inner life

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There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time, consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.

There is also the thinking process by which we break into the inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.


—Ted Hughes

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Dzogchen views karma in terms of ‘perception and response’ rather than ‘cause and effect.’ 

The essential meaning is the same but this approach opens our understanding of karma so that we cannot mistake it for fatalism. If the cause — which is our perception — perceived a focus of attraction, aversion, or indifference, the effect will be our response to that cause. There is no sense in which the actual circumstances of our lives are preordained according to a system of rewards and punishments based on our previous actions.

—Ngakma Nor’dzin

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