The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (14 page)

But when we look back to the cocoon and see the suffering that takes place in the world of the coward, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is not a journey in the sense of walking in the desert looking ahead to the horizon. Rather, it is a journey that is unfolding within us. So, we begin to appreciate the Great Eastern Sun, not as something outside of us, like the sun in the sky, but as the Great Eastern Sun in our head and shoulders, in our face, our hair, our lips, our chest. If we examine our posture, our behavior, our existence, we find that the attributes of the Great Eastern Sun are reflected in every aspect of our being.

This brings a feeling of being a truly human being. Physically, psychologically, domestically, spiritually, we feel that we can lead our lives in the fullest way. There is a gut-level sense of health and wholesomeness taking place in our lives, as if we were holding a solid brick of gold. It is heavy and full, and it shines with a golden color. There is something very real and, at the same time, very rich about our human existence. Out of that feeling, a tremendous sense of health can be propagated to others. In fact, propagating health to our world becomes a basic discipline of warriorship. By discipline we do not mean something unpleasant or artificial that is imposed from outside. Rather, this discipline is an organic process that expands naturally from our own experience. When we feel healthy and wholesome ourselves, then we cannot help projecting that healthiness to others.

Great Eastern Sun vision brings natural interest in the world outside. Ordinarily, “interest” occurs when something extraordinary happens and makes you “interested” in it. Or being interested may come from being bored, so you find interests to occupy your time. Interest also occurs when you feel threatened. You become very inquisitive and sharp in order to protect yourself, so that nothing terrible will happen. For the warrior, interest happens spontaneously because there is already so much health and togetherness taking place in his or her life. The warrior feels that the world is naturally full of interest: the visual world, the emotional world, whatever world he might have. So interest or inquisitiveness manifests as raw delight, delight together with rawness or tenderness.

Usually when you are delighted about something, you develop a thick skin, and you feel smug. You say to yourself, “I’m so delighted to be here.” That is just self-affirmation. But in this case, delight has a touch the cocoon of pain to it, because you feel sore or raw in relation to your world. In fact, tenderness and sadness, as well as gentleness, actually produce a sense of interest. You are so vulnerable that you cannot help being touched by your world. That is a sort of saving grace, or safety precaution, so that the warrior never goes astray and never grows a thick skin. Whenever there is interest, the warrior also reflects back to the sadness, the tenderness, which projects further genuineness and sparks further interest.

The Great Eastern Sun illuminates the way of discipline for the warrior. An analogy for that is the beams of light you see when you look at the sunrise. The rays of light coming toward you almost seem to provide a pathway for you to walk on. In the same way, the Great Eastern Sun creates an atmosphere in which you can constantly move forward, recharging energy all the time. Your whole life is constantly moving forward, even though you may be doing something quite repetitive, such as working in a factory or at a hamburger stand. Whatever you may be doing, every minute of every hour is a new chapter, a new page. A warrior doesn’t need color television or video games. A warrior doesn’t need to read comic books to entertain himself or to be cheerful. The world that goes on around the warrior is what it is, and in that world the question of entertainment doesn’t arise. So the Great Eastern Sun provides the means to take advantage of your life in the fullest way. Then you find that you don’t have to ask an architect or a tailor to redesign your world for you. At the point of realizing that, a further sense of warriorship can take place: becoming a real warrior.

For the true warrior, there is no warfare. This is the idea of being all-victorious. When you are all-victorious, there is nothing to conquer, no fundamental problem or obstacle to overcome. This attitude is not based on suppressing or overlooking negativity, particularly. But if you look back and trace back through your life—who you are, what you are, and why you are in this world—if you look through that step-by-step, you won’t find any fundamental problems.

This is not a matter of talking yourself into believing that everything is okay. Rather, if you actually look, if you take your whole being apart and examine it, you find that you are genuine and good as you are. In fact, the whole of existence is well constructed, so that there is very little room for mishaps of any kind. There are, of course, constant challenges, but the sense of challenge is quite different from the setting-sun feeling that you are condemned to your world and your problems. Occasionally people are frightened by this vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Not knowing the nature of fear, of course, you cannot go beyond it. But once you know your cowardice, once you know where the stumbling block is, you can climb over it—maybe just three and a half steps.

EIGHT

Renunciation and Daring

What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others.

T
HE SITUATIONS OF FEAR
that exist in our lives provide us with stepping-stones to step over our fear. On the other side of cowardice is bravery. If we step over properly, we can cross the boundary from being cowardly to being brave. We may not discover bravery right away. Instead, we may find a shaky tenderness beyond our fear. We are still quivering and shaking, but there is tenderness, rather than bewilderment.

Tenderness contains an element of sadness, as we have discussed. It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived, but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears will spill out of your eyes and roll down your cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one has to feel this sad and tender heart. If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a warrior at all. The warrior is sensitive to every aspect of phenomena—sight, smell, sound, feelings. He appreciates everything that goes on in his world as an artist does. His experience is full and extremely vivid. The rustling of leaves and the sounds of raindrops on his coat are very loud. Occasional butterflies fluttering around him may be almost unbearable because he is so sensitive. Because of his sensitivity, the warrior can then go further in developing his discipline. He begins to learn the meaning of renunciation.

