A Quote by Chogyam Trungpa
We cannot avoid our lives. We have to face our lives, young or old, rich or poor. Whatever happens, we cannot save ourselves from our lives at all... the more you understand, the more you will realize your own responsibility.
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By taking the lives of our young, and wounding the wombs and lives of their mothers, we are flying in the face of God. We cannot play God. If we continue down this path of destruction, we will be met at the gates by our own doom.
The more we make our lives about us, then the more we waste our time. When we get older, we devote our lives to ourselves, and then we wasted it. If we want to devote our lives to something significant, something that matters, then we should devote our lives to the Lord Jesus.
We will do anything to get away from our own pain. We will change our lives, rip people out, swallow a bottle of life-ending pills. When we hurt more than we can bear, when our lives get that dark, it's shocking what we will do to protect ourselves.
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.
Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, or sustain our souls.
Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.
We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives.
To live more simply is to unburden our lives - to live more lightly, cleanly, aerodynamically. It is to establish a more direct, unpretentious and unencumbered relationship with all aspects of our lives: the things that we consume, the work that we do, our relationships with others, our connections with nature and the cosmos, and more.
Peace is not just the absence of war, it is the active presence of a capacity for love and compassion, and reciprocity. It is an awareness that our lives are not to be lived simply for ourselves through expressing our individuality, but we confirm the purpose of our lives through the work of expressing our shared sense of community in a purposeful and practical way; to sustain our own lives we sustain the lives of others - in family, in a community of neighborhoods called a city, and in a community of nations called the world.
We cannot and must not allow ourselves to have the message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fade completely from our minds, and we cannot allow our vision or ideals to fade, either. For if we do, we have but one course left for us. And that flash of light will not only rob us of our vision, but it will rob us of our lives, our progeny, and our very existence.
It is only when we want to take our lives out of the Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. The secret of freedom from anxiety is freedom from ourselves and abandonment of our own plans. But that spirit emerges in our lives only when our minds are filled with the knowledge that our Father can be trusted implicitly to supply everything we need.
Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.
We cannot expect to be in control of the circumstances in our lives when we cannot control our minds for five minutes. Meditation is the daily minimum requirement that will prevent us from breaking down and falling apart at the most inopportune moments. It is the art of listening. It is a practice which enables us to tune in and fine-tune the key areas of our lives: the mind and the spirit.
We are the makers of our own lives. There is no such thing as fate. Our lives are the result of our previous actions, our karma, and it naturally flows that, having been ourselves the makers of our karma, we must also be able to unmake it.
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