Fruition of the Journey

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Letting Go of Spiritual Experience, Tricycle Magazine Fall 2004

"The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to realize the union of your mind and ultimate reality. You discover eventually that not only are you in reality, but that you also embody that reality. Your ordinary body becomes the body of a buddha, your ordinary speech becomes the speech of a buddha, and your ordinary mind becomes the mind of a buddha. This is the great transition that you have to make, relinquishing your fixation on the separation of samsaric beings and buddhas. When we can talk about them as ultimately the same, when this actual transformation occurs within an individual, it is a truly great occurrence. It is remarkable because an ordinary, confused being still retains that preexisting continuity between an ordinary being and an enlightened being, in the sense that what you become is what you have always been. At the end of the journey, you are simply returning home."

The Shower of Truth

Chögyam Trungpa, The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation, Edited by Judith Lief, Shambhala Publications 2010

When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem. The combination works because it is simple and dynamic. You have hot and cold water together, so you can take a really good shower. pg. 103

Empty Hand

Lin Jensen, An Ear to the Ground, Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2006

What’s most needed in the moment of choice is an empty hand.

Otherness

Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle Magazine, Reincarnation: A Debate, Summer 1997

For me one of the most striking passages in Shantideva is the verse in which Shantideva says that the person who dies, and the person who is reborn, are other. And, therefore, the only valid motive that one can have for acting has to be compassion. There is no "you" who continues into a future life. "You" finish at death, and something else, another being is then born, like a parent giving birth to a child. That position takes the subject—me, the ego—out of the equation. The process of evolutionary change is not about me, Stephen Batchelor, but about what I can now do to improve the spiritual evolutionary advantage of those who come after my death. If you take the idea of otherness in this way, you no longer need to posit some personal consciousness that goes from one life to the next.