Chogyam Trungpa

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1. Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment. 2. A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. 3. The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. 4. The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well. 5. 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.

6. If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warriors approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency. 7. Becoming "awake" involves seeing our confusion more clearly. 8. Everyone loves something, even if it's only tortillas. 9. When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them. 10. 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. 11. It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather. 12. ...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness. 13. 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. 14. Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view. 15. We must begin our practice by walking the narrow path of simplicity, the hinayana path, before we can walk upon the open highway of compassionate action, the mahayana path. 16. In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. 17. 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.

18. 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. 19. 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. 20. This is not to say that the point of the hard way is that we must be heroic. The attitude of "heroism" is based upon the assumption that we are bad, impure, that we are not worthy, are not ready for spiritual understanding. We must reform ourselves, be different from what we are. For instance, if we are middle class Americans, we must give up our jobs or drop out of college, move out of our suburban homes, let our hair grow, perhaps try drugs. If we are hippies, we must give up drugs, cut our hair short, throw away our torn jeans. We think that we are special, heroic, that we are turning away from temptation. We become vegetarians and we become this and that. There are so many things to become. We think our path is spiritual because it is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego. 21. 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. 22. If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. 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. 23. As long as you regard yourself or any part of your experience as the "dream come true," then you are involved in self-deception. Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen, rather that what you are now seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now is what is, nor are you willing to go on with the situation as it is. Thus, self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience. And the opposite of self-deception is just working with the facts of life. 24. Any perception can connect us to reality, properly and fully. What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particulary; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some prinicple of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything. 25. In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, 'field of power'... The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging. 26. For the accomplished warrior, belief is not a form of strategy, nor is it borrowing the stories of previous warriors from books and stories. Trying to theorize and borrow ideas doesnt seem to help. The notion of belief, or view, here is based on complete simplicity. Your view is not affected by liberalism or conservatism, nihilism or eternalism, at all. Your view is straightforward and simple; it is almost a cosmic domestic view. It is the notion of complete simplicity. When you meet a person, you dont have to develop a whole style of how to view that person according to either the historic or present situation, the sociological context, his religious connections, or whatever it may be. You dont have to go through all that. You can have a direct relationship, which is very simple, direct, and straightforwardextremely straightforward.

27. The essence of compassion is to copy how you relate with your child (in your relationships with others). The problem is how much you want to be the head of the family or the ringleader of your friends. You know, if that ambition is not there, but you have a genuine willingness to share, that is precisely the concept of sangha, or the Buddhist community, in traditional terms. You are willing to be friends with everybody, but at the same time you are not particularly taking credit. You dont make people depend on you. Everybody can stand on his or her own feet. 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. 28. 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 dont 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. 29. Shared karmic situations fall into two subcategories: national and individual karma. An example of national karma is that you may be born in a particular country where you always have to relate with 7-Elevens, take-out pizza, and badly made cars. You end up in certain environments or worlds, but you cannot totally blame that on yourself. The whole country is made up that way. The second subcategory is individual karma within national karma. For example, if the sewage system in your neighborhood is not good, that karma is particularly and personally yours, in a sense, because the pipes keep breaking and costing you a lot of money and effort. Another example is winding up with a bad teacher who gets grumpy because he is poorly paid by the school system. On one hand, that situation is not your fault; but on the other hand, you did end up in that particular school. You have a television network, but you have your own personal TV with which to tune in, and you also choose your own particular station. Its very simple. Environmental and individual karma complement each other; they feed each other. 30. If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warriors approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency. 31. When there is daring, you dare to do something: you put forth your vision fearlessly. People have doubts about big vision because they dont have a sense of gentleness in themselves first. So gentleness brings daring and a sense of fearlessness. Daring is appreciation of letting go in the fundamental sense. First you develop gentleness toward yourself; then you begin to develop daring, which is connected with how to express your gentleness to the world outside, how to proclaim your sanity. Your are not going crazy because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, which is the symbol of expansive vision in the Shambhala world. Rather, because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, you are very daring and at the same time very gentle and soft. The softer you become, the greater the message to the world becomes. 32. "The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried."

