Andrew Holecek > Quotes

“Psychopathology has always been considered — in one sense or another — as resulting from a distorted view of reality. But what one considers to be psychopathology therefore must depend upon what one considers to be reality.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“As the mind relaxes its vicelike grip on thoughts and things, which happens with meditation, it doesn’t get so tired. When we sleep, we finally get to relax and rest. But if we’re relaxed and rested all the time, which is the mind of a buddha, there’s no need to relax the mind at night.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“we don’t see things the way they are; we see things the way we are.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming

“The simplicity of mindfulness belies its profundity. It is the gateway to immortality. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.”
― Andrew Holecek, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

“We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do, we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us from discovering our real nature. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people. When they hear the words egoless or emptiness they think that experiencing those states will be like being thrown out the door of a spaceship to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But”
― Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming

“Fear is the minion of ignorance — where you find ignorance, you will find fear.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“We see the world the way we do — as solid, lasting, and independent — because we’ve been primed to do so by our parents, teachers, and virtually everyone alive. It’s this continued reinforcement that continues into the dream state and primes us to see the dream as solid, lasting, and independent, and therefore non-lucid.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“Unrecognized thought is the daytime equivalent of falling asleep. Each discursive thought is a mini-daydream. Drifting off into mindless thinking is how we end up sleepwalking through life—and therefore death.”
― Andrew Holecek, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

“For the ego, ignorance really is bliss.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“Lakar Rinpoche writes:”
― Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming

“Remember that thoughts are not the issue. Thoughts are the innocent play of the mind. If left alone, they naturally dissolve, or self-liberate, back into the clear-light mind from which they arose. But, of course, we rarely leave them alone. That’s the problem. We pour the gasoline of attention onto these tiny sparks of mind, and they ignite into the worries, dramas, ruminations, anxieties, expectations, hopes, and fears that comprise the entirety of our lives — all born from taking our thoughts to be solid and real — just like we take our non-lucid dreams to be solid and real.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“Just like we don't take responsibility for how we actualize our confusion and its resulting view of duality, we don't take responsibility for actualizing wisdom and its view of nonduality.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening Through Lucid Dreaming

“In the Buddhist view, sleep is a product of ignorance. Indeed, “sleep” is another code word for ignorance. Buddhas, as “the awakened ones” or “the ones who know,” literally don’t sleep.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“•​From the Entrance to the Middle Way: “There are two ways of seeing every thing / The perfect way and the false way / So each and every thing that can ever be found / Holds two natures within / And what does perfect seeing see? / It sees the suchness of all things / And false seeing sees the relative truth / This is what the perfect Buddha said.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“[T]he contraction of self-referencing can be thought of as gravitational pull. Like the planets in our solar system, everything in our lives orbits a narrative center of gravity--*me*. As long as we have an ego, everything is self-centered. . . . The gravitational metaphor takes on more weight when the sun is replaced by a black hole, and orbital processes are replaced be phenomena that just suck. . . . [E]verything gets sucked in to feed one massive me, like a supermassive black hole.”
― Andrew Holecek, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

“•​Two verses on the Samadhi of Illusion, from the Jewel Ornament of Liberation. First verse: “Knowing the five skandhas are like an illusion / Don’t separate the illusion from the skandhas / Free of thinking that anything is real / This is perfect wisdom’s conduct at its best!”6 Second verse: “All the images conjured up by a magician / The horses, elephants, and chariots in his illusions / Whatever may appear there, know that none of it is real / And it’s just like that with everything there is!”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“•​From the Knowledge Fundamental to the Middle Way: “Like a dream, like an illusion / Like a city of gandharvas / That’s how birth and that’s how living / That’s how dying are taught to be.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“•​From the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: “Then, wanderers, these dream-like beings, what are they? / If analyzed, they’re like a banana tree / One cannot make definite distinctions / Between transcending misery and not.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“How can you become free if you don't even know you're trapped?”
― Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming

“what it means to have a nondual relationship to unwanted experiences:”
― Andrew Holecek, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

“If you’re scientifically oriented, you can deconstruct the power of words by remembering the physics of sound. Words are just longitudinal (compression and rarefaction) waves that strike your ear, that cause your eardrum to vibrate, that transmit electro-chemical impulses to the auditory parts of your brain, that are mixed with signals from other parts of your brain, that you impute meaning upon. They’re just vibrations. “Good” or “bad” are not intrinsic to longitudinal waves but are qualities we impose upon them.”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“when the tradition asserts that buddhas don’t sleep, it doesn’t mean they stay up all night doing physical activity. It means that ignorance has been completely removed, and they remain forever awake, or lucid,”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“Self-consciousness . . . rips us away from the natural state of flow, and we become children of the damned. We choke the life-force energy and fall into self-referential "think-holes" that are deeper and darker than any black hole.”
― Andrew Holecek, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

“becoming familiar with (the very definition of meditation)”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“[T]o end contraction is to transc*end* the ego, which is why so much of the spiritual path is about letting go. The challenge we experience in attempting to let go reveals how much we love to grasp.”
― Andrew Holecek, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

“The relative unconscious mind is”
― Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep

“If you die before you die, then when you die you will not die.” If you can “die,” or let go of your ego now, then when you physically die you will not die—because you’re already “dead.”
― Andrew Holecek, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

“in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.2”
― Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming