The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (21 page)

FIFTEEN

Overcoming Habitual Patterns

The process of freeing yourself from arrogance and cutting off your habitual tendencies is a very drastic measure, but it is necessary in order to help others in this world.

A
RROGANCE COMES FROM
lack of gentleness, as we have discussed already. But beyond that, lack of gentleness comes from relying on habitual patterns of behavior. So habitual patterns are also an obstacle to invoking drala. By clinging to habitual behavior, we are cutting ourselves off from the warrior’s world. Habitual patterns are almost like reflexes: When we are shocked, we panic, and when we are attacked, we become defensive. On a more subtle level, we use habitual patterns to hide our self-consciousness. When we feel inadequate, we employ habitual responses to patch up our self-image: We invent excuses to shield our inadequacies from other people. Our standard emotional responses are often reflections of habitual patterns, as are mental fatigue, restlessness, irritation over something we don’t like, and many of our desires. We use our habitual patterns to seal ourselves off and to build ourselves up.

The Japanese have an interesting term,
toranoko,
which literally means “tiger cub.” It is a pejorative term. When you call someone a toranoko, you mean that he is a paper tiger, someone who appears brave but is actually a coward. That is the description of clinging to habitual patterns. You may make feeble attempts to expose your cowardice. Using eloquent language, you may make a confession, saying, “I know I’m not all that fearless,” but even your confession is still an expression of toranoko, a fat tiger cub who is afraid of his own shadow, afraid to jump and play with the other cubs.

The Tibetan word for animal is
tudro. Tu
means “hunched,” and
dro
means “walking.”
Tudros
are four-legged animals who walk hunched over. Their most sensitive sense organs are their nostrils, which they use to smell their way through the world. That is a precise description of habitual behavior, which is a manifestation of animal instinct. Habitual patterns allow you to look no further than three steps ahead of you. You are always looking at the ground, and you never look up at the bright blue sky or the mountain peaks. You fail to smile and rejoice at the mist rising off the glaciers. In fact, anything above your shoulder level is embarrassing. No possibility of head and shoulders has ever occurred in that realm.

You may have been instructed in how to experience head and shoulders and how to raise yourself up to see the Great Eastern Sun. But still, if you don’t overcome habitual patterns, you could remain a tudro who hunches over and walks on four feet. When you follow your habitual patterns, you never look to the right or to the left, you fail to see the brightness of colors, and you never appreciate the breeze coming in the window. You want to close the window right away, because fresh air is a nuisance.

When a tudro-type person who is filled with habitual patterns looks at a warrior, he might feel that the warrior has a very tedious existence. How in the name of heaven and earth can the warrior be so upright and awake? A tudro, a four-legged, hunched, un-head-and-shouldered person, may feel very sorry for the warrior, because the warrior has to stand on two feet and maintain head and shoulders. Quite possibly such a sympathizer might make a gift of a chair to the warrior, thinking that a chair would make the warrior happy. Then the warrior wouldn’t have to maintain his head and shoulders; he could at least slouch once in a while and put his feet on the coffee table.

But a warrior never needs to take time off. Trying to relax by slouching or indulging in habitual patterns only produces a split personality. You are such a nice boss and such a good, humorous person at the office, but the minute you come home you forget everything. You turn on your television, you beat your wife, and you send your children to their rooms telling them you need peace and quiet. One wonders what kind of peace and quiet such a person is looking for. It seems, rather, that he is looking for pain and a hellish life. So you can’t be a warrior in the office and a tudro at home.

The process of freeing yourself from arrogance and cutting off your habitual tendencies is a very drastic measure, but it is necessary in order to help others in this world. You should take pride in yourself and uplift yourself. You should regard yourself as an honest and genuine warrior. The former secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant of Burma, exemplified how to be a warrior and help others without arrogance. He was highly educated and thoroughly soaked in the practice of meditation. He conducted the affairs of the United Nations with dignity, and he was so soft and gentle. Therefore people felt in awe of him; they felt his power. They admired what he said, and the decisions he made. He was one of the great statesmen of this century and a great example of someone who has overcome habitual patterns.

Habitual patterns are dangerous and destructive. They prevent you from seeing the Great Eastern Sun. When habitual patterns constantly operate, you can’t raise up your head and shoulders at all. You are down there, looking down, looking for this and that. You are more concerned with the flies sitting on your cup than with the great sun that is coming up. You have forgotten about uplifted and open vision, and about seeing the Great Eastern Sun directly; you begin to dissolve yourself, and involve yourself in a subhuman or even subanimal realm. You are not willing to take part in any immediate delight. You are not willing to relate with the least edge of pain, or even discomfort, in order to see the Great Eastern Sun.

When you were very young, three years old, you didn’t want to escape reality, particularly, because you were so interested in how things were done. You used to ask your father and mother all sorts of questions: “Why is this so, Mommy? Why is this so, Daddy? Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that?” But that innocent inquisitiveness has been forgotten, lost. Therefore, you have to reignite it. Entering the cocoon of tudro behavior happens after that initial inquisitiveness. Once there was tremendous inquisitiveness, and then you thought that you were being mistreated by your world, so you jumped into your cocoon and decided to sleep.

Uplifting your head and shoulders may sometimes give you back pains or a strained neck, but extending yourself, uplifting yourself, is necessary. We are not talking about philosophy, but we are talking about how on earth, how in the name of heaven and earth, we can actually become decent human beings without trying to entertain ourselves from here to the next corner. The constant search for immediate entertainment is a big problem. “What can I do next? How can I save myself from boredom? I don’t want to see that bright world at all.” As we sew our fabric with a needle and thread, we think, “Is there another way that I can make these stitches? Is there any way that I can avoid having to make a straight journey?” The journey we are making is demanding, but there is no way of avoiding it.