33. A WARRIOR WITHOUT TERRITORY Student: The idea of a warrior is usually associated with territory or responding to a sense of danger. If we give up all territory, what is the motivation for having the spirit of a warrior? Chogyam Trungpa: A warrior is not like a samurai who is looking for a job. You are not trying to be hired by anybody, not even by yourself. The idea of a warrior is based on a sense of fundamental fearlessness. There is no reason why you should be a coward. It's as simple as that. You are not being a warrior because a state of war exists in your country. We are not trying to win against the egohood people. We are not trying to fight with them. You are being a warrior because you ARE a warrior. If someone asks you, "Are you twenty-one years old?" you say, "Yes, I am." They don't ask you WHY you are twenty-one years old or how you have done this. You would have no answer for that. You are just twenty-one. Warriorship is a basic sense of unshakeability. It's a sense of immovability and self-existing dignity rather than that you are trying to fight with something else. From "Meditation: The Way of the Buddha," Talk Four, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, July 1 1974. Edited from an unpublished transcript. 34. Too often, people think that solving the world's problems is based on conquering the earth, rather than touching the earth, touching ground. 35. When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home. In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic. So the first impulse that draws us away from the darkness of the cocoon towards the light is a longing for ventilation. As soon as we begin to sense of the possibility of fresh air, we realize that our arms and legs are being restricted. We want to stretch out and walk, dance, even jump. We realize that there is an alternative to our cocoon: we discover that we could be free from that trap. With that longing for fresh air, for a breeze of delight, we open our eyes. To our surprise, we begin to see the light, even though it may be hazy at first. The tearing of the cocoon takes place at that point. Then, we realize that the degraded cocoon we have been hiding in is revolting, and we want to turn up the lights as far as we can. In fact, we are not turning up the lights, but we are simply opening our eyes wider. We catch a certain kind of fever. But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us.

36. We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can't do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it. 37. A saint inthe Buddhist context...is someone who provides an example of the fact that completely ordinary, confused human beings can wake themselves up; they can put themselves together and wake themselves up through an accident of like of one kind or another. The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery and the hcaos that are part of life, begins to wake them, shake them. Having been shaken, they begin to question: "Who am I? What am I? What is happening" Then they go further and realize that there is something in them that is asking these questions, something that is, in fact, intellingent and not exactly confused. 38. Even fear itself is frightened by the bodhisattva's fearlessness. 39. In order to develop love ~ universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it ~ one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad. One must open oneself to life, communicate with it. 40. Things get very clear when you're cornered. 41. In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by the coconuts of wakefulness. 42. The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society. You may wonder what the best approach is to helping society and how you can know that what you are doing is authentic and good. The only answer is nowness. The way to relax, or rest the mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In meditation you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgment, and in that way you yourself learn to be.

43. "The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others. That is our true richness."

44. Idiot compassion is the highly conceptualized idea that you want to do good....Of course, [according to the mahayana teachings of Buddhism] you should do everything for everybody; there is no selection involved at all. But that doesn't mean to say that you have to be gentle all the time. Your gentleness should have heart, strength. In order that

your compassion doesn't become idiot compassion, you have to use your intelligence. Otherwise, there could be self-indulgence of thinking that you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the other person's aggression. If you go to a shop and the shopkeeper cheats you and you go back and let him cheat you again, that doesn't seem to be a very healthy thing to do for others.
45. The essence of warriorship, or 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. Within our lifetime there will be great problems in the world, but let us make sure than within our lifetime do disasters happen. We can prevent them. It is up to us. 46. You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there - fully, personally, genuinely. 47. Look. This is your world! You can't not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don't hesitate - look! Open your eyes. Don't blink, and look, look - look further.
48. Helping others is a question of being genuine and projecting that genuineness to others. This way of being doesnt have to have a title or a name particularly. It is just being ultimately decent. 49. Conquering fear is not based on blocking your sensitivity. Otherwise, you become a deaf and dumb monarch, a jellyfish king. Sitting on a horse requires balance, and as you acquire that balance in the saddle, you have more awareness of the horse. So when you sit in the saddle on your fickle horse, you feel completely exposed and gentle. If you feel aggressive, you dont have a good seat. In fact, you are probably not even riding the horse. You dont put your saddle on a fence railing. You have to saddle a real horse. In this case, riding the horse is riding somebody elses mind. It requires a complete connection. In the Buddhist tradition, this is called compassion, or working with somebody else. You are completely exposed in this situation. Otherwise, its like a medieval knight encased in his armor. Its so heavy that he has to be cranked up onto the horse. Then he rides off to battle and usually falls off. Theres something wrong with that technology. 50. This transmutation practice is specifically one of remaining open and receptive to your own energy when you are triggered. It has three steps. Step one. Acknowledge that youre hooked. Step two. Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in. Lean in to the energy. Abide with it. Experience it fully. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. Get curious about it. -excerpt from Pemas Taking the Leap 51. We can change the world, definitely. The problem is that we dont smile when chaos occurs to us. When chaos occurs, even within that chaos, we can smile which cures confusion and resentment. Do you understand?

52. Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of the extreme impulse 53. Too often, people think that solving the words problems is based on conquering the earth,rather than touching the earth, touching ground. 54. When you express gentleness and precision in your environment then real brilliance and power can descend into that situation. 55. When you are afraid of something, it might be a fear of darkness, a fear of knives, a fear of guns, or of anything. You cant just have fear without fear of something. So what is that other? Who is the other? Thats yourself. There is a story about a man who is locked in a room. Hes sitting in that room, a big room with lots of space and lots of possibilities of noise bouncing back. Things are getting cold and dark and darker. He hears something. So he says Who dat??? When there is no response, he says, Who dat who said, Who dat?? And then he says, Who dat who said, Who dat? when I said Who dat?? The antidote to that echo chamber is to make friends with yourself. 56. Compassion is not having any hesitation to reflect your light on things 57. The ultimate definition of bravery is not being afraid of who you are. 58. Meditation is giving a huge meadow to a restless cow. 59. We always have a choice: we can limit our perception so that we close off vastness, or we can allow vastness to touch us. 60. "The emphasis on practice is because it is the only time in your life you can steer your karmic situation. 61. Becoming 'awake' involves seeing our confusion more clearly. 62. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit. 63. The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is. 64. The sun has a sense of all-pervasive brilliance, which does not discriminate in the slightest. It is the goodness that exists in a situation, in oneself, and in one's world, which is expressed without doubt, hesitation, or regret. The sun principle also includes the notion of blessings descending upon us and creating sacred world. It also represents clarity, without doubt. 65. Sometimes one touches on a very painful spot where one is almost too shy to look into it, but somehow one still has to go through it. And by going into it, one finally achieves a real command of oneself. One gains a thorough knowledge of oneself for the first time. 66. The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. 67. meditation is a way of developing clarity, which allows us to see the precision of daily life situations as well as our thought process so that we can relate with both of them fully and completely. 68. The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern. 69. Therefore the thing is not to battle anymore, not to try and sort out the bad things and only achieve good, but respect them and acknowledge them.

70. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it. We have merely discovered it. 71. We have to make the first move ourselves rather than expecting it to come from the phenomenal world or from other people. If we are meditating at home and we happen to live in the middle of the High Street, we cannot stop the traffic just because we want peace and quiet. But we can stop ourselves, we can accept the noise. The noise also contains silence. We must put ourselves into it and expect nothing from outside, just as Buddha did. And we must accept whatever situation arises. 72. when one learns a different way of dealing with the situation, one no longer has to have a purpose. One is not on the way to somewhere. Or rather, one is on the way and one is also at the destination at the same time. That is really what meditation is for. 73. That is the basic pattern of this kind of meditation, which is based on three fundamental factors: first, not centralizing inward; second, not having any longing to become higher; and third, becoming completely identified with here and now.

74. There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are. 75. You should look into your confusion further. You should push into it instead of closing yourself off. In that way, you just keep opening and unfolding, like flowers in the summertime. Even though they are exposed to the weather, to the wind and rain, flowers still keep unfolding themselves, until finally they bloom at their best.

76. Love includes accepting others and being noble, reasonable, openhearted, resourceful, and free of possessiveness. With love, you are totally gentle, utterly kind, thorough, wise, fearless, and willing to commit yourself to any situation.
77. When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.

78. The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.

79. To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability that is in ones self and all others, your warriorship is untrustworthy.

