[OceanofDharma] Quotes of the Week: Decency Is Absence of Strategy

Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week

May 21, 2009

DECENCY IS ABSENCE OF STRATEGY

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior's approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

From "Perkiness," a talk given to the Directors of Shambhala Training, July 1978.

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Teachings by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, taken from works published by Shambhala Publications,  the Archive of his unpublished work in the Shambhala Archives, plus other published sources.

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