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“Buddha can’t be avoided. Buddha is everywhere. Enlightenment possibilities are all over the place. Whether you’re going to get married tomorrow, whether you’re going to die tomorrow, whatever you may feel, that familiar awake quality is everywhere, all the time. From this point of view, everything is a footprint of Buddha, anything that goes on, whether we regard it as sublime or ridiculous. Everything we do — breathing, farting, getting mosquito bites, having fantastic ideas about reality, thinking clever thoughts, flushing the toilet — whatever occurs is a footprint.” — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 – 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

“You have something in yourself that is fundamentally, basically good. It transcends the notion of good or bad. Something that is worthwhile, wholesome, and healthy exists in all of us …

Such goodness is synonymous with bravery. It is always there. Whenever you see a bright and beautiful color, you are witnessing your own inherent goodness. Whenever you hear a sweet and beautiful sound, you are hearing your own basic goodness. Whenever you taste something sweet or sour, you are experiencing your own basic goodness …

Things like that are always happening to you, but you have been ignoring them, thinking that they are mundane and unimportant, purely coincidences of an ordinary nature. However, it is worthwhile to take advantage of anything that happens to you that has that particular nature of goodness. You begin to realize that there is nonaggression happening all around you in your life, and you are able to feel the freshness of realizing your goodness, again and again.”

From SMILE AT FEAR: AWAKENING THE TRUE HEART OF BRAVERY, Chapter 1, “Facing Yourself”

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 – 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

WHAT WE ARE NOT

The basics teachings of Buddha are about understanding what we are, who we are, why we are. When we begin to realize what we are, who we are, why we are, then we begin to realize what we are not, who we are not, why we are not. We begin to realize that we don’t have basic, substantial, solid, fundamental ground that we can exert anymore. We begin to realize that our ideas of security and our concept of freedom have been purely phantom experiences.

  — Chögyam Trungpa
     From “The Practicing Lineage,” in THE MISHAP LINEAGE: Transforming Confusion into Wisdom

THE BRIDGE OF COMPASSION

Compassion becomes a bridge to the world outside. Trust and compassion for oneself bring inspiration to dance with life, to communicate with the energies of the world. Lacking this kind of inspiration and openness, the spiritual path becomes the samsaric path of desire. One remains trapped in the desire to improve oneself, the desire to achieve imagined goals … Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy. They recharge your energy, because in the process of relating with them, you acknowledge your wealth, your richness. So if you have difficult tasks to perform, such as dealing with people or life situations, you do not feel you are running out of resources. Each time you are faced with a difficult task, it presents itself as a delightful opportunity to demonstrate your richness, your wealth. There is no feeling of poverty at all in this approach to life.

From “The Open Way,” in CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM, pages 98 to 99.

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 – 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

“Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious and very generous. When a person develops real compassion, he or she 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, constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness.”

From “The Open Way,” in CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM, page 99.

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 – 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

“Usually in life, when we act, when we exist, we tend to have a very wretched and small notion of what we are doing. Sometimes, we try to be good boys and girls. We struggle, taking our journey stitch by stitch. We go to sleep at night, we get up the next day, and we struggle to lead our life. The ordinary approach to that is undignified and very small, like flat Coca-Cola. Sometimes we feel better, we try to cheer up, and it feels pretty good. But then, behind that, there is the same familiar “me” haunting us all the time. We don’t have to be that way, at all. We actually could see our world as a big world and see ourselves as open and vast. We can see our world as sacred. That is the key to bringing together the sun of wisdom with the moon of wakefulness.”

  — From OCEAN OF DHARMA: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa. 365 Teachings on Living Life with Courage and Compassion. Number 284.

NEGATIVITY

We all experience negativity — the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout, there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul-smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

   — Chogyam Trungpa, from “Working with Negativity,” in THE MYTH OF FREEDOM and the Way of Meditation, page 93. Shambhala Library edition.