It is very fine to look back on the lives of the great spiritual teachers, but equally, it is not particularly romantic. They had the same problems and difficulties in searching for the teachings that we have in the century. So there’s always hope for all of us; we don’t particularly have to be born perfect. We could just be ordinary people, perfectly ordinary in the tugged sense; but equally we have a chance to develop spiritual understanding, as well as to attain enlightenment. So therefore, the point of looking back to various great teachers, is not that there is something mysterious, something magical about them, but that they were just ordinary when they began. The point is just to see the way they proceed through the various situations which forced them to develop.
Chögyam Trungpa
Karmê Chöling 1970
