To help us understand that we are not what we are thinking, Buddhist teachings make a distinction between what is called Big Mind, or Natural Mind, and "small mind," or ordinary, deluded mind. Small mind, or deluded mind, is the buzzing, unpredictable, frequently out-of-control ordinary mind.
This is our finite mind, our limited conceptual mind; our ordinary, rational, discursive, thinking mind. The deluded mind has so many impulses and needs; it wants so many things. It's frequently confused; it's subject to mood swings; it's restless. It gets angry; it gets depressed; it becomes hyper.
Some ancient traditional texts refer to this small mind as "monkey mind," where it is pictured as an untamed mustang or an adorable but chaotic little monkey jumping from tree to tree, looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places.
What is meant by Big Mind is the essential nature of mind itself. This is what we call Buddha-nature, or natural mind. This is our true nature - the pure boundless awareness that is at the heart, and part, of us all. The Buddha described it as still, clear, lucid, empty, profound, simple (uncomplicated), and at peace.
It's not really what we usually think of as our mind at all. It is the luminous, most fundamental clear light nature of our ground of being. This is Rigpa, the heart of enlightenment. This is our share of nirvana here on earth.
Dzogchen teaches that all we have to do to become enlightened is to recognize and rest in this natural state of mind. In Zen they call this original mind. This is raw, naked awareness, not something we've learned or fabricated.
This is the Buddha within - the perfect presence that we can all rely on. Waking up to this natural mind, this Buddha-nature, is what meditation is all about.
- Awakening The Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das
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With love and compassion,
External circumstances are not what draw us into suffering. Suffering is caused and permitted by an untamed mind. The appearance of self-defeating emotions in our minds leads us into faulty actions. The naturally pure mind is covered by these emotions and troubling conceptions.
The force of their deceit pushes us into faulty actions, which leads inevitably to suffering. We need, with great awareness and care, to extinguish these problematic attitudes, the way gathering clouds dissolve back into the sphere of the sky. When our self-defeating attitudes, emotions, and conceptions cease, so will the harmful actions arising from them.
As the great late-eleventh- and early-twelfth-century Tibetan yogi Milarepa says, "When arising, arising within space itself; when dissolving, dissolving back into space." We need to become familiar with the state of our own minds to understand how to dissolve ill-founded ideas and impulses back into the deeper sphere of reality.
The sky was there before the clouds gathered, and it will be after they have gone. It is also present when the clouds seem to cover every inch of the sky we can see.
The nature of water is not polluted by filth, no matter how dirty. In the same way, the nature of even a troubled mind is not polluted by defilements. The mind of clear light of any being is not polluted even by afflictive emotions like hatred.
The next time you feel hatred, see if you can split off from the main run of your mind an observer that watches the hatred. Whereas we usually feel, "I hate...," as if our sense of self and hatred are totally bound up with each other, here you are watching hatred from a slight distance, seeing its faults, which itself naturally causes this excited state to settle down.
To do this, you need first to develop an ability to watch your thoughts, since as long as all of your consciousness is steeped in conceptuality, it is difficult for thought to observe thought. But if, when thoughts arise, you are able to split off an observer that watches them, then gradually you will develop a faculty of consciousness observing consciousness, and even at moments of hatred a factor from within that mind will be able to step outside the anger.
By becoming familiar with consciousness as both knower and object known, you can come to recognize what is called "ordinary mind," unaffected by liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting. When the mind is not fractured into many different functions, its natural state of luminosity and knowing can be recognized, and if you stay with this, the experience of luminosity and knowing will increase. Since the inner nature even of hatred is luminous and knowing, hatred will gradually melt into the nature of consciousness.
You do not have to intentionally stop the various thoughts and feelings that dawn in the mind; rather, do not get caught up in them, do not let your mind be drawn into them. The mind will then take on its own natural form, and its clear light nature can be identified. Then its basic purity can be known.
When you understand that clear light is the nature of your inner mind, greater and greater qualities such as love unfold. This is why mental transformation cannot be the result of making changes to your external environment. Acquiring more things once you have what is necessary cannot lead to contentment.
