I was asked to comment on Chogyam Trungpa's book "Shambhala: The Sacred Path
of the Warrior". I am not going to do a chapter-by-chapter summary. I
don't feel that this volume breaks enough new ground to warrant that close
an examination. Few books on religious topics ever do. That's because the
essence of most religions are pretty simple. For instance, the essence of
Christianity is to love God completely and to love others as much as you
love yourself. In Buddhism, the essence is to be as quiet as one can and
pay as much attention as one can. There's only so much one can say about
that without becoming repetitive.

Still, there are a few interesting symbols and concepts that Trungpa
discusses that are, in my opinion, worth some reflection.

Firstly, the myth of the Sacred City is all over the globe and has been
around for a long, long time. Atlantis is one such myth. Brigadoon,
Camelot, El Dorado, the list goes on. Plato intellectualized it in Utopia.
It's heaven. It's the perfect communion of souls, the perfect society. In
each myth, the qualities of that society are idealized versions of whatever
society invented them. In Shambhala, the society is Buddhist. Thus, if you
want to live in Shambhala, you should be the perfect Buddhist citizen. So
becoming this citizen is the main thrust of this version of telling us to be
quiet and pay attention.

Now, Trungpa paints us a picture of each citizen of Shambhala as its
champion, its guardian. The citizen of Shambhala is what Tibetans call a
"pawo", literally "brave one", a term applied to outstanding soldiers. Each
citizen of Shambhala defends it against the forces that seek to destroy it.
These forces are essentially spiritual ones, but as is usual when dealing
with religion and magick, the boundaries between spiritual forces and
physical ones are always a bit tenuous. The Tibetan pawo is not a soldier,
however. At least he or she isn't a conscript or a grunt. The Sacred
Warrior (another mythic figure crossing many cultures) is a powerful
physical force because of his or her deep spiritual roots. One becomes a
citizen of Shambhala by becoming a sacred warrior, by developing one's
connection to one's spiritual source and exerting a powerful influence over
the world because of it.

That's exactly what one seeks to do through the practice of magick.

The Tibetan myth of Shambhala attributes it as the source of Tantra. In
their view, Tantra is the interaction of spirituality with physicality.
Yet, Trungpa stays away from any specific discussion of tantric disciplines
in this book. He's trying to teach Americans how to stand up on their own
before he tries to teach them kung fu.

Given the propensity for young magicians to try to command the universe
before they even learn how to breathe efficiently and never to admit they
still need to learn anything more than the contents of their occult comic
books, this is a good book for students of magick, no matter how advanced
they want to tell themselves they are.

Trungpa gives very specific instructions on the practice of meditation,
which is how one practices being quiet and paying attention. One simply
sits on the ground, assumes a good, stable posture, and sits there being
aware that one is right here, right now. While this seems that this simple
and obvious thing, it turns out to be amazing hard to do for very long at
all. What posture is good enough, stable enough, not to distract us over
long periods? What does one do with all one's attention in such a quiet
situation? Are we waiting for something to happen? If so, what's supposed
to happen? And so on. For this reason, Trungpa says there's no replacement
for personal instruction. You'll probably never really understand what
meditation is unless you have some instruction from someone who knows what
he's doing. Yet, you can understand a lot by reading about how meditation
is done and maybe you'll even get it right on your own. Still, at some
point, it's a good idea to get some personal instruction, just to make sure
you're not missing anything.

Meditation, says Trungpa, leads to a discovery of "basic goodness".

"When we speak of basic goodness, we are not talking about having allegiance
to good and rejecting bad. Basic goodness is good because it is
unconditional, or fundamental. It is already there, in the same way that
heaven and earth are there already. It is not a 'for' or 'against' view, in
the same way that sunlight is not 'for' or 'against'."

The basic goodness of the Sacred Warrior comes from an abiding awareness of
basic goodness in the fundamentals of the world. It is basic goodness that
constitutes the spiritual root that connects the Warrior with his or her
power.

Basic goodness leads inexorably to a sense of fearlessness. Now,
fearlessness is no the same as not feeling the emotions of arousal. The
coward seeks to eliminate the feeling, to deny it exists. The Warrior
transcends the feeling by accepting it as it is and finding the basic
goodness within it.

Trungpa says that to transcend fear one must first be willing to face
sadness. Part of accepting ourselves completely is the acceptance of
sadness, the kind of sadness that comes from an open heart, an openness that
allows everything in the world to touch the softest part of us. When we
open this way, we discover our sadness. It takes the first beginnings of
true courage to face that sadness and it is by facing that sadness, by
accepting that we are vulnerable and not to try to hide from it or run away
from it, that we can transcend fear.

This is a summary of the first four chapters of the book. There's a lot
more but this gives us something to start talking about.