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

S:
So this is like acceptance?

TR:
No, I wouldn’t say it is anything so philosophical as acceptance. It is more desperate than acceptance.

S:
Giving up?

TR:
Giving up is desperate. In giving up, you have been squeezed into giving up hope; you haven’t requested to give up hope.

Student:
It seems that playing on the battlefield of your territory of “yes” and “no” is the way, since there is no way out of it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I wouldn’t say it’s the way, because that provides some kind of hope.

S:
But there’s no other battlefield to play on.

TR:
Well, that’s very hopeless, yes.

Student:
A minute ago, you seemed to say that even shunyata could provide a sense of security.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It depends on how you relate with it. [If we relate to shunyata as an answer, it might provide some hope.] Until we realize the true implication of hopelessness, we have no chance of understanding crazy wisdom at all, ladies and gentlemen.

S:
You just have to give up hope?

TR:
Hope and fear.

Student:
It seems that you can’t just sit back and do nothing. A certain dissatisfaction arises, and so very naturally hope arises that this dissatisfaction could somehow go away. So hope seems to be a very natural and spontaneous thing.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s too bad. You don’t get anything out of it anyway. That’s too bad.

S:
Yes, but it comes out of every situation, so I don’t see how you can possibly avoid it.

TR:
You don’t have to avoid it out of being hopeful that that’s the right approach. But too bad. It’s very simple. The whole thing’s hopeless. When we are trying to figure out who’s on first and what’s on second, there’s no way out. Hopeless!

S:
Yes, but history, Buddhism, traditions of all kinds give us hope.

TR:
Well, they are based on hopelessness, which is why they give some kind of hope. When you give up hope
completely,
there are hopeful situations. But it’s hopeless to try and work this out logically. Absolutely hopeless! It doesn’t give us any guidelines or maps. The maps would constantly tell us, “No hope there, no hope there, no hope here, no hope there.” Hopeless. That’s the
whole
point.

S:
Hope means the sense that I can do, I can manipulate—is that right?

TR:
Yes, the sense that I can get something out of what I am trying to do.

Student:
Is the achievement of hopelessness a one-shot affair, where you suddenly just flip into it—

Trungpa Rinpoche:
No. It’s not a sudden flash that you are saved by. Absolutely not.

S:
So it’s something that anybody could have some intuition of at any point.

TR:
We all do, always. But even that is not
sacred.

Student:
If there are no maps and no guidelines and it’s all hopelessness, is there any function for a teacher on this whole trip besides telling you that it’s hopeless?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You said it!

Student:
Would you advise just diving into the hopelessness or cultivating it little by little?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s up to you. It’s really up to you. I will say one thing. It’s impossible to develop crazy wisdom without a sense of hopelessness,
total
hopelessness.

S:
Does that mean becoming a professional pessimist?

TR:
No, no. A professional pessimist is also hopeful, because he had developed his system of pessimism. It’s that same old hopefulness.

Student:
What does hopelessness feel like?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Just purely hopeless. No ground, absolutely no ground.

S:
The moment you become conscious that you’re feeling hopeless, does the hopelessness sort of lose its genuineness?

TR:
That depends on whether you regard hopelessness as something sacred according to a religion or spiritual teaching, or whether you regard it as utterly hopeless. That’s purely up to you.

S:
I mean, we’re always talking about this hopelessness, and everybody’s beginning to feel that that’s the key, so we want it. We feel hopeless and we say, “Well, now I’m on my way.” That might eliminate some of the reality of it.

TR:
Too bad. Too bad. If you regard it as the path in the sense that you feel you are going to get something out of this, that won’t work. There’s no way out. That approach is self-defeating. Hopelessness is not a gimmick. It means it, you know; it’s the truth. It’s the truth of hopelessness, rather than the doctrine of hopelessness.

Student:
Rinpoche, if that’s so about hopelessness, then the whole picture that we have about the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana, and so on seems to become just a big trip leading to giving up hope. You often talk of a kind of judo practice, using the energy of ego to let it defeat itself. Here we would somehow use the energy of hope to bring hopelessness, the energy of all this to defeat itself. Is that for real, or is this whole idea of judo practice also just part of the trip?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is said that at the end of the journey through the nine yanas, it is clear that the journey need never have been made. So the path that is presented to us is an act of hopelessness in some sense. The journey need never be made at all. It’s eating your own tail and continuing until you eat your own mouth. That’s the kind of analogy we could use.

S:
It seems that to proceed you have to disregard the warning. Although I may hear that it’s hopeless, the only way I can go on at this point is with hope. Why sit and meditate right now? Why not just go out and play? It seems that everything in this situation is a paradox, but, you know, okay, so I’ll be here. Even though I hear it’s hopeless, I’ll pretend.

TR:
That’s a hopeful act as well, which is in itself hopeless. It eats itself right up. In other words, you think you are able to deceive the path by being a smart traveler on the path, but you begin to realize that you are the path itself. You can’t deceive the path, because you make the path. So you’re inevitably going to get a very strong message of hopelessness.

S:
The only way to get that, it seems, is to keep playing the game.

TR:
That’s up to you. You could also give up. You have a very definite choice. You have two very definite alternatives, which I suppose we could call sudden enlightenment or gradual enlightenment. This is entirely dependent upon you, on whether you give up hope on the spot or whether you go on playing the game and improvising all kinds of other entertainments. So the sooner you give up hope, the better.

