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

Nyima Öser.

When you are about to die, it may be that your doctors, your relatives, or your closest friends won’t tell you you are going to die. They might find it difficult to communicate this to you. But they communicate an unspoken sympathy, and there is something behind it.

In the world, people do not want to relate with a friend who is dying. They do not want to relate to their friend’s experience of death as something personal. It is a mutual embarrassment, a mutual tragedy that they don’t want to talk about. If we belong to less circles, we might approach a dying person and say, “You are dying,” but at the same time, we try to tell him, “After all, this is nothing bad that’s happening to you. You are going to be okay. Think of those promises about ongoing eternity you’ve heard. Think of God, think of salvation.” We still don’t want to get to the heart of the matter. We don’t talk about purgatory or hell or the tormenting experience of the bardo. We are trying to face the situation, but it is embarrassing. Though we are brave enough to say that someone is going to die, we say, “But still, you’re going to be okay. Everybody around you feels positive about this, and we love you. Take the love that we feel toward you with you and make something of it as you pass from this world, as you die.” That’s the attitude [of avoidance] we have toward death.

The actual experience of death, as I have already explained, is a sense of ceasing to exist. The normal routine of your daily life ceases to function and you turn into something else. The basic impact of the experience is the same whether you believe in rebirth or not: it is the discontinuity of what you are doing. You are leaving your present associates behind. You will no longer be able to read that book that you didn’t finish. You will not be able to continue the course you were taking. Maybe people who are involved with the doctrine of rebirth might try to tell you, “When you come back, you will finish this book. You’ll be back with us. Maybe you’ll be one of our children. Think of those possibilities.” They tend to say those kinds of things and make promises of all kinds. They make promises about being with God or coming back to the world and continuing with things you have left behind.

In this kind of talk, there is something that is not quite open. There is some kind of fear, mutual fear, even in spite of beliefs about eternity or reincarnation. There is fear or embarrassment about relating to death. There is always a feeling of something undesirable, even if you are reading your friend a chapter from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
⁵
or whatever. You might tell your friend, “Though something terrible is happening to you, there is a greater thing. Now you are actually going to have a chance to get into those experiences described in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And we’ll help you do it!” But no matter what we try, there is this sense of something that can’t be made all right, no matter what kind of positive picture we try to paint.

It seems, quite surprisingly, that for many people, particularly in the West, reading the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
for the first time is very exciting. Pondering on this fact, I have come to the conclusion that the excitement comes from the fact that tremendous promises are being made. Fascination with the promises made in the
Book of the Dead
almost undermines death itself. We have been looking for so long for a way to undermine our irritations, including death itself. Rich people spend a lot of money on coffins, on makeup for the corpse, on good clothes to dress it up in. They pay for expensive funeral systems. They will try any way at all to undermine the embarrassment connected with death. That is why the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
is so popular and is considered to be so fantastic.

People were very excited and celebratory about the idea of reincarnation in the same way. A few decades ago when the idea of reincarnation became current for the first time, everybody was excited about it. That’s another way of undermining death. “You’re going to continue; you have your karmic debts to work out and your friends to come back to. Maybe you will come back as my child.” Nobody stopped to consider that they might come back as a mosquito or a pet dog or cat.

The type of approach to death we have been discussing is very strange, extremely strange.

When we discuss the discovery of eternity by Vajradhara, as the next aspect of Padmasambhava is called, we are not looking at it as a victory over death or as a replacement for the irritations of death or anything of that nature. Eternity in this sense is connected with a true vision of the facts of life. Pain exists and pleasure exists. A negative aspect of the world does exist. Yet you can still relate with it. Fundamentally, developing this kind of sense of eternity is making friends. We might regard a certain person as a good friend in spite of his threatening qualities. In fact, that is the reason we become friends.

Relating with eternity in this sense is becoming a king of life, a lord of life. And if the lord of life is really a lord, his empire extends to death as well. So the lord of life is the lord of life and death. And this lord of life is known as Vajradhara.

The young prince who has just fled from his kingdom suddenly decides to adapt to the savagery of the charnel ground and to the fundamental principle of eternity, which is often known as the mahamudra experience. The mahamudra experience here is the experience that relates with the living quality of phenomena. That is to say, the whole scene in the charnel ground is
real.
There are skeletons, pieces of bodies, wild animals, ravens, jackals, and so forth.

In the charnel ground, the young prince discovers a new approach to life, or rather, a new approach to life discovers him. We could say that at this stage Padmasambhava becomes a solid citizen, because the sense of eternity brings indestructibility, indestructibility in the sense that nothing can be a threat and nothing can produce comfort. That is the kind of eternity we are referring to here. Death is no longer regarded as a threat. Padmasambhava’s experience of death is an experience of one of the aspects of life. He is not concerned with perpetuating his personality and existence. We could say that this approach is more than the yogi’s or siddha’s approach. This approach is more that of a buddha, since these experiences are not regarded as achievements of any kind—they are not discoveries, victories, or forms of revenge. These experiences simple take place, and because they happen, Padmasambhava tunes in to them. So Padmasambhava as Vajradhara becomes the lord of life and death, the holder of the vajra, the holder of indestructible energy—a sambhogakaya buddha.

