Kelsang Gyatso Quotes

The goal of meditation is precisely to make your mind smooth and manageable so that it can be concentrated or relaxed at will; and especially to free it from the tyranny of mental afflictions and confusion

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

I meditate. I've been a meditator since, I think I was doing it unofficially before all my life and then began to formalize it somewhere around 14.

The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.

Meditation is a lifelong process. Give it a try. As you get deeper and more disciplined into the process, you'll get deeper and more disciplined in your mind and life.

If you take an hour out of your day to meditate, you will progress ten-fold. By staying mentally focused, you can let your worries go.

I usually meditate twice a day: Transcendental Meditation.

Meditation will sharpen your senses and your awareness.

I meditate twice a day, T.M., and do yoga and tai chi.

That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind.

Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy.

You cannot fail at meditation.

In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years I did nothing else. Every holiday I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that. And that's what it's all about, being alone with yourself every day, for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening.

The life of action need not be renounced. If you meditate for an hour or two every day you can then carry on with your duties. If you meditate in the right manner then the current of mind induced will continue to flow even in the midst of your work.

We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’

The Seven Factors of Awakening are mindfulness, investigation of phenomena, diligence, joy, ease, concentration, and letting go.

To achieve that state of lasting happiness and absolute peace, we must first know how to calm the mind, to concentrate and go beyond the mind. By turning the mind's concentration inward, upon the self, we can deepen that experience of perfect concentration. This is the state of Meditation.

Meditation more than anything in my life was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I've had.

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.

In meditation we research the field without time and space and activity, and yet produce a useful effect while conducting the research.

When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us.

Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I've had.