“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.”

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"The bad news is you're falling through the air,

nothing to hang on to,

no parachute.

The good news is there's no ground."

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

“If you take steps to accomplish something, that action will have a result-either failure or success... Trust is knowing that there will be a message.  When you trust in those messages, the reflection of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir, of richness.  You feel that you are living in a rich world, one that never runs out of messages... Those messages are regarded neither as punishment nor as congratulations.  You trust, not in success, but in reality.”

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Going Beyond Fear

Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness.  If we look into our fear, if we look beneath the veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness.  Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time.  When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle.  Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear.  Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that you produce tears in your eyes.  You are about to produce rain or waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic at the same time.  That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.  You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way.  Discovering fearlessness comes from working the softness of the human heart.  

~ Chogyam Trungpa

Extracted from Elizabeth Lessers’s  Book - “Broken Open”

How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow – pg 37

Work with the Five Forces. The Five Forces are:

Be intense, be committed.

Familiarization - get used to doing and being what you want to do and to be.

Cultivate the white seeds, not the black ones.

Turn totally away from all your ego trips.

Dedicate all the merits of what you do for the benefit of others.

Practice these Five Forces and you are ready for death at any moment.

From TRAINING THE MIND by Chgyam Trungpa, 1993 by Diana Mukpo.

Extracted from http://www.theflow.org

The Preliminaries, Which Are A Basis for Dharma Practice

First, train the preliminaries.  In practicing daily life, you should maintain an awareness of (1) the preciousness of human life and the particular good fortune of life in an environment in which you can hear the teachings of buddhadharma; (2) the reality of death, that it comes suddenly and without warning; (3) the entrapment of karma-that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, only further entraps you in the chain of cause and effect; and (4) the intensity and inevitability of suffering for yourself and all sentient beings.  This is called “taking an attitude of the four reminders.”

With that attitude as a base, you should call upon your guru with devotion, inviting into your self the atmosphere of sanity inspired by his or her example, and vowing to cut the roots of further ignorance and suffering.  This ties in very closely with the notion of maître, or loving-kindness.  In the traditional analogy of one’s spiritual path, the only pure loving object seems to be somebody who can show you the path.  You could have a loving relationship with your parents, relatives, and so forth, but there are still problems with that:  your neurosis goes along with it.  A pure love affair can only take place with one’s teacher.  So that ideal sympathetic object is used as a starting point, a way of developing a relationship beyond your neurosis.  Particularly in the Mahayana, you relate to the teacher as someone who cheers you up from depression and brings you down from excitement, a kind of moderator principle.  The teacher is regarded as important form that point of view.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

From: Training The Mind and Cultivating Loveing Kindness

BEING A GRAIN OF SAND

The real experience, beyond the dream world, is the beauty and color and excitement of the real experience of now in everyday life. When we face things as they are, we give up the hope of something better. Depression and ignorance, the emotions, whatever we experience, are all real and contain tremendous truth. If we really want to experience the truth, we have to be where we are. It is just a matter of being a grain of sand.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

From “Self-Deception,” page 81 in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, the Shambhala Library Edition.

THE FLAME OF LOVE

Love (and passion altogether) can be based either on the central reference point of ego or on a more centerless approach that is beyond ego. There is a vast store of energy that is not ego’s energy at all. It is the energy of the primeval background, which permeates whatever is going on. This energy has a consuming quality, an ever-burning quality, like that of the sun. This vast power goes on and on and on, leaving no room to manipulate, leaving no room for confusion or ignorance or panic or doubt. Passion is a very powerful thing.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

From “The Flame of Love,” excerpted from pages 113 to 117 in Work, Sex, Money: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness.

THE MIRROR OF CRAZY WISDOM

In the scriptures, a crazy-wisdom person is described as “He who subdues whatever needs to be subdued and destroys whatever needs to be destroyed.” Whatever your neurosis demands, when you relate with a crazy-wisdom person, you get hit with that. Crazy-wisdom presents you with a mirror reflection. A mirror will not compromise with you. If you don’t like what you see, there’s no point in blaming the mirror.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Excerpted from “Fearlessness,” in CRAZY WISDOM, page 112.

