The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (43 page)

The Great Eastern Sun has three categories. From the experience of the simultaneity of sadness and joy, we
radiate peaceful confidence,
which is the first quality of the Great Eastern Sun. Second is
illuminating the way of discipline,
which is realizing what to accept and what to reject, as we discussed before. That aspect of the Great Eastern Sun is like turning on the light. If you are standing in the middle of a dark room and you have no idea what’s around you, when you switch on the light, you will know what to accept and reject. The third quality is becoming the
eternal ruler of the three worlds,
or conquering the three worlds. Having developed a sad and joyous situation, seeing what to accept and what to reject, therefore, you feel a sense of joy and achievement. This is conquering the threefold world, which, roughly speaking, corresponds to the heaven, earth, and man, or human, principles.

Conquering here is very personal. It is related to one’s attitude toward oneself and one’s world when one begins to see the Great Eastern Sun. You could say that, when you switch on the light, it conquers your room because there’s no darkness left. Conquering here is not the concept of a battle. It’s just switching on the light. That is the synopsis, so to speak, of the qualities of the Great Eastern Sun.

How to cultivate the Great Eastern Sun, as we discussed already, comes from joy and sadness put together, which might be something like sweet-and-sour pork.

Student:
Could you say something about what you mean by heaven and earth?

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
What do you think it could be? Do you have any ideas?

Student:
I think I can understand it when you talk in terms of synchronizing body and mind.

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
But what about heaven and earth themselves? What’s earth?

Student:
Well, that’s where I’m sitting.

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
Good. From that, you can tell what heaven is. It’s our reference point with each other.

Student:
But that sounds like being in the middle of a sandwich.

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
Well, maybe you
are
in a sandwich. We’re always sandwiched because we have a past, we have a present, and we have a future. We are sandwiched by our father, our mother, our child. Even timewise, we are sandwiched. We are sandwiched between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Heaven is anything that is spacious. It includes your lofty ideas, your beliefs, your metaphysics, your wishes, your desires. It is anything you hold as sacred, anything you might put in your safe-deposit box: your jewelry, your birth certificate, your college diploma. Earth is related with your personal existence, your car keys, the key to your apartment, money in your wallet, your husband, your wife, your groceries for the night or for the rest of the week. So heaven is the lofty principle, and earth is what you actually
have
in your refrigerator or your bank account.

Joining them together is challenging. If you think in terms of how a nation might join heaven and earth together, it gets quite complicated. But if you begin with yourself and how you relate personally to joining heaven and earth, that’s quite simple and domestic. You might think that your personal heaven and earth are not sacred enough to be joined together. But in the Shambhala world, we have fundamental appreciation and respect for whatever we do. Every act is a sacred act. With that inspiration, we regard every experience in our life as sacred as well. Therefore, we can join heaven and earth together. It could be as mundane as going to the supermarket to buy toilet tissue. You bring it home, then you use it, and you flush it down the toilet. You are joining heaven and earth together. When you buy it, you have heaven. When you use it, you have earth. You join them together, and it’s very beautiful. You can accomplish the whole thing.

We have reached a natural conclusion. From the discovery of basic goodness comes renunciation, and out of that, daring develops. Finally, we can appreciate and enjoy our individual existence as warriors. There is natural pride involved in leading life and appreciating existence as a good Shambhala person.

My family and I have been trying to establish the Shambhala training for quite a number of years. Establishing a firm ground is difficult, but once the ground is established, then new students find their way, quite easily. The hard work of the first students put together with the aspirations of newer students fulfills the purpose of the work. First you have the sky; then the sun rises out of that. The two are complementary. When sky and sun meet together, the Great Eastern Sun can manifest and shine.

The Great Eastern Sun is not realized purely because of philosophy or the existence of some organization. It is your individual participation that becomes wonderfully powerful and encourages us all. I personally have taken a vow to work with all of you and furthermore with the rest of the world. We can always trust in and fearlessly appreciate the Great Eastern Sun. We should take a vow not to use it for our personal achievement at all. If we do that, we will decline.

I appreciate sharing this teaching with you, and I hope that you can manifest yourselves further. The beauty and the glory of the warrior students prove that what we are doing is absolutely the right thing to do, and wonderful. Please be a warrior, as long as there is life, which will be several billion years. Welcome to the Great Eastern Sun vision.

Part Three

JUST

The Passion to Be

TEN

Blamelessness

HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF

A lot of problems come from self-hatred. Let us let go of that; let us let it go away. Let us be as real people. Let us be genuine people who don’t require doctors, medicine, aspirin, codeine, all the rest of it. Let us be just basic human beings.

See the beautiful deer. They have no one to rule them, but they frolic in the meadow as if they had a deerkeeper. They are so clean; they have such head and shoulders; they are beautifully horned. The deer, the fox, the jackal—all have their own beauty in being themselves. Nobody is taking care of them.

M
Y
NAME IS
L
ORD
M
UKPO OF
T
IBET.
I know that the American revolutionary world has rejected the king, along with the lords. But I’m afraid that these lords and ladies will come back again and again. Particularly, in connection with Shambhala vision, this lord is returning to the United States of America—coming not from Great Britain but from Tibet.

Maybe we should discuss the word
lord,
which has several different meanings. A lord could be a person who enslaves others, a person who rules others, or a person who actually promotes lordship in others. I am the third type of lord. We are all lords or ladies, one way or another. My name is Lord Mukpo, and I’m proud of that. I have done my duty, as my duty has called for me to do. I have never tired of performing my duty, and one of my duties is to present the Shambhala principles to you.

