The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by s.Gam.po.pa and Herbert V Guenther

In the light of death, we are brought before ourselves and our real possibilities are revealed so that we can choose which path to follow: that of frustration or that of fulfillment and liberation.

The Sangha are the eight foremost Bodhisattvas: Manjusri, Vajrapani, Avalokitesvara, Ksitigarbha, Nivaranaviskambhin, Gaganagarbha, Maitreya, and Samantabhadra.

Standing in the boat of the human body, You should cross the great flood of misery.  Since later this boat is difficult to get, Do not sleep now, you fool.

What is Karma? It is motivation and motivatedness.

The essence of the formation of an enlightened attitude is the desire for perfect enlightenment in order to be able to work for the benefit of others.

Pleasure and pain, simple and extreme, are experiences of mind.

Relative mind is our day-to-day mind of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.  We could also call it our moment-to-moment mind, because it moves and changes at such high speed -- now seeing, now hearing, now thinking, now feeling, and so on.  Actually, it's three minds rolled into one: perceptual mind, conceptual mind, and emotional mind.  Together, these three layers or aspects of relative mind account for all of our conscious mental activity.

If there is a table in front of us, by the time we notice it, what we're seeing is just our thought, "Oh, it's a table".  We aren't seeing the actual table anymore; we're seeing the label table, which is an abstraction.  An abstraction is both a mental construct -- an idea we form quickly based on a perception -- and a generalization that's one step removed from our direct experience. … We continually produce one label after another, unaware of how far removed we are from our own experience, and this is what we call conceptual mind.  Our concepts then become triggers for the third level of mind, which is emotional mind.  We react to these labels and get caught up in our habitual feelings of like an dislike, jealousy, anger, and so on.  We end up living in a world that's made up almost entirely of concepts and emotions.

By meditating we see reality in its true nature and compassion for sentient beings is born.

Buddhism does not recognize the assumption that there is something unknowable.  Knowledge, though not knowledge of something, is at the core of human nature.  Only as long as we have not penetrated to this core we speak of knower and knowable and erroneously believe that the two will never meet.

Mind is not an entity, at best it is a symbol pointing to something ineffable.

The activity is working for the benefit of others without preconceived ideas.

Stolen Sisters: The Story of Two Missing Girls, Their Families, and How Canada Has Failed Indigenous Women by Emmanuelle Walter

It was through the residential schools – centres for abuse, family destruction and alienation from cultural identity --- the violence took root in Indigenous communities.  The “residential school syndrome” – difficulty loving oneself or loving or caring for others --- a transmitter from one generation to the next. 

Over the course of more than a hundred years, 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their families by law enforcement officers and placed in residential schools designed with the express purpose of “taking the Indian out of the child”, places where hunger and abuse were commonplace.  Another practice followed on its heels: that of deliberately placing children in white families at great distances from their communities; this was the “Sixties Scoop”, which affected 200,000 children, a period that lasted form the 1960s to the 1980s.  Today 30-40% of all children placed in care are Indigenous, although they account for only 5% of all Canadian children.

80% of MMIW, as identified by researcher Maryanne Pearce, were not involved in sex work.

At least 4,134 children died in residential schools from untreated illnesses, abuse, suicide, accidents during attempts to flee, even from starvation.

The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck by Sarah Knight

Instead of feeling guilty, obligated, and anxious, would you rather feel empowered, benevolent, and carefree? 

Not giving a fuck does not mean being an asshole.

Once you feel guilty, you have already failed at not giving a fuck.

Not hurting people’s feelings and not getting caught in a lie is the purest form of Not Sorry.  You have nothing to agonize over or apologize for.

The life-changing magic of not giving a fuck is all about prioritizing.  Joy over annoy. Choice over obligation.  Openness vs feelings.  Sticking to a budget.  Eyes on the prize.

Cry of the Eagle: Encounters With a Cree Healer by Russell Willier, David Young, Grant Ingram, Lise Swartz

People are the victims of fate only they do not understand how to react to the "pattern" in the things happening around them.

The ability to understand what is happening and to act in a way that changes the future course of events entails power. 

Nobody has the right to challenge the authenticity of another's spiritual experiences.

Taking another world-view seriously means that we do not regard it as consisting merely of interesting beliefs.

"The Great Spirit has helpers like Fire, Thunder, Wind, and Water.  They are the elements -- the Grandfathers". Russell Willier

"If you use a plant and ask that plant spirit to get help from the Great Spirit, the power will come through". Russell Willier

Because of their wrongdoing, people are less worthy than a blade of grass to talk to the Great Spirit directly.

Every living creature is a tangible expression of the spirit for that species.