Liberation is attained by knowing the final nature of the mind itself; it is now bestowed on us by someone or something else. Happiness comes through taming the mind; without taming the mind there is no way to be happy. Regardless of the nature of the world, we will not suffer affliction or cause suffering when we trust in the mind's fundamental nature of luminosity, it's clear light.
- How to Expand Love by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
To alert you that you have allowed yourself to be taken over by psychological time, you can use a simple criterion. Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn't, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. "How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love - even the most simple action.
- The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
Is this a valid reason, or an excuse not to proceed? If you wish to elevate your life, it really doesn't matter how long it takes, does it? And this is particularly true when you're conscious that you live your life, every single bit of it, in the present moment and only in the present moment. All you ever get is now. Every thought occurs in the present moment, and every change has a defining moment. Often it takes something or someone outside of you to help you realize that.
An entertaining psychiatrist named Dr. Murray Banks does just that with the following little exchange between himself and a woman who has decided not to return to school because she'd be too old when she finished.
"
How old would you be in five years if you got that degree by starting now?" he asks her.
"
Forty-nine," she replies.
"
And how old will you be in five years if you don't go back to school?"
"
Forty-nine," she answers, seemingly confused... but with the look of one who's become conscious of the excuses she created for not elevating her life.
However long it took you to create any self-defeating habit, you did it all one day, one moment at a time. There's absolutely no proof that anything will take a long time, since even the idea of "a long time" is an illusion - there is only now. Make this awareness a part of your consciousness.
The Tao Te Ching reinforces this in perhaps the most famous line in that masterful work: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Elevate or move on in your life, not by thinking big and in long time periods, but with consciousness focused on the present moment.
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Excuses Begone!: How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits
by
Dr. Wayne W. DyerRecommended Reading:
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
Get honest with yourself about wanting to win the favor of others. You don't have to prove anything or anyone, and you'll never succeed by droning on and on. Remember that "those who talk do not know," or as one translation of this
verse simply states, "Shut your mouth."
Silence is your evidence of inner knowing. Talking to convince others actually says more about your need to be right than their need to hear what you have to say! So rather than trying to persuade others, keep quiet... just enjoy that deeply satisfying inner awareness.
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Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
by
Dr. Wayne W. DyerRecommended Reading:
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
In
54th verse of the Tao Te Ching, you're invited to see your role in the transformation of the planet. Instead of perceiving yourself as one insignificant individual among billions of people, you're urged to see yourself as the Tao itself. "We Are the World" is everybody's theme song. You do make a difference!
When you live with the joyful awareness that you potentially have an infinite effect on the universe, you'll radiate Tao consciousness. You'll be like a wave of energy that illuminates a room - everyone will see the light and become affected. Those who were aware - but not living as if their lives mattered - will be attracted and begin changing. So recognize and live your life as part of the Great Way, and help bring balance into the world.
In the
54th verse, Lao-tzu is advising you to see your divinity and revel in your magnificence. Know that in the silent space within you, where the Tao animates every breath and thought, your life makes a difference.
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Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao by
Dr. Wayne W. DyerRecommended Reading:
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
Although intrinsic basic goodness is within all of us, we still come face to face with tremendous challenges known as habitual patterns. Our enthusiasm and awareness may be challenged by emotional afflictions such as ignorance, desire, hatred, jealousy, or anger.
More often than not, we succumb to these distractions. Most of us are so preoccupied with our habitual patterns that we've lost the simplicity of absolute truth, which is no longer reflected in the actions of our body, speech, and mind. Failing to maintain our awareness of fundamental truth we come to depend on the falsity of appearances, or false views. We then base all our judgments on what is apparent rather than true.
If anger arises, for example, rather than looking into the depth of another person's heart, we judge the sounds and actions we perceive - which gives rise to endless elaborations. We are then unable to realize our genuine nature. We could say that, ultimately, enlightenment is the exhaustion of all such concepts.
Habitual patterns provide us with a ground of familiarity. It's the familiar way we've lived this life and innumerable other lives; the familiar way we solidify every feeling, perception, thought, and action. It's the familiar way we make things real - elaborating, judging, and expanding - and then cater to that reality and try to survive in it.
