The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (40 page)

When you feel satisfied, you become free from laziness, which brings exertion. Being free from laziness is not cranking something up. It is simply being meticulous, absolutely meticulous. You don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink. That’s the level of freedom from laziness we are talking about. You clean up after yourself. You appreciate all the details that are involved in cooking a meal, relating with your friends—your mate, your parents, your brothers and sisters—or relating with the bank, the garbage collector, your shoes that need to be shined, your clothes that need to be pressed.

In many cases, domestic life is purely regarded as a hassle. People feel that their time is too precious to spend on domestic details. If having an important job makes you feel that you work at a higher level of evolvement and that housework is beneath you, that is a setting-sun approach. Although you can afford to pay a housekeeper and order her or him around, telling the person to clean things up for you, the Shambhala training is interested in helping you to clean up your own life. That doesn’t happen by paying somebody to mow your lawn, clean your clothes, and paint your house. You have to do some of those things yourself. Freedom from laziness does not come from spending a lot of money to send everything to the laundry because you can’t be bothered to wash your own clothes. You send your clothes out to be washed, hoping that they’ll look good when they come back—but usually they don’t. You can’t use money to become free from laziness. You have to actually clean up after yourself and pay attention to every detail. You have to look into things personally. That approach will save you a lot of money—which is beside the point. It saves you from a lot of setting-sun possibilities, and out of that meticulousness comes genuine exertion. Understanding that nobody is going to add up your sums for you; you do the adding up yourself.

Then, although we may be free from laziness and gain exertion, beyond that, there is still a sense of cowardice or general anxiety. We feel a general nervousness about leading life, dealing with our livelihood, and working with others—our friends, lovers, parents, or anyone else. The only thing that corrects that situation of nervousness is to feel that both you and your environment are fully included in sacredness. You’re not just an ordinary Joe Schmidt or Suzie Jones trying to lead a reasonable life. According to the Shambhala vision, you are sacred, and your environment is also very sacred. The sacredness is not from the point of view of religiosity. Rather, because you pay so much attention to your environment and because you are so concerned about the details as well as the general pattern of your life, therefore, the environment and the discipline that you have are extremely sacred.

When you develop faith or conviction in that sacredness, then, no matter what you are doing, you will find that different kinds of messages are evolving. When you pay attention to details or to your lifestyle in general—whenever you pay attention to the basic realities—nature begins to speak to you. It dictates to you, so you have a natural reference point happening all the time. In every ordinary life situation as well as in extraordinary life situations, there is always feedback from the environment as well as from your existence. This brings real fearlessness.

Fearlessness is the absence of cowardice. That is to say, cowardice, or uncertainty, comes from speed, from not being on the spot, and from not being able to lead life properly and fully. You miss a lot of details, and you also miss the overview. To correct that, you need
room
for fearlessness, which comes from having faith in your existence. Basically speaking, fearlessness is not particularly a reward or a goal, but fearlessness is part of the journey on the path. Fearlessness alternates with fear, and both of those are kindling for the fire. You are nervous, speedy, fearful. Then that brings another area of steadiness, solidity, and calm. So fear and fearlessness constantly alternate.

The end product is natural victory. Nervousness is not particularly bad. It is just a growing pain, a teething pain. Out of that, ultimately speaking, we find that we are steady, perceptive, and aware of details. At the same time, we begin to discover total basic goodness. Finally, that allows us to understand the true meaning of freedom. Often discipline makes people feel claustrophobic. They feel that the discipline is so big and personally invasive. They feel they have to get into this
thing,
called “The Discipline.” That feeling can kill the spontaneity and the freedom that exist. Freedom doesn’t mean that people should be free to do anything they want. But when we apply discipline, we should feel that it’s spacious rather than that it’s being dictated to us from just one angle. Then we will feel that we actually possess the world of heaven, the world of earth, and the world of human beings. It feels so spacious. Therefore, we delight in our practice rather than feeling that we’ve been sucked into a little vacuum.

When you were told to do certain things in school or when your parents told you to do something or perhaps when you were involved in other spiritual traditions, people made you feel guilty and bad. You were told that the only way to learn was through constant correction. There is so much punishment involved in learning. You’re bad; therefore, you’d better be good. If you are a bad speller, you’re told how bad your spelling is, so that you will learn to spell properly. If you can’t maintain your composure during a dance performance, you’re told how clumsy you are. Therefore, you’d better work hard to be a good dancer. That kind of logic is frequently used to educate people, and it has affected a lot of you.

Shambhala education is education without punishment, absolutely. Many people have tried that approach but find it quite difficult. They often end up punishing people anyway. It’s tricky, but I think it’s quite possible. We can be free from the mentality of praise and blame. We can create the world of basic goodness, that world that is good altogether, and nothing in that world is detrimental or problematic. To start with, there is an area of
good white
. Then, in the middle of that, you put a little dot, which is the good yellow of the Great Eastern Sun.
¹
That should make you smile.

1
. The author is describing the Great Eastern Sun pin that students in Level Five of Shambhala Training receive.

EIGHT

The King of Basic Goodness

Because we know what to accept and what to reject, therefore, we are ready to fully join the world of basic goodness. That particular world is ruled and managed by a king or queen, who is capable of joining heaven and earth together. When we talk about a monarch here, we are talking about that which rules the world in the form of basic goodness. From this point of view, we regard basic goodness as the king or queen.

W
HEN YOU ARE THOROUGHLY SOAKED
in unconditional goodness and open mind, you become extremely insightful, knowing what to reject, and what to accept, and also understanding the basic notion of discipline. That brings renunciation.