Fasting and prayer may be required for deep communication with the spirit world, but even simple purification rites such as burning sweetgrass or a fungus from the diamond willow will allow one to perceive the presence of spirits.

Burning incense is like opening a curtain.  When the curtain has been pulled back one can see and communicate directly with the spirits.

Spirits can assist the shaman not only in foretelling but in changing the future.

It is dangerous to take part in ceremonies conducted by incompetent people, but it is even more dangerous not to do the ceremonies at all.

"All the plants and trees and animals have got something that they can give to help cure different sicknesses." Russell Willier

That night he dreamed about the incident.  In his vision a little man about four feet tall came to him.  He was the spirit of the herb Russell had been looking for.

The animal spirits reside in their namesakes.  Thus, the Buffalo Spirit dwells in every buffalo.

When the spirits arrive it feels as if your stomach suddenly leaves you.

What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

It is a series that continues unbroken, but changes every moment.  The series is, really speaking, nothing but movement.  It is like a flame that burns through the night; it is not the same flame nor is it another.  A child grows up to be a man of sixty.  Certainly the man of sixty is not the same as the child of sixty years ago, nor is he another person.  Similarly, a person who dies here and is reborn elsewhere is neither the same person, nor another.  It is the continuity of the same series.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by Dr John Medina

Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.  

Much like concrete, memory takes an almost ridiculous amount of time to settle into its permanent form.

Emotions get our attention.

Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia.  It cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60%.

The human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2% of its neurons at any one time.  More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint. 

The brain interpolates the information coming from both eyes.  It makes about a gazillion calculations, then provides you its best guess.

We actually experience our visual environment as a fully analyzed opinion about what the brain thinks is out there. 

Who Am I Without You? Fifty-Two Ways to Rebuild Self-Esteem After a Breakup by Christine G Hibbert

 If we don’t take care of ourselves, we simply will not have the endurance to overcome, become, or flourish.

Don’t confuse being needed with being loved.

Before you can ask for what you need, you have to know what you need.

Grief work, or mourning, is the process of letting oneself go through the emotions of grief.  Through is the only way out.

On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity by Ellen Langer

All it takes to become an artist is to start doing art.

Don't let judgments get in your way.

In traditional notions of the unconscious, we do not see certain things because we are motivated not to -- to do so would be too painful for us.

If we stop judging ourselves, creating art becomes more possible.

Whatever we engage with becomes engaging, whether or not someone "official" calls it art.

People don’t give up their current preferences or ideas easily.

Complete, creative engagement in all that we do is the natural response to our world; it need not be extraordinary at all.

Whether we become mindless over time or on initial exposure to information, we unwittingly lock ourselves into a single understanding of that information.

The language of authority too often binds us to a single perspective, one that limits our ability to respond creatively to the world.

Mindlessness freezes our response and closes us off to the possibility of change.

The loneliness, boredom, and feelings of inadequacy people experience are usually the results of a lack of connection with themselves.

Unhappiness and self-centeredness go hand in hand.

Most of us pretend we live our lives fully engaged because we think we can get away with it.

Ethics for the New Millennium by the 14th Dalai Lama

Religious belief is no guarantee of moral integrity. 

One of the things that determines whether an act is ethical or not is its effect on others’ experience or expectation of happiness.  An act which harms or does violence to this is potentially an unethical act.

The bias we naturally feel toward our families and friends is actually a highly unreliable thing on which to base ethical conduct. 

Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way.

Negative impulses arise as spontaneously as rain and gather momentum just like water following the course of gravity.  What makes matters worse is our tendency to indulge negative thoughts and emotions even while agreeing that we should not.  It is essential, therefore, to address directly our tendency to put things off and while away our time in meaningless activities and shrink from the challenge of transforming our habits on the grounds that it is too great a task.  In particular, it is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering.  The misery of millions is not a cause for pity.

Channelling: How to Reach Out to Your Spirit Guides by Kathryn Ridall

We create our own experience on all levels of reality.  There are no victims. If we create a difficult situation for ourselves, we do so in order to learn certain experiential lessons.

Toronto Street Names: An Illustrated Guide to their Origins by Leonard Wise

Berlin, Ontario, changed its name to Kitchener in 1916. 

The Baby Point area of Toronto marks a historic site on the banks of the Humber River where an Iroquois village, Taiaiagon, once stood.

In 1897 a new stadium was built at Hanlan's Point Amusement Park.  It burned down in 1909, but was rebuilt, and in 1914 Babe Ruth, then a rookie pitcher for the Providence Grays, hit his first professional home run there.  The ball landed in the Toronto Bay.

