Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the idea that excessive busyness can distract us from addressing important life challenges.
Sogyal Rinpoche's quote reflects on the nature of modern life, suggesting that our tendency to fill our days with constant activity can prevent us from confronting deeper, more meaningful issues that require reflection and thoughtful consideration. The idea is that in our rush to be productive, we may overlook significant personal or societal problems that need our attention, ultimately leading to a less fulfilling existence.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a mindfulness seminar to encourage participants to slow down and reflect on their lives.
Sit, then, as if you were a mountain, with all the unshakeable, steadfast majesty of a mountain. A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that try to bother it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.
There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.
{While meditating} I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the "correct" state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am.
We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.
Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them.
The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.
If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!
Wretched are those who are vindictive and spiteful.
With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.
To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.
Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.
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