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.
