“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 23, 2012

Nice Trungpa Rinpoche Story

So the meditation place up my street turns out to have been founded and run by Anne Klein, my friend from the Religion Department. Psych! It was quite extraordinary to receive what amounted to Dzogchen instruction in my first ever seminar at Rice a couple of months ago, from Anne. She wasn't doing it deliberately. It just sort of happened that way for those with ears. It was pretty gulp making.

Anyway, here's some pithy instruction in the form of a story of the young Trungpa Rinpoche and his colorful students (I know and love a few). They were meditating at Karme Choling, which was founded in 1971 (I think). They were doing basic shamatha-vipashyana, and one of them piped up, “Hey, Rinpoche, when is the break?”

“This is the break.”

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