If you have confidence in yourself and you develop some way of overcoming ego, then true compassion can be radiated to others. So the main point in working with people is to appreciate and manifest simplicity rather than trying to create new theories or categories of behavior. The more you appreciate simplicity, the more profound your understanding becomes. Simplicity begins to make much more sense than speculation.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
From "Becoming a Full Human Being" in The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology, pages 142 to 143
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Awareness does not mean beware, be careful, ward off danger, you might step into a puddle, so beware. That is not the kind of awareness we are talking about. We are talking about unconditional presence which is not expected to be there all the time. In fact, in order to be completely aware, you have to disown the experience of awareness. It cannot be regarded as yours—it is just there and you do not try to hold it. Then, somehow, a general clarity takes place. So awareness is a glimpse rather than a continuous state. If you hold onto awareness, it becomes self-consciousness rather than awareness. Awareness has to be unmanufactured; it has to be a natural state.

Chögyam Trungpa

From "From a Workshop on Psychotherapy," in The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology, page 179. .

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Self-Truth

If you have any doubt about whether you're doing the meditation practice right or wrong, it doesn't matter all that much. The main point is to have honesty within yourself. Just do what you think is best. That is called self-truth. If truth is understood by oneself, then you cannot be persecuted at all, karmically or any other way. You're doing your best, so what can go wrong? Cheer up and have a good time.

Chögyam Trungpa

From "A Dot in the Open Sky," in Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, page 23

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Ocean of Dharma

Quotes at random

Meditation as a Process of Evolution

When we talk about stages on the path, in relationship to our meditation practice, we have a problem with the terminology. We tend to think of a staircase: You take the first step, and then you take the next step and the step after that. We think meditation practice is like being in an elevator. As things become defined or clarified on the path, we go up in the elevator, and the numbers of each floor appear as we rise from one stage to the next. The problem is that meditation is not like progressing through stage after stage after stage. Rather, meditation is more like the process of growing up and ageing. Although you may celebrate your birthday on a particular day, that doesn't mean that, when you blow your candle out at your party, you suddenly go from being two years old to being three. In growing up, there is a process of evolution, a process of development. That is precisely the issue as far as meditation practice is concerned. Meditation is not based on stages, but it is a process that takes place in you. Such a process takes place in accordance with your life situation.

Trungpa Rinpoche

From "The 4th Moment," in The Shambhala Sun, March 2006, Volume Fourteen, Number 4, page 43.

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Transcendental Common Sense

In dealing with a situation, the choice is there already....The way to work with that, in making that choice, is not to go according to your sense of comfort but go according to straightforwardness. If there are two choices, one is ahead of you, right in front of you, and the other choice is slightly off-center. There may be ten or twelve hundred choices, but there is one choice waiting for you on the road. The rest of them are waiting on the side, as sidetracks. It seems that the journey straight ahead is scarier, more frightening. Therefore the other choices waiting on the side become more attractive, like restaurants and drive-in movies on the side of the road. The choice has to be straightforward, based on common sense, basic sanity. Actually it is transcendental common sense.

Trungpa Rinpoche
From "Auspicious Coincidence," in Glimpses of Abhidharma, page 101.
Photo, CEBB Caminho do Meio, Viamão jul/2009.

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Don't Freeze Windhorse into Ice

You should appreciate yourself, respect yourself, and let go of doubt and embarrassment so that you can proclaim goodness and basic sanity for the benefit of others. The self-existing energy that comes from letting go is called windhorse in the Shambhala teachings. Wind is the energy of basic goodness, strong, exuberant, and brilliant. At the same time, basic goodness can be ridden, or employed in your life, which is the principle of the horse. When you contact the energy of windhorse, you can naturally let go of worrying about your own state of mind and you begin to think of others. If you are unable to let go of your selfishness, you might freeze windhorse into ice.

Trungpa Rinpoche
From Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior Book and Card Set.
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An Immaculate Microscope of Mind

The sitting practice of meditation allows a sense of solidness and a sense of slowness and the possibility of watching one's mind operating all the time. Out of that, a sense of expansion slowly begins to develop and, at the same time, the awareness that you have been missing a lot of things in your life. You have been too busy to look for them or see them or appreciate them. So as you begin to meditate, you become more perceptive. Your mind becomes clearer and clearer, like an immaculate microscope lens.

From "One Stroke" in Dharma Art, pages 98 to 99.
Trungpa Rinpoche
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Image, Santiniketan Feb 2007

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SOMEBODY BECAME BUDDHA

It's very moving to know that somebody in the past became Buddha. Twenty-five hundred years ago a guy called Siddhartha became Buddha. He actually did those things and made an enormous impact and impression on people—so enormous that we still continue to follow his way and share his ideas. It's very powerful that somebody actually achieved enlightenment and went so far as to proclaim it, and to teach, and to share his life of eighty years with his students. He spoke; he taught; and he showed us how to behave, how to handle ourselves with other people. It's an extremely powerful experience. Enlightenment is no longer a myth or concept, but something that actually did take place. It did happen—I think that is the basis of our conviction.
Trungpa Rinpoche
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I encourage people not to express their anger, not to let it out. Instead, I have people try to understand why they get angry, what causes it and how it arises. When you realize these things, instead of manifesting externally, your anger digests itself. In the West, some people believe that you get rid of your anger by expressing it, that you finish it by letting it out. Actually, in this case what happens is that you leave an imprint in your mind to get angry again.
Lama Thubten Yeshe / Osel Hita (photo)
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Genuine Inspiration and Buddha Mind

Genuine inspiration is not particularly dramatic. It's very ordinary. It comes from settling down in your environment and accepting situations as natural. Out of that you begin to realize that you can dance with them. So inspiration comes from acceptance rather than from having a sudden flash of a good gimmick coming up in your mind....Inspiration has two parts: openness and clear vision, or in Sanskrit, shunyata and prajna. Both are based on the notion of original mind, traditionally known as buddha mind, which is blank, nonterritorial, noncompetitive, and open.

From "One Stroke" in Dharma Art, page 100.
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Babysitting Your Boredom

When people say they are bored, often they mean that they don't want to experience the sense of emptiness, which is also an expression of openness and vulnerability. So they pick up the newspaper or read anything else that's lying around the room—even reading what it says on a cereal box to keep themselves entertained. The search for entertainment to baby-sit your boredom soon becomes legitimized as laziness. Such laziness actually involves a lot of exertion. You have to constantly crank things up to occupy yourself, overcoming your boredom by indulging in laziness....The remedy to that approach is renunciation....For the warrior, renunciation is giving away, or not indulging in, pleasure for entertainment's sake. We are going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous babysitters in the phenomenal world.

From "Conquering Fear" in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume Eight, page 397.

Glimpse of Enlightenment

Fundamentally the idea of enlightenment—the notion or term "enlightenment" or "buddha" or "awakened one"—implies tremendous sharpness and precision along with a sense of spaciousness. We can experience this; it is not myth at all. We experience a glimpse of it, and the point is to start from that glimpse and gradually, as you become more familiar with that glimpse and the possibilities of re-igniting it, it happens naturally. Faith is realizing that there is some open space and sharpness in your everyday life. There occurs a flash, maybe a fraction of a second. These flashes happen constantly, all the time.

From "An Approach to Meditation," in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume Two, pages 451 to 452.
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Image, Matthieu Ricard.