Tantra is very much the ‘middle way’ that characterises all Buddhist vehicles. The ‘middle way’ might be better translated as: ‘the way that rejects all referential co-ordinates’ – ‘the way that doesn’t seek to locate itself in known or knowable territory’. This is the way that doesn't hold any kind of position or stance for establishing a fixed definition of being. It doesn’t say: ‘I am here because that is there’; ‘I am now because I was then, and so I will be in the future’. It doesn’t say: ‘I think therefore I am.’ In fact – it simply rejects all ‘therefores’.
p9, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4
Compassion means more than simply being kind. Compassion—or active compassion—is how we usually translate bodhicitta or changchub sem. Compassion includes kindness, but kindness is but part of the spectrum of compassion.
Compassion includes appreciation, admiration, pleasure, wonder, enjoyment, and communication—fierce, florid, and fecund communication.
Compassion is openness to infinite pattern and to embodying any aspect of that pattern for the benefit of everyone, and everything, everywhere.
p130-131, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7
Trust and respect are the emptiness and form of romance. This means that you must listen to each other with open minds and open hearts. You both need to feel valued and appreciated by each other – even for your perceived foibles and weaknesses. Foibles and weaknesses must become endearing. Having chosen each other you can now only celebrate every aspect of each other. The only way forward, for any couple, is to find more and more to love and cherish within each other.
p31-32, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7
The hell of being a practitioner is the state in which we begin to see through our neuroses, and yet we continue to afflict ourselves with them.
It can only stop through clarity and, to have clarity develop, we need humour. We have to accept that we are both the dyed-in-the-wool neurotic and the practitioner who is trying to let neuroses go. That is comical and we have to be fairly light-hearted about it. With sufficient humour, we can simply be the space that lets these two lunatics dance.
p78-79, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7
Tantra is very much the ‘middle way’ that characterises all Buddhist vehicles. The ‘middle way’ might be better translated as: ‘the way that rejects all referential co-ordinates’ – ‘the way that doesn’t seek to locate itself in known or knowable territory’. This is the way that doesn't hold any kind of position or stance for establishing a fixed definition of being. It doesn’t say: ‘I am here because that is there’; ‘I am now because I was then, and so I will be in the future’. It doesn’t say: ‘I think therefore I am.’ In fact – it simply rejects all ‘therefores’.