Колко е успокоително, когато сме отговорни за собствените си промени – когато те са доброволно извършени! До това време често промяната идва като изненада, и това става когато сме истински предизвикани. Някои хора не се впечатляват много и се радват на хаоса от несигурността, други се страхуват от неизвестното.
Ако ние можем да приемем, че всяка молекула в човешкото тяло се възобновява на всеки седем години, защо тогава имаме трудност да разпознаем това, че някои вярвания и пътища също се нуждаят от смята поне на всеки седем години?
Нашите фотоалбуми показват как бързо се променят физическите ни тела. Умствените промени стават по-бавно и е трудно да бъдат идентифицирани.
Така че помисли и отмени някои свои “Аз мисля че”.
Да се съпротивляваш на промяната не предвещава добро в един свят, който непрекъснато се променя. Добре е да се запитаме, какво толкова страшно намираме в промяната и да използваме промяната като възможност за израстване.

Approximately one-third of our lives are spent while asleep. Consider
that for a person who lives for sixty years, twenty years of that
lifetime are passed unconsciously. Moreover, it is no mistake that
enlightenment and other exalted states of consciousness are described as one who has overcome the sleep of ignorance.
Tibetan Buddhism has long acknowledged that the night, like any other time, is important for practice. The state of sleep and dream is
considered a bardo or intermediate state in some Buddhist systems and is a very good training ground for those who would approach the bardo at the end of their life with confidence. Similar to the bardo of the afterlife, the dream period is a looser, less concrete extrapolation of our waking reality, with greater possibilities of all kinds. On the one hand, it is very easy to resemble an animal or a corpse when asleep - this is
essentially our condition when we remain devoid of clear awareness and
passively experience all kinds of karmic dreams. On the other hand, as
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has explained, the dream state can also serve as a marvelous opportunity to accomplish the goals of our practice which
would ordinarily seem beyond our capabilities.
As Rinpoche elucidated during the Dream Yoga workshop, each of our dreams is said to be connected with one of the disturbing emotions (hatred, attachment, delusion,jealously, pride, or, in some cases, a combination) and originates from a corresponding energy center in our body. A dream manifests when the mind travels to one of these cakras during sleep and activates a karmic latency. (e.g. sexual center corresponds with desire, heart center with jealousy/emotional relations with others, etc.)
Rinpoche discussed two general methods for working with karmic dreams,both of which require the practitioner to become lucid in the dream (to understand that the dream is a dream). While this is obviously difficult,there are things to do during the day and surrounding the periods of sleep that are designed to facilitate lucid dreaming. These involve practices such as reminding one self many times during the day that this is a dream, setting a firm intention to become lucid just before
sleeping, and invoking the lama, yidam, and dakini for help. One should
also not become discouraged if one finds in the morning that not much
happened; instead, one should resolve to continue the training. There is
also a visualization of seed syllables, which correspond to the cakras,
that one endeavors to do at certain points during the night; one's
sleeping posture is also important to the practice.
Once one is lucid within the dream, the two methods involve either
remaining in the presence of awareness, thus leaving things 'as they are'
to 'self-liberate' (a Dzogchen approach), or else one recognizes the
dream and, realizing one's power to control the manifestations, one
begins transforming things (a tantric approach). In the second
method, which is easier for a beginner, one can perform all kinds of
unusual activities, such as multiply objects or one's own form, fly, or
communicate with our teachers or individuals from the past.
Either of these methods can help us to see our waking life in a less
concretized fashion, thereby overcoming fears while generating insight
into what in Dzogchen is called energy and manifestation. On a more
conventional level, it is also possible to purify karmic potentialities
in the dream state before they fully manifest. One can also develop and
increase 'dreams of clarity' which help us (and others) on the path to
enlightenment. As Rinpoche emphasized, enlightenment is the true purpose for working with dreams or any other practice in Buddhism.

These rules, I have been told, are handed down from ancient Sanskrit.

#1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

#2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

#3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works".

#4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. Then you can go on to the next lesson.

#5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

#6. "There" is no better than "here". When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that again, looks better than "here".

