Failure and success

If your sense of existence doesn’t depend on anything, then failure and success can be simple failure and simple success.  When failure doesn’t threaten you, then it’s just failure.  You might even be able to laugh about it!

p98, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

A ‘dangerous’ game

Creating conducive circumstances, for ourselves and others, involves planning and making efforts which in many respects is a ‘dangerous’ game.  Plans can be made and plans can fall apart, but that is no reason not to make plans.  The failure and success of plans simply gives us an opportunity to experience failure and success as the ornaments of equanimity.  If we have some sense of space, this is a distinct possibility.  

p89, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

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