Dear Friends of the Chogyam Trungpa Institute,
On behalf of everyone at CTI, I’m writing to thank you immeasurably for your ongoing support. This has been a truly monumental year for CTI. With your help, we launched the Digital Library in January of 2023, featuring the Naropa Collection of more than 170 recordings – talks, interviews, seminars, meetings, poetry readings and other events. Since then we’ve had eight additional releases, featuring seminars on the Trungpa lineage, buddha nature, The Sadhana of Mahamudra, the Heart of Meditation, and more coming soon. This activity has attracted more than 16,500 visitors from 107 countries to the Digital Library.
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APPRECIATION FOR THE TEAM
The Digital Library Team has coalesced into a committed and talented group, adding resources to the Library, creating content that provides context and focused access to the material, and engaging with our online audience. Thank you Warner Dick, Leandra Ziegler, Anne Seidlitz, and Blaire Martin for all of this!
As the newly appointed Director of the Library, Lynn Friedman now heads up the team. Lynn has given more than a decade of dedicated and tireless work to making Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings fully available online. We trust she’ll add another decade to that!
Last but not least, our dedicated Transcription Team deserves much appreciation for their continuing hard work. Their high-quality verbatim transcripts are the lifeblood of the Digital Library, as they make the recordings uniquely searchable and accessible.
THE LONG VIEW
At CTI, our mission is to conceive of preservation in all its dimensions: in relation to the past, present, and future. The work of the Chogyam Trungpa Digital Library spans these three times by:
- Preserving original recordings in contemporary digital formats, with historical and contextual information in a linked database.
- Breathing new life into these gems, through transcription and providing guided online access to support students’ practice and study.
- Planning all of the above with truly long-term preservation in mind, establishing an invaluable repository for future generations.
Trungpa Rinpoche talked about Naropa University as a one hundred year project. Now seated at Naropa, the Chogyam Trungpa Institute — and Digital Library — embraces that long view. We see that our responsibility is to ensure that all of Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings are available decades if not centuries from now.
GOALS FOR THE FUTURE
Thus, for 2024 The Chogyam Trungpa Institute staff and Board of Advisors are now contemplating an ambitious plan – to complete the entire library of more than 1,500 fully-transcribed talks by 2027, the 40th Anniversary of Chogyam Trungpa’s passing, or Parinirvana. And your contributions are making all this possible!
At this time of Thanksgiving, we appreciate all of you for your continuing generosity. We thank you for exploring and using the resources of the Library, for your volunteer activity, and your general good wishes.
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We hope you will consider a year-end gift, to help keep us transcribing, captioning, streaming, and celebrating the teachings of the incomparable Vidyadhara Chokyi Gyatso, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Yours in the vast ocean of dharma,
Carolyn Rose Gimian
Executive Director on behalf of the entire CTI Team, Staff, and Advisory Board