“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


Thursday, March 28, 2013

"You Cannot Say There Is No Coffee"

In our ordinary experience, there is the world and there is you. Recognizing this does not mean that you are going against the Buddha’s teaching of egolessness. There is definitely something there, which is the working basis and magic of the path. You cannot negate that you taste a good cup of coffee. You cannot say that there is no coffee and there is no “you” to taste it—there are such things! Mindfulness of life is based on that kind of immediate appreciation. The meditation practice is to learn to appreciate the immediateness of what is happening right here and now.
--Trungpa Rinpoche

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Trungpa Rinpoche's simple statement is both as simple as it sounds and also a kind of inside joke.

It's a gentle way of attracting full heart attention from all audience types. "Immediate appreciation" is simultaneously the result of the path, the path, and something that one is immediately introduced to through relating to your teacher in a certain way.

It's a kind of custom fitting apparatus, the Dzogchen discourse.