“The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”
“There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable.”
“A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet.”
“When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I could only get a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.””
“Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”
“The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether has to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves; we’re here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later. People often say to me, “I wanted to come and have an interview with you, I wanted to write you a letter, I wanted to call you on the phone, but I wanted to wait until I was more together.” And I think, “Well, if you’re anything like me, you could wait forever!””
“One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.”
“Inquisitiveness or curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open — actually being able to let go and open.”
“It’s very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human.”
“The emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need. It is just as if we had looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it all right here.”
“Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.”
“Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.”
“The ground of loving-kindess is this sense of satisfaction with who we are and what we have. The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything. We know we’re never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life — they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package.”
“I’m always suspicious of the ones who say everything’s going well. If you think that things are going well, then it’s usually some kind of arrogance.”
“When you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!”
“You might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or you might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you’re the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.”
“The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It’s who we are right now, and that’s what we can make friends with and celebrate.”
“The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.”
“So whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression — whatever it might be — the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.”
“How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.”
“If you want to attain enlightenment, you have to do it now. If you’re arrogant and stubborn, it may take someone running after you with a stick. But the more you open your heart, the more you make friends with your body, speech, mind, and the world that’s inside of your circle — your domestic situation, the people you live with, the house you find yourself eating breakfast in every day — the more you appreciate the fact that when you turn on the tap, water comes out. If you have ever lived without water, you really appreciate that. There are all kinds of miracles. Everything is like that, absolutely wonderful.”
“Whatever you’re given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That’s the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already — your body, your speech, your mind?”
“The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.”
A big burly samurai comes to the wise man and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.” And the roshi looks him in the face and says: “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you?” The samurai starts to get purple in the face, his hair starts to stand up, but the roshi won’t stop, he keeps saying, “A miserable worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?” Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he’s just about to cut off the head of the roshi. Then the roshi says, “That’s hell.” The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it, that he just created his own hell; he was deep in hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes and he starts to cry and he puts his palms together and the roshi says, “That’s heaven.”
“As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.”
“Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life.”
“When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha” means that when you see that you’re grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it’s called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.
“The first noble truth says that if you are alive, if you have a heart, if you can love, if you can be compassionate, if you can realize the life energy that makes everything change and move and grow and die, then you won’t have any resentment or resistance.”
“The second noble truth says that this resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.”
“The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves.”
“Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation.”
“When we meditate, we’re creating a situation in which there’s a lot of space. That sounds good but actually it can be unnerving, because when there’s a lot of space you can see very clearly: you’ve removed your veils, your shields, your armor, your dark glasses, your earplugs, your layers and layers of mittens, your heavy boots. Finally you’re standing, touching the earth, feeling the sun on your body, feeling its brightness, hearing all the noises without anything to dull the sound. You take off your nose plug, and maybe you’re going to smell lovely fresh air or maybe you’re in the middle of a garbage dump or a cesspool. Since meditation has this quality of bringing you very close to yourself and your experience, you tend to come up against your edge faster. It’s not an edge that wasn’t there before, but because things are so simplified and clear, you see it, and you see it vividly and clearly.”
“You begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.”
“Trungpa Rinpoche often talked about the fact that we all have a soft spot and that negativity and resentment and all those things occur because we’re trying to cover over our soft spot.”
“We who are living in the lap of luxury with our pitiful little psychological problems have a tremendous responsibility to let our clarity and our heart, our warmth, and our ability ripen, to open up and let go, because it’s so contagious.”
“My whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.”
“Taking refuge in the dharma is, traditionally, taking refuge in the teachings of the Buddha. Well, the teachings of the Buddha are: Let go and open to your world. Realize that trying to protect your territory, trying to keep your territory enclosed and safe, is fraught with misery and suffering. It keeps you in a very small, dank, smelly, introverted world that gets more and more claustrophobic and more and more misery-producing as you get older.”
“From a broader perspective, the dharma also means your whole life. The teachings of the Buddha are about letting go and opening: you do that in how you relate to the people in your life, how you relate to the situations you’re in, how you relate with your thoughts, how you relate with your emotions. The purpose of your whole life is not to make a lot of money, it’s not to find the perfect marriage, it’s not to build Gampo Abbey. It’s not to do any of these things. You have a certain life, and whatever life you’re in is a vehicle for waking up. If you’re a mother raising your children, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re an actress, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re a construction worker, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re a retired person facing old age, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re alone and you feel lonely and you wish you had a mate, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you have a huge family around you and wish you had a little more free time, that’s the vehicle for waking up. Whatever you have, that’s it. There’s no better situation than the one you have. It’s made for you. It’ll show you everything you need to know about where your zipper’s stuck and where you can leap. So that’s what it means to take refuge in the dharma. It has to do with finding open space, not being covered in armor.”
