The Heart of the World Quotes

“Our minds have no real or absolute boundaries; on the contrary, we are part of an infinite field of intelligence that extends beyond space and time into realities we have yet to comprehend. The beyul and their dakini emissaries are traces of the original world, inviting us to open to the abiding mystery at the heart of all experience, the inseparability that infuses every action, thought, and intention.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place

“A form of consciousness beyond the veils of discursive thought, a space forever present for those who seek it, not in some far-off wilderness, but in our inner most hearts. When that realization dawns in the depths of one's being, the world effortlessly transforms into that which was sought.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place

“Maybe that’s what the key is all about,” Oy said, joining the conversation, “a new way of investigating nature. Maybe Yangsang actually is some unknown dimension of time and space. If we limit ourselves only to what we can perceive, or prove, we rob reality of all its magic. Science is sometimes like a blind person claiming there’s nothing there, or like someone who is deaf claiming that music does not exist. Just because something can’t be proved scientifically doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” “It may be linked to the plants that Kawa Tulku is looking for,” Hamid suggested. “Like the vision plants used by shamans in the Amazon, the plants described in the neyigs may offer a missing ingredient in how we percieve reality; something that bridges the gap between what we imagine to be real and what actually is real.” Oy interjected, “You mean between what we know to be true intuitively and what can be empirically measured. Empirical knowledge is only one kind of knowledge. It’s not truth. Even with microscopes, what we see with our eyes is only a narrow spectrum of light between red and violet. We see only five percent of the ‘real’ world. Most of what’s out there remains hidden.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“In the Buddhist sense, imagination does not so much transform as reveal what is already present, the mind’s inherent creativity realizing its essential unity with all phenomena and events. Paradise is thus not so much a place as liberation into the fullness and bounty of everyday experience”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“In the local worldview, every action establishes a relationship with the environment. Estrangement from nature is not an option. Even one’s subtlest thoughts and intentions— whether positive or negative—are held to elicit a response from the animating forces within the landscape. Ill thoughts and selfish concerns can cause rockfalls and hail. Well-directed prayers, on the other hand, can literally stop the rain. A constant interchange occurs, giving rise to what Tibetans call tukje, Great Compassion, or empathy with all things.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“The Buddha proclaimed sunyata, or Emptiness, to be the underlying nature of all phenomena, a web of causal relationships that the philosopher-poet Octavio Paz referred to as a “fathomless abyss above which metaphysical thought flaps its wings.” In the Buddhist Tantras, this “truth that does not itself exist” and the concurrent freedom from self-identity is celebrated as the birth of a radiant, compassionate awareness, often symbolized by luminous multiarmed deities.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“In its true state the mind is naked, immaculate, transparent, empty, timeless, uncreated, unimpeded; not realizable as a separate entity, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; undifferentiated, radiant, indivisible . . . to know whether this is true or not, look inside your own mind.” A later seventeenth-century Buddhist master had written: “Do you not weary of the mind’s endless convolutions? Cut to the source and rest in the essence, the undivided union of emptiness and spontaneous presence.” But the mind’s habits do not yield easily.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“Rather than renouncing the ephemeral thoughts and emotions that bolster self-identity, Tantra, or Vajrayana, seeks to transform them into potent catalysts for entering deeper, less restricted strata of consciousness, and unveiling the enlightened mind of wisdom and compassion said to be inherent within all beings.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet's Lost Paradise

“As I followed the accounts of Tibetan pilgrims, as well as those of Victorian and Edwardian explorers, Pemako became for me a realm of unbounded possibility, a place where geographical exploration merged with discoveries of the spirit.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place

“The Falls of the Tsangpo had offered turn-of-the-century explorers a geographical quest to rival the search for the headwaters of the Nile. But the Tibetans—who knew of it already—did not view the falls as a topographical trophy but as a sacrament, a threshold between the physical universe and the world of the spirit.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place

“Whether this mysterious sanctuary hidden amid Pemako’s mist-shrouded mountains can ever be located geographically is of secondary importance to the journey itself. In the Buddhist tradition, the goal of pilgrimage is not so much to reach a particular destination as to awaken within oneself the qualities and energies of the sacred site, which ultimately lie within our own minds.”
― Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place