The conditioning is going to be stronger

For people who are not in the nondual state however – it might be more helpful to be at a retreat centre, by the ocean, or in a forest. As long as you are dualistically conditioned—if you’re in a place which evokes that conditioning—the conditioning is going to be stronger than in a place that doesn’t evoke conditioning.

p383, Warp and Weft of Wonderment, Ngakma Mé-tsal, Aro Books Worldwide, 2024, ISBN 9781898185680

Hallucination

The idiocy of buying into prevalent conditioned perception and relating to arbitrary ideas as if they were truth – is that we can make no sense of the world as it is. We relate to the world more-or-less as an hallucination. 

p213, Warp and Weft of Wonderment, Ngakma Mé-tsal, Aro Books Worldwide, 2024, ISBN 9781898185680

Programmed by society

 

What does that mean about my appreciative sense? Is my appreciation actually personal to me? Or am I simply programmed by society to like what I like? Most people are conditioned.

p214, Warp and Weft of Wonderment, Ngakma Mé-tsal, Aro Books Worldwide, 2024, ISBN 9781898185680

Continually breaking through

Becoming a Buddhist is a process of continually becoming a Buddhist – of continually breaking through limitations and conditioned perception.

p86, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, 978-1-898185-06-2

Indoctrination

People often fail to question the commonly accepted version of reality into which they have been indoctrinated.  It’s not necessarily a deliberate process of indoctrination – it merely happens as part of the way human society functions.

 p216, Tracts of the Sun : An Earth Orbit of Vajrayana Expressions.  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2022, ISBN 978-1-898185-28-4

Cutting through conditioning

Every time you try to stare into the face of an arising emotion, you confirm yourself in the practice of cutting through conditioning.  Even wanting to start is a success.  If you begin to practice you will experience a difference in your life.  The ultimate goal is always both very close and very distant; and when one day you come to realise that the path is the goal, the concepts of failure and success will no longer have any meaning.

p242, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

Every experience

The khandros and pawos are our environment: the earth, water, fire, air, and space which manifest as the conditions in which we find ourselves.  When we realise that the entire phenomenal world is the dance of the khandros and pawos – every experience becomes a teaching.  Every experience becomes the possibility for liberation. 

 p99, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, 978-1-898185-06-2 

Perception

No-one else is responsible for how we perceive the world.  We accept and reject society’s influences and the influences of our parents and friends on our own terms.  We fabricate our own perception, and unless we discontinue the process and de-structure our perception, we’ll merely continue to be repressed by our personal totalitarian regime.  The responses we make to our environment will remain the same and we will attract the kind of circumstances which match our perception.

p51, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, ISBN 978-1-898185-06-2