#7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

#8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
=
#9. The answers lie inside you. The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.



FIVE Simple Rules to be Happy

Free your heart from hatred.
Free your mind from worries.
Live simply.
Give more than expected.
Expect less.


I send you love

TIBETAN LAMA SPEAKS OF MORTALITY

The Boston Globe
September 21, 1993, Tuesday, City Edition
By James L. Franklin, Globe Staff

Everybody is worried about dying, the Tibetan teacher Sogyal
Rinpoche said. "But to die is extremely simple. You breathe out,
and you don't breathe in."

A ripple of laughter passed through the 400 people crowded
into a conference room recently at Interface in Cambridge, a
center for alternative religious, health and psychological
programs.

They'd come to see a lama, a Tibetan monk, who is noted for
his ability to speak to Westerners and who, in a little less
than a year, has sold nearly 100,000 copies of a book of Buddhist
teachings, "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying."

Rinpoche - a religious title meaning "precious one" - left his
homeland as a child in 1959, studied in Catholic schools in India
and in Britain at Trinity College, Cambridge, and set out to
bring the ancient tradition of Tibet to bear on the anxieties
of men and women in Europe and North America.

"I'm not a very good lama," he insisted to an interviewer. He
speaks often of his own teachers, his "masters," some of whom he
served as translator when they came to the West.

The book is the result of doing what his teachers told him, to
pass on the ancient teaching to a new world, as "a service to
humanity." That includes, he says, teaching Westerners
"discernment": which Buddhist teachings to use and which to
ignore, how to find a teacher and persevere on the path to
enlightenment.

And he is succeeding in drawing new students to Buddhism, said
Steve Zimmerman of Watertown, who leads classes at Rinpoche's
local Rigpa center there. "Because he was raised largely in the
West, he has much greater understanding of Westerners."

David F. Gibbs, 45, a social worker at the Merrimack Valley
Hospice in Lowell, said he once found Tibetan Buddhism "too
ritualistic and elaborate, beyond my cultural experience."

Now he finds Rinpoche's teaching has helped him "develop more
compassion and understanding," in seeing how the people who come
to the hospice "are distinct from their behavior, how they are
more than what they are thinking or feeling or doing."

For part of the 10 years he spent preparing the book, Rinpoche
worked in the hospice movement in Britain, helping those who face
imminent death as a result of cancer, AIDS or other serious
illnesses. He came to believe that much of what is wrong in
Western society arises from the denial of death.

"I feel this denial of death actually complicates problems
that exist in Western society," Rinpoche said in the interview.
"It is why there is no long-term vision, not very much thought for
the consequences of actions, little or no compassion."

"People see death as terrible, as tragic. Because they want to
live, they see death as the enemy of life and therefore deny
death, which then becomes even more fearful and monstrous."

Beneath this fear of death lies "the ultimate fear . . . the
fear of looking into ourselves," he said.

But death can be a friend, he told the crowd at Interface.
"Death holds the key to the meaning of life," which is why
Trappist brothers regularly greet each other with the Latin
phrase memento mori, "remember you are dying," Rinpoche said.

"Remembering . . . brings life into focus . . . It sorts out
your priorities, so you do not live a trivial life . . . It helps
you take care of the most important things in life first. Don't
worry about dying; that will happen successfully whether you
worry about it or not."

He warns his students not to think about death "when you are
depressed," but rather "when you are on holiday or impressed by
music or natural beauty."
But he knows that "when I am not practicing," or meditating in
a disciplined way, "I am afraid of death." He has worried, too,
about the death of the lamas with whom he left Tibet. "A whole
generation of legendary masters is passing away - sometimes I
wonder what the future is going to hold," he said.

Rinpoche is hopeful when he remembers living teachers, such as
the Dalai Lama, who wrote the foreword to his book. But he knows
that the possible loss of Tibet is another experience of
impermanence, of death, like that all human beings must face.

His goal is to help the dying, those who care for them, and
all who listen, to "face our own mortality and realize how much
love, how much compassion is in you," he told an interviewer.

"This dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this,
compassion is the only way. Love is the only way."