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The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Deep
Encourages
Days
Traditions
Rather
Partly
Others
Buddhism
Surfaces
Take
Surface
Westerners
Feels
Deeper
Dalai
Roots
Lama
Tradition
Acquiring

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Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.
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I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place.
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I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?
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So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.
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Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.
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Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.
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A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
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None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.
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Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.
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The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
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Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.
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Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
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I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
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Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.
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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
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The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.
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Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance.
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When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese. Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.
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I think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.
Pico Iyer