In 1797 Bay St. was named when the town of York extended its boundaries for the first time.  It ran from the bay to Lot St. (Queen).  Dr Henry Scadding wrote: "Old inhabitants say that Bay St was at first Bear Street, and that it was popularly so called from a noted chase given to a bear out of the adjoining wood on the north, which to escape from its pursuers, made for the water along this route".

Deer Park was a village at Yonge and St Clair that drew its name from the herds of tame deer that roamed the area.

The Buddhist Doctrine of Life after Death by Nayaa Thera Piyadassi

Karma is the action, the result of the action is called karma-vipaka. 

Things are not causeless (ahetuka) nor due to one single cause (eka-hetuka).

According to Buddhism, man is conditioned by his biological laws (bijaniyama), by his environment and physical laws (utu-niyama), by psychological laws (citta-niyama) including his karmic heritage (kamma-niyama); he is not determined by any or all of them.  It has an element of free will (attakara) or personal endeavor (purisakara) by exercising which, he can change his own nature as well as his environment (by understanding it) for the good of himself as well as others.

Karmic process (karmabhava) is the energy that out of a present life, conditions a future life in unending sequence.

The last thought-moment in this life conditions the first-thought moment in the next.

The craving for re-existence makes him re-exist.

What you call life here is the functioning of the five aggregates namely: material form, feelings, perception, mental formations or dispositions and consciousness.

One may ask: “If every death is followed by a birth, the world’s population should be constant, but how is it that, everyone knows, the world’s population is fast increasing year by year?” Rebirth can take place not only in this world (whose population only we can count) but in other world systems of which the Buddhist texts speak.

The dying individual with his whole being convulsively clinging to life, at the very moment of his death, sends forth karmic energies which like flash of lightning, hit a new mother’s womb.

The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's ReDiscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamanetz

When [Moshe] Waldoks first met the Dalai Lama at the preliminary session in New Jersey, he felt challenged by him.  "He got down to the brass tacks of what religious experience has to be.  He asked us, "Isn't the role of religion to create compassion in people?" and when religion stops creating compassion in people and unfortunately, we've see religion as a source of divisiveness in the world, what's wrong?"

True dialogue…must change the speakers from you and me to we and us all.

Jews make up less than half of the one percent of the world's population. 

Tradition should have been a vote, not a veto.

Young Tibetans growing up in India or in Europe are not always interested in cultivating Buddhist practice. In that sense the Dalai Lama and the rabbis share a problem: how to keep religion relevant in a highly materialistic and secular culture; how to renew without losing continuity.

We were seeing firsthand that the Dalai Lama's brilliant tolerance was not practiced universally in his community.  In fact, it has been said that were he not the Dalai Lama, he would be considered a heretic.

"Religious life should be a mixture of faith and analysis." Dalai Lama

"When your karma ripens there is nothing that can protect you." Geshe Sonam Rinchen

The Dalai Lama had offered Jews extraordinary advice -- and a challenge.  Could we make Judaism more beneficial -- instead of just asking Jews to hold on out of guilt?

Seeing Judaism in the light of Tibetan Buddhism, I realized that the religion of my birth is not just an ethnicity or an identity, but a way of life, and a spiritual path, as profound as any other.  That path has three parts: prayer, study, and acts of loving-kindness.

The Path of Energy: Awaken Your Personal Power and Expand Your Consciousness by Dr Synthia Andrews

Einstein’s groundbreaking equation e=mc2 explains that energy and matter are the same substance separated only by their rate of vibration.  Energy and matter live in a perpetual dance of transformation: energy entrained in matter, matter released back to energy.

All emotions have function; however, if they’re not processed and integrated, they become an unconscious filter in the lens through which you see life and an unconscious director of your actions. 

When you’re receiving energy information and it encounters a charged area in your field, the emotional content will be stimulated.   Instead of receiving current information about your environment, you receive information about your habitual patterns that reflect past trauma.  To discern the difference, ask yourself which it is:  current information about the situation, or stored information about the past.  Just ask the question, and then pause and wait for an answer.  If the information is about you, deactivate it by sending it into the earth.  Then ground, center and open to receive an accurate read in present time. 

Stopping a psychic attack:  simply acknowledging that a psychic attack is under way removes a considerable amount of its force.  Attacks use your fear and confusion to gain strength.  When you take this away, the power over you can be, in some cases, completely eliminated. 

Being With Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death by Joan Halifax

Denial of death runs rampant through our culture, leaving us woefully unprepared when it is our time to die, or our time to help others die.  We often aren't available for those who need us, paralyzed as we are by anxiety and resistance -- nor are we available for ourselves. 

The only way to develop openness to situations as they are is by practicing the partners of presence and acceptance.

