When you are busy and preoccupied, you feel hassled by your own existence.
You are so busy that you think that you do not have any time to spare for your
practice. Such torment and busyness seem to be monumental or historic, but
that is not the case. As far as we are concerned, that kind of torment is
absolutely ordinary. As you begin to work on that, you realize that the
inconvenience, discomfort, and anguish that you experience is no more than
anybody else experiences. So your experience is no longer regarded as
monumental--no more than if you step on a cat's tail, and the cat cries
out, "Wooaaaoow!" However, it is still a problematic situation. Therefore
you need to practice the paramita of discipline, which overcomes that type of
preoccupation altogether. You begin to realize that preoccupations are
garbage; they are worth flushing out so that something real could come up.
Then paramita activity begins to make sense, and you begin to act in a more
genuine way.
-- Chogyam Trungpa, from "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma.
Volume Two: The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion"
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