My training had introduced me to the spacious awareness of my natural mind. We compare this awareness to open skies and oceans — references meant to invoke immeasurable vastness, even though awareness is more immeasurable than skies and oceans combined. Once we learn to recognize the ever-present quality of awareness, to let go of the conditioned and contingent mind and recognize that we are this spacious awareness, then our thoughts and emotions manifest as waves or clouds inseparable from awareness. With recognition, we no longer get carried away by the stories that keep our minds spinning in repetitive cycles, or jumping around like a crazy monkey.

Mingyur Rinpoche

from the book In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

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Further quotes from the book In Love with the World:

• The source of what we like or do not like
• Reverse activity
• Accepting whatever happens
• Within each one of us
• Boundless reality
• Nothing endures but change
• Vast and intimate
• Great news
• It’s how we relate to emotions
• Change yourself
• Upholding the lineage
• Anywhere, anytime
• Stay with what is
• Meditative awareness
• Beyond habitual patterns
• Fundamentally pure and good
• Replace longing with love
• The masks that hide our true selves
• The chattering voice in our heads
• Only with recognition