Western Tibetan Buddhists are always looking out there at the distant snow peaks and they lose the flowers along the path.

If you put a little pin in the middle and you make a little space, a little circle, then the nature of the mirror shines through. So now you know the mind is not dust, that behind that dust there is this mirror-like nature of the mind, and if it's a big enough hole, you might be so transfixed by the hole you don't notice the rest of the dust.

The more you realize, the more you realize how much there is to realize and, at the same time, how much you realize that there is nothing to realize. So, it's an enormous job, not something that is going to be finished in this lifetime.

As a human being, we have everything we need. It's enough suffering to give us incentive to go on, but not so much that we don't know where to turn.

Since I was a small child, I'd believed we were inherently perfect, and that we had to keep coming back again and again until we recognized our innate perfection.

We have produced many of our problems through our confused mental states.

Buddhism is the most active one! The whole time, we're dealing with the mind and how to tame it, and how to transcend our ordinary conventional mind. This takes an enormous amount of determination and perseverance. It also requires an attitude of being relaxed and spacious, rather than tense and stressed. It's certainly not a matter of lying back and expecting it all to happen. If we don't make it happen, it won't!