The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (32 page)

Meeting reality usually takes the form of an accident. We are bewildered by this accident, by this accidental discovery of reality, and then we are uncertain what to do. Should we pull it, push it, possess it, play with it, or what? But actually we don’t have to do anything with it. Just let that reality be there. And that seems to be the problem that Naropa encountered in his meeting with Tilopa. He regarded himself as a student and thought he had to do something—ask for Tilopa’s teaching. Thus he was still seeing Tilopa as an external person rather than as a part of his own psychological makeup presenting itself as Tilopa.

Dealing with spiritual masters is very tricky. They may be individual persons with a name and age and so on, born in such-and-such a place, with a particular lifestyle. Yet such a master is part of your ghost, part of your shadow; he’s your phantom, coming back because you would like to deal with him on the level of spirituality rather than in terms of ego’s language.

If you try to deal with him directly in terms of ego’s language, it is very, very complicated. Dealing with a lawyer or a salesman is quite simple. If it’s a salesman, you just examine the merchandise and pay him money, take your merchandise, and go home. That’s a very realistic relationship. But with a spiritual friend, it is quite different. You can’t pay him with material objects. You can’t pay him by being ingratiating or by being aggressive and insisting on getting something out of him: “If you don’t teach me, I’ll kill you.” That doesn’t work either. Somehow there is always a very subtle relationship involved. Although there is some kind of exchange, that exchange is very subtle, almost bewildering. And most of us do not know how to relate with it.

Even Naropa, for instance, didn’t know how to relate with it. Naropa was one of the world’s most educated men, one of the world’s most intelligent scholars. As a professor, Naropa was often referred to as “the only eye of the world.” Still, something did not work in the way he dealt with Tilopa. In spite of his scholastic, philosophical, and metaphysical understanding of the dharma, somehow something didn’t click at all. In fact, things went the opposite way altogether.

It seems that the relationship between the student and the teacher is a very subtle relationship, and if that subtle relationship does not work, then it works its way into a very painful process. We cannot present ourselves in that subtle relationship as a friend. We have to reduce ourselves to a patient, a sick person. We could be a friend at the same time, but still our main style of presenting ourselves to our spiritual friend is as a physically or mentally fucked-up person—rather than just a friend who is gracious, intelligent, friendly, and loving. Someone might try to present himself that way, but somehow his whole way of carrying his being makes it very difficult for the spiritual friend to accept him in this role of friend.

As a spiritual friend, you see this person inviting himself onto your doorstep. He is frantically shivering, shaking, freaking. Obviously, you invite him in, give him a seat, calm him down. And then you find out what is wrong with this person. Does this person need an operation, or would just some instant medicine help? Usually the person needs an operation more than hospitality.

This operation has different stages. To begin with, one has to deal with the body and the environment. (When I say “body,” I am referring to mind-body). The whole problem of this person who has come to you, the kind of sickness he has, is a conflict between “that” and “this.”
That,
in this case, refers to the projections we put out. When we put out projections, they bounce back on us, manifesting as seductive or threatening, or whatever.
This
is the perceiver of those projections.

So there is a conflict between “that” and “this” constantly, all the time. That is the cause of the symptoms of the sicknesses of all kinds that the person who has come to us is going through—all kinds of suffering. It is a sickness of cosmic chaos, a sickness of cosmic misunderstanding, a sickness of losing ground either here or there, losing the ground of “that” or losing the ground of “this.” Therefore, the operation is not so much one of cutting out pieces of sickness and sewing the person back up. That doesn’t cure. Cutting out the areas of sickness and sewing him back up doesn’t mean anything. He still has the sickness; he still has the body.

The only operation that the spiritual friend can perform is a mutual operation. The student should not be under anesthetics of any kind. No anesthetics. It is the experience of the operation that is important rather than the operation itself. A mother might want to have natural childbirth because she wants to see her child being born, brought out of her. She doesn’t want to be put under anesthetics. She wants to take part in the whole process of the birth. Here, it is exactly the same: we have to have a natural operation rather than one with anesthetics.

And of course, every penetration of the knife that cuts the tense skin, full of muscular tension that has developed from the chaos, from the conflict between “this” and “that,” is enormously powerful. This tension is just about to explode; that is why the operation is needed. No matter how gentle the physician is, there will be pain. In fact, the gentler the physician, the more acute the pain will be, because the physician does not take any chances. He does not just chop something off, but he is deliberate, very slow and very careful. The stroke of his knife is a very slow movement, extremely slow and kind.

This is exactly the kind of operation that Tilopa performs on Naropa. His operating knife is extremely sharp. At the beginning you hardly notice it’s cut, but sometime later it becomes overwhelming. That kind gesture, which we talked about earlier as the absence of idiot compassion, is part of dealing with reality, the absolute quality of the world.

It seems that we do not have the time and space here to go into the symbolism of the twelve successive situations that Naropa faced. Each one contains a different symbolism. But we can describe the whole process that those twelve experiences make up. To begin with, it is a process of cutting and opening up, releasing the tension in the skin. The skin is extremely tense because there is pressure from inside and pressure from outside. The inside pressure is confusion and uncertainty about how to relate with things. The external pressure comes from the fact that things we have put out have begun to bounce back on us. There is this extraordinary pressure that builds up, so we cut open the patient’s skin and remove a certain part of his organism that is producing this neurological pressure.

This seems to describe the subtle level of the twelve experiences Naropa went through. In this process, the first thing is dealing with the facade, then dealing with the inner phenomena, and then dealing with the innermost ones, going deeper, deeper, deeper into social situations, emotions, and so on. To begin with, there are social hesitations of all kinds that are based on conventional rules. Naropa has been brought up as a prince, and he has an upper-class snobbishness. In accordance with this, his life is based on the expectation that everything will be conducted properly and precisely. That kind of gentility in him is connected with the social setup.

