The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (74 page)

Think very seriously about that and try to do your best. There doesn’t seem to be a particularly complete discovery, complete mastery—of mistress-ing, or whatever—of the feminine principle. Nothing will be complete in any case—but something might be complete. Thank you. [
Laughter
]

Part Two

EVAM

EVAM.

FROM THE PERSONAL SEAL OF CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA AND THE TRUNGPA TULKUS. DESIGN BY MOLLY K. NUDELL.

TALK 1

Generations of Astronauts

W
ELCOME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
, fellow students. First of all, I would like to find out how many students did not have a chance to read or study the literature that was put out [
Feminine Principle Sourcebook
].
¹
Anybody? Does that mean that everybody has done the preliminary study group? Okay.

This is an unusual situation, in that we provided some vanguard study before the seminar itself began. I am glad you had a chance to study and work with the material. That will certainly provide some kind of base, or footing—a great deal. However, what we are going to discuss is not all that esoteric and all that extraordinary, far-out, mind-blowing, and so forth. It is somewhat ordinary, to your disappointment. However, maybe you could pick up some highlights throughout the few days we have together. You might be able to find something particularly personal and real.

I would like to get to the topic right away, at this point. What we are going to study, what we are going to discuss, is the
EVAM
principle, as you know already. Do I have that right? Yes?
EVAM
? [
Laughter
] I will be working with Khyentse Rinpoche, who is my personal teacher and a friend of my root guru. Khyentse Rinpoche is in town, so I would like to also ask him for a few suggestions. We would like to work together on this topic, so that this seminar could become more potent, so to speak.

We often ignore the sense of general ground. Instead we usually try to pick out the highlights. We do that all the time in our life, and that has become problematic. We have no idea of the general perspective. We say, “Oh, those general perspectives, let us leave that to the learned or the technicians.” We fight constantly, stitch by stitch, inch by inch, all along. By trying to have little goodies and words of wisdom here and there, consequently we become completely ignorant and stupid. We lost track of our sky, in trying to fight for a grain of sesame seed each day.

The vision of
EVAM,
basically speaking, is much larger than talking about the marriage counselor’s level, or the relationship between two people, or simply the relationship between sky and earth. The interesting point is that whenever we talk about relationship, we manage to reduce ourselves into just simply one louse trying to fight another louse in the crack of a seam in our shirt, which we call our home. Psychiatrists do that, marriage counselors do that, physicians do that, local gurus do that. Usually we have a problem there: whether somebody can make glamour and glory out of how to get from here to the next stitch of thread going through that seam. As one louse, could we walk over to the next louse and make friends with it? Our vision is generally absolutely cramped and so poor, so little, so small, depressingly small.

Sometimes being small could be large at the same time, of course—if you are small enough. But you are not small enough. You are not so small that you become gigantic and fantastically spacious. In this case, we are neither absolutely small nor absolutely big enough—we hold ourselves between the two. So we find ourselves being just simply lice, trying to fight. A very small-minded level. That goes on with some encounter groups, some kinds of counseling, and in inviting troubleshooters to shoot your personal problems. We missed altogether—completely!—the notion of basic vision. With the
EVAM
principle, we are not talking about how you can comb your husband’s hair in the most Buddhistic beautiful way, so that he wouldn’t complain—or, for that matter, how you can tell your wife not to cash too many checks from your mutual bank account. This vision is much bigger, greater. It is enormous, very vast, gigantic.

There are two principles, of course,
E
and
VAM. E
represents basic accommodation, basic atmosphere, which could be said to be empty or full—it doesn’t really matter, that’s purely a linguistic problem. Then we have
VAM,
which is what is contained within that vastness, whether it is full or empty. What is contained, if it’s full, is emptiness; what is contained, if it’s empty, is fullness. Those little logics are no longer problematic. We usually start out by saying, “What do you mean to say—is there something or not?” But we are not talking in those terms. When we talk about empty here, we are not talking about the emptiness in our wallet. That kind of emptiness is slightly different than basic emptiness, which has nothing to do with poverty or mismanagement. [
Laughs.
] We are talking about basic adventure, if we could talk actively; or if we talk passively, we could call it our basic being. It depends on what way you want to look at it, the basicness of it.

