Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

A fried egg is to butter as anger is to irritation The great dharma advice found in the seven point mind training suggests that we apply to our meditation whatever we might happen to meet. The problem is that wherever we go, whatever we are doing has already become the source of our confusion, to which self-cherishing has added the final drop of alcohol, making us crazy enough to do wrong things willingly. Turning this around, our own confusion is used as rich examples to direct our meditation toward understanding impermanence, suffering, karma and more. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~~ "Die großen Dharmaratschläge, die man in der Geistesschulung in Sieben Punkten findet, besagen, dass wir unsere Meditiation zur Anwendung bringen, egal was passiert. Das Problem ist, dass egal wo wir sind und was wir tun dies bereits die Quelle unserer Verwirrung darstellt, zu der die Egozentrik den letzten Tropfen Alkohol hinzugefügt hat, was uns verrückt genug macht, aus freien Stücken ...

Visualize a perfect world, then make it real! Never abandon your responsibility of correct self-cherishing in a dangerous situation. For example: if someone is trying to kill you, imagine the harm that you have brought to that person in the past to bring them to the point where they need to kill you to resolve some old energetic equation. When it is serious trouble, you need to ... have a dual function of being sorry while running away as fast as you can. You do not want it to happen, and have an obligation to prevent them from doing that, because a great deal of karmic damage to them would go into the act of actually killing you. Since, out of compassion, you do not want anyone to experience that karmic result, at any cost you should try to keep that from happening! If someone is out of control, you should definitely take steps so that they do not bring to fruition the harm they would like to inflict. Do not let them hurt you! If you let them hurt you, this hurts ...

If you only have enough time and energy to fix one problem, use that energy to work on reducing your self-cherishing. If you have time, energy and opportunity to do many, many things, then do them, but also work on self-cherishing. However, most people only work on the other things, and they do not work on their self-cherishing. So , what do they bring to their altruistic activities in well meaning organizations? Self-cherishing. And what is the success rate? Very low. The reason why the ills of the world have not been corrected is that the problem is not the ills, the problem is individual self-cherishing, combined with a lack of kindness toward others. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~ ""Wenn Du genug Zeit und Energie hast, um ein einziges Problem zu lösen, dann nutze diese Energie, um an der Reduzierung Deiner Egozentrik zu arbeiten. Wenn Du Zeit, Energie und die Möglichkeit hast an vielen, vielen Dingen zu arbeiten, dann tu das, aber arbeite auch an der Eg...

So many complaints flying around about the environment, political leaders, poverty, and more, but it is almost always done from an aggressive self-righteous position. “I’m right and you’re so bad! Those people or that political party, grrrrr…..” It would be more skillful of us to react to disturbing news by thinking, ‘Oh, how terrible! Look how they are suffering and causing suffering to others. I must get rid of my self-absorption. I must eliminate my self-cherishing!’ The longer we act as a symbiotic host for self-cherishing, that will be how long suffering will be alive in the world. All of the suffering we see should be a tremendous embarrassment to ourselves, who are acting as the host for self-cherishing. That is how we do it with dharma! We blame our self-cherishing, and not ourselves. Then we have mind training. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~ "Es liegen so viele Beschwerden über die Umwelt, über Politiker, Armut und anderes in der Luft...

Our precious mother is out there running amok in the world, a danger to others, using guns and weapons of destruction, or to a lesser degree, practicing harmful speech and an inability to care for others properly. All of our precious mothers from so many, many previous lives, are living without us now, doing who knows what? While each one was our precious mother in some previous time, when we had an intimate connection, what did we do to them? Our own self-cherishing instigated their aggression! They hurt us, we hurt them back, but they also developed even worse habits of negative karma, and became more distorted. Not seeing clearly, misinterpreting events and the actions of others, they continue to suffer. They are also causing others to suffer by the change we brought about in them during our personal relationship. Unhappiness, poverty, aggression, and even war: all of these can be placed directly upon our own self-cherishing. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~~ "Unsere kostbare Mutter lä...

We are plagued by problems because our self-absorption is like an oily friend, seeming to care for us, but instead causes harm. Our false friend also prevents us from trying too hard to stop our suffering by only finding the easiest way out of feeling bad, such as thinking, ‘I don’t care.’ This strategy is a kind of lack of suffering, but a poor one since it doesn’t address any of the problems causing suffering. However, if we think about it carefully and unemotionally, self-cherishing is actually a distortion of correct self-preservation. ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~ "Wir werden von Problemen gequält weil unsere Selbstversunkenheit wie ein aalglatter Freund ist, der sich anscheinend um uns sorgt, aber uns stattdessen schadet. Unser falscher Freund hindert uns auch daran, uns mehr Mühe zu geben unser Leid zu beenden, indem wir nur die einfachste Lösung suchen, um uns nicht mehr schlecht zu fühlen, wie z. B. zu denken 'Das macht mir nichts ...

The placement of understanding self-cherishing, along with meditation of great kindness toward all is unique to Tibetan mind training practices. Although you may have studied, discussed and meditated upon compassion from many different viewpoints, the juncture of self-cherishing and meditating with great kindness perh aps has not been touched yet. Done correctly, these two practices are mutually supportive, with the added benefit of realizing that your self-cherishing is no longer your own business. You are not the sole experiencer of your self-cherishing; all sentient beings suffer because of your own self-cherishing! By utilizing love and concern for others, we will soon reach the conclusion that self-cherishing is not an option. At a certain stage, some meditators will get a “a creepy feeling” to be harboring something so harmful inside their own mind that it is like sleeping with snakes! Later, we will discover that much of the suffering we experience ourselves...