By stopping habitual patterns, we can appreciate the real world on the spot. We can appreciate the bright, beautiful fantastic world around us; we don’t have to feel all that resentful or embarrassed. If we don’t negate our habitual patterns, we can never fully appreciate the world. But once we overcome habitual patterns, the vividness of the drala principle, the magic, will descend, and we will begin to be individual masters of our world.

SIXTEEN

Sacred World

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world—which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.

A
RROGANCE AND HABITUAL PATTERNS,
as we discussed in the last two chapters, are obstacles to experiencing drala. In order to discover magic in the world, we have to overcome the individual neurosis and self-centered attitudes that prevent us from experiencing greater vision beyond ourselves. By obscuring our vision, they also prevent us from uplifting ourselves so that we can extend ourselves to help others.

Some people feel that the world’s problems are so pressing that social and political action should take precedence over individual development. They may feel that they should sacrifice their own needs completely in order to work for a larger cause. In its extreme form, this kind of thinking justifies individual neurosis and aggression as purely a product of a troubled society, so that people feel they can hold on to their neurosis and even use their aggression to try to effect change.

According to the Shambhala teachings, however, we have to recognize that our individual experience of sanity is inherently linked to our vision for a good human society. So we have to take things one step at a time. If we try to solve society’s problems without overcoming the confusion and aggression in our own state of mind, then our efforts will only contribute to the basic problems, instead of solving them. That is why the individual journey of warriorship must be undertaken before we can address the larger issue of how to help this world. Still, it would be extremely unfortunate if Shambhala vision were taken as purely another attempt to build ourselves up while ignoring our responsibilities to others. The point of warriorship is to become a gentle and tamed human being who can make a genuine contribution to this world. The warrior’s journey is based on discovering what is intrinsically good about human existence and how to share that basic nature of goodness with others. There is a natural order and harmony to this world, which we can discover. But we cannot just study that order scientifically or measure it mathematically. We have to feel it—in our bones, in our hearts, in our minds. If we are thoroughly trained in the disciplines of warriorship, then by invoking the drala principle, we can reawaken that intimate connection to reality. That provides the ground to work with others in a genuine and gentle fashion.

When you invoke drala, you begin to experience basic goodness reflected everywhere—in yourself, in others, and in the entire world. You are not being blind to the setting-sun or degraded aspects of existence. In fact, you see them very precisely, because you are so alert. But you also see that every aspect of life has the potential of being upgraded, that there is the potential for sacredness in every situation. So you begin to view the universe as a sacred world. The sacred world is that which exists spontaneously, naturally in the phenomenal world. When you have gold, that gold can be formed into different shapes—both beautiful and grotesque—but it still remains twenty-four-carat gold. A diamond may be worn by the most degraded person, but it still remains a diamond.

Similarly, the idea of sacred world is that, although you see the confusion and problems that fill the world, you also see that phenomenal existence is constantly being influenced by the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. In fact, we could say that it takes on the qualities of the Great Eastern Sun. The sacred world is
Great
because of its primordial quality. That is, sacredness goes back and back through history to prehistory to before history, before thought, before mind had ever thought of anything at all. So experiencing the greatness of the sacred world is recognizing the existence of that vast and primordial wisdom, which is reflected throughout phenomena. This wisdom is old and young at the same time, and it is never tarnished or diminished by the relative problems in the world.

The sacred world is connected with
East,
because there are always possibilities of vision in this world. East represents the dawn of wakefulness, the horizon of human consciousness where vision is constantly arising. Wherever you are, when you open your eyes, you always look ahead, to the East. You always have possibilities of wakeful vision, even in the most degraded or confused situations. Finally, the sacred world is lighted by the
Sun,
which is the principle of never-ending brilliance and radiance. The sun is also connected with seeing self-existing possibilities of virtue and richness in the world. Normally, when you see a brilliant light, that light comes from a finite source of energy. The brightness of a candle depends on how much wax surrounds it and the thickness of the wick. The brightness of a light bulb depends on the electric current running through it. But the Great Eastern Sun is eternally blazing: it has no need of fuel. There actually is greater luminosity that occurs without fuel, without even a pilot light. Seeing the sacred world is witnessing that greater vision, which is there all the time.

The experience of sacred world begins to show you how you are woven together with the richness and brilliance of the phenomenal world. You are a natural part of that world, and you begin to see possibilities of natural hierarchy or natural order, which could provide the model for how to conduct your life. Ordinarily, hierarchy is regarded in the negative sense as a ladder or a vertical power structure, with power concentrated at the top. If you are on the bottom rungs of that ladder, then you feel oppressed by what is above you and you try to abolish it, or you try to climb higher on the ladder. But for the warrior, discovering hierarchy is seeing the Great Eastern Sun reflected everywhere in everything. You see possibilities of order in the world that are not based on struggle and aggression. In other words, you perceive a way to be in harmony with the phenomenal world that is neither static nor repressive. So the understanding of hierarchy manifests as a sense of natural decorum, or knowing how to behave. That is, you see how to
be
naturally in this world, because you experience dignity and elegance that do not have to be cultivated.

The warrior’s decorum is this natural togetherness and calm, which come from a feeling of being in harmony with yourself and with the environment. You don’t have to try to fit yourself into situations, but situations fit naturally. When you achieve this level of decorum, then you can abandon the final vestiges of the giant backpack of habitual patterns that you have been carrying for so long to protect yourself from nature. You can appreciate nature’s own qualities, and you see that you do not need your bag of ego-centered tricks. You realize that you can live with nature, as it is, and as you are. You feel a sense of ease or looseness. You feel at home in your world.