The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (20 page)

S:
It’s what you taste.

TR:
It’s what you taste, yes, while exploring the subtleties of everything as an infant would.

S:
Does that exploration have to be painful?

TR:
Pain is arbitrary at this point. Experiences are not particularly regarded as painful or pleasurable. They just are.

Student:
You said that the child was fearless. And then you said that cowardice is the path. Aren’t those two contradictory?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
They both amount to the same thing at this point. You are fearless because you don’t go beyond certain limitations; you are fearless “as it is,” and therefore you are a coward at the same time. That may be very difficult to grasp. I don’t know whether I am making myself clear.

Student:
I have the same question. When you tell us, “It’s up to you,” it seems that we have a choice about what our limitations are, almost as though we created them ourselves.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t see why not, because your limitations are
your
limitations.

S:
They don’t feel like
my
limitations. They’re something that I discover as I go along.

TR:
Well, you had to discover them, so you manufactured them as you went along.

S:
You mean to say, if I wanted to, I could discover other limitations instead?

TR:
Precisely! That’s the whole point.

S:
What’s the point about going beyond them? You seemed to say that crazy wisdom discouraged going beyond them.

TR:
Yes.

S:
Going beyond them would be like going into some realm of utter fear or something?

TR:
Well, this is very simple—kindergarten level. Going beyond your limitations is making things up rather than actually going beyond your limitations. It’s manufacturing a dream world.

S:
Are you making a distinction between made-up limitations and more real ones?

TR:
Sure.

S:
And you shouldn’t try to go beyond the more real ones?

TR:
You can’t go beyond them anyway. They’re real ones. You can’t. you can’t relate with them. You’d be going beyond your strength.

S:
Then there’s no danger of going beyond the natural limitation?

TR:
Well, one tends very often to try to explore it.

S:
Then what’s the difference between exploring it and going beyond it?

TR:
The difference is if you go beyond your own limitation, you get hurt. You get some message.

S:
So how does fearlessness apply in this situation?

TR:
You see, the point is, we do not even trust our own abilities. Usually we don’t. That’s where fearlessness could play an important part—in exploring the complete realm of your strength. But then going beyond that is frivolous; if you do that, you’re subject to destruction. So fearlessness is not a matter of doing something outrageous outside of your realm, but of exploring the complete range of your whole strength.

S:
What would keep a fearless person from exploring beyond his own strength?

TR:
Some message will come back to that person.

S:
Would that really prevent a person who is fearless from going beyond, from exploring everything?

TR:
Fearlessness is still a conditional situation; such a person wouldn’t be fearless
of everything.

S:
Is this the use of cowardice as intelligence?

TR:
Yes.

S:
Is that the wisdom part of crazy wisdom?

TR:
Somewhat. If you regard crazy wisdom as just being completely outrageous, that’s not particularly good or healthy. You are letting yourself in for destruction. That’s the usual idea people have, you know: if you’re trying to freak out, just push more, push more.

S:
It seems that such boundaries presuppose a structure that is independent of oneself—a structure of boundaries out there beyond which a person shouldn’t really venture.

TR:
Not quite. It is dependent upon one’s relationship with the structure.

S:
The message that I get out of all this is one should try to be aware of one’s limitations so as not to step over them and get hurt.

TR:
Not exactly. It’s a question of being cautious.

S:
How do you know when you’re being cautious? This seems to be the point. How do you know when you should pull back or when you should go forward?

TR:
You have to relate to what’s happening in the whole process. When you begin to notice a deceptive attitude like “Maybe I could try something better than this,” then you have begun to develop fear already because you haven’t actually ventured into that area before. A warning comes from the sense of self-deception.

S:
How do you become aware of that deception?

TR:
It’s very obvious. Only we know ourselves. We are the closest person to ourselves that we have. We know when we are deceiving ourselves and when we are not. There’s no demonstration needed for that. That’s something that’s understood between you and yourself.

S:
Probably a teacher is very helpful to encourage you in certain areas.

TR:
You have your areas already. You already have the possibility of rediscovering your strengths and abilities. Teachers can’t follow you, live with you, be your bedfellows all the time. Your teacher cannot always be there to guide you, but your self-deception guides you all the time.

Student:
Does karma begin to form in the dharmakaya?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We run into different philosophical opinions of different schools on this point. Some people say that no karma develops at that point, and some say that there is karma in the dharmakaya, because the dharmakaya is also a separate entity and has an allegiance toward nirvana. Longchen Rabjam, the great maha ati teacher, would say that karma has developed already; so our school would say that karma has developed already at the dharmakaya level. The dharmakaya brings you a message of sanity because of the insanity that you have already. So that is a relational action; relational action has already happened. In other words, the potter’s wheel of the second nidana has already developed.

Student:
Why does Padmasambhava choose such a dramatic means of expressing his dissatisfaction with living in a palace? Why does he have to throw a trident and drop his vajra, piercing a heart and cracking a skull? Why doesn’t he just walk out?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Walking out sounds like a cop-out. For him just to disappear and just be discovered as missing sounds like the action of a very transparent person who’s afraid to communicate with anything and just flees. Padmasambhava is much more heavy-handed than that.

