A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don’t appreciate themselves.

The key to warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala vision is not being afraid of who you are. Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.

To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.

~ Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
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There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. At that time great powers have arisen, barbarian powers. And although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common. Among the things they have in common are weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to the world. It is just at this point in our history, when the future of all beings seems to hang by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You cannot go there, because it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. You can’t tell whether someone is a Shambhala warrior just by looking at her or him, because these warriors wear no uniforms or insignia.

Now the time is coming when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors. So, now is the time for the Shambhala warriors to go into training. They train with the use of two ‘weapons’. One is compassion. The other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena.

You need both. You need compassion because it provides the fuel to move you out to where you need to be and to do what you need to do. It means not being afraid of the suffering of your world. When you’re not afraid of the world’s pain, then nothing can stop you.

But by itself compassion is very hot; it can burn you out. So you need the other tool, the insight into the radical interconnectivity of all that is. When you have that, then you know that this is not a battle between the good guys and the bad guys.

And you also know that we are so interwoven in the web of life that even our smallest acts have repercussions that ripple through the whole web, beyond our capacity to see. 

Photo by Barbara
While trekking in Nepal
Scan of a 35mm slide