[…] mind and the arising of emotional reactions, and your susceptibility to them. When the mind is agitated—in other words, you can say it is fragmented—it has no power. So it is susceptible, or emotional reactions can arise easily in that, because there isn’t any attention operating. Attention is scattered and fragmented. So that’s why, […]

[…] the Buddhist point of view, gods are just other sentient beings. They have a bit better karma, so they have a nice heaven, they’ve got lots of power, etc. And some of them think they created the world; some of them think they are in charge of destroying the world; some think that they […]

[…] one with a hundred zeroes after it, we’re going to call that a google.” And then he came up with a googleplex, which was ten to the power of a google. That’s where the term google comes from. Randye: So what does it say about our civilization that we got rid of all those […]

[…] talk about this because unless this is something we can actually know through our own experience, its just words, it’s just speculative philosophy. It doesn’t have any power. So I want you to take any situation. Take a challenging one, or a difficult one. Right now. And open to the experience of it. So […]

[…] actually approached life was focused on well-being and feeling well emotionally and physically, rather than on just enjoying things? This would be a different economic system. The powerful forces arrayed against waking up Ken: Then there are five further factors, and it’s our luck whether they happen. These you’ll find on the top of […]

[…] where many, many people are completely caught up in defining themselves in terms of their material existence, in terms of their status, in terms of their wealth, power, so forth, so forth, and never, or if ever, give any thought to spiritual understanding or spiritual possibilities. I remember one person—this is back in the […]

[…] on. And there’s no peace. It generates suffering for countless people. It doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run. It just reshuffles things. Different people are in power, other people fall out of power, and then other people come back into power. It just goes on and on, and it doesn’t matter how many […]

[…] picture. And the other thing about despising is that it allows the illusion of separation, which isn’t present either. We may feel that we don’t have any power over what happens, and individually each of us has only a little bit, a thimbleful, or something like that. But those thimblefuls add up, a lot. […]

[…] eat. You notice it’s raining, but you’re not concerned. You know you can handle that. You feel strong. Your body feels good. You feel a sense of power moving through your body. You get in your car. You notice there’s maybe an accident on the road. And you think, “Well, those people probably weren’t […]

[…] place in the monastery and journey to meet another teacher, a person called Milarepa, who was a mountain yogin, who lived in the mountains of Tibet. So powerful was his practice that he just wore a cotton sheet in, you know, these very cold, snowy regions. And Gampopa became his principle disciple. The reason […]

[…] convinced that he was a demon. Centuries passed. The first tribe which had learned about fire reserved the secrets for their priests, who remained in affluence and power while the people froze. The second tribe forgot the art and worshipped instead the instruments. The third worshipped a likeness of Nour himself, because it was […]

[…] of the Tibetan tradition, to paraphrase something Stephen Batchelor said, “In its institutional forms, Buddhism provides very powerful answers to questions of the spirit. But sometimes the power of those answers overwhelms the stammering voice that asks the questions.” What I find when I am reading this and many other Tibetan texts is that, […]