The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (2 page)

A Biography of Chögyam Trungpa

Books by Chögyam Trungpa

Resources

Index

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME SIX

V
OLUME
S
IX OF
The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa
brings together thoroughly tantric, or vajrayana, material on the nature of mind and space and their interaction. These are teachings that are productive to study and worthwhile to pursue, yet they include much advanced material, which can at times be frustrating and perplexing to our “normal” ways of thinking. All of these teachings were given during Trungpa Rinpoche’s early years in the West. “The Bardo” is based on teachings given by Rinpoche in England in the 1960s. The remainder is from lectures in North America, the earliest from 1971, the latest from 1976. Yet, while these teachings were presented early on, most of them were not published until after his death in 1987, the exceptions being “The Bardo,” the “Foreword” and “Commentary” from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and “Femininity.”

Much of this material is genuinely esoteric and difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Trungpa Rinpoche presented this material in public seminars, for the most part. With the exception of one seminar that forms part of
Glimpses of Space
, he did not restrict access to these teachings, unlike his approach to much of the vajrayana material he presented to his advanced students. What makes these teachings hard to understand is not that they require a great deal of prior study of the Buddhist teachings. Based on the way that he presented the material, it is not necessary to know very much about Buddhism to grasp what he is saying. Rather, it is necessary to know something about mind or, more accurately, to be open to one’s own innate or instinctual relationship with space, mind, and awareness. If one approaches these teachings with a genuinely “open” mind, they are not much more perplexing to the neophyte than they are to the initiated.

Transcending Madness
, the material from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
(the translation of the text itself is not included), and “The Bardo” all present teachings on the bardos. Next in Volume Six,
Orderly Chaos
presents teachings on the principle of mandala.
Glimpses of Space
explores the principles of space and feminine energy. The little volume
Secret Beyond Thought
presents teachings on the five chakras and the four karmas. The final article in this volume, “Femininity,” is a popular treatment of the feminine principle.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche presented the two seminars that make up
Transcending Madness
in 1971. The first took place in Allenspark, Colorado, about an hour outside of Boulder, and the second at Karmê Chöling, the first practice center he established in the United States, located in rural Vermont. He had barely been in North America for a year when these teachings were presented. In the introduction to Volume Three of
The Collected Works
, there is some description of the tenor of that first year, in particular relative to the chaotic but cheerful environment that surrounded Trungpa Rinpoche’s life and teaching in Boulder. The first seminars that Rinpoche gave in Boulder were edited to become
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.
It was only a little while after presenting the “Cutting Through” seminars that he gave the Allenspark material, “The Six States of Bardo.” It was attended by most of his students from Boulder.

In the short time since he had arrived in Boulder in the fall of 1970, he had drawn together a community of several hundred students. As Judith Lief, the editor of
Transcending Madness
, writes in her foreword to the book: “Trungpa Rinpoche had attracted many students with a background in higher education, psychology, and the arts. These early students were strongly interested in integrating their Buddhist training with their practice of Western disciplines” (Editor’s Foreword). One might put it another way: Chögyam Trungpa was interested in integrating his students’ Buddhist training with the practice of Western disciplines—and they were generally interested in doing whatever interested him. To be sure, he attracted many students with an impressive background in a Western discipline, whether psychology, physics, anthropology, writing, painting, publishing, business, interior design, or any of hundreds of other possibilities. However, these students were often ready to give up whatever they were pursuing in the world in order to become meditators and spiritual practitioners. It was not then, nor is it now, uncommon to associate becoming a spiritual person with giving up the occupations of the world.

It was Chögyam Trungpa who suggested: Why don’t we start a therapeutic community? Why don’t we write poetry? Why don’t we start a business? Once the idea caught on, the students started bringing the possibilities to him, but it was largely his initial inspiration to join together spiritual and temporal activity in this unique fashion.

Already by the fall of 1971, when the Allenspark seminar took place, a group of Rinpoche’s students were working with him on plans to start a therapeutic community to work with seriously disturbed individuals.
¹
Trungpa Rinpoche and Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center San Francisco, had discussed this idea in May of 1971, just a few months prior to Roshi’s death. When Trungpa Rinpoche gave the Allenspark seminar and the subsequent seminar on the bardos at Karmê Chöling, one of his motivations for presenting these tantric teachings was that he felt the material could be helpful to his students in understanding and working with mental illness.

While this sounds rather straightforward, in fact it was a revolutionary move. The bardo teachings connected with the
Bardo Thödröl
, the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, are advanced teachings in the dzogchen or ati tradition within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. It was remarkable of Rinpoche to connect them with the study and application of Western psychology.

In a number of areas of his work in North America, Trungpa Rinpoche joined together the study of vajrayana Buddhism with the practice of Western disciplines, particularly in psychology and the arts. Judith Lief reports that when she arrived in Boulder in 1972, many of Rinpoche’s students belonged to one of the two main “camps” within the Buddhist community: one studying psychology and another group working with theater. Both groups were working with teachings that Trungpa Rinpoche had given them, based in both cases on advanced vajrayana material. The psychology group was studying the transcripts from the two seminars that make up
Transcending Madness.
(What the theater group was doing comes up in Volume Seven.)

Although he may have connected the bardo material with Western psychology, Rinpoche didn’t simplify these teachings to show his students how to apply them practically.
Transcending Madness
is a precise and difficult-to-fathom presentation of the teachings of bardo as they relate to the six realms of existence. It makes its basic points very clearly, but the author didn’t abbreviate when it came to the details. He was not presenting pop psychology. It requires commitment and a genuine letting go of concepts to connect with this material.

