This unwithheld approach

When we embrace our emotions in Vajrayana practice, we begin to operate in a more magnanimous way.  We embrace greater emotions: greater appetite, greater rage, greater passion, greater speed, and greater abandon.  With this unwithheld approach we begin to lose track of our referential ground and our referential boundaries.  Then we have nothing to gain or lose—we simply have the existential fact of what is—whatever it is. 

p148, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7

The 'Law of Karma'

Awareness means relinquishing the police state of karmic-vision and assuming personal responsibility.  Karma is the sum total of our perception in all it’s excruciating intricacy.  The ‘Law of Karma’ is different from externally enforced societal law, because ‘karmic law’ is directly consequential and self-implementing.  We perceive the world in a certain way, and react to it in accordance with that style of perception.  This is what is meant by karma.  There’s no injustice in this kind of ‘law’ apart from the injustice to the non-dual state perpetrated by karmic patterning. 

p51, Rays of the Sun, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, ISBN 978-1-898185-06-2

The Buddha of our time

Padmasambhava is the Buddha of our time; for anyone interested in these teachings – this is something that needs to be taken to heart. Padmasambhava is both a personal relationship and a vast sphere of meaning and luminous experience. Padmasambhava is the Buddha whose teachings and practices become more powerful as our condition of confusion as sentient beings becomes more intense. To really practice in the Tantric tradition, Padmasambhava has to be understood.  He has to be understood as embodying the depth of meaning and influence that goes completely beyond the reach and range of the rational mind. Without a sense of the vastness of what is in encompassed by his name, it’s impossible to have a useful relationship with Tantra.

p133, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4

Inclusivity

There is space for historical academic research, and there is space for the reverential attribution of teachings to various personages.  There is space for people who want to get as close as they can to the words of Padmasambhava and Yeshé Tsogyel—and there is space for people who want to go for the essence irrespective of the nearness or distance of its historical origin.  Buddhism is a vast field of wonder for its sincere practitioners, and so many, many, many different methods are encompassed within its parameters.  We feel that it is preferable to come from a position of inclusivity rather than exclusivity.

p51, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7