Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

Planet Earth, this world, is not your real home. You cannot stay here endlessly; you need to evolve beyond this small place. Inside, part of you already knows that, sometimes feeling a kind of sick longing for real home. This world is like Hotel Karma. You have a certain amount of lifespan; how long you are going to stay. You don’t even know how much money you have in your pocket and how long you will be here. When the management says, “You have not paid your bill. Now you have to go.” Like that, when your lifespan is finished, you must check out of Hotel Karma. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche

We have been fooled, beyond the carefully balanced innate view we need to participate in the human realm, into thinking that the inner bases have spirituality, holiness or will provide something that they are not capable of providing. Therefore, we should not blame our innate view, though in most philosophies and practices, this is exactly what is done. Perhaps we should begin to disrespect it cautiously because our actual dilemma is not the fault of the innate view. The innate view has allowed us to participate in this human realm for a very long time, but once we began to think that it could provide us something that it cannot, we were wrong. excerpt Mystery of Emptiness & Love avail http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Emptiness-Love-Geshe-Rinpoche/dp/0692003940/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246398169&sr=1-1 also on Kindle

How does a person become enlightened? A truthful answer might be “I do not know.” You would think that would be the whole answer, however now we need to make effort to discover what kind of "I do not know?' we are saying... "I don’t know, lets all give up and go have a beer?" On the other hand, are we talking about “I don’t know, other people can try if they like, but I’m not going to, because it sounds too hard.“ Could it be instead, “I don’t know, I should try to find out.” If you are internally “ripe” for awakening, now is the time to find a good teacher because helping others is in the structure of the dharma of sharing in the transformational process. Find a spiritual teacher, but as there are many types of worldly spiritual paths, not just any spiritual teacher will do, find an enlightened spiritual teacher. Not only find someone who is already enlightened, but now find someone willing to personally guide you and show you how to become enlightened. Let us thin...

As a thoughtful, spiritual person, perhaps a Buddhist, and/or meditator, your mind naturally turns toward more spiritual subjects. You probably have experienced having lunch with a friend talking about cars or other things but soon you have driven the conversation toward spirituality. It is without planning it that way because that is just how your mind operates; your conversation naturally migrates toward more inner interests. DGR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Als nachdenklicher, spiritueller Mensch (vielleicht bist Du Buddhist und/oder meditierst) wendet sich Dein Geist ganz natürlich mehr spirituellen Themen zu. Du hast wahrscheinlich schon erlebt, wie beim Mittagessen ein Freund über Autos oder andere Dinge spricht und Du die Unterhaltung sehr bald auf ein spirituelles Thema gelenkt hast. Ohne dass Du es so geplant hättest - Dein Geist funktioniert einfach auf diese Weise. Die Unterhaltung wandert ganz natürlich auf innerlichere Interessen zu. DGR

I don’t stand a chance against myself. When I take myself on as a competition I don’t lose! I have to fall into line because this part of me wouldn’t let me rest until I win! DGR

In an old Marx Brothers movie there is a scene where Groucho Marx is following someone so closely that he is almost touching their back in a lock step. This is a good analogy of how our enemy and we are in a kind of lock step of harming each other. We might feel that we are the victims now but eventually the aggressor will become the victim, and the victim will become the aggressor. While we are locked to others by hurting each other, what is our responsibility to this dynamic? Our responsibility is to stop and even remove ourselves from the situation, if it cannot be resolved. It is not so easy to make the enemy stop from their side, (the strategy thus far), but if we can take responsibility to stop, the enemy stops hurting them self as well. These ideas are very much alive in Tibetan Buddhism presented to us so that people stop grasping after their reaction, "I am a victim. This person hurt me," We need to get off the merry (not) go round to become more skillful, not only ...

Everyone who practices toward enlightenment has a responsibility in their daily life to share the story that there is more to life than just making money and gaining status. We share by displaying our values of peace, kindness, real compassion, and enthusiasm for selfless service. What spirituality means in your own life, whether you are a nurse, business owner, or teacher, is how you attract others toward reality by opening their curiosity toward spirituality without becoming a “sutra-thumper.” “Oh, Buddha said this, and we must obey the Buddha!” Not like that. People get annoyed. I would be annoyed if people told me what I must do just because the Buddha said so. I would feel like washing myself because they were trying to control me and make me mindlessly dogmatic. When you become skillful in telling the story, you could be turning others toward the Dharma without being pushy. This is a reflection of your inner skillful activity, which the Great Bodhisattvas have in abundance. Skil...

When we are young, we live with a great deal of uncertainty. We don’t know exactly how to stand elegantly or even where to hold our hands without feeling awkward. Gradually, we gain physical poise as well as mental confidence in who we are and what we can accomplish. Yet, there will always remains a huge amount of knowledge  beyond our present capacity to understand, even about the outer environment we inhabit.  There is also an inner environment that we inhabit, which is even more difficult to understand. There is an annoying “something” that we don’t exactly feel comfortable with, need to know, but we don’t want others to know that we still don’t fully know what we are doing. So, we develop a strategy of bravado, (not a good method, but a method),  to adapt to uncertain inner and outer circumstances. However, this might not be such a good strategy for the intense preparation for enlightenment as it is for everyday life. The beginners’ mind referred to in Buddhist Zen ...

You should have been enlightened already. You have had myriad experiences in the human realm that should have satisfied your every desire and curiosity. Over a very long time, you have taken rebirths here in this human realm without remembering that this world is not the final destiny of living beings. Part of the reason why we might have remained far too long, when we should have evolved beyond this perceptual realm, is that the door to higher development might have closed temporarily. This happens because of a solidification of perceptions causes a new attitude or feeling that we “figured out” life and stopped trying! A certainty of knowing what is going on is a powerful force; if we do not already have an antidote to solidification that we can rely upon, we literally close ourselves to growing up. Therefore, in each stage of the Buddhism Path to Perfection, we deliberately train our mind to remain flexible so that we can continue to evolve. Now, logic tells us this is a good idea...