Then there are the inner phenomena, which you get into at the level of being just about to give up social jargon. There is conflict, because it is hard to tune in to that inward way of thinking and that inward emotion. This also involves giving up the philosophical and metaphysical beliefs of all kinds that Naropa had acquired.

Then beyond that is naked emotion, direct emotional states.

In other words, these twelve experiences that Naropa went through were a continuous unlearning process. To begin with, he had to unlearn, to undo the cultural facade. Then he had to undo the philosophical and emotional facade. Then he had to step out and become free altogether. This whole process was a very painful and very deliberate operation.

This does not apply to Naropa and his time alone. This could also be something very up-to-date. This operation is applicable as long as we have conflicting emotions and erroneous beliefs about reality. Conflicting emotions and wrong beliefs about reality are known as the two veils. As long as they remain universal, the treatment, the operation without anesthetics, remains very up-to-date. And that is merely the beginning.

Student:
Are there several layers of emotional veils, different kinds of emotions constituting more than one layer of the veil of conflicting emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
According to Nagarjuna’s analysis of human psychology, there is the actual emotion, the direct one that we usually call emotion; then there is the intention of that emotion, of that confusion of emotion; and then there is the activator of the emotion. You see, the whole thing goes back to ego’s basic formula of maintaining itself. The ego cannot maintain itself unless there is a subtle way of setting its wheels in motion. Those wheels are set into motion by a slight move; then they roll faster, then finally extremely fast. It’s like setting anything in motion: first it’s slow, then it’s faster, then it’s extremely fast.

The layers of emotion begin with fascination. There is the fascination with a feeling that there might be something there, but on the other hand, there might not—that kind of uncertainty about something’s being there. Then one begins to get much more adventurous: “Supposing there is something there, let’s look for it, or let’s get into it.” The whole thing moves more rhythmically. And since there is now something you can move, that you have put forward, then finally you are not only just concerned with that movement or that speed, not just concerned with discovery alone, but you begin to be concerned about what comes after the discovery and begin hoping there will be another discovery. And so on and so on.

So the final emotional state is not so much just wanting to have experience of one thing, but wanting to experience the next thing. So the whole process becomes very fast, very speedy.

Student:
You were talking about projecting something out and getting it back and the whole thing reflecting some kind of cosmic chaos. I didn’t follow that.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
When you project something out, that projection also becomes a message for the next thing. If you shout, your echo comes back to you. If you talk to somebody, that person reacts to your communication. If you put out any vibrations, they automatically rebound back on you. This is a natural thing, which is always there. Scientifically, things happen that way. Because of that, there is the natural situation that it is hard to strategize the whole process. How to deal with the rebounds is the inner level. For that you have to develop another tactic, another policy. Having put something out in the first place was impulse, an impulsive move. But getting what you put out back is an unexpected thing. You will have to work out how to deal with that thing. There’s that kind of red tape. Somebody has to be manufacturing foreign policy, so to speak, which makes everything very centralized and self-conscious.

Student:
How do you relate to your spiritual friend while you are slowly being cut up by him? You said aggression doesn’t work. That seems to be obvious. Various social games don’t work. Yet there is this exquisite torture. I suppose that should produce feelings of gratitude, but somehow . . .

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, you see, he is not dealing with your problems other than through your reactions. Do you see what I mean?

S:
No.

TR:
The operation is performed on your reactions, not on anything else. Your reactions are the very juicy substance that is cut up and sewn and pieced together. That way you have no room at all to play with, even in the most vague situations like those in the first portion of Naropa’s search, before he meets Tilopa. Each time he first meets a situation, he has a reaction against it, which triggers off the next situation automatically. And later on, there is always a message coming through to him, saying things like, “Tomorrow I will visit a freak show.” There is a hint. He blindly keeps failing to guess the message, but he reacts to it.

S:
If you could control your reactions, would that help? If your reactions weren’t so much in conflict with the situation around you or weren’t so aggressive toward it, there wouldn’t be that friction. . . .

TR:
It’s not a question of what you should be or what you should be doing. It’s a question of what you are. The operation can always be performed on what your potential for reactions is. I mean, you can’t escape.

Student:
Is it right, then, to say that there must be a fundamental trust in your spiritual friend so that you can allow yourself to react however you’re going to, knowing that there is a communication that goes beyond your immediate reactions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I suppose that’s the situation. But at the same time that you have a feeling of fundamental, absolute trust, you also have the feeling that you don’t want to walk out of the situation while it’s still such a mess. You have started already, so your fate is inevitable. It’s an unfinished karmic situation.

Student:
I didn’t quite follow that part about having to relate with your body. Is it that when you see something new, you don’t know what to do with it, so you move into a state where you have to relate more with your body than your thoughts? I didn’t understand that point.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, the starting point is the physical situation. Usually physical problems bring about the fundamental situations leading to meeting the spiritual friend. For example, Naropa’s attempt to commit suicide brings Tilopa there. Because finally Naropa is actually relating with his body; finally he has come to the point where the only solution is relating with the earth. Of course, his particular solution was rather a questionable one.

S:
I took that symbolically as the suicide of ego.

TR:
Yes, but then you are holding the wrong end of the stick by taking the ego to be body rather than mind. There is a confusion as to what really is ego and what is not. You just think, “If I eliminate this tiresome object that gets in the way all the time . . .” But if you eliminate that, you may have no further opportunity of receiving teaching.