Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty — climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful […]
Your mind is highly preoccupied with what you want, so you fail to see what is. Chögyam Trungpa
When a person sits and meditates, it is a special situation, a sacred act. In meditation, even the most impure, crude, or confused thoughts are regarded as sacred. You may fall asleep on your cushion or feel that you have not actually meditated at all. Even daydreams on the cushion are important. You should have […]
Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen, rather than what you are now seeing. Self-deception manifests in trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience. The opposite of self-deception is just working with the facts […]
You have to go beyond duality and you also have to go beyond nonduality at the same time. You have to return to duality: that is the final goal. It is like the ox-herding pictures: finally you return to the world, with a big belly and with the ox behind you. That picture, returning to […]
Working with conflict is precisely the idea of walking on the spiritual path. The path is a wild, winding mountain road with all kinds of curves; there are wild animals, attacks by bandits, all kinds of situations cropping up. As far as the occupation of our mind is concerned, the chaos of the path is […]
We need to find the link between our traditions and our present experience of life. Nowness, or the magic of the present moment, is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present. When you appreciate a painting or a piece of music or a work of literature, no matter when it was created, […]
Meditation is getting into the natural situation, the organic natural situation of what we are, directly, thoroughly, properly. In order to do this, we cannot just rent a helicopter and fly to the heart of the matter without any inconvenience. We do not have the money to buy such a fantastic machine. So what shall […]
There’s nothing wrong with negativity. Chögyam Trungpa
Supposing you feel an itch in your pocket, but you don’t have any chewing gum on that particular day. You should feel contented; you should feel relieved. “For heaven’s sake, I don’t have any chewing gum! That’s fine.” A chance to appreciate that simplicity has been presented to you. Ordinarily, people talk in terms of […]
We cannot avoid our lives. We have to face our lives, young or old, rich or poor. Whatever happens, we cannot save ourselves from our lives at all. We have to face the eventual truth — not even the eventual truth but the real truth of our lives. We are here; therefore, we have to […]
If we face ourselves properly, fully, then we find that something exists in us that is basically awake, as opposed to asleep. We find something intrinsically cheerful and fundamentally pride-worthy. That is to say, we don’t have to con ourselves. We discover genuine one-hundred-percent gold, not even twenty-four carat. We are fundamentally awake. You might […]
Things do exist as they are, but we tend to see our version of them as they are, rather than things as they really are. That makes everything that we see projections. But one doesn’t have to make a definite and absolute reassurance of that necessarily at all. You just go along with situations, go […]
One characteristic of a dharmic person, someone who practices meditation and the teachings of the Buddha, is to prevent too many activities, or you could say, reduce too many activities. According to tradition, that actually boils down to cutting nonfunctional talking, cutting the baby-sitter mentality, the entertainment mentality. You can get yourself into all kinds […]
Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss, or tranquillity, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes. Chögyam Trungpa
Before we discuss the technique of meditation, let us point out the merit and sanity and wakefulness you are going to get out of just simply being willing to sit like a piece of rock. It’s fantastically powerful. It overrides the atomic bomb. It’s extraordinarily powerful that we decide just to sit, not hang out […]
By developing gentleness toward ourselves, the irritation of being with oneself is taken away. When that kind of friendliness to oneself occurs, then one also develops friendliness toward the rest of the world. At that point, sadness, loneliness, and wretchedness begin to dissipate. We develop a sense of humor. We don’t get so pissed off […]
Familiarization is one of the five strengths that allow us to practice our bodhisattva discipline of helping others throughout our whole life. This process is analogous to falling in love. When somebody mentions your lover’s name, you feel both pain and pleasure. You feel turned on to that person’s name and to anything associated with […]
In Buddhist psychology, ego is seen as a kind of filter, a network through which energy is constantly being channeled and manipulated rather than being able to flow freely in unrestricted space. It is not a solid entity but a moment-to-moment process of birth, evolution, and death. Chögyam Trungpa
In the tantric tradition there are different approaches or styles of action, and everybody does not have to be uniform. Tantra does not have a one-track mind. There are different kinds of relationships with things, and you can identify yourself with all or one of these. You can take pride in what you are, what […]
