On Chögyam Trungpa
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is the quintessential spiritual guide. His teachings—steeped in ancient tradition and presented with relaxed fluency in western language and culture—are profound, accessible, and fresh. In addition to the buddhadharma, he offered the secular path of Shambhala, cultivating an appreciation of inherent bravery, dignity and goodness beyond cultural and religious bounds. Through his many books, Trungpa Rinpoche continues to be an incomparable source of wisdom and courage in the world. The Chronicles is an ongoing celebration of his profound teachings and life example.
Copyright Diana J. Mukpo. Used here by arrangement with Diana J. Mukpo and Shambhala Publications, Inc.
These teachings by Chögyam Trungpa are selected at random from Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week: the email service that brings Trungpa Rinpoche’s dharma to your inbox several times each week. For more information, or to add your name to the list, visit OceanofDharma.com.
Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week is edited and produced by Carolyn Rose Gimian. Thank you to Lady Diana Mukpo, Mrs. Gimian, and Shambhala Publications for making these teachings available on the Chronicles.
Bank of Cloudy Mind
Meditation provides a gap, which creates a sort of chaos in the psychological process, chaos in the mechanism of building up karmic situations. That chaos helps to see what is underneath all these thought patterns, both of the explicit and subconscious types. It begins to reveal what is underneath, which at this point is the collection of hidden suppressed thoughts. Any kind of thing that you wanted to ignore, did not want to encourage or are ashamed of yourself about is put into this bank of confusion–the cloudy mind. The cloudy mind acts as a container for these collections. Ashamed thoughts, irrelevant thoughts, all sorts of unwanted material have been put aside there. And meditation provides the situations which bring these thoughts up, because meditation goes right through the thought patterns and touches the ground of cloudy mind. In this way the bank is broken open, the container is broken open.