Sublime

Trungpa Rinpoche gave a definition of taking refuge that was pinned up on our bulletin board the other day. It begins with an absolute statement: “Since all things are naked, clear from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.” But then Rinpoche goes further and makes it very practical. “The everyday practice is simply to develop a comp

the sequential joining together and separating of complementary opposites as a means of staying present, mindful, and alert to the feelings, thoughts, sensations, and insights that may—or may not—arise.

“There are three kinds of views of self. The first is that this body is the self, or these feelings, perceptions, mental formations, or consciousness are the self. This is ‘the belief in skandha as self,’ and it is the first wrong view. But when one says, ‘The skandhas are not the self,’ one may fall into the second wrong view and believe that the

Dwelling meditatively in the different and expanded sense of self that the process of inquiry opens will make it less likely that habitual self-views are so easily reestablished once this particular experience ends.