"Unlike virtually any of the other Tibetan teachers that came to the West, initially---he dropped his “Tibetan-ness” you might say. He dropped the cultural artifacts of his spiritual specialness. He let go of robes, he let go of any kind of pretense that could come between himself and his students. And he learned the English language, fully, completely. Really, his teaching was a living process of translating this tradition of buddhadharma into the West.

The experience that many of the senior students had who were close to Trungpa Rinpoche, and the experience that I had with him toward the end of his life, was as if you were watching the Buddha himself actually turn the wheel of dharma for our benefit. “Our” meaning Westerners, people like ourselves who come out of a very Western tradition, come out of all the conditioned patterns that come with our Judeo-Christian, scientific enlightenment tradition. This center is devoted to trying to share the way of life that he gave to his students, that we try and continue to practice in our own life, and that we then propagate.

So, in a sense, again, this weekend is an introduction to his work. Specifically the title of the weekend, “Meditation in Action,” refers to this book, Meditation in Action, which is the first book that was published under Chögyam Trungpa’s name. And this book dates back to the initial period of Trungpa Rinpoche teaching in the West in England and in Scotland. And it’s the first book of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings to be published in the unique format that then became the hallmark of all of his publications, which is to say, the book is a very edited transcription of talks that he gave. One of his senior students at the time, a man named Richard Artur, had the inspiration to edit Trungpa Rinpoche’s talks and put them into a form that would serve as an introduction to his work.

And it’s very interesting in that in this book we find the unique characteristics of Trungpa Rinpoche’s presentation of the dharma. Right at the beginning, the thread of teaching that then continued over the next 20 years---this book was written in 1967, Trungpa Rinpoche died in 1987. So over those 20 years there was a unique thread of continuity that we find in his teachings that shows up initially in this book. And the thread is really the raison d’etre you might say, the very essence of what we are, as students of Buddhism in this tradition of Trungpa Rinpoche. Trungpa Rinpoche introduced buddhadharma not as a religion, not as an abstract philosophy of life, but as a living, experiential inquiry into two fundamental questions: Who am I? Who or what am I? What is this mind that I have? What is this life that I have fallen into? And what is this world that I seem to keep banging into? What is this world out there? What are my parents, who are my parents, how did it get this way? What is the nature of the culture that I live in, what is the nature of language? How is it that my emotions and my feelings and my various feelings in this world, how---how---how do I---how do I understand this seemingly internal experience of a self in relation to a world out there?

His approach to dharma, and what we try and continue here at the dharma center, is really an approach of how to live, how to be in this human experience. Actually, we start with the proposition that maybe we don’t really even know how to be human. Perhaps what we need is a process whereby we can learn to assimilate our experience, where we can learn to digest our experience, where we can even have our experience, where we can give ourselves enough space and enough kindness to actually learn in a very simple way what it means to have experience. Then, what is the nature of that experience and how do we skillfully bring that experience to some sort of path of maturation?

And so, you’ll see in Trungpa Rinpoche’s works, if you chose to read his books or for those of you who’ve read them, you’ll see that there’s a unique---the philosophical term would be a “phenomenological” approach, or a very experiential approach. He’s describing what it is to be human from the inside out. He’s describing what it is to be on the path of buddhadharma, not from the point of view of an abstract person on the path, but from the point of view of what does it feel like to suffer? What does it feel like to be confused? What does it feel like to get a glimpse of sanity in the midst of that confusion? How can we work with our experience in such a way that it tends towards clarity, spaciousness, lovingkindness, empathy, compassion. How can we work with our experience so that it tends to move in that direction as opposed to moving in the direction of fear, contraction, difficulty, depression, feeling defeated, feeling that one is in a continuous, self-referential loop of self-defeating behavior? These are the fundamental questions that we ask.

So, we approach buddhism not from the point of view of selling a religion or getting you to become a buddhist, per se. That’s not really the point. Trungpa Rinpoche’s approach and our approach to the buddhadharma---Buddha is a Sanskrit word that means “awake” or “awakened.” Dharma in this case means “truth.” So, the truth of an awakened life. What we’re inviting you into in this room and what we hope to practice in this room, is what it means to live an awakened life.

And, a very interesting thing with Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching, that from the very beginning he talked about taking the path of dharma as a “tripless trip.” It was a very interesting term that he used. Much of his original dharma language was formulated in the ‘60’s as a response to the hippie movement. So the term trip was a technical term. It meant any time you would go on a trip you were kind of leaving the reality of the present movement. You were leaving the…clarity, the definitiveness, the authenticity of the present moment and you were going on some personal fantasy, kind of like a dream. Right?

But then he said, in order to mature one’s life, one must go on some sort of spiritual path. One must leave the safe homeground of one’s conditioned patterns and take some sort of trip. One must go on a journey, one must take a trip, but he said it must be a tripless trip - meaning, it must be a journey that takes you back to yourself. It must be a journey that takes you more and more into your own heart, more and more into your own direct experience and less and less away from what it is to be an authentic person.

Trungpa Rinpoche’s dharma is a dharma of confrontation, as opposed to a religion of consolation. It is a truth, a set of teachings that confronted your inauthenticity on the spot. It is an approach to spiritual evolution that is highly confrontational in a sense. It did not and does not offer you an easy platitude, an easy consolation. It says fundamentally that the only way into the space of sanity, goodness and clarity is to actually go through what you actually are. To discover your mind, to discover your own heart, to discover your own conditioning, to look at your life directly, nakedly."