Crazy Wisdom Begins this Friday!

Allen Ginsberg made him his guru. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him. It was 1970 and he was the first Tibetan lama most Americans had ever seen. Yet he openly drank, and bedded his students. Was this how an enlightened teacher should behave? Crazy Wisdom tells the story of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche the brilliant “bad boy of Buddhism” with exclusive never-before-seen archival material and commentary from Ram Dass, Pema Chödrön, and others in his circle, as well as critics like Robert Thurman.

Premiere Screening, Friday November 25 at 6:30 p.m.!

For more showtimes and info about related tours, please visit rmanyc.org/crazywisdom

Presented in association with New York Shambhala Meditation Center

Thank you, rmanyc.

There are second thoughts happening each time you act. There is hesitation, and from that hesitation or gap, you can go backward or forward. Changing the flow of karma happens in that gap. So the gap is very useful. It is in the gap that you give birth to a new life.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation. 
When you were very young, 3 years old, you didn’t want to escape reality, particularly, because you were so interested in how things were done. You used to ask your father & mother all sorts of questions. ‘Why is this so, Mommy? Why is this so Daddy? Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that?’ But that innocent inquisitiveness has been forgotten, lost. Therefore, you have to reignite it.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is on Facebook
Without this world we cannot attain enlightenment. There would be no journey. So in a sense all the things taking place around the world, all the irritations and all the problems, are crucial. In other words, we could say that if there is no noise outside during our sitting practice, we cannot develop mindfulness. If we do not have aches and pains in our body, we cannot attain mindfulness; we cannot actually meditate. If everything were lovey-dovey, there would be nothing to work with. Without others and the challenges they present, we would have no chance at all to develop beyond ego. So the idea here is to feel grateful that others are presenting us with tremendous obstacles. Without them, we could not follow the path at all.
from the Vidyādhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987), courtesy of Rev. Danny Fisher.
As far as meditation practice is concerned, in meditation, we work on THIS thing, rather than on trying to sort out the problem from the outside. We work on the projector rather than the projection. We turn inward, instead of trying to sort out external problems of A, B, and C. We work on the creator of duality rather than the creation. That is beginning at the beginning.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is on Facebook. Quote from “The Heart of the Buddha.”
The sitting practice of meditation allows a sense of solidness and a sense of slowness and the possibility of watching one’s mind operating all the time. Out of that, a sense of expansion slowly begins to develop and, at the same time, the awareness that you have been missing a lot of things in your life. You have been too busy to look for them or see them or appreciate them. So as you begin to meditate, you become more perceptive. Your mind becomes clearer and clearer, like an immaculate microscope lens.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (from Rev. Danny Fisher)
The phenomenal world that all human beings experience is fickle and flexible and also merciless. You often wonder whether you can ride on that fickle and merciless situation or whether it is going to ride on you. To use an analogy, either you are riding on a donkey or the donkey is riding on you. Ordinarily, in your experience of the world, it is questionable who is riding on whom. The more you struggle to gain the upper hand, the more speed and aggression you manufacture to overcome your obstacles, the more you become subject to the phenomenal world. The real challenge is to transcend that duality altogether. It is possible to contact energy that is beyond dualism, beyond aggression—energy that is neither for you nor against you.
from the Vidyādhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987) via: Rev. Danny Fisher

A Gift of Dharma

When wisdom has been completely and thoroughly achieved, then it has to relate with something. It has to relate with its own radiation, its own light. When light begins to shine, it reflects on things. That is how we know whether it is bright or dim. Therefore, when light is very brilliant, when it reflects on things properly and fully, we know that there is some kind of communication taking place. That communication is expressed by the intensity of that wisdom light shining through. That communication is traditionally known as buddha-activity or compassion.

Compassion is not so much feeling sorry for somebody, feeling that you are in a better place and somebody is in a worse place. Compassion is not having any hesitation to reflect your light on things. That reflection is an automatic and natural process, an organic process. Since light has no hesitation, no inhibition about reflecting on things, it does not discriminate whether to reflect on a pile of shit or on a pile of rock or on a pile of diamonds. It reflects on everything it faces. That nondiscriminating reflection is precisely the nature of the relationship between student and teacher. When the student is facing in the right direction, then the guru’s light is reflected on him. And when he is unreceptive, when he is full of dark corners, the teacher’s light is not fully reflected on him. That light does not particularly try to fight its way into dark corners.

 The Vidyādhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987), from the Rev. Danny Fisher

Through the practice of meditation, we gradually begin to relate with our world, our friends, and other situations. And slowly we begin to trust the world as well. We begin to feel that the world is not as bad as we thought — there might be something worth learning. However, we cannot just go out and love the world. We have to start with ourselves, because the world is our world. Running away from ourselves into the world would be like trying to accept the rays of the sun while rejecting the sun itself.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (from: sharanam & Shambhala Sun via Ocean of Dharma
The point is to look properly. See the colors: white, black, blue, yellow, red, green, purple. Look. This is your world! You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate - look! Open your eyes. Don’t blink, and look - look further.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is on Facebook