All that matters is to be at one with the living God to be a creature in the house of the God of Life. Like a cat asleep on a chair at peace, in peace . . . feeling the presence of Peace like a great assurance a deep calm in the heart a presence as of the master sitting at the board in his own and great being in the house of life.
I began to face death and its implications very young. I could never have imagined then how many kinds of death there were to follow, one heaped upon another. The death that was the tragic loss of my country, Tibet, after the Chinese occupation. The death that is exile. The death of losing everything my family and I possessed ... for we had been among the wealthiest and most famous in Tibet.
~ from THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING by Sogyal Rinpoche
The wisdom of the peoples of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the post-modern world, one that we must begin to accept as the crisis of self, society and the environment deepens. This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony and vision.