Renounce the underpinnings of suffering (self-cherishing, grasping and expectations) and your suffering will disappear. Suffering cannot arise after these obstacles are gone. Therefore, there is a direct link between self cherishing, grasping, expectation, and seemingly unrelated suffering. The suffering is smoke and mirrors of the actual problem. Domo Geshe Rinpoche Entsage den Dingen, die das Leiden unterstützen (Egozentrik, Anhaftung und Erwartungen) und Dein Leiden wird verschwinden. Wenn diese Hindernisse nicht mehr da sind, kann kein Leiden mehr entstehen. Deshalb gibt es eine direkte Verbindung zwischen Egozentrik, Anhaftung und Erwartung und dem scheinbar in keinem Zusammenhang stehenden Leiden. Das Leiden ist wie Schall und Rauch des eigentlichen Problems." DGR"

Opening the self-cherishing heart, giving love based upon a desire to own someone, is one form that natural selfishness is displayed in a desire realm such as the human realm. On the other hand, displaying true appreciation toward others is powerfully transformative in the very place we need to learn and establish a lovely dissimilarity between others and ourselves. It is possible to have a good and loving relationship with a special individual other, but it will be at the expense of an unusual feeling. For generally selfish or self-centered people, this feeling will be perceived as feeling vulnerable, so controlling others as possessions feels safer to them. Mahayana Buddhists cultivate a healthier view, seeing all others as dear, because at the level of our being needing healing and learning in order to become transformed, we must have a genuine desire to get along with others. Because it is not based on buying and selling of our self-love, it does not require others to be nice peopl...

"The great opportunity to learn in this wonderful, simple world that we live in has become contaminated in many different ways regarding relationships. There are so many who feel they have been hurt by others. Perhaps even you have given your love, and now lost confidence in yourself, even your own ability to love yourself. Now you have to watch yourself because you made a mistake. This love, which was shared so specially as an extension of your own self love, given in order to have it returned in an amplified form, was used to hurt. Well, watch out everybody because now someone has been hurt, true?! This is very sad. I do not think that Tibetan lamas teaching about the destruction of self cherishing really understand how this dynamic works in western society, or how people can be so generous, open and so loving and then turn around and flip into mean-spirited people. This is not in our system in Tibet! I cannot say that everything Tibetan is holy, careful and wonderful, but in th...

"The basis of Mahayana altruism is that suffering exists. We are feeling suffering, and all living beings are feeling suffering as well because the object of their attention is also themselves. The developed stage of this unnecessary attention is called self-cherishing. Not only do living beings stare at themselves, but they also take themselves as the inner object of their attention making their own needs vastly more important than the extreme needs of others. This self-cherishing causes them to take all kinds of wrong actions, for example, craving to feel happy and inflicting various degrees of harm on others so that others do not get in the way of acquiring that happiness" ~Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~ "Die Basis der Mahayana Nächstenliebe ist, dass das Leiden besteht. Wir fühlen das Leiden, und alle Wesen fühlen das Leiden ebenso, weil der Gegenstand ihrer Aufmerksamkeit auch selbst ist. Die entwickelte Bühne dieser unnötigen Aufmerksamkeit wird genannt selbstschätzend...

Traditional Buddhism creates a powerful antidote to help you discover how you are actually alive. The basis for the Mahayana, the path of altruistic compassion teaches that human life needs to have another object other than yourself. By contrast, the suffering ordinary life with the innate base illogical view, is very much dependent upon looking at yourself! The antidote is the Mahayana view of giving you a change of perceptions to cultivate while encouraging you toward the spontaneous accomplishment of beneficial intention. Perhaps you have read about the bodhisattvas, compassion and heroes, but it will still not touch you until you understand that you are not alive in the way you think you are. Many work hard at being a bodhisattva when it is the actual being's transformation and energetic healing into another form in its evolutionary journey that they need to facilitate instead. The Mahayana or Greater Vehicle asks us to consider caring for all sentient beings as a valid al...

Using practical efforts to help others transform to the enlightened state, Buddhism sometimes changes into a system that attempts to erode the superstructure of the ego. This does not work as well as it should because the punishment of the ego will usually cause it to submerge, change or to adapt to the harsh methods to destroy it. You actually cannot crush the ego. The mind is very tricky and changeable, and so it remains, in spite of efforts to destroy it. However, it can very easily morph into a disgusting display of impoverished self-degradation that is totally fake. It is scary to watch a person attempt to control their ego by hiding self-cherishing in humility. They can even be hiding it from themselves. The ego is suffering and needs to be separated from the overactive, over stimulated, and unaligned energetic state of confusion. The self-cherishing that is a feature of unenlightened existence as well as inappropriate pride need to be destroyed in order to be rescued fro...

Your self-image has been massaged through self-cherishing, and this has caused you to become confused as to how you actually exist. It is based upon false values because, for example, you could be shaken in your body/mind conditioning by simply choosing the wrong garment from your closet and feel awful the whole day! This seem to happen more in women, but I am sure there are many men who are like that too, " Oh, this tie just makes me look fat! " Most feelings of self-consciousness or shyness are related to self-cherishing even though it might appear to be a lack of self-cherishing by the appearance of a kind of false humility. This is not a genuine humility based in equanimity but actually enhances and encourages destructive behavior with little hope of resolving the dilemma by a false dynamic. This is because it mimics spirituality or holiness and is a trick of the self-cherishing mind to avoid losing its power. Whether we arrive from false humility or false sense of o...