Student:
It seems that you can put up with a hopeless situation only so long. At a certain point, you just can’t relate to it anymore and will take advantage of any distraction to turn away from it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s up to you.

S:
Should you just force yourself again and again, continually, to—

TR:
Well, it comes about that way as your life situation goes on.

Student:
If the whole situation is hopeless, on what basis do you make decisions like whether to kill one buffalo to feed your family or five hundred buffalo to have their heads on the wall?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Both alternatives are hopeless. Both are ways of trying to survive, which is hope. So both are equally hopeless. We have to learn to work with hopelessness. Nontheistic religion is a hopeless approach of not believing anything. And theistic religion is hopeful, believing in the separateness of me and the nipple I suck on, so to speak. Sorry to be crude, but roughly it works that way.

Student:
You said there’s no God, there’s no self. Is there any so-called true self? Is there anything outside of hopelessness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I should remind you that this whole thing is the preparation for crazy wisdom, which does not know any kind of truth other than itself. From that point of view, there’s no true self, because when you talk about true self or buddha nature, then that in itself is trying to insert some positive attitude, something to the effect that you are okay. That doesn’t exist in this hopelessness.

Student:
This hopelessness seems to me to be a restatement of the idea of stopping self-protection, stopping a sense of trying to improve the situation. According to our stereotyped understanding of enlightenment, it is in the moment that we stop protecting and improving that real understanding can begin. Is that what you’re saying?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
As far as this process is concerned, there’s no promise of anything at all, none whatsoever. It’s giving up everything, including the self.

S:
Then that hopelessness puts you in the here and now.

TR:
Much more than that. It doesn’t put you anywhere. You have no ground to stand on, absolutely none. You are completely desolate. And even desolation is not regarded as home, because you are so desolately, absolutely hopeless that even loneliness is not a refuge anymore. Everything is completely hopeless. Even
itself
[
shouts “itself” and snaps fingers
]. It’s totally taken away from you, absolutely completely. Any kind of energy that’s happening in order to preserve itself is also hopeless.

Student:
The energy that was preserving the self, that forms a kind of shell around the self, if that stops, then it just escapes into no division between itself and what’s all around it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It doesn’t give you any reassurance. When we talk about hopelessness, it means literal hopelessness. The sense of hope here is hope as opposed to loss. There’s no means by which you could get something in return anymore at all. Absolutely not. Even itself.

S:
It’s lost its self?

TR:
Lost itself, precisely.

S:
That kind of groundlessness seems to be more than hopelessness. I mean, in hopelessness there’s still some sense of there being
someone
who is without hope.

TR:
Even that is suspicious.

S:
What happens to the ground? The ground drops away. I don’t understand.

TR:
The ground is hopelessness as well. There’s no solidity in the ground either.

S:
I hear what you’re saying. You’re saying that no matter what direction one looks in—

TR:
Yes, you are overwhelmed by hopelessness. All over. Utterly. Completely. Profusely. You are a claustrophobic situation of hopelessness.

We’re talking about a sense of hopelessness as an
experience
of no ground. We are talking about experience. We are talking about an experience, which is one little thread in the whole thing. We are talking about the experience of hopelessness. This is an experience that cannot be forgotten or rejected. It might reject itself, but still there is experience. It is just a kind of thread that goes on. I thought we could discuss this further in connection with Padmasambhava’s experience of experience. But the fact that this is Padmasambhava’s experience of experience doesn’t mean anything. It’s still hopeless.

Student:
You seem to be saying that where there’s no hope, it’s intelligent. And when you think there’s hope, then that’s ignorance.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think so, my dear. It’s completely hopeless.

Student:
When you talk about hopelessness, the whole thing seems totally depressing. And it seems you could very easily be overwhelmed by that depression to the point where you just retreat into a shell or insanity.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s up to you. It’s completely up to you. That’s the whole point.

S:
Is there anything—

TR:
You see, the whole point is that I’m not manufacturing an absolute model of hopelessness with complete and delicately worked-out patterns of all kinds, presenting it to you, and asking you to work on that. Your goodness, your hopelessness, is the only model there is. If I manufactured something, it would be just a trick, unrealistic. Rather, it’s your hopelessness, it’s your world, your family heirloom, your inheritance. That hopelessness comes in your existence, your psychology. It’s a matter of bringing it out as it is. But it’s still hopeless. As hopeful as you might try to make it, it’s still hopeless. And I can’t reshape it, remodel it, or refinish it at all. It’s not like a political candidate going on television, where people powder his face and put lipstick on his mouth to make him presentable. One cannot do that. In this case, it’s hopeless; it’s absolutely hopeless. You have to do it in your own way.

Student:
Is it possible for someone to be aware that it’s all hopeless but yet be joyous?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, I mean we could have all kinds of hopeless situations, but they are all the expression of hopelessness. I suppose what you described could happen, but who are you trying to con?

Student:
The situation with Naropa having his visions and having the possibility of choosing to jump over the bitch or deal with the bitch, is that the same situation of “yes” or “no” you described in your talk?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes.

S:
And Naropa’s hopelessness at the end—

TR:
Naropa’s state of hopelessness before he actually saw his guru was absolute. Understanding Padmasambhava’s life without a sense of hopelessness would be completely impossible.