10/23/2025
One of my first Buddhist teachers was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. By proxy. He died in 1987. I was 15. But I studied him deeply, and met many of his protégés, many of whom I still study with today.
He had a “crazy wisdom” that would cut through the mire of self-deception quite quickly. As I aged, I didn’t agree with everything he said or did, but I now reflect on many of the essential teachings I learned from him.
One of them was this: when he spoke of “standing on the razor’s edge.” He is describing the delicate, often excruciating balance of genuine spiritual practice and the illusion of our ego projects. You could say, the precise, sharp line where ego and awareness meet.
On this edge, there is a moment when you begin to see your habitual patterns rising. My need for comfort, identity, control. And instead of indulging in them, repressing them, or ignoring them, this teaching asks me to stay right there, fully awake.
There is no escape route. I cannot collapse into despair, or anger and outrage at the world, or frustration with the people in it. That is bypassing the discomfort and certainly counts as indulgence. There’s also no room left for excuses or complaints about how life should be. I cannot slip into self-punishment or self-congratulation.
To walk this edge means standing precisely between illusion and awaking. To stay in that vivid, uncomfortable immediacy where both fear and freedom coexist. To stay awake in the in-between of grasping at comforting beliefs or eternalism, and letting go so completely that I fear there is no ground and I might fall into nihilism.
It’s really a metaphor for living with full consciousness in the face of uncertainty. Can we remain awake in the middle of paradox, neither numbed by pleasure nor destroyed by pain? Can we stand on the razor’s edge every time, moment by moment without slipping into the ego drama of illusion?
