All the things you need in the death transition, you need now in the life transition, because life is a transition, it is a between state. Therefore, every night when you fall asleep, it's like you die. And every time you do, you should be using the process of falling asleep as giving up your attention to sense objects, your discursive ruminating thoughts and so on. You should use that as a process of giving up and giving yourself completely to the universe and becoming completely obliterated.

Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.

Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.

Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic - people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn't you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up.

They [Chinese] will need a sympathetic intercessor with other people in the world to avoid conflict and create trust, and of course, Dalai Lama would be ideal. In another ten years from now though, he won't have the time to be really effective for them. They're truly wasting their time not using him now.

If your enemy is happy, then why would they be bothered to be your enemy? Being someone's enemy is no fun. It does not add to happiness.

Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.