On the whole, Trungpa Rinpoche was suspicious of attempts to simplistically merge two distinct disciplines. Nor was he generally enamored of “borrowing” ideas from Eastern spirituality and applying them to Western concepts. There was a good deal of such experimentation during the 1960s and ’70s, much of it well intentioned but poorly thought out or poorly executed. The results were often more like a creation in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory than an evolutionary process. It was rare that a genuine hybrid emerged, carrying the strengths of its ancestry. Chögyam Trungpa’s criticism of the problems with the New Age mentality, however, did not stop him from introducing teachings from his own lineage into the stream of Western thought and art.

A number of people who were applying very small discoveries from the East to something in the West were making bold claims about themselves and the importance of their discoveries. In contrast, Rinpoche’s approach was much more understated. He didn’t say, “Now I am presenting some of the most ancient and precious teachings of my lineage, and I’m going to show you how these can be practically applied in your culture. This is the first time in the history of humankind that anyone has ever done this, and it’s a radical and fantastic thing to do.” His method was much more subtle and ultimately much more profound. He told the people at the Allenspark seminar: “Everybody here is involved in a very dangerous game because we are working on the karmic pattern of America. We are trying not only to fight it, but we are trying to infiltrate it . . . we are working on the infiltration of the materialistic world.”

Thus,
Transcending Madness
is not a how-to book about applying Tibetan bardo teachings to working with the mentally ill. It is rather a book about how to apply these teachings to one’s own state of mind. The premise of Trungpa Rinpoche’s presentation is that madness is not an aberration experienced by some people who have something wrong with them to begin with, people who are different from you and me. Rather, insanity is something that we all experience, although it may be in a more embryonic form. By seeing how we work with sanity and insanity in ourselves, we can begin to understand what others are experiencing and perhaps be helpful to them.

Trungpa Rinpoche had known the psychiatrist R. D. Laing in England in the 1960s. Laing believed that there was a great deal of sanity in madness, and he and Chögyam Trungpa undoubtedly had some interesting and productive discussions on this topic. Unfortunately, there is no record of their communication, and neither man is alive to tell us about their conversations. Trungpa Rinpoche said many times that he admired Laing and respected his views, and one can only assume that this was a mutual feeling. Just as Rinpoche’s interest in starting a therapeutic community came out of a dialogue with Suzuki Roshi, it is not unlikely—although there is no confirmation for this idea—that his inspiration to present the bardo teachings as applicable to Western psychology may have been influenced by his association with Laing and his ideas.

Bardo
is a Tibetan word that means an “intermediate” or “in-between” state. The idea of bardo is most commonly understood in connection with teachings in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and generally people associate bardo with what occurs at the moment of death and in the after-death state. The traditional teachings on bardo speak of six bardo states, several of which are associated with the process of dying and experiences that occur after death. Other bardo states include birth, the dream state, and the state of meditation. In
Transcending Madness
and in the foreword and commentary to
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, Rinpoche stresses that these teachings are also about how we live. As Francesca Fremantle, the coauthor and translator of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, says in her introduction to the book: “The fundamental teaching of this book is the recognition of one’s projections and the dissolution of the sense of self in the light of reality.” In
Transcending Madness
, working with these teachings in each moment of our lives is clearly the focus.

As Trungpa Rinpoche puts it, “Everyone must go through different phases of so-called normality and so-called abnormality, such as tension, depression, happiness, and spirituality. All these phases that we go through constantly seem to be what we have been talking about in this seminar. Unless we are able to apply this to everyday life, there is no point to it” (
Transcending
Madness, Part One, chapter 9) .

In her foreword to the book, Judith Lief clarifies the meaning of bardo and how it relates to the six realms of existence, the fundamental framework that Trungpa Rinpoche uses in presenting the material in
Transcending Madness.
“This volume . . . is based on the interweaving of two core concepts: realm and bardo. The traditional Buddhist schema of the six realms—gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings—is sometimes taken to be a literal description of possible modes of existence. But in this case the schema of the six realms is used to describe the six complete worlds we create as the logical conclusions of such powerful emotional highlights as anger, greed, ignorance, lust, envy, and pride. Having disowned the power of our emotions and projected that power onto the world outside, we find ourselves trapped in a variety of ways and see no hope for escape.”

She continues: “The six realms provide a context for the bardo experience, which is described as the experience of no-man’s-land. The bardos arise as the heightened experience of each realm, providing at the same time the possibility of awakening or of complete confusion, sanity or insanity. They are the ultimate expression of the entrapment of the realms. Yet it is such heightened experience that opens the possibility of the sudden transformation of that solidity into complete freedom or open space” (Editor’s Foreword).

As Lief also states, Chögyam Trungpa “presented teachings on the realms and bardos as a way of understanding madness and sanity and learning to work directly and skillfully with extreme states of mind. Based on direct observation of mental patterns, these teachings provide a way ‘to see our situation clearly along with that of our fellow human beings’” (Editor’s Foreword).

In terms of mental illness in others, there are important implications that arise from this view of madness and sanity as intertwined or coexisting in us all the time. For one, the preparation for working with disturbed individuals is first of all to work on oneself and to understand sanity and madness within one’s own state of mind. Because we don’t regard mental illness as something alien, it is not something to fear. In fact, it is quite familiar ground. We realize that we have the ability to understand what other people are experiencing and to relate directly with them in their pain and confusion, because their state of mind is also part of our own experience. This teaching becomes a powerful tool to build identification and compassion in working with others. Judith Lief has shown this in her own work with dying people, which she describes in her book
Making Friends with Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality.