We can only share the experience of love if we relinquish our definitions of who we are and what we propose to become. We become besotted with each other when circumstances align themselves in such a way that we catch glimpses of each other’s beginningless nondual being.’ These glimpses are rays of light in the sky of our being. In these glimpses we see our own intrinsic nature reflected back. Our love for each other is a rapturous reflection of the love which exists as the natural relationship between all beings and all situations.p4, Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-3-3
Aro Quotation
Monday, 25 January 2021
Monday, 18 January 2021
Moments of magic
In spite of our compulsion to distance ourselves from the texture of our experience, we do also value the qualities of immediacy and spontaneity. Most people can remember moments of magic in their lives; moments when their consciousness was naturally expansive. Moments when there was a feeling of spaciousness – when everything unfolded with a sense of wonder and ease. This is possible when we have unguarded moments – moments when we forget to mix in our pre-structured concepts with what we perceive.
p32, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8
Monday, 11 January 2021
An enormous difference to our lives
p92, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8
Monday, 4 January 2021
A theme that runs throughout history
p92, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8
Monday, 28 December 2020
The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion
To practise Tantra is to plummet into wisdom-fire. The word ‘fire’ is used because fire transforms solidity into emptiness and shows us the empty nature of the material world. Fire is a fascinating element – it’s both tangible and intangible. You can’t pick it up – you can only pick up what it’s burning. It’s intangible and yet it destroys or devours tangibility. It has great power to transform substance, yet it seems to be substanceless. So wisdom-fire as a Tantric term carries the sense in which wisdom; that is to say primordial wisdom, can change the world as we perceive it quite radically. The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion – it can reduce our own hard and substance-orientated concepts to ashes.
p12, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4
Monday, 21 December 2020
We have to let go of what we are
Dying means letting go of self-image and self-conception. We have to let go of what we are and open ourselves to what we can un-become. From a Buddhist point of view it is unbecoming not to un-become. In order to un-become, we must let go of security and find the security of insecurity. We must discover the freedom of insecurity in which security and insecurity dance as nondual display. If we cannot let our past preconceptions die we have no future, and cannot experience the present. Unless we can die, we cannot be alive in the moment – and the moment is all we ever have.
p87, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, 978-1-898185-06-2
Monday, 14 December 2020
The merest marginal moment
The question of death however, is subtle. It is not merely an issue of when the last breath is taken. Death pervades life. Death is a continual presence. Death assumes the form of: conclusion, termination, removal, exodus, exclusion, subtraction, confiscation, separation, parting, loss, departure, and in fact – any finale. Death can be the merest marginal moment in which something mutates, misfires, or changes. Death is not simply the day-by-day shift of the aging process which adds its lines to our faces, but the infinitesimal truncations which enable ‘old versions of ourselves’ to die and be replaced by rebirths in each passing moment.
p182, Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-3-3
Monday, 7 December 2020
People ...mostly could not help themselves
Apart from the sense of bemusement, there was an inherent obligation to be kindly rather than indulgent – whenever the choice lay before me. People were as they were – and mostly could not help themselves. I had come to understand that I could—and therefore should—step outside the framework in which I had to take offence at anything.
p350-351, Goodbye Forever: miscellaneous memoirs of an English Lama, Volume One Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2020, ISBN 978-1-898185-51-2
Monday, 30 November 2020
Gö kar chang lo vows
The fact that I’d taken gö kar chang lo vows was always with me. It affected everything I did or said. I had become careful: far more careful than I had ever been before – but also curiously carefree. The vicissitudes of life were vaguely like a pantomime: they were scenarios with which I had to engage with whatever earnestness seemed suitable to the occasion. It was possible to be earnestly light-hearted in the face of whatever came along.
p350, Goodbye Forever: miscellaneous memoirs of an English Lama, Volume One Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2020, ISBN 978-1-898185-51-2
Monday, 23 November 2020
Romance goes beyond limitations
How can one be open to romance when one is tied up in limitations which govern how it can occur? Basically we need as few limitations as possible. Body type is a limitation which causes people to restrict themselves too much – especially at this point in history. People have been surprised to hear us say that a yogi or yogini should be attracted to all body types: peaceful, joyous, and wrathful. That is to say: thin, sensuous, and large. One cannot entertain concepts of being a tantrika if there are body types to which one could feel no attraction.
p152-153, Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-3-3
Monday, 16 November 2020
Existential kaleidoscope
p167, Goodbye Forever: miscellaneous memoirs of an English Lama, Volume One Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2020, ISBN 978-1-898185-51-2
Monday, 9 November 2020
There is a gap there
If we want to cultivate some understanding of what is meant by emptiness, we have to look for the reflections of emptiness within the mirror of the world of form. We need to look at the moments when our experience is transitional; when one sequence of events seems to conclude, and the beginning of another has not yet become obvious. There is a gap there – and that gap is emptiness.
p33, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4
Monday, 2 November 2020
Simple, ordinary, and direct
p122, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7
Monday, 26 October 2020
Simple, blunt, uncompromising
When we commit ourselves to practice and to opening, we commit ourselves to change – and when we change, we die. We have to die in order to change. If we cannot die we cannot change. This is a simple, blunt, uncompromising statement of fact.
p87, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, 978-1-898185-06-2
Monday, 19 October 2020
Obsession
I'd succeeded and failed simultaneously. The failure? That was obvious – but what of the success? That comprised of my having had the single pointed intention to do what I had done. I'd carried through with a plan. I'd not given up. That was important for a Buddhist practitioner. The lengths to which obsession carries a person, in terms of activity, is the mark of someone who stands the chance of realising goals in Buddhism.
p75, Goodbye Forever: miscellaneous memoirs of an English Lama, Volume One Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2020, ISBN 978-1-898185-51-2
Monday, 12 October 2020
Then the mind begins to awaken
The rider must focus on the horse. In this way, the rider is empty in relation to the form of the horse. Through this relationship, the horse is able to respond fully, and achieve its potential. The meditator learns emptiness in order to clarify the relationship with form, and thereby discover the nonduality of emptiness and form. Then the mind begins to awaken.
p10, Battlecry of Freedom Ngakma Nor'dzin, Aro Books Worldwide, 2019, ISBN 978-1-898185-46-8
Monday, 5 October 2020
The flow of whatever is

p39-40, Shock Amazement: The four naljors and four ting-ngé’dzin from the Dzogchen series of the nature of Mind. Khandro Déchen and Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2018, ISBN 978-1-898185-45-1
Monday, 28 September 2020
A provocative irritant

p31-32, Shock Amazement: The four naljors and four ting-ngé’dzin from the Dzogchen series of the nature of Mind. Khandro Déchen and Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books Worldwide, 2018, ISBN 978-1-898185-45-1
Monday, 21 September 2020
Worthwhile just as we are
Monday, 14 September 2020
Abandon inhibition
p153, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7