Ego is able to convert everything to its own use, even spirituality. For example, if you have learned of a particularly beneficial meditation technique of spiritual practice, then ego’s attitude is, first to regard it as an object of fascination and, second to examine it. Finally, since ego is seeming solid and cannot really absorb […]
When you are trying to help someone, you have to have humor, self-existing humor, and you have to hold the moth in your hand, but not let it go into the flame. That’s what helping others means. Ladies and gentlemen, we have so much responsibility. A long time ago, people helped one another in this […]
As a dharmic person, a practitioner, you also have awareness of the teacher and of other realized people whom you are studying with. The idea is to be without shyness and to be able to relate with your teacher, who in the hinayana tradition is an elder. You relate to the teacher as somebody who […]
The spiritual journey is not a very easy one, absolutely not easy at all. It demands a lot from us. And we may not find what we want, absolutely not. Our questions may not be answered one by one. But something else is taking place. Maybe the question mark itself is beginning to rot, become […]
Who killed my only father? Who killed my only mother? Who caused the rain of blood? Who gathered the black clouds of the thunderbolts? Who caused the earthquake that shook the whole world? I asked these questions in the middle of a crowd But no one was able to answer. So I asked a second […]
You can almost fall in love with the universe, with the general situation. At that point, there is no reference point to anyone or anything. It is just being in love, just appreciating your world. You don’t have to crank anything up. The main point is developing some kind of appetite for the universe, that […]
Meditation is a way of permitting hang-ups of mind to churn themselves up. If we try to focus on our neurosis as a practice, that is an escape; and if we try to suppress it, that is also an escape. So the process is to relate with the neurosis as it is, in its true […]
One of the problems we have is feeling poverty-stricken. To overcome that, we have to be direct, and we have to trust ourselves. We are not poverty-stricken. If we are capable of smiling, we have goodness in us, always. Whether young or old, very old or very young, still, there are always possibilities of a […]
You don’t need to rely on anybody else’s goodness. You have a resource already, which is your own goodness. Your are already good, and you can actually transmit that goodness to others. In buddhism, we call this buddha-nature. Examine yourself and your state of being. You will find that you have the heart of goodness […]
We try to avoid our individuality, but that is a big problem. Individuality sometimes comes out of ego, like wanting to be an emperor, a king, or a millionaire. But individuality can also come from personal inspiration. It depends on the level of one’s journey, on how far you have been able to shed your […]
When we fly in an airplane above the clouds, we realize that the sun is always shining even when it is cloudy and rainy below. In the same way, when we cease to hold on to our identity, our ego, we begin to see that the nonexistence of ego is a powerful, real, and indestructible […]
The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment. Treading the spiritual path is painful. It is a constant unmasking, peeling off of layer after layer of masks. It involves […]
How on earth, how in the name of heaven and earth can we actually become decent human beings without trying to entertain ourselves from here to the next corner?… It boils down to taking interest in what you see. I have a very frustrated feeling, actually, that when I talk about appreciating red, white, blue, […]
Whether you care to communicate with it or not, the magical strength and wisdom of reality are always there….By relaxing the mind, you can reconnect with that primordial, original ground, which is completely pure and simple. Out of that, through the medium of your perceptions, you can discover magic, (which in the Shambhala tradition is […]
At this point, we are in a powerful spot: being in the present, we can reshape the whole future. Therefore, shouldn’t we be more careful, shouldn’t we be more awake in what we are doing this very moment? Chögyam Trungpa
Enlightenment is referred to as en-lighten-ment. It is further luminosity; it illuminates life. Up to this point, we had a very bad lighting system; but now we are getting a better lighting system, so we begin to see every curve of skin, every inch of our world, properly. We might get irritated by such sharpness […]
The idea of buddha mind is not purely a concept or a theoretical, metaphysical idea. It is something extremely real that we can experience ourselves. In fact, it is the ego that feels that we have an ego. It is ego that tells us, “My ego is bothering me. I feel very self-conscious about having […]
Any perception can connect us to reality, properly and fully. What we see doesn’t have to be pretty, particulary; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some prinicple of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything. Chögyam Trungpa
Our path is sometimes rough and sometimes smooth; nonetheless, life is a constant journey. Whether we sleep, eat, dress, study, meditate, attend class—whatever we do is regarded as our journey, our path. That path consists of opening oneself to the road, opening oneself to the steps we are about to take. Chögyam Trungpa
Boredom is part of the discipline of meditation practice. This type of boredom is cool boredom, refreshing boredom. Boredom is necessary and you have to work with it. It is constantly very sane and solid, and very boring at the same time. But it’s refreshing boredom. The discipline then becomes part of one’s daily expression […]