We may not like our anger, for example, but if anger is our habitual ground it's more familiar than tolerance. And in spite of our aspirations, we're unable to let go of anger and turn to tolerance. We are constantly faced with the challenge of breaking through what have become very set patterns of thinking, speaking, and living.
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This Precious Life: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on the Path to Enlightenment
by
Khandro Rinpoche Recommended Reading:
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
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If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
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With love and compassion,
By knowing yourself as awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self-seeking in situations, places, and conditions.
In other words: what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form - no more and no less.
-
Stillness Speaks
by
Eckhart TolleRecommended Reading:
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You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
Life is glorious; life is beautiful, if you will only find God beneath the debris of matter. You must not be hypnotized by this changing picture of life and death, but behold immortality. It is the most joyous thing that you can experience. God is hidden behind the moon and the sun and the stars. Your very conscience is the voice of God. And there is no other way to uncover God except by real devotion and meditation.
Every day, resurrect yourself in meditation. Compare your state before and after meditation. Meditate deeply if you would know God. Let your evil habits, indifference, and restlessness die daily.
Resurrection means relaxation, to relax awareness from your body and mind in meditation. Then you become free: your soul knows that you can live without the body though still living in the body; it is separate.
Human life may be beautiful, but it is like a bird's life in a cage. You open the cage door, but the bird does not way to fly away. It is afraid - and we, also, in meditation, say, "Will I slip into the Infinite and never come back?" We are afraid of the vast sky. We have lived identified too long with the body, and are afraid of our own infinite omnipresence, afraid to resurrect our omnipotence, our omniscience.
You do not know what joy lies beyond the screen of the subsconscious mind. If you do away with the restlessness and sensations of the body, sit quietly, and say: "In the Heaven of Silence, O God, be born within me," then on the alter of silence He will come. The joy of God is indescribable - joy that no changing dream of life and death can ever take away from you.
-
Karma and Reincarnation: The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 2 (v. 2)
by
Paramhansa Yogananda Recommended Reading:
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
Who would not like to reprieve from the consequences of his own wrong doings? Few people, however, are willing to do what is necessary to win such a reprieve. For it is not pleading that can free us from the grinding wheel of justice. Cosmic Law is mathematical in its precision. The way to escape its decrees is to live in divine consciousness. Freedom comes not by uttering wheedling prayers, but by attuning oneself deeply with the all-loving Inner Silence.
No matter how busy we are with our work or with worldly affairs, we should strive in the inner silence to attune ourselves with God. By silent devotion we can deepen our awareness of divine love and wisdom. The Divine is above the law. In everything we do, we should feel God's all-creative Intelligence working through us. The closer we live to God, the less His law will be able to affect us.
The greatest "business" of all is to busy ourselves with God. The greatest duty of all is to place Him first in our lives. No business and no earthly duty would be possible without the intelligence man derives from Him.
Make it a point always to keep
your most important of all engagements: your daily appointment wiht the Lord.
Twice daily, enter the inner silence. Worship God on the alter of the dawn. At the day's end, sit quietly in the temple of the night; let darkness conceal you from the distractions of the day.
Contemplate the monotonous recurrence of death and rebirth. While still in this body, work to destroy the seeds of your past karmas (actions). Remember, roasted seeds will not germinate. People who in deep meditation roast their karmic seeds in the fires of wisdom will never again need to reincarnate on earth.
-
Karma and Reincarnation: The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 2 (v. 2)
by
Paramhansa Yogananda
If I had to think of an easy way to help you get started and learn EXACTLY how to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most problems… I would tell you to go check out my eBook “Feng Shui Secrets: What Everyone Should Know About How To Be Successful With Feng Shui.”
You can easily learn how your home may be causing these problems and how to correct them with no interior design or expensive decorating required.
You can go here for all the details: Feng Shui Secrets
If you're really serious about overcoming certain obstacles in your life, here is your chance to
work with me one-on-one to transform the areas of your life that are causing you the most challenges.
With love and compassion,
