Moonlight Drive

“I don’t regret anything. Everything happens for a reason-it’s part of the healing process. Life is a healing process.”

“The reality is, we can change. We can change ourselves. We can change our minds. We can change our hearts. And therefore the universe changes.”

“I can’t remember that I was ever looking for anything. I was waiting for something to touch me. It’s like, I’ll be open to it, and see if it moves me. There has to be a "falling in love" moment.”

“Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.”

— Richard Gere

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“When I was in my late twenties, I went to Asia for the first time. My first film was at the Cannes Film Festival, and I took the opportunity after Cannes to go to India and Nepal. That was the first time I met Tibetans, in a refugee camp outside of Pokhara in Nepal. I was kind of floored by the experience. I felt it was otherworldly, but really it’s not otherworldly. It’s the world. We’re the ones who are otherworldly. We live in a hallucinated view of the world, while I saw that these people seem to be completely centered in the world that they inhabit. It was a different feeling than around my Japanese Zen teachers and fellow students, as incredibly profound to me as Zen was. Something else was going on there.

A few years later, I had a strong impulse to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I didn’t know anything about the political situation—I thought you could just go to Tibet and if you were really lucky, you got to meet the Dalai Lama. But my friend John Avedon, who had just finished his book In Exile from the Land of Snows, said, look, if you want to meet the Dalai Lama, he’s not in Tibet anymore. He’s in India.

So I went to Dharamsala. This was in the early eighties. I had met the great Nyingma teacher Dudjom Rinpoche in New York before that, and was profoundly moved by him. I had some letters of introduction, and eventually, after a couple of weeks during the monsoon in Dharamsala, I got to see His Holiness.

I saw him for maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes, but it felt simultaneously like it was one minute and ten hours, because it was so, so dense. I was struck by the utter normalcy of His Holiness, and how quickly he was able to get past my defenses and my romanticism. I pretty much changed my life at that point. I left Dharamsala and went right on a long trek through Ladakh and Zanskar. And I’ve been kind of on a trek ever since.”

Richard Gere on Tibet’s Gift of Love https://www.lionsroar.com/richard-gere-on-tibets-gift-of-love/