12 Rules for Life: Tantric Buddhist Edition

1. Live every moment of life with the view: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” This must be done fully without a safety net.

2. We are beginninglessly enlightened, so there’s no need to seek self-help externally. Just relax to allow your Buddha-nature to emerge outward from within.

3. When panicking, say to yourself: “This is fantastic, it’s just like falling in love!” When falling in love, say to yourself: “Maybe this is a panic attack!”

4. Ruthlessly and efficiently cut through delusions and neurosis. Don’t waste energy on maintaining the illusions of duality.

5. Ambivalent feelings are the bare electric cables of hope and fear. Take hold of them to feel the existential voltage of reality. Ride the energy wave of duality!

6. Amor fati. Even if I’m in hell, I’ll find a way to enjoy it.

7. Don’t throw away the hero in your soul. The hero knows that the alternation of chaos and order, birth and death, form and emptiness, peace and war, is the energy wave of life.

8. The path is the goal, because form is emptiness. Sisyphus escapes samsara as a Buddha once he realizes that he is beginninglessly enlightened.

9. Discipline equals freedom. The most difficult discipline is to be what you are—a Buddha.

10. Hold the line. Degeneration is a slow and incremental process. Don’t get to a point where you wake up one day and realize that you’ve become something that you never would have allowed.

11. Do not mimic other people’s desires. Envy leads to the sacrifice of the scapegoat.

12. Suffering is not a problem when you realize that form is impermanent, emptiness is vast, and form is emptiness. The Bodhisattva simply dissolves suffering into the emptiness, avoiding the fate of the scapegoat.

This post was inspired by Ngak'chang Rinpoche, Jordan Peterson, Chögyam Trungpa, Jocko Willink, Ray Dalio, René Girard, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Thanks for reading!