The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (31 page)

You can’t reject your history. You can’t say that your hair is black if it is blond. You have to accept your history. Those wanting to imitate Oriental culture might go so far as to become 100 percent Hindu or 100 percent Japanese, even to the point of undergoing plastic surgery. But somehow denying your existence—your body, your makeup, your psychological approach—does not help. In fact, it brings more problems. You have to be what you are. You have to relate with your country, the state of your country, its politics, its culture. That is extremely important, since you cannot become someone else. And it is such a blessing.

If we could become someone else, or halfway someone else, that would provide us with a tremendous number of sidetracks and possibilities for escape. We should be thankful that we have a body, a culture, a race, and a country that is honestly ours, and we should relate with those. We can’t reject all that. That represents our relationship to the earth as a whole, our national karma, and all the rest of it. That seems to be the starting point for attaining enlightenment, becoming a buddha, an American buddha.

Student:
Rinpoche, Naropa’s experiences seem to be all symbols. Can’t we go too far in taking everything as a symbol? How do we prevent ourselves from going too far in that sense?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Naropa, in a sense, failed in this way because he didn’t have the chance of relating with Tilopa immediately. For that very reason, he got too much involved in symbolism. The same could apply to us as well. It’s not so much a matter of too much symbolism as of too much fascination with the context. For example, you could be completely fooled by a salesman if you’re in a shop. The salesman might say, “This is such beautiful material. This is such a functional item. It’s of good quality, yet cheap. It’s so beautiful; you’ll be getting your money’s worth.” At that point, you can’t deny that what the salesman is telling you is the truth. He’s absolutely telling the truth. The thing he’s trying to sell you does have those good qualities. But if you ended up buying it on the basis of fascination, you might be disappointed afterward, because somehow afterward you’re not relating with it on the same level of fascination anymore. You might find at that point that your fascination is rejected by the experience you had in your first glimpse before the salesman began to fascinate you. The whole thing is based on fascination.

S:
What I was asking about was if there was a point where one had gone too far in taking experiences as symbolic, a point where the whole thing’s a projection.

TR:
Yes, that is related with fascination, not being able to relate with yourself. One has to relate to one’s whole being rather than just purely dealing with accuracy and beautiful display.

Student:
In the Buddhist tradition, after the death of ego, is there any self left? Does self exist?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s a very old question. You see, in order to have the continuity of something, you have to have somebody constantly watching this continuity happening. If you have ego continuing, you also have to have the observer observing that ego is continuing. This is because the whole thing is based on a mirage. If there’s no watcher, there’s no mirage. If there’s a watcher to acknowledge that the mirage exists, there will be a mirage. After enlightenment, there’s no watcher anymore; therefore the watcher’s object does not exist anymore.

S:
Does the being exist after that?

TR:
The being is self-consciousness, making sure you are there. And you don’t watch yourself being there anymore. It’s not a question of whether being exists or does not exist. If you see being as not existing, then you have to watch that, make sure that being does not exist anymore, which is continuing the being anyhow.

S:
So in other words, there is a death or an identity after ego death, and the death or ego is the death of confusion about it?

TR:
Well, the watcher dissolves, so we cannot say yes or no either. It’s beyond remark.

Student:
Regarding relating with our culture, Alan Watts says that one thing that has given our culture a great neurosis is seeing things in terms of the conflict between good and evil rather than just seeing them as they are. This makes me want to ask you about the Buddhist view of what the devil is or the black magician. A lot of our cultural history that is still going on has to do with black magic.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Defining good and evil or the devil and black magic is very much related to our topic of sanity and insanity, and the whole subject of meditation is related with that as well. The result of any situation that is connected with self-enrichment, or an attempt at self-perpetuation, either in an ego-centered way or a very innocent and kind way—the result of anything aimed at enriching the ego—is destruction, complete confusion, perpetual confusion. There is no killing of ego here. From a black magician’s point of view, you don’t kill somebody’s ego, you kill somebody’s non-ego.

S:
How can you do that?

TR:
You just do it out of conviction, belief. In other words, you can’t destroy it completely, but you put a smear of ink over it, and you don’t look again; you just hope for the best—that you killed it. The whole thing is connected with spiritual materialism, which I talk so much about. Spiritual materialism means enriching the ego. Anything related with spiritual materialism is a step toward the black magician, if I may say so. It could be a step toward the black magician or the white magician actually, but in any case toward the magician, toward gaining power. If you want to help your friend, you just do it. If you want to destroy your enemy, you just do it. In that way, you have the potential of the black magician, even if you are regarded as a kind person who is at the same time a powerful person.

The whole question is how much the relationship with ego becomes a central theme in spiritual practice. When it does, you get good and bad, what is and what is not, which is called duality in Buddhist terminology. The whole thing of who you are is purely related with the watcher. You can’t measure anything without a starting point. And you can’t count unless you can start from zero. So zero is you, ego. You start from there and you build your number series, you build your measurement system, you build your relationships. Once you do that, you get an overwhelming sense of good and kind or bad and destructive. You build all kinds of things based on that basic reference point. It seems that the whole thing is based on how much you are involved with ego. That seems to be the basis for defining goodness or wickedness.

Student:
What are the methods in your way for killing the ego? What methods would you use in our society?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It has nothing to do with society at all. It is purely a matter of dealing with one’s psychological state of being. Sociological styles don’t make any difference in this regard. Sociological approaches or styles are just a photograph. The direct way of dealing with ourselves here is getting into the nitty-gritty of our whole existence and dealing with excruciating pain and excruciating pleasure as directly as possible. That way we begin to realize that pain and pleasure do not exist in a centralized way, but pain and pleasure exist in an expansive, joyful way. So we don’t have to nurse anything.

