Quotes by Chogyam Trungpa

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, 'field of power'... The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

For the accomplished warrior, belief is not a form of strategy, nor is it borrowing the stories of previous warriors from books and stories. Trying to theorize and borrow ideas doesn’t seem to help. The notion of belief, or view, here is based on complete simplicity. Your view is not affected by liberalism or conservatism, nihilism or eternalism, at all. Your view is straightforward and simple; it is almost a cosmic domestic view. It is the notion of complete simplicity. When you meet a person, you don’t have to develop a whole style of how to view that person according to either the historic or present situation, the sociological context, his religious connections, or whatever it may be. You don’t have to go through all that. You can have a direct relationship, which is very simple, direct, and straightforward—extremely straightforward.

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

Shared karmic situations fall into two subcategories: national and individual karma. An example of national karma is that you may be born in a particular country where you always have to relate with 7-Elevens, take-out pizza, and badly made cars. You end up in certain environments or worlds, but you cannot totally blame that on yourself. The whole country is made up that way.

The second subcategory is individual karma within national karma. For example, if the sewage system in your neighborhood is not good, that karma is particularly and personally yours, in a sense, because the pipes keep breaking and costing you a lot of money and effort. Another example is winding up with a bad teacher who gets grumpy because he is poorly paid by the school system. On one hand, that situation is not your fault; but on the other hand, you did end up in that particular school. You have a television network, but you have your own personal TV with which to tune in, and you also choose your own particular station. It’s very simple. Environmental and individual karma complement each other; they feed each other.

The basics teachings of Buddha are about understanding what we are, who we are, why we are. When we begin to realize what we are, who we are, why we are, then we begin to realize what we are not, who we are not, why we are not. We begin to realize that we don’t have basic, substantial, solid, fundamental ground that we can exert anymore. We begin to realize that our ideas of security and our concept of freedom have been purely phantom experiences.

The essence of compassion is to copy how you relate with your child (in your relationships with others). The problem is how much you want to be the head of the family or the ringleader of your friends. You know, if that ambition is not there, but you have a genuine willingness to share, that is precisely the concept of sangha, or the Buddhist community, in traditional terms. You are willing to be friends with everybody, but at the same time you are not particularly taking credit. You don’t make people depend on you. Everybody can stand on his or her own feet. The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.

When there is daring, you dare to do something: you put forth your vision fearlessly. People have doubts about big vision because they don’t have a sense of gentleness in themselves first. So gentleness brings daring and a sense of fearlessness. Daring is appreciation of letting go in the fundamental sense. First you develop gentleness toward yourself; then you begin to develop daring, which is connected with how to express your gentleness to the world outside, how to proclaim your sanity. Your are not going crazy because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, which is the symbol of expansive vision in the Shambhala world. Rather, because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, you are very daring and at the same time very gentle and soft. The softer you become, the greater the message to the world becomes.

When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us.

When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home.

In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic.

So the first impulse that draws us away from the darkness of the cocoon towards the light is a longing for ventilation. As soon as we begin to sense of the possibility of fresh air, we realize that our arms and legs are being restricted. We want to stretch out and walk, dance, even jump. We realize that there is an alternative to our cocoon: we discover that we could be free from that trap. With that longing for fresh air, for a breeze of delight, we open our eyes. To our surprise, we begin to see the light, even though it may be hazy at first. The tearing of the cocoon takes place at that point.

Then, we realize that the degraded cocoon we have been hiding in is revolting, and we want to turn up the lights as far as we can. In fact, we are not turning up the lights, but we are simply opening our eyes wider. We catch a certain kind of fever.

But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us.

We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can't do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.

A saint inthe Buddhist context...is someone who provides an example
of the fact that completely ordinary, confused human beings can wake themselves up; they can put themselves together and wake themselves up through an accident of like of one kind or another.
The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery and the hcaos that are part of life, begins to wake them, shake them.
Having been shaken, they begin to question: "Who am I? What am I? What is happening" Then they go further and realize that there is something in them that is asking these questions, something that is, in fact, intellingent and not exactly confused.