English: Sogyal Rinpoche teaching in Lerab Ling,
A string of beads has a thread running through all the beads, keeping them together. What we need is a thread too—of sanity and stability. Because when you have a thread, even though each bead is separate, they hang together. When we have the teachings in us, stabilizing us, there’s a thread to keep our life together that prevents us from falling apart. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, “The Stability of Ease”
In meditation, imagine that in front of you are three persons—an enemy, a friend, and a neutral person. At that time, in our minds we have (1) a sense of closeness for one of them, thinking, “This is my friend”; (2) a sense of dislike even when imagining the enemy; and (3) a sense of ignoring the neutral person. Now, we have to think about the reasons why we generate these feelings—the reasons being that temporarily one of them helped us whereas the other temporarily harmed us, and the third did neither. However, when we think in terms of the long course of beginningless rebirth, none of us could decide that someone who has helped or harmed us in this life has been doing so for all lifetimes.
When you contemplate this way, eventually you arrive at a point where a strong generation of desire or hatred appears to you to be just senseless. Gradually, such a bias weakens, and you decide that one-sided classification of persons as friends and enemies has been a mistake. ~ His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama, The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace, page 166
page 166.
English: 14th Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers but in our daily lives. If we find we cannot help others, the least we can do is to desist from harming them.~ His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached.
When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes
“Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking.” As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, “The Aim of Attention”
Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen rather than what you now seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now is what is, nor are you willing to go with the situation as it is. Thus, self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience.
~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
A Buddhist's Journey 