The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (16 page)

First, you must trust in yourself. Then you can also trust in the earth or gravity of a situation, and because of that, you can uplift yourself. At that point, your discipline becomes delightful rather than being an ordeal or a great demand. When you ride a horse, balance comes, not from freezing your legs to the saddle, but from learning to float with the movement of the horse as you ride. Each step is a dance, the rider’s dance as well as the dance of the horse.

When discipline begins to be natural, a part of you, it is very important to learn to let go. For the warrior, letting go is connected with relaxing within discipline, in order to experience freedom. Freedom here does not mean being wild or sloppy; rather it is letting yourself go so that you fully experience your existence as a human being. Letting go is completely conquering the idea that discipline is a punishment for a mistake or a bad deed that you have committed, or might like to commit. You have to completely conquer the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with your human nature and that therefore you need discipline to correct your behavior. As long as you feel that discipline comes from outside, there is still a lingering feeling that something is lacking in you. So letting go is connected with letting go of any vestiges of doubt or hesitation or embarrassment about being you as you are. You have to relax with yourself in order to fully realize that discipline is simply the expression of your basic goodness. You have to appreciate yourself, respect yourself, and let go of your doubt and embarrassment so that you can proclaim your goodness and basic sanity for the benefit of others.

In order to let go, first you have to train yourself in the discipline of renunciation as well as the aspects of discipline that were discussed in the last chapter. This is necessary so that you will not confuse letting go with aggression or arrogance. Without proper training, letting go can be confused with pushing yourself to the breaking point in order to prove to yourself that you are a brave and fearless person. This is too aggressive. Letting go also has nothing to do with enjoying yourself at other people’s expense by promoting your own ego and “laying your trips” on others. Arrogance of that kind is not really based on letting go, in any case. It is based on a fundamental insecurity about yourself, which makes you insensitive rather than soft and gentle.

For example, a professional driver in an auto race can drive at two hundred miles an hour on the race track because of his training. He knows the limits of the engine and the steering and the tires; he knows the weight of the car, the road conditions, and the weather conditions. So he can drive fast without it becoming suicidal. Instead, it becomes a dance. But if you play with letting go before you have established a proper connection with discipline, then it is quite dangerous. If you are learning to ski and you try to let go and relax at an early level of your athletic training, you might easily fracture a bone. So if you mimic letting go, you may run into trouble.

You might think that, based on this discussion, you will never have sufficient training to let go and relax in your discipline. You might feel that you will never be ready to be a daring person. But once you have made a basic connection to discipline, it is time to let go of those doubts. If you are waiting for your discipline to become immaculate, that time will never come, unless you let go. When you begin to enjoy the discipline of warriorship, when it begins to feel natural, even though it may still feel very imperfect, that is the time to let go.

Obviously, letting go is more than just relaxation. It is relaxation based on being in tune with the environment, the world. One of the important principles of letting go is living in the challenge. But this does not mean living with a constant crisis. For example, suppose your banker calls and says that your account is overdrawn, and the same day your landlord tells you that you are about to be evicted for failing to pay your rent. To respond to this crisis, you get on the telephone and call all your friends to see if you can borrow enough money to avert the crisis. Living in the challenge is not based on responding to extraordinary demands that you have created for yourself by failing to relate to the details of your life. For the warrior, every moment is a challenge to be genuine, and each challenge is delightful. When you let go properly, you can relax and enjoy the challenge.

The setting-sun version of letting go is to take a vacation or to get drunk and become wild and sloppy and do outrageous things that, in your “right” mind, you would never contemplate. The Shambhala understanding is, obviously, quite different. For the warrior, letting go is not based on getting away from the constraints of ordinary life. It is quite the opposite. It is going further into your life, because you understand that your life, as it is, contains the means to unconditionally cheer you up and cure you of depression and doubt.

The setting-sun understanding of cheering up is talking yourself into feeling better, rather than actually cheering up. When you wake up in the morning and get out of bed, you go into the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror. Your hair is somewhat disheveled, you are half asleep, and there are bags under your eyes. In the setting-sun world, you say to yourself, with a big sigh, “Here we go again.” You feel that you have to crank yourself up to get through the day. To use another example, when the Iranian revolutionaries were guarding the hostages at the American embassy, they probably woke up in the morning with a feeling of delight: “Great! We have hostages next door!” That is a setting-sun version of cheerfulness.

Cheering up is not based on artificial willpower or creating an enemy and conquering him in order to make yourself feel more alive. Human beings have basic goodness, not next door, but
in
them already. When you look at yourself in the mirror you can appreciate what you see, without worrying about whether what you see is what
should
be. You can pick up on the possibilities of basic goodness and cheer yourself up, if you just relax with yourself. Getting out of bed, walking into the bathroom, taking a shower, eating breakfast—you can appreciate whatever you do, without always worrying whether it fits your discipline or your plan for the day. You can have that much trust in yourself, and that will allow you to practice discipline much more thoroughly than if you constantly worry and try to check back to see how you are doing.

You can appreciate your life, even if it is an imperfect situation. Perhaps your apartment is run down and your furniture is old and inexpensive. You do not have to live in a palace. You can relax and let go wherever you are. Wherever you are, it
is
a palace. If you move into an apartment that was left in a mess, you can spend the time to clean it up, not because you feel bad or oppressed by dirt, but because you feel good. If you take the time to clean up and move in properly, you can transform a dumpy apartment into an accommodating home.

