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Contemplations of Khandro Rinpoche

The Suffering of Samsara
"Ask yourself if it is necessary to make such great issues of the things arising from the compositeness of our senses. We can feel and understand these experiences, but none of them are solid. The moment we say 'happiness,' for example, that moment has moved on. We may assume that this is the same happiness of a few moments ago, but other than the grasping mind that thinks it is so, nothing actually stays the same. We could spend a lifetime fixated on the experiences of happiness, anger, ignorance, hatred, or jealousy. To really understand suffering, think about the magnitude and intensity of the suffering caused by grasping."

Understanding Right Livelihood
"Right activity cannot arise from a foundation of wrong livelihood. It is necessary to understand that the term livelihood also has a wide range of interpretations. It is not only one's job, it is any responsibility that one takes on that leads to some action or result. It could lead to a negative action, such as a power struggle, jealousy, disparaging comments or criticism; something that can create turmoil in the minds of practitioners. Between teachers, it can be the one who teaches. Between meditation instructors, it can be the one who is in the position of authority. Often, how our intentions arise in our words creates hardness, a cutting, or an injury in the mind of the other that is equivalent to actually killing the person. A physical killing may have less of an impact than killing the mind of a person and destroying any ground of goodness within the other's mind. Therefore, it is extremely important for every meditator to realize how quickly one can create a circumstance that might pull another person from their path and their progress in understanding the dharma. Right livelihood does not inflict harm, intentionally or unintentionally, on other sentient beings and is congruent with the view of absolute truth."

Let Go of Grasping at a Self
"If you could have one human life forget about many lifetimes, just one human life grounded in sanity, it would be harmonious and positive. It would generate goodness for yourself and others and be free from ignorance, selfishness, anger, attachment, greed, confusion, and chaos. Ask yourself if you are spending your life grasping at an individual self, which generates separation, judgments, and conflict with others. Are you so stuck on your own happiness hoping to maintain it and fearing you cannot that when a genuine taste of happiness does arise it is always tainted with hope and fear? Contemplate the fruition of grasping at illusions and ask yourself if that's what you want."

The Seed of Enlightenment
"It is important to remember that enlightenment is possible at all times. It must be recognized that within every emotion, every thought, every concept, there is a seed of enlightenment. Even concept can lead to awareness of the fundamental nature or to absolute realization. This is true because a concept, if broken through and understood in its true nature, can allow the mind to rest within rigpa or the essence of awareness, no other concepts can be created; if one concept is broken through, all others can also be broken through as well. Based on the understanding of the empty nature of that one single thought, one can relate to all other concepts in the same way and recognize their inherent emptiness. Therefore it is not necessary to break through the solidity of every concept before one reaches a state of exhaustion of all concepts. One doesnt have to exhaust all ignorance, all attachment, all desire, all hatred or all jealousy; instead any one, if completely understood based on recognizing the nature of mind, is sufficient for freeing all illusions."

from a teaching on Terdak Lingpas The Jewel Ladder, 2000

The Most Precious Gift
"Contemplate your life and who you are as a person especially your great capacity for goodness. Think of all the hard work and all the teachers, buddhas, and bodhisattvas, Sangha, and teachings that continuously generate the blessings that have brought you to this precious moment. Contemplate the fruition of this moment so that when you leave your meditation, you can really say, 'This is what I would want to give to sentient beings.'"

The Foundation of Right View
"To cut through selfishness, contemplate the Four Reminders and generate the mahayana principle of bodhicitta. Generating the genuine compassion of loving-kindness dispels the ignorance that grasps at individual liberation. Contemplating the Four Reminders and the selflessness arising from bodicitta forms the foundation of right view. This is the view we need to take into meditation so that our meditation is not fabricated or conceptual. To generate enlightened mind, it is essential to spend time studying and contemplating these things."

On Meditation
"As you leave a puddle of water undisturbed, leave your mind undisturbed. If the mind is obscured, just as the sky allows the clouds to be there, let those obscurations be. Free it from your story line or interference, your opinion."

