Monday, December 11, 2006

A Lightning Flash

Life, as Buddha told us, is as brief as a lightning flash; yet, as Wordsworth said: “The world is too much with us: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” It is that laying waste of our powers—that betrayal of our essence, that abandonment of the miraculous chance that this life, the natural bardo, gives us of knowing and embodying our enlightened nature—that is perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about human life. What the masters are essentially telling us is to stop fooling ourselves: What will we have learned, if at the moment of death we do not know who we really are?


---Sogyal Rinpoche

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good one! I love that quotation by Wordsworth and it is practically my (negative) mantra this time of year. But maybe that is because I am just cheap? ;->