Human dignity is not based on monetary wealth. Affluent people may spend a great deal of money making their homes luxurious, but they may be creating artificial luxury. Dignity comes from using your inherent human resources, by doing things with your own bare hands—on the spot, properly and beautifully. You can do that: Even in the worst of the worst situations, you can still make your life elegant.

Your body is an extension of basic goodness. It is the closest implement, or tool, that you have to express basic goodness, so appreciating your body is very important. The food you eat, the liquor you drink, the clothes you wear, and getting proper exercise are all important. You don’t have to jog or do push-ups every day, but it is important to take an attitude of caring about your body. Even if you have a physical handicap, you don’t have to feel that you are imprisoned by it. You can still respect your body and your life. Your dignity extends beyond your handicap. In the name of heaven and earth, you can afford to make love to yourself.

Shambhala vision is not purely a philosophy. It is actually training yourself to be a warrior. It is learning to treat yourself better, so that you can help to build an enlightened society. In that process, self-respect is very important and it is wonderful, absolutely excellent. You may not have money to buy expensive clothes, but you don’t have to feel that your economic problems are driving you into the depression of the setting-sun world. You can still express dignity and goodness. You may be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but you can be a dignified person wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans. The problem arises when you don’t have respect for yourself and therefore for your clothes. If you go to bed in a depression and throw your clothes on the floor, that is a problem.

The basic point is that, when you live your life in accordance with basic goodness, then you develop natural elegance. Your life can be spacious and relaxed, without having to be sloppy. You can actually let go of your depression and embarrassment about being a human being, and you can cheer up. You don’t have to blame the world for your problems. You can relax and appreciate the world.

Then there is a further stage of letting go, which is telling the truth. When you have doubts about yourself or doubts about the trustworthiness of your world, then you may feel that you have to manipulate the truth in order to protect yourself. For example, when you have a job interview, you may not be entirely truthful with your potential employer. You may feel that you have to bend the truth to get the job. You think that you have to make yourself appear better than you are. From the Shambhala point of view, honesty is the best policy. But telling the truth does not mean that you have to bare your innermost secrets and expose everything that you are ashamed of. You have nothing to be ashamed of! That is the basis for telling the truth. You may not be the greatest scholar or mechanic or artist or lover in the world, but what you are is genuinely, basically good. If you actually feel that, then you can let go of hesitation and self-consciousness and tell the truth, without exaggeration or denigration.

Then you begin to understand the importance of communicating openly with others. If you tell the truth to others, then they can also be open with you—maybe not immediately, but you are giving them the opportunity to express themselves honestly as well. When you do not say what you feel, you generate confusion for yourself and confusion for others. Avoiding the truth defeats the purpose of speech as communication.

Telling the truth is also connected with gentleness. A Shambhala person speaks gently: He or she doesn’t bark. Gentle speech expresses your dignity, as does having good head and shoulders. It would be very strange if someone had good head and shoulders and began to bark. It would be very incongruous. Often when you talk to a person who doesn’t know English, you find yourself yelling—as if you had to shout to be understood. That is exactly what should
not
happen. If you want to communicate with others, you don’t have to shout and bang on the table in order to get them to listen. If you are telling the truth, then you can speak gently, and your words will have power.

The final stage of letting go is being without deception. Deception here does not refer to deliberately misleading others. Rather, your self-deception, your own hesitation and self-doubt, may confuse other people or actually deceive them. You may ask someone to help you make a decision: “Should I ask this person to marry me?” “Should I complain to so-and-so who was rude to me?” “Should I take this job?” “Should I go on vacation?” You are deceiving others if your question is not a genuine request for help but simply reflects your lack of self-confidence. Being without deception is actually a further extension of telling the truth: It is based on being truthful with yourself. When you have a sense of trusting in your own existence, then what you communicate to other people is genuine and trustworthy.

Self-deception often arises because you are afraid of your own intelligence and afraid that you won’t be able to deal properly with your life. You are unable to acknowledge your own innate wisdom. Instead, you see wisdom as some monumental thing outside of yourself. That attitude has to be overcome. In order to be without deception, the only reference point you can rely on is the knowledge that basic goodness exists in you already. The certainty of that knowledge can be experienced in the practice of meditation. In meditation, you can experience a state of mind that is without second thoughts, free from fear and doubt. That unwavering state of mind is not swayed by the temporary ups and downs of thoughts and emotions. At first you may only have a glimpse. Through the practice of meditation, you glimpse a spark or a dot of unconditional, basic goodness. When you experience that dot, you may not feel totally free or totally good, but you realize that wakefulness, fundamental goodness, is there already. You can let go of hesitation, and therefore, you
can
be without deception. There is an uplifted quality to your life, which exists effortlessly. The result of letting go is contacting that uplifted energy, which allows you to completely join together discipline and delight, so that discipline becomes both effortless and splendid.

Everyone has experienced a wind of energy or power in their lives. For example, athletes feel a surge of energy when they are engaged in their sport. Or a person may experience a torrent of love or passion for another human being to whom he or she is attracted. Sometimes, we feel energy as a cool breeze of delight rather than a strong wind. For example, when you are hot and perspiring, if you take a shower, you feel so delightfully cool and energized at the same time.

Normally, we think that this energy comes from a definite source or has a particular cause. We associate it with the situation in which we became so energized. Athletes may become addicted to their sport because of the “rush” they experience. Some people become addicted to falling in love over and over again because they feel so good and alive when they are in love. The result of letting go is that you discover a bank of self-existing energy that is always available to you—beyond any circumstance. It actually comes from nowhere, but is always there. It is the energy of basic goodness.