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Actually there's a very bad trend in some cults about how Guru's are supposed to be mean to their students, and there are some who revel in this and are abusive.
Robert Thurman
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Robert Thurman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: August 4
Curator
Exhibition Curator
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman
Students
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More quotes by Robert Thurman
First of all, no self doesn't mean there is no self, haha. So the no problem is jumped at a little too fast I'm afraid. Especially in American culture where people tend to be materialistic philosophically. I don't mean running to the mall, but philosophically, you see?
Robert Thurman
Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.
Robert Thurman
Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic - people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn't you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up.
Robert Thurman
The most important enemy for everyone is their own illusion that makes them unrealistic or exaggerates their sense of self-importance in the world. Ironically, you're the super secret enemy. Whether lay or householder, everyone has that internal enemy.
Robert Thurman
You take up energy towards someone because you think loving your enemy doesn't just mean caving into your enemy. It means first of all liberating yourself.
Robert Thurman
I think humans will find their humanity sometime, somehow.
Robert Thurman
Everyone has the same life purpose, which is the quest of happiness for oneself and for others.
Robert Thurman
If someone gets a bigger house, does that automatically make them happy? Maybe for a second. But then they worry about the bigger house and how to take care of it.
Robert Thurman
The better teachers recognize that by freeing yourself of the rigid ego identity habit, you actually strengthen the resilient, flexible, creative ego, and you then can be more effective in helping others, and creative in whatever work you do.
Robert Thurman
You should never be ashamed of the suffering you've been through.
Robert Thurman
This question, Is loving your enemy a life practice?, I like that question. It is a life practice, certainly, for everyone. It relates to the idea of, Is this a householder practice or is it a monk practice? I think it's both. Everyone has that practice.
Robert Thurman
A lot of people, after seeking a bit, have some experience, and sometimes will believe they're enlightened. One has to be careful about that. Especially Americans, who are very external stimulus oriented. When they have some type of deep inner experience, often they think that was the ultimate experience.
Robert Thurman
So that's the process of understanding, and through that process, if you have a deep realization of the selflessness in regard to your absolute self, then it releases your relational self to be happily interconnected with everything in a blissful way. Then you yourself have no problem in the sense of no suffering. You reach Nirvana.
Robert Thurman
They [Chinese] will need a sympathetic intercessor with other people in the world to avoid conflict and create trust, and of course, Dalai Lama would be ideal. In another ten years from now though, he won't have the time to be really effective for them. They're truly wasting their time not using him now.
Robert Thurman
Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.
Robert Thurman
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
Robert Thurman
What makes me fully alive is anything. Really just being alive is enough.
Robert Thurman
The Buddhists think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life ... have been my mother - for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you.
Robert Thurman
The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.
Robert Thurman
You have to be responsible for yourself, refer to yourself, develop yourself, help others, whatever it may be. So we shouldn't have an idea that the whole thing is to shatter ones ego.
Robert Thurman
