56 Quotes by Thubten Yeshe

Without understanding how your inner nature evolves, how can you possibly discover eternal happiness? Where is eternal happiness? It’s not in the sky or in the jungle; you won’t find it in the air or under the ground. Everlasting happiness is within you, within your psyche, your consciousness, your mind. That’s why it is so important that you investigate the nature of your own mind.

Q: What is nirvana and do many people attain it?Lama: When you develop your powers of concentration such that you can integrate your mind into single-pointed concentration, you will gradually diminish your ego’s emotional reactions until they disappear altogether. At that point, you transcend your ego and discover an everlasting, blissful, peaceful state of mind. That is what we call nirvana. Many people have attained this state and many more are well on their way to it.

True love does not depend on physical expression. You should realize this. True love is a feeling deep within you. It is not just a matter of wearing a smile on your face and looking happy. Rather, it arises from a heartfelt understanding of every other being’s suffering and radiates out to all of them indiscriminately. It does not favor a chosen few to the exclusion of everyone else. This is true love.

It is never too late.Even if you are going to die tomorrow,Keep yourself straight and clear and be a happy human being today.If you keep your situation happy day by day,you will eventually reach the greatest happiness of enlightenment. – Lama Yeshe

Lord Buddha himself taught that basically, human nature is pure, egoless, just as the sky is by nature clear, not cloudy. Clouds come and go, but the blue sky is always there; clouds don’t alter the fundamental nature of the sky. Similarly, the human mind is fundamentally pure.

Whether you get up one morning with a foggy mind and the world around you appears to be dark and foggy, or you awaken with a clear mind and your world seems beautiful and light, understand that these different impressions are coming from your own mind rather than from changes in the external environment. Instead of misinterpreting whatever you experience in life through wrong conceptions, realize that it’s not outer reality, but only mind.

There’s a very strong connection between the body and the mind. In Tibetan tantric yoga, we take advantage of that strong connection: by concentrating strongly on the body’s psychic channels we can affect the mind accordingly. Therefore, even in everyday life, the food you eat and the other things your body touches have an effect on your mind.

All of us, the religious and the non-religious, Easterner and Westerner alike, want to be happy. Everybody seeks happiness, but are youlooking in the right place? Perhaps happiness is here but you’re looking there. Make sure you seek happiness where it can be found.

Recognizing the dissatisfactory nature of our existence and renouncing the world in which transitory sense objects contact transitory sense organs to produce transitory feelings, none of which are worth grasping at, we seek instead the everlasting, eternally joyful realizations of enlightenment or nirvana.