MysticBliss: Selections from Tibetan Book of Living & Dying

A storm-fallen section.

The following are from Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche tells us, becoming a warrior means that "we can trade our small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision, one of fearlessness, openness, and genuine heroism..." To enter the transforming field of that much vaster vision is to learn how to be at home in change, and how to make impermanence our friend.


Physicists have introduced us to the world of the quantum particle, a world astonishingly like that described by the Buddha in his image of the glittering net that unfolds across the universe. Just like the jewels in the net, all particles exist potentially as different combinations of other particles. So when we really look at ourselves, then, and the things around us that we took to be so solid, so stable, and so lasting, we find that they have no more reality than a dream.


The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true?


What a beautiful and what a healing mystery it is that from contemplating, continually and fearlessly, the truth of change and impermanence, we come slowly to find ourselves face to face , in gratitude and joy, with the truth of the changeless, with the truth of the deathless, unending nature of mind!