Kelsang Gyatso Quotes

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

Therefore when the mind knows itself and loves itself, there remains a trinity, that is the mind, love and knowledge.

I reflect over my actions; I don't dwell on them.

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

Through faithful practice, layer after layer of the mind opens before us, and each reveals new facts to us.

Openness of mind strengthens the truth in us and removes the dross from it, if there is any.

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.

I'm my own biggest critic. I'm the one who has to go home and look at myself in the mirror.

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

Mind is just in the middle. You are nothing but a mess. If you can go beyond it, intelligence grows in you; if you go below it, any intelligence that you had disappears.

If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

To ask the mind to kill itself is like making the thief the policeman. He will go with you and pretend to catch the thief, but nothing will be gained. So you must turn inward and see where the mind rises from, and then it will cease to exist.

Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But meditation is a natural state - which we have lost.

I didn't fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.

Many people see themselves as a problem that needs to be solved. They also habitually see the present moment as an obstacle that they need to overcome or get away from. With awareness, an inner sense of spaciousness arises that enables you to look at your own mind, which is to say the human mind, with a certain degree of detachment.

When you lose your mind, you'll come to your senses.

To begin to meditate is to look into our lives with interest in kindness and discover how to be wakeful and free.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

You cannot drop the ego. Once you start trying to drop the ego you will get in a very deep mess; you will become more and more worried and puzzled. And this is not the way to get rid of the ego. The only way to get rid of the ego is to look at it.

Meditation is nothing but putting the mind aside, putting the mind out of the way, and bringing a witnessing which is always there but hidden underneath the mind. This witnessing will reach to your center, and once you have become enlightened, then there is no problem. Then bring the mind in tune with you