In the ordinary sense, renunciation is often connected with asceticism. You give up the sense pleasures of the world and embrace an austere spiritual life in order to understand the higher meaning of existence. In the Shambhala context, renunciation is quite different. What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others. Any hesitation about opening yourself to others is removed. For the sake of others, you renounce your privacy.

The need for renunciation arises when you begin to feel that basic goodness belongs to you. Of course, you cannot make a personal possession out of basic goodness. It is the law and order of the world, which is impossible to possess personally. It is a greater vision, much greater than your personal territory or schemes. Nonetheless, sometimes you try to localize basic goodness in yourself. You think that you can take a little pinch of basic goodness and keep it in your pocket. So the idea of privacy begins to creep in. That is the point at which you need renunciation—renunciation of the temptation to possess basic goodness. It is necessary to give up a localized approach, a provincial approach, and to accept a greater world.

Renunciation also is necessary if you are frightened by the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. When you realize how vast and good the Great Eastern Sun is, sometimes you feel overwhelmed. You feel that you need a little shelter from it, a roof over your head and three square meals a day. You try to build a little nest, a little home, to contain or limit what you have seen. It seems too vast, so you would like to take photographs of the Great Eastern Sun and keep them as a memory, rather than staring directly into the light. The principle of renunciation is to reject any small-mindedness of that kind.

The sitting practice of meditation provides an ideal environment to develop renunciation. In meditation, as you work with your breath, you regard any thoughts that arise as just your thinking process. You don’t hold on to any thought and you don’t have to punish your thoughts or praise them. The thoughts that occur during sitting practice are regarded as natural events, but at the same time, they don’t carry any credentials. The basic definition of meditation is “having a steady mind.” In meditation, when your thoughts go up, you don’t go up, and you don’t go down when your thoughts go down; you just watch as thoughts go up and thoughts go down. Whether your thoughts are good or bad, exciting or boring, blissful or miserable, you let them be. You don’t accept some and reject others. You have a sense of greater space that encompasses any thought that may arise.

In other words, in meditation you can experience a sense of existence, or being, that includes your thoughts but is not conditioned by your thoughts or limited to your thinking process. You experience your thoughts, you label them “thinking,” and you come back to your breath, going out, expanding, and dissolving into space. It is very simple, but it is quite profound. You experience your world directly and you do not have to limit that experience. You can be completely open, with nothing to defend and nothing to fear. In that way, you are developing renunciation of personal territory and small-mindedness.

At the same time, renunciation does involve discrimination. Within the basic context of openness there is a discipline of what to ward off, or reject, and what to cultivate, or accept. The positive aspect of renunciation, what is cultivated, is caring for others. But in order to care for others, it is necessary to reject caring only for yourself, or the attitude of selfishness. A selfish person is like a turtle carrying its home on its back wherever it goes. At some point you have to leave home and embrace a larger world. That is the absolute prerequisite for being able to care for others.

In order to overcome selfishness, it is necessary to be daring. It is as though you were dressed in your swimsuit, standing on the diving board with a pool in front of you, and you ask yourself: “Now what?” The obvious answer is: “Jump.” That is daring. You might wonder if you will sink or hurt yourself if you jump. You might. There is no insurance, but it is worthwhile jumping to find out what will happen. The student warrior has to jump. We are so accustomed to accepting what is bad for us and rejecting what is good for us. We are attracted to our cocoons, our selfishness, and we are afraid of selflessness, stepping beyond ourselves. So in order to overcome our hesitation about giving up our privacy, and in order to commit ourselves to others’ welfare, some kind of leap is necessary.

In the practice of meditation, the way to be daring, the way to leap, is to disown your thoughts, to step beyond your hope and fear, the ups and downs of your thinking process. You can just be, just let yourself be, without holding on to the constant reference points that mind manufactures. You do not have to get rid of your thoughts. They are a natural process; they are fine; let them be as well. But let yourself go out with the breath, let it dissolve. See what happens. When you let yourself go in that way, you develop trust in the strength of your being and trust in your ability to open and extend yourself to others. You realize that you are rich and resourceful enough to give selflessly to others, and as well, you find that you have tremendous willingness to do so.

But then, once you have made a leap of daring, you might become arrogant. You might say to yourself: “Look, I have jumped! I am so great, so fantastic!” But arrogant warriorship does not work. It does nothing to benefit others. So the discipline of renunciation also involves cultivating further gentleness, so that you remain very soft and open and allow tenderness to come into your heart. The warrior who has accomplished true renunciation is completely naked and raw, without even skin or tissue. He has renounced putting on a new suit of armor or growing a thick skin, so his bone and marrow are exposed to the world. He has no room and no desire to manipulate situations. He is able to be, quite fearlessly, what he is.

At this point, having completely renounced his own comfort and privacy, paradoxically, the warrior finds himself more alone. He is like an island sitting alone in the middle of a lake. Occasional ferry boats and commuters go back and forth between the shore and the island, but all that activity only expresses the further loneliness, or the aloneness, of the island. Although the warrior’s life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others. The fullness of his experience is his own, and he must live with his own truth. Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about: It is a cause for rejoicing. It is entering the warrior’s world.

NINE

Celebrating the Journey

Warriorship is a continual journey. To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.