Quotes from Chogyam Trungpa

Gone, gone, gone beyond, completely exposed, awake, so be it.

The basic discipline of mind training or lojong is a sevenfold cleaning or processing of one's mind.

If you give a gift with something behind it, with an ulterior motive that you feel good about, then you are still planting habitual patterns in the back of your mind.

Refusing to Give Up The essence of human bravery is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with. That is why the Shambhala vision exists. It is a centuries-old idea: by serving the world we can save it.

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.

A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves.

Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

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."

No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.

There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: "Knowledge must be burned, hammered, and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament." So when you receive spiritual instruction from the hands of another, you do not take it uncritically, but you burn it, you hammer it, you beat it, until the bright, dignified color of gold appears. Then you craft it into an ornament, whatever design you like, and you put it on.

As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.

Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to be a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.

If there is some profound method that offers a quick way, we would rather follow that than undertake arduous journeys and difficult practices. But some manual work and physical effort is necessary.

The courage to work with ourselves comes as basic trust in ourselves, as a sort of fundamental optimism.

To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.

Just fully being skillful involves total lack of inhibition. We are not afraid to be. We are not afraid to live. We must accept ourselves as being warriors. If we acknowledge ourselves as warriors, then there is a way in, because a warrior dares to be, like a tiger in the jungle.

We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do. Disappointment is a a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious, and direct. If we can open, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are irrelevant compared with the reality of the situations we are facing.

Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.

You begin to understand that warriorship is a path or a thread that runs through your entire life. It is not just a technique that you apply when you are unhappy or depressed. Warriorship is a continual journey. To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life. That is the warrior's discipline.

When you eat with awareness, you find that there is more space, more beauty. You begin to watch yourself, to see yourself, and you notice how clumsy you are or how accurate you are…When you practice awareness, everything becomes majestic and good. You begin to see that you have been leading a different kind of life in the past. You had the essence of mindfulness already, but you hadn't discovered it.

When we see a bright color, we are witnessing our own inherent goodness. When we hear a beautiful sound, we are hearing our own basic goodness.