All quotes from The 12th Tai Situpa's book
Loving-kindness
and compassion will allow our understanding and appreciation to be
progressively more successful. If we don't have loving-kindness and compassion,
our progress will stop.... We develop loving-kindness and compassion so that we
will proceed forward rather than go backward.
Karma
does not exist as an entity. Karma is a word that describes the relative causes
and conditions that create our lives.
If we
don't see that others have the same potential as we do, we easily develop false
pride in our small accomplishments.
Suffering
happily means realizing that the suffering is external and impermanent.
Knowing
and understanding truth and how to use it is intelligence.... Knowing and
understanding ultimate truth is wisdom.
Wanting
to be enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings is dualistic
thinking. We fool ourselves if we think
we are non-dual right now. We are
nondual for short periods of time at best.
No
matter what we do, learn, or think, we can only think from the level we are on.
Death
is relevant only to the body. The mind
does not die.
If at
the moment of death a person -- just an ordinary person -- has strong devotion,
compassion, and clarity, this state of mind will have great and positive
influence on his or her future rebirth.
Beings
at different levels of development have different perceptual capabilities.
When
each person incarnates, the lifetime is a manifestation of individual karma --
that is, causes and conditions -- created in past lifetimes. That is the cause of whatever situation a
person is experiencing now.
Because
we are ignorant of nonduality due to the power of "I", we become
dualistic.
Through
ignorance, we develop the impulse to do something, to act -- positive action,
negative action, or actions that are neutral, neither good or bad. As a result
of this impulse, the next causes and conditions are created.
The
physical body develops according to the capability of the formless mind:
according to its desire, its ignorance, its anger, its stinginess, and its
pride and jealousy.
Emptiness
is described as the basis that makes anything possible. Everything is a manifestation of
interdependence, and everything is emptiness.
There
is no independent existence. That is
emptiness. It may also be stated that
there is nothing that is not interrelated, therefore there is nothing that is
not emptiness.
If
your mind could enter another human being -- the person right next to you, for
instance-- and relate to the environment through that person, you would find
that the same environment of which you were previously aware becomes different,
according to the perceptions of the other person.
By
accident, we can have some kind of pure encounter with our real ultimate
potential, but that is not something we can keep up.
Instant
enlightenment happens after a lot of work.
When
the insubstantiality of a phenomenon like pain is recognized, it is possible to
go beyond it.
A
person is born at a particular moment, surrounded by particular influences,
because of his or her karmic causes and conditions. It is the field in which they must work in
that lifetime.
Likes
and dislikes develop from duality and turn into attachment and aggression,
desire and anger. That naturally gives
rise to jealousy and pride, hope and fear.
Until
enlightenment happens, everything is a process that leads toward it.
Practitioners
should not wait for conditions they do not have. You should use whatever conditions you have now.
