The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying: A Spiritual Classic from One of the Foremost Interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism to the West

Contemplating impermanence on its own is not enough: You have to work with it in your life.

It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change. If we shut off this possibility, we become closed, and we become grasping.

The teachings make it clear that if all we know of mind is the aspect of mind that dissolves when we die, we will be left with no idea of what continues, no knowledge of the new dimension of the deeper reality of the nature of mind.

So discipline is to do what is appropriate or just; that is, in an excessively complicated age, to simplify our lives.

ACTIVE LAZINESS

They have all handed down a vision of some sort of life to come, which infuses this life that we are leading now with sacred meaning.

THE MIND AND THE NATURE OF MIND

I think of a bardo as being like a moment when you step toward the edge of a precipice; such a moment, for example, is when a master introduces a disciple to the essential, original, and innermost nature of his or her mind. The greatest and most charged of these moments, however, is the moment of death.

Even if we were to think of the possibility of enlightenment, one look at what composes our ordinary mind—anger, greed, jealousy, spite, cruelty, lust, fear, anxiety, and turmoil—would undermine forever any hope of achieving it, if we had not been told about the nature of mind, and the possibility of coming to realize that nature beyond all doubt.