Student:
Is fear something other than just projections?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Fear is the message as well as the radar. It is usually a relationship situation. It’s not absolute. It’s not independent of dualism. I think the crazy-wisdom approach to fear is not regarding it as a hangup alone, but realizing it is intelligent. It has a message of its own. Fear is worth respecting. If we dismiss fear as an obstacle and ignore it, then we might end up with accidents. In other words, fear is a very wise message.

S:
My experience of fear is that it seems to be a really major manifestation of my confusion. One of the daily experiences is that it’s a lie and a trap, a tremendous energy trap. I just try to keep from getting caught up in the impulse of it.

TR:
Well, you see, the point is, you can’t con fear or frighten fear. You have to respect fear. You might try to tell yourself that it’s not real, that it’s just false. But that kind of approach is very questionable. It is better to develop some kind of respect, realizing that neurosis also is a message, rather than garbage that you should just throw away. That’s the whole starting point—the idea of samsara and nirvana being one. Samsara is not regarded as a nuisance alone, but it has its own potent message that is worthy of respect.

S:
I’m far from throwing it away, but at the same time, I don’t want to centralize it as an issue, to make a mystery out of it. So it’s a very fine balance between not throwing it away and trying to let it go.

TR:
Well, you have experience already and you don’t have to question the experiencer on how to handle it diplomatically.

S:
There doesn’t seem to be much choice. The fear has such tremendous power.

TR:
Well, that’s fine. Then you have no chance to think about it or strategize it. Just leap.

S:
There’s a kind of fear that’s a threat to the ego, when it’s one of your illusions that feels threatened. Is there a difference between that kind of fear and the fear of going beyond your real limitations?

TR:
There seems to be one, yes. There is the fear of not being able to handle what you have, and there’s also a sense of needing something more than what you have. Hesitation to deal with what you have can be conquered by a leap, but needing to improvise further entertainment is a deception.

S:
The deception of going beyond your limitations.

TR:
Yes.

S:
Can you take a leap without worrying about your limitations?

TR:
Well, if you can, leap. Otherwise, you can’t leap either. If you can, take a leap. Then, as you leap, you come back naturally [to the proper relationship to your limitations]. Unless you try to take a sensational leap. In that case, you don’t even know what you’re doing, but you do it because you want to entertain yourself. It’s like taking an overdose.

Student:
Is the sense of discovery you talk about the same as keeping your space open, or is it a different idea?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, that seems to be it. Discovery doesn’t have to be a manifestation of something. It’s an attitude of being willing to accommodate whatever comes along. It is somewhat a sense of the duality of something.

S:
Quite often in spiritual trips, particularly when they have spectacular practices, there’s a tendency to want some practice that you don’t know anything about. Would you think of that as a case of helpful inquisitiveness or discovery?

TR:
Not if you don’t know what you’re getting into. There’s a difference between exploring what is there and exploring what isn’t there. When a child is playing with the razor’s edge, the razor is there and the honey is there on the razor’s edge. But if the child is exploring something outside, beyond the edge of the balcony, there’s nothing beyond the balcony except a sheer drop. That is suicidal.

Student:
When one comes to crazy wisdom, why does one man become like the Madman of Tsang and another become a person like your guru?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think it just depends on our manifestation and our way of viewing things. It’s a question of what we are ready for. My guru was the audience for the Madman of Tsang, and I was the audience for my guru. I wasn’t all that crazy at the time, so he wasn’t very crazy. But the Madman of Tsang was as crazy as he was because my guru was crazy enough to relate it.

FOUR

Death and the Sense of Experience

T
HE YOUTHFUL PRINCE
’
S EXPLORATION
of life situations is connected with a sense of eternity. Exploring life situations is making friends with the world, and making friends with the world consists of regarding the world as trustworthy. [It becomes trustworthy because] there is something eternal about it. When we talk about eternity, we are not talking about the eternity of one particular entity continuing on and on, as in the philosophical beliefs of the eternalists. In this case, discontinuity is also an expression of eternity. But before discussing eternity, it might be good to discuss death.

Death is the desolate experience in which our habitual patterns cannot continue as we would like them to. Our habitual patterns cease to function. A new force, a new energy, takes us over, which is “deathness,” or discontinuity. It is impossible to approach that discontinuity from any angle. That discontinuity is something you cannot communicate with, because you cannot please that particular force. You can’t make friends with it, you can’t con it, you can’t talk it into anything. It is extremely powerful and uncompromising.

This uncompromisingness also blocks expectations for the future. We have our plans—projects of all kinds that we would like to work on. Even if we are bored with life, we would still like to be able to recover that boredom. There is constant hope that something better might come out of the painful situations of life, or that we might discover some further way to expand pleasurable situations. But the sense of death is very powerful, very organic, and very real.