The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (22 page)

There is a difference between that kind of hunger and grasping, and actual communication with the subject that you’re going to learn, making an actual relationship with the subject. It is like the difference between reading the menu and deciding to eat. If you have a clear idea what kind of food you want to eat, you don’t have to read the menu—you immediately order it. But in fact we seem to spend so much time just reading the menu. There are all sorts of temptations of possible dishes: “Shall we order this or that? That sounds good as well. I never tasted this, but it sounds foreign; it sounds good, exotic. Shall we have a drink before we order? Shall we have wine with the meal? What shall we do?” Such a scene is created around just purely reading the menu. “And before we read the menu, should we have something special, so we are inspired to read the menu? Appetizers? Cookies and nuts?”

Also, of course, the secret criteria that we use in ordering the food, reading the menu, are very embarrassing ones which we don’t want to share with anybody. They are purely restricted to you, particularly if you have invited guests. You don’t talk about how much it costs; you just talk about what would be a nice thing to eat. You are tasteful in public, with your friends, but in actual fact you are thinking about how much it’s going to cost. If you are a very efficient person, you will work out the total price, depending on how many people are going to eat. A whole culture is based around the eating and drinking process, a whole independent culture, another kind of civilization, almost. As far as your experience in that particular restaurant is concerned, the whole world is eating there. It’s another world. Everybody’s complaining; everybody’s ordering; everybody’s eating; everybody’s drinking; everybody’s paying; and more people are coming, more and more. Everybody’s being served. It is the world of the
hungry
ghosts.

If we simplify, we eat because we are hungry and we drink because we are thirsty. But somehow, that primeval motive is not relevant anymore. We don’t eat because we are hungry; we eat because we want the taste, or because we want to go out. The whole idea of going to a restaurant to eat is because it is different, a change from home cooking, a way of relaxing in many cases. We choose from one highlight to another highlight—constantly changing, all the time.

According to the scriptures there are several types of craziness or levels of hallucinations involved in the realm of the hungry ghosts. In the first stage, you dream of food, how delicious it will be to have it. For instance, you may have an irresistible driving force to have chocolate ice cream. You have this whole image of chocolate ice cream in our mind. In fact, you reach the meditative state of chocolate ice cream. You see it in your vision, your hallucination. The whole world becomes that shape.

Seeing the world as a gigantic chocolate ice cream waiting for you, you go toward it. But when you get near it, the chocolate ice cream begins to become just a pile of rocks, or a dry tree. That’s a second kind of hallucination.

A third type of hallucination begins with having a certain idea of food in your mind, a hallucinatory or visionary quality of food. You have in your mind a strong driving force to work for it and eat it, and that driving force goes on and on. In the distance you see food being served and you go there—but suddenly the hostess and the waitresses and waiters become the guardians of the food. Instead of serving you, they have swords, armor, and sticks to ward you off. But the food is still visible in the middle of that whole scene. That’s a third type of hallucination of the hungry ghost realm.

And then there is the fourth type. You see the food and you have a tremendous desire to eat. Your desire to eat becomes very active and aggressive, so you have to fight with those guardians and knock them out. Then you rush to the food, you pick it up and eat it. But the minute you swallow it, it turns into flames in your stomach and begins to burn you.

These are all analogies of the different degrees of hunger. That grasping quality of the hungry ghost realm could take different shapes. It could take the shape of some kind of communication with the food or the object of desire—but that could be distorted, once you see it as it is. Or that grasping could be seen as a succession of situations you have to go through, like the person who eats and then finds that the food becomes flames in the stomach. These particular types of hunger and thirst give a general feeling of the hungry ghost realm.

But there’s something more than that. In terms of bardo experience, the particular type of bardo experience associated with the hungry ghost realm is called sipa bardo, the bardo of existence, creation, or becoming. You actually manufacture a completely new experience, another type of experience. And the particular experience of sipa bardo, the bardo of existence, is the threshold between grasping with hunger and the experience of letting go—not quite letting go, but the experience of giving up—in other words, giving up hope. Giving up hope doesn’t mean just naively declining, or giving up hope purely out of frustration, that you can’t bear it anymore. The absence of hope in this case is based on being able to see the humorous situation of the moment, developing a heightened sense of humor. You see that your striving and grasping is too serious and too concentrated. A person can’t have a sense of humor, generally, unless he or she is extremely serious. At the height of seriousness, you burst into laughter. It’s too funny to be serious, because there is a tendency to see the contrast of it. In other words, humor cannot exist without contrast, without two situations playing. And you are seeing the humorous quality of that.

So what is lacking in the hungry ghost realm is humor. It is a deadly honest search, seriously searching, seriously grasping. This could apply to seriously searching spiritually or materialistically, anything: seriously making money, seriously meditating with such a solemn face. It could be said to be like perching, as though you were a chicken just about to give birth to an egg. In my personal experience, you see this with babies. When you begin to see a serious face on a baby, you have to make sure that there is a diaper. When we want something, usually we perch very seriously. It is completely humorless. You want to give birth to something: you’re trying to pass through, or manufacture something. Then you grasp it, possess it, eat it, chew it, swallow it.

The world of the hungry ghosts, or pretas, is based on the seriousness of wanting to grasp something, and it is heightened by the bardo experience to the point where you are not actually hungry anymore. You see, that’s the difference between the bardo experience and the ordinary hungry ghost experience. In the ordinary hungry ghost experience, you are hungry; in the bardo experience of the absolute intensity of hunger, you are not hungry anymore. Because the vision of whatever you want to have is so much in your mind, you reach a certain kind of obsession. In fact, you are so overwhelmed by the desire of wanting something that you forget you are hungry, that you’re starving. You become more concerned with the presence of what you want; you begin to become one with the presence of the thing you want. That’s where the seriousness begins to be involved; that’s where the perching begins to develop.

