.

Your infinite life thus becomes grounded in the greatest virtue of all – wisdom. Your wisdom deepens constantly as you gain a deeper and deeper understanding of your own selflessness and your resulting interconnectedness with all other beings. You engage other people with generosity, sensitive and empathic justice, and invincible tolerance, forbearance, and forgiveness. With practice, you gradually erase the division between meditation and action until you are filled with endless joy and bliss. Your newfound freedom energizes your actions in daily life, and you become an inexhaustible source of the infinite life force. Your embrace of beings who feel lost and frightened and abandoned does not ruffle the surface of the great ocean of your happy, loving presence, as you unleash waves of dynamic effort to help them. (p. 72)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“How do you release yourself? Through the analytic knowledge of facts. How can you stay angry if you are aware of yourself as a constantly changing process? The continuity of your anger gets broken. How can you stay depressed? The continuity of your sadness gets broken. It transforms. You associate with the not-mad and not-sad. You take responsibility for your mad and sad. You stop being stuck in those same old thought patterns. You stop thinking over and over again, „Well, I reacted once with anger, and now I‘m stuck here. There‘s nothing I can do about it.“ Because you absolutely can do something about it. The fact that you are selfless means that you are not a fixed entity; you are changeable. You can transform your thoughts in order to transform your life. (p. 67)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“When you become aware of your selflessness, you realize that any way you feel yourself to be at any time is just a relational, changing construction. When that happens, you have a huge inner release of compassion. Your inner creativity about your living self is energized, and your infinite life becomes your ongoing work of art. (p. 54)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“Each of us is like a bubble of awareness. When we transform ourselves, free ourselves from inner knots and blemishes and blossom out our inner beauties, our new openness and blissful pleasure resonates instantaneously and reinforces liberation and satisfaction in the other bubbles. Changing ourselves for the better changes the world for the better. Rehearsing positive changes through intelligent meditation practice makes us more capable of performing the more positive world, creating it in our infinite living and sharing it with others. (p. 46)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“So the Buddha took off, leaving his old life behind, and went into the jungle to be by himself so that he could quietly investigate the inner world through meditation. After many years, he gained tremendous insight into the functioning of the human mind and the problems we create for ourselves. He came to understand how negative states develop, how those negative states can be replaced by positive states, and how those positive states can be cultivated without limit. The Buddha realized that the human life-form is the ideal life-form in which to do that cultivation, each person ultimately by themselves but with the help of therapists and teachers and philosophers. And that was the birth of psychology, really: the beginning of the systematic scientific exploration of the way the mind works.”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“We all have the ability to walk out of the gloomy prison of self-limiting, uncritical existence into the bright daylight of a boundless, deeply meaningful, and tremendously satisfying existence, with its attendant playful, exuberant, joyous wisdom. The infinite life is life unbound by time or space. Deaths are only doorways, transitions from one life-form to the next, just as sleep is only a passage from evening to a new day. Your every movement of body, speech, and mind arises from a beginningless past and resonates into an endless future. You are free and boundless in dimension, and also very real and unique. You are lost in oneness with the awesome infinite, yet you have infinite importance due to your total interconnectedness with all other beings. When self-centered and unhappy, you are a big problem for them, often engaged in life-and-death struggles. When enlightened, self-transcendent, boundlessly open, and truly happy, you can be the living solution to all their problems. Open your eyes and look at yourself carefully. Expand the concept of reality that you live by – your awareness of, and responsibility for, your own personal continuity. Everything you do now, your very breathing, flows from your sense of yourself as a living continuum and your drive to improve your state of being. You are a dynamic evolutionary process. There is no limit to how far you can develop positively into higher states of spirituality, understanding, love, happiness, and creativity. (p. 29)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“We have all been each other‘s mothers, fathers, lovers, best friends, and worst enemies, and we will continue to be everything to each other throughout time. So in order for our lives to become completely actualized in enlightened happiness, all other beings must also experience their lives as full of happiness. We can leave out no single being. Like the Three Musketeers, we are „all for one and one for all“. We cannot liberate just ourselves from suffering, because it is impossible to achieve fully perfect bliss if anyone is excluded from it. Infinite interconnection logically mandates infinite responsibility. (p. 24)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“From a strictly realistic perspective, should we bet on infinite life and endless consequences to our actions? Pascal would argue that our answer must be a resounding „Yes!“ We might as well assume that there will be a future continuity of our personal consciousness, however changed, however disembodied or re-embodied, however connected or disconnected we remain to the „self“ we experience in this life. If we make that bet on our own future lives, then we will prepare in whatever way we can to assure that we continue in a good way, in a better embodiment and environment. We will become truly responsible for our thoughts and our acts. Even though we may not remember the previous-life self who made those preparations, we certainly will want to enjoy the results. If our bet is misplaced, and our preparations have no effect because we actually do enter oblivion at death, we will simply not exist to regret having made them.

But if we wrongly bet on noncontinuity and therefore do not prepare for the future and have to face it unprepared, then we may suffer seriously in our next existence, and we will very much regret our decision. Even if we don‘t remember making it, don‘t know why we are suffering, don‘t know how to fault ourselves for being so unconscious in our previous life, we will still suffer and regret. Pascal‘s wager is therefore a very safe bet – it has a clear-cut positive outcome. Whether our personal life is really terminal at death or in fact infinite in continuity, if we bet, like Pascal, on the existence of our life after death, in whatever form, we will be in the best possible position, however things turn out. (pp. 7-8, The Nature of Reality)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“There is no full stopping of anything, it‘s nonsense to say something can become nothing; your consciousness is a something, just like your body! You are body and mind, spirit and soul – the whole „you“ is what is immortal! Always has been and always will be, living and dying, changing and experiencing. The question is not really whether or not you go on, but rather how are you going to enjoy it? How are your friends going to enjoy you, once you‘re all going to be there together forever?(p. 4, The Nature of Reality)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within

“I more and more have come to feel that if anything positive could result from my teaching, any real benefit for any person, it should be that they get just a hint of the reality of their own former and future lives, that they diminish just the tiniest bit their usual „only this one life“ sense of cosmic disconnection, loneliness, alienation, and meaninglessness. I want everyone to be able to see more clearly their culturally common belief that, „My life only began when I was born and it ends when I die. So my responsibility to the universe is limited and even my responsibility to myself is limited. Nothing really matters because we‘ll be nothing in the end.“ If nothing else,I want to help you free yourself from that trap, that imprisoning way of thinking. To intensify your spiritual evolution, the first and most important step you must take is to embrace your boundlessness, take responsibility for your infinite continuity, and live your immortality here and now. (pp. 3-4, The Nature of Reality)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within