The message of the Buddha was clear and direct -- freedom from suffering lies within suffering itself, and it is up to each individual to find his or her own way…. He further taught that enlightenment is not a mystical, transcendent experience but an ongoing process, calling for three fundamental qualities: fearlessness, intimacy, and transparency.

A spiritual life is not about being self-conscious, or wearing a button that says "I'm a boddhisattva!"  It is about doing what you have to do with no attachment to outcome.

Equanimity, grounded in letting go, is the capacity to be in touch with suffering and at the same time not be swept away by it.  Equanimity can be thought of as the state of being non-partial -- not impartial, but non-partial.

Our practice of not-knowing points to an openness in perspective, an openness that is deeper than a story, deeper than our expectations, deeper than our wishes, deeper than our personality, deeper than cultural constructs.

Pain is really made up of non-pain elements.  We feel sensations such as duration, intensity, and cadence, and our brains do the rest, interpreting these sensations as pain and making up the story that goes along with it.

Suffering can give birth to a bigger perspective and greater resilience, and, strangely enough, suffering is the mother of kindness and compassion if we turn toward it with openness, making a friend of it. 

Keeping your personal life together is not an optional indulgence but an absolute necessity when it comes to being of use to others in the world.

Our well-being is the well-being of others. 

Here are a few good principles for self-care: See your limits with compassion.  Set up a schedule that is sane.  Know what practices and activities refresh you, and make time for them.  Actively involve, include, and support other caregivers.  Develop a plan for doing your work in a way that is mindful, restorative, wholesome, and healthy.

We need to learn to stay with suffering without trying to change it or fix it.  Only when we are able to be present for our own suffering are we able to present for the suffering of others.

True Belonging: Mindful Practices to Help You Overcome Loneliness, Connect With Others and Cultivate Happiness by Jeffrey Brantley and Wendy Millstine

Mindfulness can help you recognize and let go of the self-centered perspective when it becomes too demanding, constricting, or distorting.  It can help you relate from a much larger space of awareness that is inherently deeply present and in touch with each moment. 

Can you locate that part of yourself that dehumanizes others, understand and heal the trauma it represents, and engage each person you meet with pro-social, instead of anti-social, behaviors?  How can you disentangle yourself from interior habits of war-making, of isolating and criticizing based in unconsciousness or misinformed fears and prejudice? 

Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire

Being creative requires the cultivation of a balance of skills -- including the ability to learn and memorize -- as well as the ability to free oneself from that knowledge and from habitual ways of thinking in order to imagine possibilities that have never been dreamed of before.

For Gertrude Stein, it was being in her car, looking at cows.  She made a habit of writing for just thirty minutes a day, driving around a farm and stopping at different cows until she found the one that most inspired her.

We need new and unusual experiences to think differently.

Today, Americans spend an average of eleven hours each day interacting with digital devices, and the average smartphone user checks his or her device every six and a half minutes (that's 150 times a day).

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and In Life, One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

You will accomplish your goals in large part by making every conversation you have as real as possible.

Burnout doesn't occur because we're solving problems; it occurs because we've been trying to solve the same problem over and over.

The problem named is the problem solved. 

Multiple, competing realities existing simultaneously: This is true and this is true and this is true.

Multiple realities are not competing.  They just exist.  You own a piece of the truth, and so do I. Let's figure out what to do.

Clarity develops as we thoughtfully consider all aspects of a topic.

Fierce does not mean barbarous, menacing, or cruel.  Fierce means powerful, strong, unbridled, unrestrained, robust.

The progress of the world depends on the progress of each individual human being right now.

A value is a tightly held belief (as opposed to a vague notion) upon which a person or organization acts by choice.

Integrity requires alignment of our values -- the core beliefs and behaviors that we have claimed as important to us -- and our actions. 

You get what you tolerate.  People do not repeat behavior unless it is rewarded.

When we are real with ourselves and others, the change occurs before the conversation has ended.

Successful relationships require that all parties view getting their core needs met as being legitimate.

Our companies, our relationships, and our lives are mirrors accurately reflecting us back to ourselves.

We must recognize that humans share a universal longing to be known and, being known, to be loved.

What's on the other side of your toughest issue is worth it:  relief, success, healthy, freedom from stress, happiness, a high-performing team, a fulfilling personal relationship. 

Where there is anger, there is fear.

How we enter our conversations is how we emerge from them.

The most valuable thing any of us can do is find a way to say the things that can't be said.

For a leader, there is no trivial comment.

You must extend to others what you want to receive.  It begins with you.

Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization by Analayo

The mental agitation and tension of unwholesome thought processes can be gradually reduced and overcome through direct observation.

Not seeing the arising and passing away of phenomena is simply ignorance, while to regard all phenomena as impermanent leads to knowledge and understanding.