At that point it is possible to develop a sense of humor and be able to see that you are actually perching. And you begin to see the ironic aspect of it. Then there’s no hunger and no hallucination or desire. That is beyond the bardo experience, when you get through it. But when you are in it, the seriousness still continuously goes on. That’s the hungry ghost experience, or the bardo of existence. So fundamentally this realm is based on the relationship between the self-conscious ego, myself, and me. That ego wants to be; it wants to have certain particular things as “my idea”; it wants to be fulfilled. The frustration comes from the danger of its not being able to be fulfilled completely and properly.

Student:
When Gautama Buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree and he was being tempted by the maras, he vowed to attain enlightenment even if his bones crumbled and turned into dust. In that situation, would he be in the hungry ghost realm? It seems like a sort of hopeless seriousness.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Exactly, yes. You see, once you reach the higher spiritual levels of enlightenment, the higher your state, the more advanced your state of development, the more temptations there are. Therefore the temptations also become very sophisticated as you become more sophisticated. This goes on and on. That is exactly the point of the hosts of mara beginning to attack the Buddha. I would say that point is the most advanced level of the hungry ghost realm, in a sense, in terms of our own personal experiences. That is why the maras have to come and why the temptations of mara are necessary. They are exactly what is needed in order to provide contrast between awake and confusion.

Student:
Rinpoche, you said the danger is in being unsatisfied. What did you mean by that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, I suppose it is the possibility of continuing in a state of confusion and not being able to make a relationship with present experience. The danger in this case is the possibility of being extremely self-creative, as opposed to self-destructive, meaning the destruction of ego. Instead you could become extremely self-creative, learning how to play the game of ego and how to develop all sorts of luxurious ways of feeding and comforting ego—an ego-fattening process.

Student:
Would you say something about how the energy ends up in this hunger where you are looking at the menu and looking at the waitresses and looking at how much it’s going to cost and whether your friend has ordered something better than you? All of this is enough to put a person in bed for a couple of hours because he’s run out of energy. How is it that you do not use up all your energy when you’re with your friends in that way?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
There again it’s a completely humorless situation. Everything is regarded as an extreme case.

S:
It doesn’t seem very funny to be worrying about all these various things.

TR:
It would be funny if you realized what was happening.

Student:
You said that the hosts of mara are necessary in order to provide contrast. Is that because the hosts of mara bring confusion to its peak?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Exactly, yes. Very sophisticated confusion, purely matching the possible awake state that you’re going to attain. It’s equal. Yes.

S:
So one should not really have to strive to develop that completely, but just accept it and not try to call it awake.

TR:
Once you accept it, it becomes the force of compassion. In the story of the Buddha, each arrow shot at him turned into a flower. There wouldn’t be flowers unless the maras shot arrows. So the whole thing becomes a creative process, a rain of flowers. Each act of aggression becomes loving-kindness, compassion.

S:
That’s the thing. When you get into confusion, it becomes overcrowding sometimes, and the temptation then is to move away from the confusion.

TR:
Yes, that’s the general temptation. But then what happens is that the temptation follows you all the way. When you try to run away, the faster you try to run, the faster the temptation comes to you all the time—unless you decide not to run. You’re providing more feedback to the temptation when you decide to try to get away, unless you are willing to make a relationship with it.

Student:
Could you say something about how this relates to the pain of sitting in meditation? There seems to be a possibility of accepting the pain, having it be just simply part of what is. But most of the time it’s a teeth-gritting type of thing where you think, “When are they going to ring the damn bell?,” hoping that something might drop and another might appear.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Again, it’s the same thing. There is a certain tendency to translate all mental pain and discomfort into physical discomfort. In sitting meditation, for instance, you imagine that getting up and walking away is the way to solve the pain—the psychological pain which has been translated into physical pain. That is a kind of confusion. If a person is able to relate with the irritation and the pain of sitting, he or she sees that it is nothing more than purely looking for another change, away from the psychological level. In that sense, of course, pain becomes irrelevant.

S:
I was a bit lost on that. That state of gritting—what can let go of that in the right way?

TR:
If you are able to see that you are perching, then the whole tension that has built up becomes different; and in fact, it won’t be there anymore. It needs humor, a sense of humor, all the time. You see, a sense of humor is associated with the living, a lively situation. Without a sense of humor there is the solemnness associated with death, a dead body. It’s completely rigid, cold, serious, and honest—but you can’t move. That’s the true distinction.

Student:
Jesus said about the lilies of the field, “Be not anxious, saying what shall we eat, what shall we drink? Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin. But I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not as attired as these.” Could you comment on this?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It seems self-evident, self-explanatory. It’s the same as the Zen saying, “When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep.”

Student:
When you talked about the temptations of mara, you said that as we go along they become more and more subtle. Could you relate the meditative absorption in the world of the gods to those kinds of temptations? What’s the difference between the meditative absorption in the god world and temptation?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s a good one. You see, the interesting point is that in the complete meditative absorption of the world of the gods, there wouldn’t be temptation because nobody wants or demands your attention. You are paying full attention all the time to ego. So the maras are satisfied. They don’t have to try to shake you back, bring you back to samsara—you are already in samsara and you are grooving on it. It seems as if temptation can only occur if you are trying to get away from centralized ego.