The only reason we have to feel confident that we will reach the top of the stairs or that our airplane will take off and land safely at our destination is that we are enjoying the bliss of ignorance.
But this bliss doesn’t last long, for the bliss of ignorance is nothing more than constant overestimation that the odds of probability will work in our favor, and an underestimation of the obstacles.
Of course, causes and conditions do come together and things do happen as we anticipated, but we take this kind of success for granted. We use it as proof that it should not be otherwise, that our assumptions are well-founded. But such assumptions are just food for misunderstanding.
Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
from the book What Makes You Not a Buddhist
Read a random quote or see all quotes by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.
Further quotes from the book What Makes You Not a Buddhist:
- The impossible is possible
- The real source of fear is not knowing
- Happily ever after
- Like moths to the flame
- Shielding ourselves and others from the truth
- Fearlessness
- Driven by ambitions
- Understanding the nature of enlightenment
- Corrosion begins as soon as creation begins
- Nonviolence
- The primordial absence of defilements
- Products and parts
- Emptiness
- Where will they scatter my ashes
- The real enemy
- What is in the mind of a Buddhist
- Acts of Generosity
- Today is the death of yesterday
- Being a Buddhist
- Primordial purity