80. In order to experience fearlessness, it is necessary to experience fear.

81. The pattern of the practitioners progress on the path is as follows: First, one develops extreme exertion in uncovering ones own neurosis. This one-pointed mindfulness brings the sense of ones actual human quality. The second stage is marked by gentleness, allowing ones energies to expand and be shared with the rest of sentient beings. Finally, one develops fearlessness and a sense of joy and penetrating insight, filled with immense devotion to the lineage and ones root teacher.

82. The real function of a spiritual friend is to insult you 83. We must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
84. When you are frightened by something, you have to relate with fear, explore why you are frightened, and develop some sense of conviction. You can actually look at fear. Then fear ceases to be the dominant situation that is going to defeat you. Fear can be conquered. You can be free from fear, if you realize that fear is not the ogre. You can step on fear, and therefore you can attain what is known as fearlessness. But that requires that, when you see fear, you smile.

85. On the whole, the practice of meditation is a sloppy job. You have to accept that you have been a fool and start with being foolish. In the beginning, deciding to try the practice of meditation is just leaping to some conclusion about what to do. In doing the practice at the

beginning, rather than really meditating, you just imagine that you are meditating. So to begin with, the whole practice is based on confusion. And confusion is accepted as part of the path. Since the situation is very loose and unorganized, it is as though you are leaping into unknown territory. A lot of people find that very frightening. You are not quite sure what you are involved with. But that is the only way to get into the practice.

86. One of the greatest misunderstandings that people have is regarding the spiritual journey as a vacation trip.
87. We have to make a relationship with our emotional energy. Usually, when we speak of expressing our energies, we are more concerned with the expression than with the energy itself, which seems to be rushing too fast. We are afraid the energy will overwhelm us, so we try to get rid of it through action. However, once you develop a harmonious relationship with your energy, then you can actually express it, and the style of expression becomes very sane, right to the point. 88. The purpose of dharma art is to overcome aggression. According to the Buddhist vajrayana tradition, if your mind is overcome by aggression, you cannot function properly. On the other hand, if your mind is preoccupied with passion, there are possibilities. In fact, artistic talent is somewhat related to the level of passion, or heightened interest in the intriguing qualities of things. Inquisitiveness is precisely the opposite of aggression. You experience inquisitiveness when theres a sense of wanting to explore every corner and discover every possibility of the situation. You are so intrigued by what youve experienced, what youve seen, and what youve heard that you begin to forget your aggression. At once, your mind is at ease, seduced into greater passion. When you are in a passionate state, you begin to like the world, and you begin to be attracted to certain things-which is good. Obviously, such attraction also entails possessiveness and some sense of territoriality, which comes later. But straightforward, pure passion - without water, without ice, without soda - is good. It is drinkable; it is also food; you can live on it. Its quite marvelous that we have passion, that we are not made purely out of aggression. Its some kind of saving grace that we possess, which is fantastic. We should be thankful to the Great Eastern Sun vision. Without passion, nothing can be experienced; nothing can be worked on. With aggression, we have bad feelings about ourselves; either we feel tremendously righteous, that we are the only ones who are right, or we feel pissed off that somebody is destroying us. That is pathetic. It prevents us from seeing basic goodness.

89. If you must begin then go all the way, because if you begin and quit, the unfinished business you have left behind begins to haunt you all the time.
90.We prefer to hid in our personal jungles and caves. When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think that we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. We are so afraid of our own fear that we deaden our hearts. 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 behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.

91. When anything irritates us, its trying to communicate with us. Usually we are looking for an answer rather than trying to communicate with irritation. The point is to acknowledge irritations presence rather than try to suppress it.
92. In order to follow the spiritual path one must first overcome the initial excitement; that is one of the first essentials. For unless one is able to overcome this excitement, one will not be able to learn, because an form of emotional excitement has a blinding effect. One fails to see life as it is because one tends so much to build up ones own version of it. Therefore one should never commit oneself to conform to an religious or political structure without first finding the real essence of what one is looking for. 93. 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, constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness.
94. We have to be so genuine and gentle. Otherwise there is no way to work with the universe at all. You have a tremendous responsibility: the first is to yourself, to become gentle and genuine; the second is to work for others in that same way. It is very important to realize how powerful all of us are. What we are doing may seem insignificant, but this notion of dharma art will be like an atomic bomb you carry in your mind. You could play a tremendous role in developing peace throughout the world.