Quotes About Spirituality

But meditation is a life's work. You cease to sit and meditate in this life when the last breath runs out of your body on your deathbed.

The practice of meditation is not so much concerned with the hypothetical attainment of enlightenment, but with leading a good life. In order to learn how to lead a good life, a spotless life, you need continual awareness that relates with life constantly, directly, and very simply.

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego.

So a sense of humor is not merely a matter of trying to tell jokes or make puns, trying to be funny in a deliberate fashion. It involves seeing the basic irony of the juxtaposition of extremes, so that one is not caught taking them seriously, so that one does not seriously play their game of hope and fear. This is why the experience of the spiritual path is so significant, why the practice of meditation is the most insignificant experience of all.

It has been said that sleeping, dreaming, and meditating, or developing awareness, are the only states in which we do not sow further seeds of karma.

The basic act of surrender does not involve the worship of an external power. Rather it means working together with inspiration, so that one becomes an open vessel into which knowledge can be poured.

The whole idea is that these yidams must not be regarded as external gods who will save you, but they are expressions of your true nature. You identify yourself with the attributes and colors of particular yidams and feel the sound that comes from the mantra so that finally you begin to realize that your true nature is invincible. You become completely one with the yidam.

the yidam is the expression of one's own basic nature, visualized as a divine form in order to relate with it and express its full potentiality.

Sacred outlook is not only about thinking everything is good; it is the absence of imprisonment. You begin to experience freedom that is intrinsically good, almost unconditionally free. So the vajra world you are entering is basically good, unconditionally free, fundamentally glorious and splendid.

AT THIS POINT we may have come to the conclusion that we should drop the whole game of spiritual materialism; that is, we should give up trying to defend and improve ourselves. We may have glimpsed that our struggle is futile and may wish to surrender, to completely abandon our efforts to defend ourselves. But how many of us could actually do this? It is not as simple and easy as we might think. To what degree could we really let go and be open? At what point would we become defensive?

I would like to devote myself to the dharma completely and fully.

Chögyam Trungpa

I was taught that only about 25 percent of your concentration should be put on the breath when you're meditating. This is just a rough estimate, so please don't fixate on the percentage. The point is that in this approach, working with breath is just touching the highlights of the breathing. You don't remain completely one with it all the time.

Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen and Khenpo Kangshar—leading teachers in the Nyingma and Kagyü lineages.

If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness.

Gone, gone, gone beyond, completely exposed, awake, so be it.

Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.

There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: "Knowledge must be burned, hammered, and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament." So when you receive spiritual instruction from the hands of another, you do not take it uncritically, but you burn it, you hammer it, you beat it, until the bright, dignified color of gold appears. Then you craft it into an ornament, whatever design you like, and you put it on.

Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.

I do not want to be a part of a church that can make it without the Holy Spirit.

WE WERE IN THE REGION OF YARLUNG and went to the Shelgrak crystal cave, which

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.