The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (63 page)

S:
It seems there would have to be some duality or something for this oneness to be affected by.

TR:
It happens as you come out of the oneness, I suppose. When you are on your way out, you break up into different reflections.

S:
But what is breaking you?

TR:
What’s breaking you is that there is more room to play about. When you are not restricted by the oneness, there is a sense of breaking off from it—or a better expression would be, indulging in the freedom—in different ways. You find different ways of indulging in freedom. If you come from the same home as your six brothers and seven sisters, when each one of you steps beyond the restrictions of your parents’ rule, you will establish different lifestyles, just because of no longer being restricted by your parents’ command. The break takes place because you want proof that you exist. And the different styles arise from that.

S:
But if the basic background is the same for everybody, how do the different styles come to be different?

TR:
Because the basic background is the same, therefore there can be differences. Otherwise, if the basic background were different, then the expressions would be the same. That’s worth thinking about actually. The basic background is one, not exactly one in the sense of one entity, but one in the sense of being all-pervasive, filling everywhere. Then something happens out of that that allows us to step out. And as we step out, there are possibilities of moving about in that big room. Those possibilities come just from the very fact that that area is a big one, an all-encompassing one.

S:
So it’s an interaction between you and the space.

TR:
It is like having a big floor—you finally begin to dance, to move about. You move because there is oneness of you and the space. The oneness allows you to move more. It gives you some kind of freedom. In this case, that freedom is somewhat distorted, but nevertheless the process is one of looking for freedom of some kind, or demonstrating one’s freedom.

Student:
Is there some kind of predetermined relationship between a particular style of ignorance and intelligence as represented in the mandala and the form that it takes on the human level? Is it all predetermined before it takes human form, or is it something more socialized, something that develops as one grows up living with one’s six brothers and seven sisters and then goes out into the world?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is very hard to answer. I think it is more of an accident in some sense, somewhat a matter of chance. But there is some kind of determining factor that tends to create that chance itself. So, if I may say so, it’s both; it has both elements in it at the same time. It is not so well defined. You are prone to a lot of accidents. And the more your intelligence develops and the more prepared for the teachings you become, the more you are prone to accidents. Somehow these accidents come out of some kind of intelligence that is based on the weakening of the basic strategy. The basic strategy begins to fall apart slightly, so there are less defense mechanisms taking place. Therefore, you are prone to more accidents.

Student:
You talked about there being the basic all-pervasive oneness, and then all of a sudden there is a duality situation of some kind, which I understood as the first skandha. What I don’t understand is that you said the reason one can move about is that one is one with the space. It’s a situation of being one and not being one at the same time, which seems quite paradoxical.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think that is the case.

Well, we could intellectualize the whole thing and turn it into Madhyamaka logic. But we should try as much as possible not to do that. Using an experiential approach at this point is more efficacious. So, [experientially speaking, the point is] that in order to accomplish an experience, you have to have a chance to dance with it. You have to have a chance to play, to explore. And then each style of exploration that takes place, we could say, is a different manifestation. Nevertheless it is all part of one big game. It’s all the same thing. This is like the traditional analogy that says the beads of a mala [a rosary] are one, not a hundred, because if there are a hundred pieces, you can’t have one mala.

S:
Is there something about the totality of the ignorance, the totality of the way the ignorance covers the ground, that is the same as the way each one of these primordial energies also covers the ground? Experientially, I mean.

TR:
Yes. Otherwise, you couldn’t function. I mean, you do have some driving force behind you.

S:
So there is a certain way that intelligence is relating with the totality of the ignorance?

TR:
Yes. That is why the intelligence, that is, the message of the teachings, becomes more threatening: there is no room left for escape. The whole area is completely covered.

S:
Can your basic energy change in the course of your life, say, as you move from childhood to adulthood?

TR:
I suppose you can change your opinion about things, but the basic energy remains the same. Moving from childhood to adulthood is not particularly a big deal. It’s just a question of becoming professional. It’s like learning to open a wine bottle with a corkscrew. The first time, you may spill the wine all over; the second and the third time you get better; by the fifth time you are good at it. That development has nothing to do with the basic energy particularly. It’s just improving your mind-body coordination.

Student:
You spoke of trying to fill the gap. Is the gap the same for all people?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is not so much a question of whether the gap is the same gap, but how the boundary is, whether the boundary is fat or thin. The gap is always the same. The gap depends on the boundary, I suppose.

S:
I don’t understand. Is the gap boredom, or what is it?

TR:
Anything. The gap is something that you cannot utilize as part of your energy. It is something slightly foreign, but it is still part of you. It could be boredom, uncertainty, ignorance—any gap, any absence of ego, for that matter (which comes later, I suppose).

S:
Is this a sense of panic that is a form of intelligence? Is this a manifestation of intelligence we are talking about?

TR:
It depends what happens after you panic. There is a sense of intelligence in the panic. If, after you have panicked, you do not resort again to more entertainment, if you let yourself be suspended a little bit, then that panic is much closer to reality, more dharmic, if I may use that word.

S:
More precisely aware of what is going on?

TR:
Yes. The other panic is just, you know, diving into more deep water.

S:
How do you let yourself be suspended? What is the process of going that way rather than diving?