Contemplating Death
"Comparing the experience of death with the experience of life, we could say that in sleep we have dreams, and that our day time experience could be considered like being asleep and having dreams as well. It seems useless to expend effort in aggression or fear during dreams; similarly, the amount of time we exert in daytime hesitation, aggression, ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, hatred, self-preservation, individual self-identity, ego, or arrogance seems equally as useless. The uselessness of exerting energy to maintain something that at the moment of death cannot add to one's life, give happiness, allow for the simplicity of letting go, or generate happiness for another. It cannot bring about a sense of accomplishment at the time of death. Contemplating the moment of one's death and realizing the futility of putting time and energy into useless activities, each meditator should turn the mind towards dharma and the fruitful activity of benefiting other sentient beings."

Hi erichsprincess. Your questioning of Rinpoches contemplation where she mentions, the view of absolute truth brings to mind this quotation, found in this link.



Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

(Siddhartha Gautama - The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.

The nature of healthy relationship - Tibetan Buddhism view, presented by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.

Much wisdom

A genuine, not artificial, compassion, can only arise after we have discovered our own condition. Observing our own limits, our conditioning, our conflicts and so on, we can become truly conscious of the suffering of others, and then our own experience becomes a basis or model for being able to better understand and help those around us.

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If one doesn't know how to understand the true meaning of a teaching through one's own culture, one can create confusion between the external form of a religious tradition and the essence of its message.

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DZOGCHEN
The Self-Perfected State
Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche

"Similarly, Saraha lived as an arrowsmith, Savaripa as a hunter, and most of the other mighty siddhas of India, too, adopted very lowly lifestyles, often those of outcastes. It is therefore important not to take any of your teacher's actions in the wrong way; train yourself to have only pure perception.


People who ignore this point, continually misinterpreting and criticising what their teacher does, would, so it is said, find fault even in the Buddha if they were to live with him long enough.

The monk Sunaksatra was the Buddha's half-brother. He served him for twenty-four years, and knew by heart all the twelve categories of teachings in the pitakas.* But he saw everything the Buddha did as deceitful, and eventually came to the erroneous conclusion that, apart from an aura six feet wide, there was no difference between the Buddha and himself.


So saying, he left. Thereafter, Ananda became the Buddha's personal attendant. He asked the Buddha where Sunaksatra would be reborn.

'In one week's time' the Buddha replied, 'Sunaksatra's life will come to an end and he will be reborn as a preta in a flower garden.'"

* (The three collections of the Buddha's teachings, Vinaya, Sutra and Abhidharma. The Vajrayana teachings are sometimes considered as a fourth pitaka.)

The Words of My Perfect Teacher
- Patrul Rinpoche
Chapter six: How To Follow A Spiritual Friend

"If one recognizes one's own intrinsic State as pure from the beginning and only temporarily obscured by impurities, and if one maintains the presence of this recognition without becoming distracted, then all the impurities dissolve."

- Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche

*

Notice that Rinpoche does not say to maintain presence of recognition of the impurities.

He says to maintain undistracted presence of recognition of one's own intrinsic State as pure.

"Although in Mahayana, compassion (really love) is conceived of on a par with wisdom, in practice priority is usually initially placed on gaining liberation. Its just more efficient that way. Clearing away some moha first makes it less likely that one's efforts to help others will be misguided. Eliminating raga and dvesha makes it less likely that one's zeal will lead to aggressiveness and the sacrificing of principles for an end. Further, after one is free from the concepts of helper, helped and helping, there is less feeling of chagrin or loss of enthusiasm when ones efforts to help fail."

Shinzen Young
How Meditation Works

"Ayn Rand rejects altruism, the view that self-sacrifice is the moral ideal. She argues that the ultimate moral value, for each human individual, is his or her own well-being. Since selfishness (as she understands it) is serious, rational, principled concern with one's own well-being, it turns out to be a prerequisite for the attainment of the ultimate moral value. For this reason, Rand believes that selfishness is a virtue."

Virtue of Selfishness

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"Everybody is seeking his happiness, and everybody is selfish deep down. Otherwise is not possible. I am not condemning it - remember it. It is how it should be."

Osho
Volume 6, page 25