THE LINEAGE OF CRAZY WISDOM

Can you imagine being hit by love and hate at the same time? In crazy wisdom, we are hit with compassion and wisdom at the same time, without a chance of analyzing them. There’s no time to think; there’s no time to work things out at all. It is THERE—but at the same time, it isn’t there. There is no textbook for becoming a crazy–wisdom person. It doesn’t hurt to read books, but unless you have some experience of crazy wisdom through contact with the crazy–wisdom lineage—with somebody who is crazy and wise at the same time—you won’t get much out of books alone.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Excerpted from “Let the Phenomena Play,” in CRAZY WISDOM, pages 58 to 59.

JUST DO IT

Underlying intelligence is always there. As long as we relate with our underlying primordial intelligence and as long as we push ourselves a little, by jumping into the middle of situations, then intelligence arises automatically. When you're in the middle of a situation, you automatically pick up on what is needed. It's not a question of how to do it—you just do it. And you find yourself doing it perfectly, even surprising yourself.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

From “The Myth of Happiness,” in WORK, SEX, MONEY: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness, page 33.

MONEY AS ENERGY

Money represents the energy principle; you can connect with that when you’re aware of how much you're spending. Every dollar you make or spend represents your energy of the moment. The way we deal with money connects with a basic characteristic of our state of mind. We should see money in terms of the expenditure of energy and how we are going to transmute that energy into a proper use.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

From “The Question of Money,” pages 156-157 in Work, Sex, Money: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness.

MOCKING EGO’S DECEPTION

Cutting through confusion is an easy matter if we know what to cut.  In tantric philosophy, it is said that the destruction of ego is the spontaneous action of enlightened energy. Here the Lion’s Roar is not a roar of victory, but a roar that mocks ego’s deception. There is no room for the further confirmation of concealing, for the Lion’s Roar is constant cutting through, constantly exposing of one deception after another.

From “Dharmas without Blame,” page 493 in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume Two.

"Making the journey... depends first of all on your personal realization of genuineness and basic goodness. Ultimately, giving up selfishness, or ego, is only possible if you have a living, human example — someone who has already done so, and therefore makes it possible for you to do the same."

-- Chogyam Trunpga Rinpoche

"Becoming "awake" involves seeing our confusion more clearly."

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

“There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.”

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

‎

"The greater the sanity we achieve, the more we find there are problems. As we become more sharp and more perceptive, therefore we begin to perceive specks of dust much more vividly. In such cases, please don’t panic. It’s the result of the sharpening of our prajna, our intellect. The more we tie up the loose ends, the more loose ends we find everywhere. That is something very natural, that we have to live with."

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

THE MASK BEGINS TO GIVE YOU UP

You don't relate directly to your life because you're wearing a suit of armor. Then you act to maintain the comfort inherent in the suit of armor, which makes you numb towards relating directly with actual experiences. The alternative is not exactly a question of taking off the armor. It is a question of seeing the possibility of nakedness, seeing that you can relate with things nakedly. That way, the padding you wear around your body becomes superfluous at some stage. It's not so much a question of giving up the mask; rather the mask begins to give you up because it has no function for you anymore.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

YOUR PRACTICE IS A STATEMENT, NOT A QUESTION

In the practice of meditation, questions arise on the basis of trying to secure your basic ground as ego. If there is no ego-oriented question, there are no other questions. Instead, your practice is a statement, somewhat. It is extremely direct and deliberate. You are actually doing something. You are getting into this process without making sure that what you’re doing is okay. Things are actually taking place, almost of their own accord, very simply and directly. That is meditation.

