Chogyam Trungpa Quotes
-
Becoming "awake" involves seeing our confusion more clearly.
-
Elegance means appreciating things as they are. There is a sense of delight and of fearlessness. You are not fearful of dark corners.
-
Meditation should not be regarded as a learning process. It should be regarded as an experiencing process. You should not try to learn from meditation but try to feel it. Meditation is an act of nonduality. The technique you are using should not be separate from you; it is you, you are the technique. Meditator and meditation are one. There is no relationship involved.
-
Begin to build up confidence and joy in your own richness. That richness is the essence of generosity. It is the essence of resourcefulness ; that you can deal with whatever is available around you and not feel poverty stricken.
-
Generosity is self-existing openness, complete openness. You are no longer subject to cultivating your own scheme or project. And the best way to open yourself up is to make friends with yourself and with others.
-
The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.
-
You don't know how to take off your suit of armor. You have no idea how to conduct yourself without the reference point of your own security... You can expose your wounds and flesh, your sore points. You can be completely raw and exposed.
-
...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
-
The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought.
-
The Shambhala teachings are founded on the premise that there is basic human wisdom that can help to solve the world's problems. This wisdom does not belong to any one culture or religion, nor does it come only from the West or the East. Rather it is a tradition of human warrior-ship that has existed in many cultures at many times throughout history.
-
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
-
Faith is the readiness to reveal whatever is concealed. You don't have to conceal doubts by putting on patches of self-confirmation. The readiness to be exposed seems to make the difference between ego's approach to spirituality and an enlightened one.
-
The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death.
-
Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit.
-
It's no use trying to be different than you are.
-
The simplicity of meditation means just experiencing the ape instinct of ego.
-
When we clean up after ourselves, we have nothing to blame. When we begin to live our lives in that way, cleaning up after ourselves, what is left is further vision and further openness, which leads to cleaning up the rest of the world.
-
In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.
-
Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.
-
There is something suspect about our inability to enjoy anything.
-
Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.
-
Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.
-
We must continue to be open in the face of great opposition. No one is encouraging us to be open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.
-
As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.