According to the Buddha, no one can attain basic sanity or enlightenment without practicing meditation. The teachings given here on basic meditation-shamatha and vipashyana, mindfulness and awareness -- provide the foundation that every practitioner needs to awaken as the Buddha did. Trungpa teaches us to let go of the urge to make meditation serve our ambition; thus we can relax into openness. We are shown that the deliberate practice of mindfulness develops into uncontrived awareness, and we discover the world of insight that awareness reveals. We learn of a subtle psychological stage set that we carry with us everywhere and unwittingly use to structure all our experience -- and we find that meditation gradually carries us beyond this and beyond ego altogether to the experience of unconditioned freedom. Ch?gyam Trungpa-meditation master, scholar, and artist-founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado; Shambhala Training; and Vajradhatu, an international association of meditation centers. The author is deceased.