Obscurations Quotes & Sayings

Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler's question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. "For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky," Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn't strike everyone. "There's nothing I can do, so it's really quite liberating. There's nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It's beautiful." Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn't mean a blue sky isn't always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again. His — Pico Iyer

When an untoward event occurs in your life, react to it without haste or passion. — Joe Hyams

Today's plans have changed, babe," he announced before taking a sip of his, and I looked at him. "Plans?" I asked, not knowing we actually had plans. "Yeah, gotta be at George's in an hour." "George's?" I queried. "Though, thinkin' this is good. You can meet him, feel him out." "Meet him? Feel him out?" I parroted. — Kristen Ashley

Bhagavan - in Tibetan, "One who has destroyed the four Maras,"2 which are death, distraction, pride, and the emotional obscurations. The — Dalai Lama XIV

Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell ... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know. — Lafcadio Hearn

All things are void. So how possibly could there be any obscurations since everything is void, when you're void itself? There's only the void. In the void, there's only shining, perfect clear light of reality. — Frederick Lenz

Perceptions, our ways of thinking, and our behavior. It is a question of bringing about a complete reversal of mental habits by reducing emotions in a gradual process of study, reflection, and meditation - in other words, familiarization. That is how we refine the mind and purify it through a training that actualizes its potential. We learn to master the stream of our consciousness, to control the emotional obscurations, without letting ourselves be dominated by them. That is the path toward realization of the absolute nature. Our practice integrates all the aspects and all the various levels of the Buddha's teaching. — Dalai Lama XIV

Mastery of craft frees the subconscious. — Robert McKee

It was a silly idea. Homemade brownies for the bouncer who'd pulled Eric off of me? It was all I could think of to thank him, because I was pretty sure Hallmark didn't have a 'thanks for saving me from sexual assault' section of greeting cards. - Viv — Brenda Rothert

Our griefs, as well as our joys, owe their strongest colors to our imaginations. There is nothing so grievous to be borne that pondering upon it will not make it heavier; and there is no pleasure so vivid that the animation of fancy cannot liven it. — Jane Porter

The sense of self is one of the obscurations that prevents us from seeing clearly, the idea that there is a self or that we are anyone in particular. — Frederick Lenz