“Since all things are naked, clear from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.”
“There are two common forms of human neurosis. One is getting all caught up in worry and fear and hope, in wanting and not wanting, and things: jobs, families, romances, houses, cars, money, vacations, entertainment, the mountains, the desert, Europe, Mexico, Jamaica, the Black Hole of Calcutta, prison, war or peace, and so on. So many of us are caught in all that occurs, somehow captured by occurrence as if we were caught in a whirlpool. In samsara we continually try to get away from the pain by seeking pleasure, and in doing so, we just keep going around and around and around. I’m so hot I open all the windows, and then I’m so cold I put on a sweater. Then it itches, so I put cream on my arms, and then that’s sticky, so I go take a bath. Then I’m cold, so I close the window, and on and on and on. I’m lonely, so I get married, and then I’m always fighting with my husband or my wife, so I start another love affair, and then my wife or husband threatens to leave me and I’m caught in the confusion of what to do next, and on and on and on. We are always trying to get out of the boiling pot into some kind of coolness, always trying to escape and therefore never really fully settling down and appreciating. That’s called samsara. In other words, somehow we have this preference for occurrence, so we’re always working in that framework of trying to get comfortable through political beliefs and philosophies and religions and everything, trying to gain pleasure in all that occurs. The other neurosis — which is just as common — is to get caught by peace and quiet, or liberation, or freedom.”
“Often the reason that people go from necrosis into psychosis is that they see that spaciousness and synchronistic situation and how vast things are and how the world actually works, but then they cling to their insight and they become completely caught there. It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.”
“Ego can use anything to re-create itself, whether it’s occurrence or spaciousness, whether it’s what we call samsara or what we call nirvana.”
“Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.”
“Our whole life could be a ritual. We could learn to stop when the sun goes down and when the sun comes up. We could learn to listen to the wind; we could learn to notice that it’s raining or snowing or hailing or calm. We could reconnect with the weather that is ourselves, and we could realize that it’s sad. The sadder it is, the vaster it is, and the vaster it is, the more our heart opens. We can stop thinking that good practice is when it’s smooth and calm, and bad practice is when it’s rough and dark. If we can hold it all in our hearts, then we can make a proper cup of tea.”
The Zen master Dogen said, “To know yourself or study yourself is to forget yourself, and if you forget yourself then you become enlightened by all things.”
““I had to hear Rinpoche say that shopping is actually always trying to find security, always trying to feel good about yourself.”
“Continual dabbling around in spiritual things was just another form of materialism, trying to get comfortable, trying to get secure, whereas if you stuck to one boat and really started working with it, it would definitely put you through all your changes. You would meet all your dragons; you would be continually pushed out of the nest. It would be one big initiation rite, and tremendous wisdom would come from that, tremendous heartfelt, genuine spiritual growth and development. One’s life would be well spent. He stressed that his students should stop just dabbling in spirituality to try to feel good or get high or be spiritual. He was very cynical and knocked all kinds of “trips,” as he called them; you can imagine the trips in North America in 1970. Many of us, we don’t have to imagine that. We remember well — we’re laboratory specimens!”
“Today I’d like to talk about inconvenience. When you hear some teachings that ring true to you, and you feel some trust in practicing that way and some trust in it’s being a worthwhile way to live, then you’re in for a lot of inconvenience. From an everyday perspective, it seems good to do things that are kind of convenient; there is no problem with that. It’s just that when you really start to take the warrior’s journey — which is to say, when you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, when you begin to feel this passion for life and for growth, when discovery and exploration and curiosity become your path — then basically, if you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it’s often extremely inconvenient.”
“Comfort orientation murders the spirit”
“Opting for coziness, having that as your prime reason for existing, becomes a continual obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, doing something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land.”
“The essence of samsara is this tendency that we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. The basic teaching is that that is how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck in a very small, limited view of reality. That is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are all the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but you’re stuck in this cocoon, or maybe you’re inside a capsule, like a vitamin pill. Moment after moment, you are deciding that you would rather stay in that capsule. You would rather remain a vitamin pill than experience the pain of stepping out into that big space. Life in that capsule is cozy and secure. We’ve gotten it all together. It’s safe, it’s predictable, it’s convenient, and it’s trustworthy. We know when we walk into our house exactly where the furniture is, and it’s the way we like it. We know we have all the appliances we need and we have the clothes we like. If we feel ill at ease, we just fill in those gaps. Our mind is always seeking zones of safety. We’re in this zone of safety and that’s what we consider life, getting it all together, security. Death is losing that.”
“Nostalgia for samsara is full of shit.”