TR:
Well, in our discussion, we are trying to work with personal experience rather than developing guidelines of how to solve your problem. From that point of view, it is not so much a question of how to do it, but it is a question of somehow letting the panic possess us. Usually what happens is that when the panic arises, we try to brush it off and occupy ourselves with something else. It’s like the traditional situation of a wife panicking and then the husband trying to calm down his freaky wife and make her feel secure. There is somebody very reasonable in us, who says, “This is your imagination. Everything is going to be okay. Don’t worry. Take a rest. Have a glass of milk.” But if rather than taking this approach, you somehow go along with the panic and become the panic, there is a lot of room in the panic, because the panic is full of air bubbles, so to speak. It is very spacious—crackling all the time. It is very spacious and somewhat unpleasant on the surface, but, you know, it could be a real thing. So you probably find yourself suspended in the midst of panic, which is suspended in space. It sounds like a Coke ad!

Student:
When one finds oneself in an irritating or uncomfortable situation, does one stay with one particular style through that whole situation, or does the style change from moment to moment? Or does it change along with each new problematic situation?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It depends which particular area you are relating to. Sometimes it changes very speedily and sometimes it remains very solid. But it depends on your reference point.

S:
On the type of problem that arises?

TR:
Yes, on the type of problem that arises
and
also your reference point in the outside world coming back to you and how that relates with the whole situation. Usually, you act in accordance with that; you reshape your style.

S:
Is everything simply conditioned by situations then? We have no personality, and after the basic split we simply produce the five types of responses in reaction to situations?

TR:
We are not just shaped by situations. Somehow there is also an element present that is ignoring the basic ignorance at the same time. If you were purely reacting in accordance with the situation, if you didn’t have a personality, when would you learn lessons? If you couldn’t learn anything, you would simply be reacting to situations all the time. You would just bounce around like a Ping-Pong ball. You couldn’t develop egohood; you couldn’t become anything. You would just bounce around until you die, and even afterward . . . (well, we don’t know about that).

S:
My idea was not that there was no intelligence, but rather no particular style.

TR:
Style is intelligence. You begin to accumulate information about when you went wrong and how you can go right. You build up a record of that, and then as you become more experienced, you become a professional. In fact, at that point, somebody else can come to you and consult you. You can give professional advice on how to handle situations. It may be that this is only an expression of ignorance at the professional level, but nevertheless there is still some achievement there that takes place.

S:
If the style itself is intelligence, and that intelligence is coming from the primordial energy, which is just one energy, I still don’t see the time or the place where the variety takes place.

TR:
I think there is a misunderstanding there about the primordial intelligence. When we talk about the primordial intelligence on the ego level, ego’s primordial intelligence, we are not talking about one intelligence, we are talking about all intelligence. We are not dealing with the one and the many as such, we are talking about all and one at the same time. All and one at the same time.

S:
That leads me to a question I’ve been wondering about. When there is the basic split from the alaya, the basic split that happens in the first skandha, does everybody have their own particular split, or is there one split that created all this?

TR:
It’s all-encompassing, all big space. You don’t exist as one little confused fundamental ego. Your ego is big, gigantic. You have an all-pervasive ego. But somebody else might also have an all-pervasive ego, which is different from yours. I am not saying we are all the children of one ego. We all have our egos, we all have our primordial backgrounds. But each of them is big.

S:
So there’s an infinite number of alayas.

TR:
Sure, yes. That was actually a major subject of debate in tantric philosophy. Certain people said that there is only one alaya, other people said that there are many. That argument went on. But then they discovered that there are many alayas.

Student:
Rinpoche, in view of the experience of the present moment being all that there is, doesn’t it follow that what we call personality or style is really just a collection of memories or echoes of present moments? Wouldn’t it then not be an organic thing, but something that is merely dead, in the past, just tracks?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s possible that there is some memory that makes your trip harden as you go along in your life. It becomes more daring, a more professional troubleshooter, so to speak. But at the same time, you also depend on certain messages deriving from what actually does exist in life. Those messages tend to feed you, and you put them in the pigeonholes of your memory. But it is not exactly memory as such. It is just a kind of historical feeling preserved in your mind—the bad experience and the good experience. This is not memory in the sense of definite details. You get impressions of things as they are, and then those tend to coincide with what exists in your life situation. Then you feed your memory on those concepts. So the whole thing is built up out of a dream world, a fictional world of some kind.

Student:
A lot of statements have been made about the basic split from the alaya, and this sounds very much like the one mind, which I didn’t think was part of the Buddhist tradition. Is the alaya the same as the one mind? It would seem that one of them, the alaya, is the ignorant state and the other one, the one mind, is the enlightened state. Are there two sort of basic fields that we oscillate back and forth between? Or is it like in the Hindu tradition where the idea is to become one with the one mind?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, if you’re theorizing you could dream up a big one mind that everybody is included in. But in terms of experience, which is very real to us, we experience a totality that is our totality. You may find your neighbors still running around in the samsaric battleground while you are experiencing the one mind. They are two entirely different worlds.

We are talking about experience in terms of what happens now, what is happening at this point to you. You might experience
the
one mind, but it is worthless to talk about whether
the
one mind is someone else’s mind or whether you are getting into your own one mind. There’s no point in splitting hairs at that point. Particularly since you have achieved the one mind already, you have no desire for further territorializing as to whether this is yours or whether somebody’s else’s mind is also in it, in you.