Wednesday, 1 November 2017

Ocean of Dharma by Chӧgyam Rinpoche Trungpa




All quotes from Chogyam's book



Sacredness is like putting on a fur coat in the biting cold of winter.  Sacredness fulfills its purposes, and it also brings cheerfulness and goodness into the system so that we don’t pollute the world.



We should regard everything that we do as very important – not a big deal, but very important.





You can’t act on your desires alone.  you have to contemplate the details of what needs to be removed and what needs to be cultivated.




The more we seek security, the more insecurity that creates.



Dharma literally means “truth” or “norm”.  It is a particular way of thinking, a way of viewing the world, which is not a concept but experience.



We must drop all reference points, all concepts of what is or what should be.  Then it is possible to experience the uniqueness and vividness of phenomena directly.



Regularity in life is not the point; experience is the point.



In boredom you have no choice but to relate directly to what is happening to you.





Elegance means appreciating things as they are.





My ego is bothering me.  I feel very self-conscious about having to be me.  I feel that I have a tremendous burden in me, and I wonder what the best way to get rid of it is.  Yet all these expressions of restlessness that keep coming out of us are the expression of Buddha nature: the experience of our unborn, unobstructed, and nondwelling nature.



The idea of Buddha mind is not purely a concept or a theoretical, metaphysical idea.  It is something extremely real that we can experience ourselves.  In fact, it is the ego that feels that we have an ego.  It is ego that tells us.



The mind’s cunning tricks are endless; therefore one should develop one’s one way of freeing oneself from frivolousness.  Meditation provides an immediate opportunity to bring one’s neuroses to the surface, examine them, work with them, and recognize them as materials of the path rather than villains.



We are referring to a basic attitude of trust in the nonexistence of our being.  In the tantric notion of indestructability, there is no ground, no basic premise, and no particular philosophy except for one’s own experience, which is extremely powerful and dynamic.  It is a question of being rather than figuring out what to be or how to be.



We must be willing to be completely ordinary people.



We are attracted to our cocoons, our selfishness.



Enlightenment is the complete absence of any kind of promises.



The demand for relief or sanity that is contained in confusion is, in fact, the beginning point of Buddhism.



Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.



Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.



You can actually survive beautifully by doing nothing.



Being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms.



Whenever you need reassurance, that means you have a fixed idea of what ought to be.



Meditation is not purely sitting alone in a particular posture attending to simple processes, but it is also an openness to the environment in which these processes take place.  The environment becomes a reminder to us, continually giving us messages, teachings, insights.



What we do with the present situation as it relates to the future is completely up to us. It is an open situation.



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.




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.



Seeing the sacred world is witnessing the greater vision, which is there all the time.



Becoming a warrior means that we can look directly at ourselves, see the nature of the cowardly mind, and step out of it.  We can trade the small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision.



True fearlessness is not the reduction of fear, but going beyond fear.



Chaos is the inspiration, confusion is the inspiration.



Enlightenment possibilities are all over the place.



Through the practice of meditation, we begin to find that within ourselves there is no fundamental complaint about anything or anyone at all.