Student:
Rinpoche, you spoke of compassion as being bad medicine for ego. Yet Naropa violates our definition of compassion in a number of ways.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
There are two different types of compassion. There is actual compassion, direct compassion, absolute compassion. Then there is the other kind of compassion that Mr. Gurdjieff
³
calls “idiot compassion,” which is compassion with neurosis, a slimy way of trying to fulfill your desire secretly. This is your aim, but you give the appearance of being generous and impersonal.

S:
What is absolute compassion?

TR:
Absolute compassion is seeing the situation as it is, directly and thoroughly. If you have to be tough, you just do it. In other words, idiot compassion contains a sort of opium—constantly trying to be good and kind—and absolute compassion is more literal, more discriminating, and more definite. You are willing to hurt somebody, even though you do not want to hurt that person; but in order to wake that person up, you might have to hurt him or her, you might have to inflict pain.

That is precisely why, in the Buddhist tradition, we don’t start with the teaching of compassion, the mahayana, but we start with teaching of the lesser vehicle, the hinayana. In the hinayana, you try to get yourself together. Then you start applying your compassion after that, having gotten yourself together, having built the foundation. You can’t just work on the level of absolute compassion right from the beginning. You have to develop toward it.

Student:
I think you said earlier that one of the obstacles to developing in this way is the need for reassurance. How does one get away from the need for reassurance?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Acknowledge needing reassurance, acknowledge it as an effigy that looks in only one direction and does not look around. An effigy with one face, possibly only one eye. Doesn’t see around, doesn’t see the whole situation. Do you see what I mean?

S:
The effigy only looks one way. Is this the person who needs reassurance?

TR:
Yes, because that reassurance has to be attached to that one situation. Whenever you need reassurance, that means you have a fixed idea of what ought to be. And because of that you fix your vision on one situation, one particular thing. And those situations that are not being observed because of the point of view of needing reassurance, that we are not looking at, are a source of paranoia. We wish we could cover the whole ground, but since we can’t do that physiologically, we have to try to stick to that one thing as much as we can. So the need for reassurance has only one eye.

S:
And the way to get beyond that one-eyed vision?

TR:
Develop more eyes, rather than just a unidirectional radar system. You don’t have to fix your eye on one thing. You can have panoramic vision, vision all around at once.

Student:
Something like a fish-eye lens.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Something like that, but even that has a camera behind it.

THREE

An Operation without Anesthetics

N
AROPA
’
S EXPERIENCE
of discovering Tilopa is connected with finally giving up hope, giving up hope of getting what we wanted to get. For Naropa, that search for an ultimate answer finally had to be given up. But this is not easy to give up, because each time we try to give up having the ultimate answer—our final answer, the truth—giving up the truth is discovered as another truth. So we could go on and on and on giving up truths. Giving up hope becomes another hope of getting something out of giving up hope.

We seem to love ourselves enormously. We love ourselves so much that we reach the point where we might kill ourselves. A kind of love-hate relationship goes on in which our extreme desire, our extreme love of ourselves, becomes hatred in practice. This is precisely why samsaric mind, the samsaric point of view of gaining happiness, is regarded by the Buddhist teaching as holding the wrong end of the stick. That is precisely why confusion is regarded as off.

Looking at Naropa’s situation, we see that to have found a teacher like Tilopa, we have to give up our conceptualized way of thinking and our conceptualized attitudes. We have to learn that lesson: to become tired of the dreams, sick of them. The dreams have no root. They are purely fantasies. But then, after that, when the dreams cease to function, there is something else to relate with. That is the shell of the dreams. The shell, or the shadow, of the dreams becomes tough and strong. Having woken up, we face reality.

Having given up hope of meeting Tilopa, Naropa finally meets Tilopa. But that turns out to be another problem. That is another uneasy situation. Having gone through the fantasies and used them up, we are faced with the reality or ultimate truth, or whatever you would like to call it. What do we do with the reality? How shall we handle this reality? Having woken up, what shall we do?

A lot of the great Tibetan teachers talk about transcending the phantom of mind and facing reality. Once one faces it, reality is like pure gold. One has to examine that gold, process it—hammer it and mold out of it whatever shapes one wants. Or we could also say that when one faces reality, it is like dough, and processing it is like kneading dough. If you want good bread, you have to knead the dough with complete strength. And it is said that the important point in this is not kneading the dough but cleaning the bowl. If you are good at kneading, you clean the bowl with the dough. The result might be good bread, but this is still uncertain.

Dealing with reality is an extremely big problem, a much bigger one than dealing with the phantoms of our imagination. In our meditation practice, dealing with thought processes is relatively simple. You just relate with thoughts as thoughts, and the thought process becomes transparent. But dealing with the technique of meditation is another matter; dealing with your body is another matter. That is the most difficult problem of all.

Dealing with reality is difficult because we are still approaching it in an unrealistic way. There is reality in its full glory. Should we look at it as a spectrum? Should we regard it as something that belongs to us? Should we regard it as a show? If we don’t regard it in any way at all, how are we going to deal with that reality in its full splendor? In fact, we do not know what to do with reality. Having been presented with it, we are completely bewildered.

It’s like meeting your favorite film star on the street. If you suddenly bumped into him or her on the street, you would have to make up your mind what to say, what to do. Somehow it’s a dream coming true; it’s real. There is something real about meeting that particular person, but at the same time, there is something unreal because you are not prepared for that reality. It happened by accident.