The real work was the identification of those aspects of yourself that led to what he called “the negative emotions” – anger, envy, bitterness, greed, cynicism, hatred and the like – things that poured hurt into an already overfull world.

Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.

It doesn’t take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they’re right.

I came to be emulated. That’s what people didn’t get. Followed, as in being an example, as in making your interior world resemble mine. p. 22.

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

It’s like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions.

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese’s back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.

Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.