In Love with the World Quotes

“Right here, I thought, right now, is where the suffering arises. Between the sound and the projection, between things as-they-are and things as-we-want-them-to-be. This is what the Buddha taught: To misperceive reality is to suffer.”
― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self—because it never existed in the first place.”
― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“Nothing endures but change, and accepting this has the potential to transform the dread of dying into joyful living.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“It [mind of absolute reality] is everywhere and nowhere. It’s somewhat like sky—so completely integrated with our existence that we never stop to question its reality or to recognize its qualities.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“Through the practice of shamata meditation, the tumultuous habits of mind calm down; and then we can investigate the characteristics of the calm waters beyond the monkey’s control. This is called vipashyana—or insight—meditation. I knew monkey mind intimately. I also knew that when we dismiss any value to knowing this monkey, it’s like owning a car without knowing how to drive. The less we know about the chattering, muttering voice in our heads that tells us what to do, what to believe, what to buy, which people we should love, and so forth, the more power we grant it to boss us around and convince us that whatever it says is true.”
― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“My maroon robes, yellow shirt, and shaved head identified me as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a lama by profession—a perfect disguise for the disorderly mix of curiosity, anxiety, and confidence that accompanied my every heartbeat—and who in so many ways was still seeking the answer to my father’s question: Who is Mingyur Rinpoche?”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Judging someone for looking unclean or smelling bad, or being loud, or anything, is a pretty neurotic way to seek happiness—but it provides a toehold to climb up from and allows you to temporarily enjoy the illusion that you are better than someone else. It’s never just: They are bad. It is also: Therefore, I am good.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Ego is not an object; it’s more like a process that follows through on the proclivity for grasping, and for holding on to fixed ideas and identities. What we call ego is really an ever-changing perception, and although it is central to our narrative story, it is not a thing. It therefore cannot really die, and cannot be killed or transcended. This tendency for grasping arises when we misperceive the constant flow of our body and mind and mistake it for a solid, unchanging self. We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self— because it never existed in the first place. The key point is that there is no ego to kill.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Recognizing the fluidity of all forms disempowers the false claims of the fixed mind.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world’s system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Non-duality is the essential quality of awareness, yet when we speak of three types of awareness—normal, meditative, and pure—we are speaking of a gradual experiential process that takes place from dualistic to non-dualistic states, from very cluttered minds to minds that are increasingly liberated from habitual reactivity and preconceptions about how things are supposed to be.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“The quality of emptiness that we are referring to was never born; likewise, it cannot die. This essential nature of our lives is unborn—like space itself. Space provides no place to abide, no foothold in which to secure our steps. In skylike emptiness, we cannot be stuck. Yet here we are, alive in this wondrous world of appearances, which can always benefit from wise discernment. With particularity as fine as flour, we discriminate between actions that intend to relieve suffering for ourselves and others and those that intend to cause harm.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“A conversation that took place between two American women describes this intimate relationship between physical and immaterial forms of dying. One of these women came to see me soon after her only child, a twenty-year-old son, died from an accidental drug overdose. We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman’s best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son’s death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths. The profound misfortune of the death of this woman’s son opened her heart to an exploration of impermanence and death that went far beyond her own personal story.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“She turned her heartbreak into wisdom.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“Now more than ever, I place my faith in Gandhi’s approach: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Nothing is more essential for the twenty-first century and beyond than personal transformation. It’s our only hope. Transforming ourselves is transforming the world.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“The term ego—or ego-self—is frequently used to describe the self-centered, fabricated outer layer of self, and we often speak of letting go of the ego, or dissolving it, or transcending it. I myself had thought of adding wood to the fire as an ego-suicide mission. However, the common usage of ego, both within Buddhist teachings and in the world at large, makes ego sound like an entity that has a shape and a size, and that can be extracted like a tooth. It doesn’t work that way.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“Once we become familiar with steady awareness, we still often move between this state and normal awareness. Despite the difference between them, both types of awareness exist within a dualistic construct: There is something watching and something being watched—the experience of awareness recognizing itself.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“This clear mind of awareness is always with us, whether we recognize it or not. It coexists with confusion, and with the destructive emotions and cultural conditioning that shape our ways of seeing things. But when our perception shifts to meditative or steady awareness, it is no longer narrowed by memory and expectation; whatever we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear has greater clarity and sharpness, and enlivens our interactions.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“With meditative awareness, we try to remove these filters and reduce the projections. We face inward and recognize awareness as a quality of mind itself. When we look at the mountain, there is less mental traffic between us and the mountain, fewer concepts and ideas.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

“When the conventional world agrees that what the mind knows with its ordinary perception sums up all that can be known, then it becomes more difficult to pursue the truth.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“When I examined my difficulties with too much newness all at once, I could see ego-self as a process, not as a solid thing. I was not able to allow all my previous identities to die at once. I needed time. I needed to work through the layers. I accepted that the roles I wished to toss onto the pyre were fabricated, not inherent to my being. But they could not be extracted as if with a surgical procedure. I had grown into them, and I needed to grow out of them.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“No separate me loved the world. The world was love. My perfect home. Vast and intimate. Every particle was alive with love, fluid, flowing, without barriers.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“My body is moving…changing…this breath is coming in and going out…changing. I am breathing in new air, changing, I am breathing out old air, changing. I am part of this universe. This air is part of this universe. With each breath, the universe changes. With each inhale, the universe changes. With each exhale, the universe changes. Each inhale fills my lungs. Each inhale brings oxygen to my blood. Changing. Body changing. Each sensation is temporary. Each breath temporary, each rising and falling temporary. All changing, transforming. With each exhale, the old me dies. With each inhale, a new me is born. Becoming, renewing, dying, rebirth, change. As my body is changing, so are those of everyone I know. The bodies of my family and friends are changing. The planet is changing. The seasons are changing. Political regimes are changing. My monasteries are changing. The whole universe is changing. In. Out. Expansion, contraction”
― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“However, the common usage of ego, both within Buddhist teachings and in the world at large, makes ego sound like an entity that has a shape and a size, and that can be extracted like a tooth. It doesn’t work that way. Ego is not an object; it’s more like a process that follows through on the proclivity for grasping, and for holding on to fixed ideas and identities.”
― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“Love the world, and the world will love you back.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“One piece of advice, I told him. Don’t conclude that your mind is significantly different from anyone else’s. We all have this monkey mind. Once we put the monkey under the magnifying glass, the mind commonly appears crazier than ever. It’s not. You are just allowing yourself to become acquainted with how crazy it has always been. This is great news.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“It works something like this: A new relationship with a romantic or business partner, or a new boss or a new residence or pet—any new beginning—starts with a moment of death. To enter an unmapped domain of newness, and to be completely open and available to what it offers, we must let go of our cherished ideas of how things are supposed to work. We must allow these preconceptions to dissolve; only through dying will the past not dominate this moment. Then we can fully appreciate the sweetness of the fresh atmosphere that accompanies this stage.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“While I might have boldly claimed to King Menander that I am not my robes, it now became evident that part of my identity lived in six by nine feet of maroon cotton.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“We seek the liberation that comes from recognizing the self that is not defined by grasping, and is therefore capable of recognizing its original state.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

“And I am in the bardo of dying, trying to let go of my old life and not yet born into my new one. At least I am not stuck. I am moving.”
― Yongey Mingyur, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying