Quotes from Chogyam Trungpa

So vipashyana experience and practice is absolutely necessary for a person who follows the Buddhist path and really wants to understand the dharma.

You have to meet yourself, to know who you are and what you are. Without vipashyana experience, you don't have any idea of who you are, what you are, how you are, or why you are, at all!

As a student who has no idea of dharma and no mind training, you decide to commit to the path and to train yourself. As you train your mind, you begin to see all kinds of things. What you see is not so much the inspiration of a glimpse of enlightenment, or buddha nature. Instead, the first thing you see is what is wrong with samsara.

The basic act of surrender does not involve the worship of an external power. Rather it means working together with inspiration, so that one becomes an open vessel into which knowledge can be poured.

You might as well come back to the breath. It is more joyful, more wholesome, and you don't have to be startled by anything.

Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious and very generous. When a person develops real compassion, he is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself because compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without 'for me' and without 'for them.' It is filled with joy, spontaneously existing joy, and constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness.

When you experience your wisdom and the power of things as the are, together, as one, then you have access to tremendous vision and power in the world. you find that you are inherently connected to your own being. That is discovering magic.

The whole idea is that these yidams must not be regarded as external gods who will save you, but they are expressions of your true nature. You identify yourself with the attributes and colors of particular yidams and feel the sound that comes from the mantra so that finally you begin to realize that your true nature is invincible. You become completely one with the yidam.

starting point, the nature of ego.

When you begin to enjoy the discipline of warriorship, when it begins to feel natural, even though it may still feel very imperfect, that is the time to let go.

When you have softness and precision at the same time, the lotus of awakened heart is blossoming within you. The lotus always blooms in the mud. You are willing to give birth to this beautiful lotus flower in the muddy waters of your life. For the first time, you realize that you are a candidate to be a wakeful person.

There is a very dangerous tendency to lean on one another as we tread the path. If a group of people leans one upon the other, then if one should happen to fall down, everyone falls down. So we do not lean on anyone else. We just walk with each other, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

The Heart Sutra ends with "the great spell" or mantra. It says in the Tibetan version: "Therefore the mantra of transcendent knowledge, the mantra of deep insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequalled mantra, the mantra which calms all suffering, should be known as truth, for there is no deception." The potency of this mantra comes not from some imagined mystical or magical power of the words but from their meaning. It

Aloneness seems to be the heart of discipline [...] You cannot develop yourself properly unless you give up your need for companionship. Once you give up your search for companionship, you can make friends with your loneliness. At that point, you become a genuine practitioner.

the yidam is the expression of one's own basic nature, visualized as a divine form in order to relate with it and express its full potentiality.

Sacred outlook is not only about thinking everything is good; it is the absence of imprisonment. You begin to experience freedom that is intrinsically good, almost unconditionally free. So the vajra world you are entering is basically good, unconditionally free, fundamentally glorious and splendid.

However, the desire to be enlightened can be a problem. It is when it is not all that important to you that you will attain enlightenment.

Altogether, the idea of meditation is not to create states of ecstasy or absorption, but to experience being.

The skandhas present a complete picture of ego. According to Buddhist psychology, the ego is simply a collection of skandhas or heaps—but actually there is no such thing as ego. It is a brilliant work of art, a product of the intellect, which says, "Let's give all this a name. Let's call it 'I.

At first, the mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then, the mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams. But in the end, mountains are mountains again and streams are streams again.

The basis for the practice of meditation is appreciation. Every breath we take is a gift, naturally pure and good. We appreciate every pebble in the riverbed, every apple on the tree. Ordinary activities are in themselves powerful and worth appreciating.

AT THIS POINT we may have come to the conclusion that we should drop the whole game of spiritual materialism; that is, we should give up trying to defend and improve ourselves. We may have glimpsed that our struggle is futile and may wish to surrender, to completely abandon our efforts to defend ourselves. But how many of us could actually do this? It is not as simple and easy as we might think. To what degree could we really let go and be open? At what point would we become defensive?

such understanding might be extremely boring. Also, such understanding might include seeing some things you don't want to see.

and your sense of personal authenticity and power should be resolved into virtue.