The Shambhala idea of renunciation is very personal. It has nothing to do with giving up something bad, harmful, or trivial. Renunciation is necessary to make oneself more available, more gentle, and more open to others. The barriers between oneself and oneself and between oneself and others are removed. The basic temptation to take time off is also removed. Any hesitation and any form of warding off or putting up obstacles in order to maintain one’s privacy are removed. We renounce our privacy, for the sake of both others and ourselves. Therefore, renunciation has a sense of sacrificing one’s own privacy and personal comfort, as well as the temptation to take time off, take a break.

Having realized the universal possibilities of unconditional goodness and seen that there is already natural law and order, we begin to feel somewhat claustrophobic, because we realize that basic goodness is impossible to possess personally. You can’t make a pet project out of basic goodness. The greater vision of basic goodness may seem like a fantastic idea. Nonetheless, sometimes you feel that you need to localize it somewhere. Basic goodness is such a good thing to have; therefore, you would like to own it and put your initials on it. You think that you would like to take just a little pinch and keep it in your pocket, a little piece of basic goodness to nurse in your own little pocket. So the idea of privacy begins to creep in. At that point, it is necessary to renounce the temptation to possess basic goodness. You can’t hold it in your pocket or put your seal and your initials on the dotted line of basic goodness.

Renunciation means giving up a localized approach, a provincial or personalized approach. Sometimes, when we experience vastness, we feel that it is too vast. We need a little shelter. We need a roof over our head and three little square meals to eat. That’s one of the ways the setting-sun concept came about. Although we realize the Great Eastern Sun is vast and good, we can’t handle it. So we build a little kiosk, a little home, to capture it. It’s too bright to look at directly, but we’d like to take photographs of it, put them in a square picture frame, and keep them as a memory. I suppose the idea of tourism came from that, too. So the idea of renunciation is to ward off small-mindedness of that type.

Renunciation relates to both what to ward off and what to cultivate. It takes place in the atmosphere of basic goodness, with patience, without laziness, and with faith, as we discussed in the last chapter. Moreover, the environment of renunciation comes from the environment of the sitting practice of meditation. In meditation practice, you watch your breath, and you regard thoughts as purely your thinking process, your thought process, without punishing them or praising them. So while thoughts that may occur during sitting practice are regarded as quite natural, at the same time, they don’t come with credentials. The Sanskrit word for meditation is
dhyana;
the Tibetan term is
samten
—which both refer to the same thing: steady mind. Mind is steady in the sense that you don’t go up when a thought goes up, and you don’t go down when it goes down, but you just watch things going either up or down. Whether good or bad, exciting, miserable, or blissful thoughts arise—whatever occurs in your state of mind, you don’t support it by having an extra commentator.

Sitting practice is very simple and direct, and in the Shambhalian style, it is very businesslike. You just sit and watch your thoughts go up and down. There is a background technique, a physical technique, which is working with the breath as it goes out and in. That automatically provides an occupation during sitting practice. It is partly designed to occupy you so that you don’t evaluate thoughts. You just let them happen. In that environment, you can develop renunciation: an ability to renounce extreme reactions against your thoughts or for them. When warriors are on the battlefield, they don’t react to success or failure. Success or failure on the battlefield is just regarded as another breath coming in and going out, another discursive thought coming in and going out. So the warrior is very steady. Because of that, the warrior is victorious—because victory is not particularly the aim or the goal. But the warrior can just be—as he or she is.

There are three categories or principles of renunciation that I’d like to introduce. I try to be kind and not present too many categories, but these will actually enable you to think constructively.

C
ARING FOR
O
THERS

Caring for others is the first level of renunciation. What you reject, or renounce, is caring completely for yourself, which is regarded as selfish, or for that matter, shellfish: carrying your own hut, your own shell, your own suit of armor with you. According to the traditional Buddhist stories of karmic cause and effect, lone ladies and lone lords may reincarnate as tortoises or turtles, who carry their own homes around with them. So
selfish
and
shellfish
are synonymous. That’s what we have to avoid.

Caring for others means that you have to be stable within yourself. The ground for that is being
free from doubt
. Having experienced the trustworthiness of basic goodness, therefore, we have faith in goodness, which brings the freedom from doubt that is necessary in order to care for others. When people think about helping others, they often worry that, if they open themselves up, they will catch other peoples’ germs and their diseases. They wonder, “What if we open up too much? What is the self-defense mechanism?” So the first thought people have is, What are they opening themselves up to, and how can they protect themselves? But if you are without doubt, that in itself is protection. Then you can open yourself fully to others, with gentleness, kindness, and caring—which brings daring. Caring for others, free from doubt, brings daring. Got it?

Daring is the result or the active aspect of fearlessness. When you experience a lack of fear, then what you
do
with fearlessness is daring, or letting go. Because you care for others, you have fearlessness, you have faith, there’s no doubt, and you become daring. Traditionally speaking, even the most savage animals have developed gentleness and loving-kindness toward their own young. With that logic, any one of us is capable of being kind to others. Let alone when our motivation comes from basic goodness! That brings many more possibilities of being kind to others and being daring.

To work for others, a certain amount of gallantry is necessary. In other words, you have to rid yourself of crude anxiety, which you do by trusting yourself more. You learn to trust yourself by having a good experience of being by yourself. During this portion of your life, you might spend a lot of time alone, being by yourself and practicing sitting meditation, which
is
being by yourself. At this point, you don’t need others to help you; you just need to be by yourself.