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The trouble with Westerners is that they want to witness their own enlightenment.

Chogyam Trungpa

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Chogyam Trungpa
Age: 47 †
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Died: 1987
Died: April 4
Erudite
Guru
Painter
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Peking
Trungpa
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Enlightenment
Witness
Trouble
Westerners
Observation

More quotes by Chogyam Trungpa

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The emphasis on practice is because it is the only time in your life you can steer your karmic situation.
Chogyam Trungpa
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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.
Chogyam Trungpa
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If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by car or airplane, we are hardly there at all. It becomes merely a dream.
Chogyam Trungpa
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Watchfulness is experiencing a sudden glimpse of something without any qualifications - just the sudden glimpse itself.
Chogyam Trungpa
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You can almost convince yourself that you've accomplished things just by thinking about them. The alternative is to be more realistic. You don't necessarily regard the dreaming process as bad or an obstacle, but it's not realistic enough.
Chogyam Trungpa
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The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.
Chogyam Trungpa
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We must see with our own eyes and not accept any laid-down tradition as if it had some magical power in it.
Chogyam Trungpa
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A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused.
Chogyam Trungpa
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What is needed is the constant unmasking of ego's strategy.
Chogyam Trungpa
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The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.
Chogyam Trungpa
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The complexities of life situations are really not as complicated as we tend to experience them.
Chogyam Trungpa
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The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.
Chogyam Trungpa
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People's creativity is very much alive, but when they get paid for their creativity, they often experience that as rather meaningless. Money as the reward for their creative process is very one-dimensional, a tremendous comedown.
Chogyam Trungpa
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When you have a brilliant sun, which is a source of vision, the light from the sun shines through every window of the house, and the brightness of its light inspires you to open all the curtains. In the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, no human being is a lost cause.
Chogyam Trungpa
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Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.
Chogyam Trungpa
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In the practice of sitting meditation you relate to your daily life all the time. Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds. It enables us to relate to our lives as something workable.
Chogyam Trungpa
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We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing.
Chogyam Trungpa
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Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.
Chogyam Trungpa
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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.
Chogyam Trungpa
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Our life is an endless journey it is like a broad highway that extends infinitely into the distance. The practice of meditation provides a vehicle to travel on that road. Our journey consists of constant ups and downs.
Chogyam Trungpa