In Love with the World
What a Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
With
Having read it
★★★★☆
A story of life, near death and all the awareness, reflection and spaciousness of various happenings that’ll get you thinking, considering, appreciating and maybe even learning more from and even adapting to the ins and outs of reaching luminosity, or form thereof.
Compassion that arises with empathy acknowledges that ignorance causes suffering. Not the suffering of poverty and homelessness, but the suffering of misperception, of taking phenomena to be real in ways that are not true.
A good passage
Once again, I concluded that modern urban people seem more stressed and agitated than poor rural people. Having material comforts seems to make people grasp excessively, as they are more afraid of losing their possessions. They are always wanting more and more and are never satisfied. Disadvantaged people in Nepal and India, with much lower expectations, seemed more satisfied with what little they had. I had begun to recognize that the problems that beset modern people at the peak of their family and work lives closely parallel issues that arise for people everywhere at the end of life: an inability to accept impermanence, grasping at what is not available, and not being able to let go.
A second good passage
Underlying so much anxiety in the modern world is the fear of death: of what will happen and how it will happen. Will it be painful? Will it be difficult? Will there be guilt, remorse, redemption? People everywhere are afraid of dying, but the fear of death, and the denial of death, seem to be reinforced by material values, by our tendency to grasp at the life we know.
A third good passage
We really do change every second, like everything else in our visible and invisible worlds. Fifty to seventy billion cells in our bodies die every day, allowing for billions of new cells to take fleeting existence. Life occurs on an ocean of death. Without death there is no life.