The next journey that Padmasambhava makes is connected with his wanting to explore all kinds of teaching situations and wanting to relate with the great teachers of the world of that time. He visits one of the leading teachers of the maha ati tradition, Shri Simha, who supposedly came from Thailand (Siam) and was living in a cave in another charnel ground. Vajradhara, the sambhogakaya aspect of Padmasambhava, went and asked him how to destroy the sense of experience. And Shri Simha reduced Padmasambhava to the syllable
HUM,
which is penetration. You don’t try to dissolve experience or try to regard it as a fallacy. You penetrate experience. Experience is like a container with lots of holes in it, which means that it cannot give you proper shelter, proper comfort. Penetrating or puncturing this is like puncturing a comfortable hammock hanging underneath a tree: [once it is punctured,] when you approach it and try to sit in it, you find that you end up on the ground. That’s the penetration of the seed syllable
HUM.
Reducing Padmasambhava to
HUM,
Shri Simha swallows him through his mouth and shits him out through his anus. This is bringing him to the nirmanakaya experience of being able to penetrate the phenomenal world thoroughly and completely, of being able to transmit a message to the phenomenal world.

Having destroyed his own sense of survival and achieved a sense of eternity, Padmasambhava now develops a sense of penetration. (Of course, he isn’t really developing anything, he is just going through these phases. We are telling the story of Padmasambhava in accordance with how we have manufactured him, rather than trying to express that he did all those things.) This is when Padmasambhava became known as the great yogi who could control time, who could control day and night and the four seasons. This yogi aspect of Padmasambhava is called Nyima Öser. Nyima Öser penetrated all the conceptualizations of time, day and night, the four seasons. In his iconography, he is seen holding the sun still, using its rays as a tether.

The idea here is not that some achievement of a subtle experience can bring you to such complete absorption that you cease to experience the distinctions between night and day and the four seasons. Rather, the conceptualized attitudes toward day and night and the four seasons—or toward pain and pleasure or whatever—are penetrated through. Usually, day and night and the four seasons bring us comfort by giving us the feeling we are relating with reality, with the elements: “Now we are relating with summer, now we are relating with autumn, now we are relating with winter, and now we are relating with spring. How good to be alive! How good to be on earth, man’s best place, his home! It’s getting late; it’s time for dinner. We could begin the day with a hearty breakfast.” And so forth. Our lifestyle is governed by these concepts. There are lots of things to do as time goes along, and relating with them is like swinging in a hammock, a comfortable bed in the open air. But Nyima Öser punctured this hammock. Now you can’t have a good time swinging and having a comfortable snooze in the open air. That’s the penetrating quality here.

Student:
You are having a comfortable snooze in this hammock. Then you penetrate the comfortable appearance of this hammock. So where does that leave you—standing up?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You find yourself on the ground.

S:
But alert somehow?

TR:
Yes. One of the qualities seems to be a sense of awake rather than absorption.

Student:
If Padmasambhava is the great yogi who controls time, does that mean that time doesn’t control him the way it does us?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s not really a matter of controlling time or not being controlled by it. It’s discovering timelessness. If you translate this into a kind of peasant language, then you could say “controlling time.”

Student:
You have repeatedly emphasized that Padmasambhava doesn’t learn anything and in a sense knows everything. I don’t understand why we can’t look upon him as an ordinary human, like any one of us, who has learned various things at various stages.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We could equally well relate with our own stages in this way. Our process of spiritual development, or whatever you want to call it, is an unlearning process rather than one of collecting new experiences. Padmasambhava’s style is unmasking, unlearning—layers and layers of phenomenal covering are gradually removed.

S:
The unmasking, or unlearning, process seems to be like a series of deaths. Why does that have to be so painful? Why can’t it be like a kind of liberation and have a kind of joyous feeling?

TR:
Well, it is joyous, and maybe we are complaining too much. We are more aware of the intensity of the darkness than of the brilliance of the light.

S:
It seems that the proper way to relate to death is without any strategy. Do you have to give up your fear before you can be without a strategy? Or can you just relate to your fear?

TR:
Fear is a very interesting thing, actually. It has insight as well as the panicky blind quality. So it seems that if you give up hope of attaining anything, then tuning in to fear is tuning in to insight. And skillful means arise spontaneously out of fear itself, because fear seems to be extremely resourceful. It is the opposite of hopelessness, in fact. But fear also has the element of panic and the deaf and dumb quality—you know, doing the best you can. But fear without hope seems to be something very insightful.

S:
Is fear insightful in that it points to why you were afraid in the first place?

TR:
Not only that. It has its own intuitive aspect going beyond just logical conclusions. It has spontaneously existing resourcefulness.

S:
Could you say more about that?

TR:
When you connect with your fear, you realize you have already leapt, you are already in midair. You realize that, and then you become resourceful.

S:
Isn’t that what we are all doing—being resourceful out of nowhere?

TR:
We don’t realize that we’re already in midair.

Student:
Rinpoche, you say that fear without hope would be intelligent. Could the same be said about the other intense emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Hope and fear largely constitute the rest of the emotions. Hope and fear represent the kind of pushing and pulling quality of duality, and all the emotions consist of that. They are different aspects of that; they all seem to be made out of hope and fear of something—pulling and magnetizing or fending off.

S:
Is having fear also desire of the same thing you are afraid of?

TR:
Yes, that’s the way it is. But when you realize that there is nothing to be desirous
of
(you know, the desire is the hope aspect of the fear), when you realize that, then you and your fear are left nakedly standing alone.

S:
So you just connect with the fear without hope. But how do you do that?

TR:
It’s relating without feedback. Then the situation automatically intensifies or becomes clear.

S:
Can you apply the same approach to anger? If I’m angry, instead of either expressing or suppressing it, I just relate to it? I stop the anger and just relate to the thought process?