The Shambhala message is not a very complicated one: it is simply that the human condition can be worked out, or we might say, conditions of neurosis can be overcome. That is the essence. It may not be all that different from what you have heard before, except that a lord is presenting this to you. In this case, being a lord is the same as being a sentient being. This particular lord has been subject to simple living, including almost animal-realm situations, and he has worked his way through them. This lord has seen the problems of human society, and he has understood them. All of you have been to school, where you have gone through a process of learning and discipline, and you have been punished and praised by your schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. This lord has gone through the same thing.

The point of Shambhala vision is to benefit others. We are not going to be simply strong, self-made individuals. You might think that, when you become a lord, you are going to employ servants. “I’m going to project my power onto others to subjugate them. They’re going to listen to what I have to say, and my wishes and commands will be carried out.” In this case, it is just the opposite. Lordship is just like loving someone for the first time in your life or falling in love with someone. We are talking about that kind of sympathy and gentleness. That is the essence of lordship.

You are inquisitive enough to listen to the sound of someone’s voice. You are inquisitive enough to look at somebody’s face. You are inquisitive enough to smell somebody’s body. You are inquisitive enough to touch someone’s body. I am not particularly presenting a pornographic description of Shambhala vision. But passion has been undermined so much, particularly by religiosity, by just a simple remark like “Sex is bad.” We are not saying here that sex is the best, either. Rather, we are talking about human nature and the human virtue, or goodness, of helping others. How to help others, how to like somebody, or how to love somebody are often so mixed up. We hear dreadful stories, such as the stories about priests making it with their parishioners. There is all that garbage that goes on, all those human stories. We might discuss warped love later, but here we are talking about fresh love. Our subject matter is benefiting others, working for others. To work for others, we have to work on ourselves. We have to love ourselves. We have to be gentle with ourselves. That is the main point: As human beings, we need to develop gentleness, which is genuineness.

Along with that comes a sense of surrendering and a feeling of revulsion and disgust toward the world. We’re not talking about seeing the world through rose-tinted glass or purely thinking that the world is beautiful. First, help yourself. Develop a sense of healthiness and a sense of
me helping others
. “This person, Joe Schmidt, is a great helper of others.” Then you see the ugliness—people’s confusion and their resentment and aggression toward the world. Often, someone may try to convert you to his or her aggressive system of thinking. The main point is not to join that person. That is very important and quite straightforward. (Maybe someone from California will have a problem understanding that, but certainly those from New York will have no difficulty with this idea.)

The second point is to trust in your heart, which is very, very simple. Trust in your heart. How? Why? When? Which heart? How do you do that? You might ask all those questions. The answer is simply
because you are here
. How do you know that the ceiling won’t drop on your head? Or that the floor won’t give way, so that you end up in the basement? Trust. Trust starts from realizing that there are trillions of worthwhile people who want to connect with Shambhala vision and with basic goodness. Therefore, you develop a sense of warriorship, which is free from cowardice, or nervousness as it is commonly known in America. But the actual, technical term is
cowardice
. This has nothing to do with milk, of course.
Cow
-ard,
cow
-ard, and
cow
-ard. In fact, the cow-ard is the opposite of the cow-cow. This cow does not even give milk. It is too cowardly to give milk; it is completely dry and shaking.

The Tibetan word for warrior is
pawo. Pa
means “ignoring the challenger” or “ignoring the other’s challenge.”
Wo
makes it a noun. So the warrior is one who does not engage others’ sense of aggression. When there’s no aggression, trust takes place. Out of that genuine sense of warriorship comes joy. For the first time in your life, you feel at ease. “Goodness gracious! Why on earth have I been driving myself mad by being petrified by all these things around me? And how has it happened that I can finally relax?” Whew. Tremendous relaxation, which comes with a tremendous smile. It comes with natural head and shoulders.

When you relax in the ordinary sense, it is like when the flight attendant on an airplane says, “The captain has turned the
SEAT BELT
sign off now. You can move around the cabin, and we’re going to serve you a drink and a meal and show you a movie.” That’s inviting you to be floppy. You can sit back, watch a movie, have a drink, and eat good food. Actually, it’s usually bad food. The conventional sense of relaxation might also be that you feel as though you’re about to vomit and then you relieve that feeling with a big burp. On the airplane, if you feel sick to your stomach, the flight attendant might say, “Go ahead. We don’t mind if you throw up. We’ll clean up after you.” No head and shoulders. With good head and shoulders, you are not going to vomit, belch, or burp, but you
are
going to be yourself. “I am Joe Schmidt.” “I am Jane Doe.” “I am Lodrö Dorje.” “I am Ösel Tendzin.” “I am Diana Mukpo.” “I am Chögyam Trungpa Mukpo.”
¹
Taking pride in your existence with good head and shoulders is the antidote to sickness, the trick to antiflop, and that is the ground of our discussion.

The last point I’d like to discuss is blamelessness. Usually, when things go wrong, we come up with an excuse. “Why did you kill the president?” You come up with a logical reason, so that you are not to blame. “Poor me. I had to assassinate the president because I’m psychotic.” Or you think of something else that caused you to do this. To overcome that approach, true blamelessness is very important. Whether you are a Buddhist or a Shambhala practitioner, when you don’t keep up with your meditation practice, you begin to cook up all sorts of logics. “The reason I’m not practicing my Shambhala discipline or my Buddhist discipline is that my marriage has fallen apart.” “I’ve been sick.” “I couldn’t sleep.” “I have no money.” Blah, blah, blah. The point here is to develop real blamelessness rather than coming up with such logical excuses—which might even give you a reason to sue others. (We have a problem of having too many lawyers in this country.)