Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

After initiation, the Buddhist Great Path, which has become activated or actualized in you, is still not you, but is the path, in you. Therefore, it is good to think that you are now on a journey, a journey of discovery, of realizations, and with personal effort, a journey of successes on the interior. Not all the successes will happen where you can perceive them in the mind because the Way, or the Path to enlightenment, and then on to perfection, will occur on more than one level of your being. There could be accomplishments by transformation as well as activations and actuations of the Great Path within subtle mind. Your conscious or ordinary mind, where you might not be so well-connected or developed, could remain unaware while important changes are experienced in the inner minds. Various subtle or inner minds are actually closer to reality and so transformations there are very important. Perhaps this is a new concept for you; to have something happening in your deep mind that y...

The great methods of the Middle Way of Buddhism do not refer to a path "out there" somewhere, nor is the path "in here" somewhere, belonging to me if I could just figure it out. In fact, for many, particularly those who have followed the Buddhist path toward the enlightened state for many lives can develop confusion by their modern world and become misaligned. Therefore, the path does not exist in them. I saw a video of a poor fellow trapped in an elevator for forty-one hours; he could have died in there, but he did survive the ordeal. It was a holiday weekend, the building had security video cameras on, but nobody came to rescue him because, obviously, no one looked at their cameras. Every once in a while, he would force open the elevator doors, but there was only a concrete wall. This is like the suffering misalignment of a meditator who knows a lot but not enough to get them out of a meditational difficulty. If you were stuck in your body and your min...

"The way is not in the sky, the way is in the heart." Although I had not heard this quotation from The Buddha, in my memory of scripture, it could have changed through translations and other Buddhist cultures, so I cannot really identify the original words. However, this quotation resonates with me and resonates with wisdom encouragement for us to move away from feeling that the Buddha is something outside us. If we look to a monotheistic vision of a supreme and vast being, like the open sky, we would need to perceive that He was looking down upon us from up above and giving us blessings and life. A creator God view of spirituality, which is the background that most have been indoctrinated, is fairly irresistible to those born into that culture. However, if you do not hold this view, then as a minority, you need to be careful about the feelings of others who do hold these views. Some will hide by developing a dualistic view, thinking, ‘Well, this is what I actually belie...

There are methods to help us make important perceptual changes so that we can achieve our natural potential without unwanted influences harming or impeding our progress. Even those who are clear already, without harmful obstacles, still need to make effort to understand the changes they are already experiencing. · One valuable perception we can cultivate right now is giving ourselves permission to change. A friend said recently they felt doomed to failure because their lack of confidence is combined with not feeling as if they deserved the positive changes. Perhaps someone suffering from confidence paralysis could jump away from that position by using positive affirmations that have worked for others such as: "I am good enough to be the best me possible, in fact, I was born to be me! I hereby give myself authorization to change.” “Change is happening already. I know that because I have changed my mind a dozen times just today! By giving myself formal permission to c...

We are powerfully influenced by our internal and external world to seek spiritual experiences because we want to feel good. Naturally, everybody wants to feel good, but when it moves beyond a certain point by becoming a central spiritual mandate or criterion, we could then become an adherent of one of the many feel-good religions vying for our attention. “Gimme the feel-good feelings! I do not want to make effort, I do not want to change.” We might feel easy delight to join the chorus; “Do not tell me anything that might be difficult, such as I have to think, purify or change my behavior. Don’t talk to me about those things. I just want to feeeelllll good.” Well, that is what drugs are for. Whether you are using the recreational drugs of “feel good” spiritual process or drugs sold on the streets, it is not so different. People with a main spiritual gauge of wanting to feel good, fail as soon as something does not feel good, like the effort needed to get rid of obstacles or neg...

How can we prevent changing? Change will happen whether we are prepared for it or not. What we do in deliberate inner spiritual work is push for positive, beneficial change that will effortlessly recreate us into the one that we always knew that we could be! Therefore, deliberate change is what we seek, within parameters of cultivated new and healthy influences, rather than going with the flow of our presently held influences, most of which we might unhappily discover, are not of our own choosing. Without making effort, we could be leading a life that is based on factors that are not who we are, not of our own decisions, and often, not very happy because we really wanted to be doing something else with our life! As we continue thinking about this extremely important subject of influences, we will discover inner and outer obstacles one after the other. Another obstacle preventing you from being who want to be might wish to be is poor health. Actually, this is a very Tibetan answer...