Daily Inspiration Quote by Chogyam Trungpa

In Trungpa's hands, "conquering" isn’t just a bad habit; it’s a whole worldview disguised as competence. The line skewers the modern reflex to treat every crisis as an engineering problem and every landscape, person, or emotion as a resource to be managed. "Conquering the earth" evokes empire, extraction, and the ego’s favorite story: that control equals safety. It’s a spiritual critique delivered in plain language, which is why it lands. He doesn’t argue against action; he argues against the mental posture behind action.

"Touching the earth, touching ground" is the pivot, and it’s deliberately tactile. Trungpa pushes the listener out of abstraction and into contact: with bodies, with breath, with limits. The subtext is that many "solutions" fail because they’re launched from dissociation - from being unmoored from what is actually happening in the room, the community, the ecosystem, the self. Ground isn’t a metaphor you can debate; it’s something you either feel or you don’t.

Context matters. Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who brought Vajrayana practice to the West, spent years watching spiritual ideas get repackaged as self-improvement and power. This quote reads as an early warning about that drift: the same conquest mentality that flattens nature can colonize spirituality, turning mindfulness into another tool for winning. His intent is corrective, even preventative: before you try to fix the world, notice the craving to dominate it. Touch first. Then act.