They were the good old days. Don't give up hope in the bad new days, which will become the good old days. We appreciate Kennedy because he was killed; Martin Luther King was a great man. If you'd meet Naropa or Tilopa on the spot you'd be pissed off. History is very deceptive, reality is more important. There is a piece of philosophy for you.

Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.

If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

Aloneness seems to be the heart of discipline [...] You cannot develop yourself properly unless you give up your need for companionship. Once you give up your search for companionship, you can make friends with your loneliness. At that point, you become a genuine practitioner.

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. In the face of the world’s great problems, we can be heroic and kind at the same time. We must try to think how we can help this world. If we don’t help, nobody will. It is our turn to help the world. (p. 10)

Refusing to Give UpThe essence of human bravery is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with. That is why the Shambhala vision exists. It is a centuries-old idea: by serving the world we can save it.

Action without compassion is like planting a dead tree. It will never grow. But any action that contains compassion is planting a living tree that grows endlessly and never dies. Or even if the tree dies, it always leaves a seed behind, which will grow into another tree. That organic quality of compassion goes on and on and on.

When you commit yourself to the bodhisattva path, the path of helping others, you feel as if you have done it before and you have been doing it all along. It is like living up to your inheritance, or taking over your parents’ business. You feel that there is something quite natural and right about it.

However, maitri is not just being kind and nice. It is the understanding that one has to become one with the situation. That does not particularly mean that one becomes entirely without personality and has to accept whatever the other person suggests. Rather, you have to overcome the barrier that you have formed between yourself and others. If you remove this barrier and open yourself, then automatically real understanding and clarity will develop in your mind.