~ Chogyam Trungpa

The Teacher Tells Us The Truth

The elder tells us the facts and figures. He or she tells us that the world is not made out of honeycombs and oceans of maple syrup. The elder tells us that the world has its own unpleasant and touchy points. When you have been told that truth, you begin to appreciate it more. You begin to respect that truth. For the elder, such truth is old hat: he or she knows it already, having gone through it herself. Nevertheless, she doesn’t give out righteous messages. She simply says, “Look, it’s not as good as you think. It is going to be somewhat painful for you, getting into this world. You can’t help it—so you’d better work with it and accept the truth.” That is precisely how the Lord Buddha first proclaimed the dharma. His first teaching was the truth of suffering.

~ Chogyam Trungpa

We have five types of energizing factors, or five strengths, so that we can practice our bodhisattva discipline throughout our whole life: strong determination, familiarization, seed of virtue, reproach, and aspiration.

Number one is strong determination. Strong determination means not wasting your time. It is also making it a point that you and the practice are one. Practice is your way of strengthening yourself.

The second strength is known as familiarization. Because you have already developed strong determination, everything becomes a natural process. Even if you sometimes are mindless, even if you lose your concentration or your awareness, situations will remind you to go back to your practice.

Number three is known as the seed of virtue. You have tremendous yearning all the time, so you do not take a rest from your wakefulness. It means not taking a break from your practice, basically speaking, but continuing on—not being content with what you are doing and not taking a break. You do not feel that you have had enough of it or that you have to do something else instead.

Number four is reproach, reproaching your ego.  It is revulsion with samsara. Whenever any ego-centered thought occurs, you should think, “It is because of such clinging to ego that I wander in samsara and suffer endless pain. Since ego-clinging is the source of pain, if I try to maintain ego, there can be no happiness. Therefore, I must try to tame ego as much as I can.”

Number five is aspiration. The practitioner should end each session of meditation practice with the wish  to save all sentient beings. Because you have experienced joy and celebration in your practice, it does not feel like a burden to you. Therefore, you aspire further and further. You would like to attain enlightenment. You would like to free yourself from neurosis. You would also like to serve all “mother sentient beings” throughout all times, all situations, at any moment. You are willing to become a rock or a bridge or a highway. You are willing to serve any worthy cause that will help the rest of the world.

Trungpa, Chogyam (2010-10-05).  Excerpt from: Training the Mind and Cultivating LovingKindness (Kindle Locations 1574-1636). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

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 seemingly solid and cannot really absorb anything, it can only mimic. Thus ego tries to examine and imitate the practice of meditation and the meditative way of life. When we have learned all the tricks and answers of the spiritual game, we automatically try to imitate spirituality, since real involvement would require the complete elimination of ego, and actually the last thing we want to do is to give up the ego completely. However, we cannot experience that which we are trying to imitate; we can only find some area within the bounds of ego that seems to be the same thing. Ego translates everything in terms of its own state of health, its own inherent qualities. It feels a sense of great accomplishment and excitement at having been able to create such a pattern. At last it has created a tangible accomplishment, a confirmation of its own individuality.

If we become successful at maintaining our self-consciousness through spiritual techniques, then genuine spiritual development is highly unlikely. Our mental habits become so strong as to be hard to penetrate. We may even go so far as to achieve the totally demonic state of complete “egohood.”

“But how,” we might ask, “are we to conduct the examination? What method or tool are we to use?” The method that the Buddha discovered is meditation. He discovered that struggling to find answers did not work. It was only when there were gaps in his struggle that insights came to him. He began to realize that there was a sane, awake quality within him which manifested itself only in the absence of struggle. So the practice of meditation involves “letting be.”

Trungpa, Chogyam (2010-09-28). Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Kindle Locations 186-233). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

"Meditation involves seeing the transparency of concepts, so that labeling no longer serves as a way of solidifying our world and our image of self. Labeling becomes simply the act of discrimination."

Trungpa, Chogyam (2010-09-28). Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Kindle Locations 259-260). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.