## Metadata - Author: [[Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Helen Tworkov]] - Full Title: In Love With the World - Category: #books ## Highlights - Traditional Tibetan culture was so closely merged with Buddhist values that the attempt to introduce children to reality started early, especially if one grew up, as I did, within a dharma household. Say you are crying because your brother hit you, or your friend took away your toy. You might be told, Chiwa mitakpa! Impermanence and death! Don’t be such an idiot. If you don’t think about impermanence and death, your life will never amount to anything! This might be comparable to a Western parent saying to a child: Don’t cry over spilled milk. However, in Tibet, the recognition of impermanence and death was used as the measure of what was truly important. One day I saw a red bicycle in the marketplace in Kathmandu. My eyes fastened on it and it parked itself inside my head. Chiwa mitakpa, my father told me. That toy will fall apart; it will die. To fasten so tightly to an object that has no lasting quality is like trying to hold air in your hands. This cannot bring you real happiness. ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=585)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Tibetans have an expression that my teacher Guru Vajradhara Tai Situ Rinpoche often repeats: Keep the view as vast as space. Keep your actions as fine as flour. ([Location 617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=617)) - The death of the small self cannot be accomplished in a lasting or effective way if we deny or circumvent the fear of physical death; yet working with small deaths can loosen the intense anxieties that surround physical death. ([Location 691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=691)) - The resistance of the grasping self to give itself up can be pretty fierce. Its job is to remain in control. The ego of this abbot had known a busy night. Even when I had been able to cut through the misperceptions, they reconnected like a cut mochi cake—those glutinous Japanese rice cakes: You can slice them in half and watch them ooze back together. This is the tyranny of the grasping ego. ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1279)) - The Buddha identified mistaking impermanence for permanence as one of the primary causes of suffering. Known as the Supreme Physician, he offered a cure for the sickness of samsara. But until we identify this sickness for ourselves, we will not accept the cure. ([Location 1383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1383)) - Sitting on the station floor, I knew that for these sensations to be so intensely disturbing meant that I had to be misperceiving myself. That’s the way suffering always works—our misperceptions turn us into targets. I recalled watching people in parks throughout Southeast Asia practicing the martial art tai chi. I’d watched from the side, amazed to discover that defense was based on fluidity rather than resistance. In tai chi, for a martial arts master, the opponent’s blow has no place to land. The same is true with a master of the mind. The more rigid our sense of self, the more surface we provide for the arrows to hit. ([Location 1445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1445)) - All I wanted to do with the parts of myself that I disliked was get rid of them, discard them as garbage. I did not understand their value as compost for my sanity. ([Location 1533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1533)) - My father explained that the wish to get rid of also arises from the fixed mind. If you are attached to the bike and you give it away, your mind will stick to the bike, whether you own it or not, and you might become proud of your action. If you do not work with the mind of attachment, the mind will stick to one thing or another. You have to liberate the attachment and then you can choose to keep the bike or not. Do not push away, do not invite. Work from the middle, and slowly you will transform attachment into an open mind that allows you to make appropriate choices. ([Location 1669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1669)) - People everywhere try so hard to make the world better. Their intentions are admirable, yet they seek to change everything but themselves. To make yourself a better person is to make the world a better place. Who develops industries that fill the air and water with toxic waste? How did we humans become immune to the plight of refugees, or hardened to the suffering of animals raised to be slaughtered? Until we transform ourselves, we are like mobs of angry people screaming for peace. In order to move the world, we must be able to stand still in it. Now more than ever, I place my faith in Gandhi’s approach: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Nothing is more essential for the twenty-first century and beyond than personal transformation. It’s our only hope. Transforming ourselves is transforming the world. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=1683)) - Less than a week had passed since I’d acted like a jailbird leaving Tergar. Now the police had picked up an escapee, a dangerous most-wanted Buddhist abbot, armed with emptiness, aspiring to move deeper into emptiness. ([Location 2151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=2151)) - My motivation was the same as it had been on the Varanasi station floor, the same as sitting before any shrine: to become free of self-created suffering in order to help liberate others. ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=2219)) - The mind states that I entered are not unique to meditators, or limited to spiritual seekers. We’re talking about recognizing original mind, the mind emptied of concepts and dualities, beyond time, beyond gravity or direction. One mind, same mind, just different narratives woven around it. Inherently, this mind cannot be confined to any one group or tradition. Words cannot describe it. Nonetheless they are helpful. Without my tradition, I would not have the language to share anything; and language provides a context for these experiences. Without context, experience alone often does not bear fruit. ([Location 3511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD2N7M3&location=3511))