That basic vastness,
E,
seems to be unconditioned. That is to say, unconditioned by love and hate, this and that. It is also unconditioned by good or bad, of course; that’s one of the most basic things of all. You have a logical problem there. You could say, “If everything is completely unconditioned, then how could it exist as
E,
as basic space? How can you even say it’s basic space?” True, you can’t. Maybe that’s it. Not even maybe—that is it. That is that, whatever.

The unconditioned also could create further conditions, unconditioned-conditions, naturally. If that happens, we have no end. We have unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned, unconditioned of unconditions. We go back and forth, back and forth. We are completely lost, at a loss completely. However, in this case we are not purely talking in terms of conditions being metaphysical speculation, but about the unconditioned simply as something viewed, looked at, by bottomless mind, mind that doesn’t have a bottom. There is no problem of full or empty. It is obviously some state of meditation, state of awake. In other words, when we are awake, we do not have to refer to ourselves every minute, every second, or every half an hour, saying, “Now, I’m awake,” anymore. We are just awake throughout the whole day. Therefore, unconditioned means not putting things into categories, but simply being and not possessing.

The metaphor is being in outer space. If you are an astronaut, for instance, and you decide to step out of the ship, you find that you are neither pulled nor pushed in midair. If you are high enough for planets, you are not falling down and you are not falling up. You are just swimming, floating in the space. You are not going to hit anywhere; you are not going to be in any particular danger. Nevertheless, there is the biggest danger of all, which is the danger that you want to hang on to something while you are still floating. Sometimes you wish that you might have contact with the nearest planet so it could create a magnetic field for you—so you could commit suicide, crash onto that planet. At this point, we are not only talking about outer space as the greatest excitement of the Buddhist ultimate idea, particularly. We are talking about it as the closest analogy for the idea of the
E
principle, which is that you are suspended in air. It is extraordinarily basic.

We usually try to make sure that we do not end up in the loony bin, hopefully—or end up in something worse than that, whatever that may be. More courageous people are trying to make sure that they are getting somewhere beyond simply trying to prevent themselves from getting into the loony bin, making some kind of success beyond that level. “Now that these problems are solved, whew, I don’t have to go to the loony bin anymore. That air is cleared at least, fantastic, bravo—and then I want to go further, progress further.” Further what? [
Laughter
] What is going on there? It seems to be impossible. There’s too much space. Fantastic space! Gaps of all kinds! If we want to get to the nearest planet, we can’t even lay hands on it.

Further what? You are busy reading books, trying to get quotations. You have interviews with your teachers and meditation masters and whatnot, here and there. You take courses, of course, and you get busy, getting the whole thing rolling. But then, if you are intelligent enough and not caught up in spiritual materialism, the whole thing you have been doing—trying to hold on to something or other—just disappears. You just float along in space somewhere. You are not coming, you can’t say that; you are not going, you can’t say that. You are just somewhere there—you can’t even say that! E! [
Laughter
] That’s it.

It’s very frightening. It is more frightening once you get hold of that particular understanding, so to speak—“hold,” metaphorical speaking [
laughter
], just a linguistic problem we have here. But the more you see it—it is more dangerous, seemingly. And you find yourself being more frightened, absolutely frightened, petrified, terrified that there’s so much space once we get into the path. And once we begin to explore ourselves, there is a lot of space, too much space. We try our best to create problems, of course. That happens in my experience working with most of you here, actually. You come to me to review your state of being and have interviews. We have done that with a lot of you people, and you are very eloquent, all of you. You begin to dig up little things here and there. But that is not what I particularly regard as a masterpiece—it’s just occupational therapy, you want to have something.

The more students get into the practice, the more space that provides. It is very unfriendly to begin with, seemingly unfriendly. The reason is that you think you are not in the position to jump in, and you still regard outer space as foreign territory. That has become problematic. Other than that, there’s no particular problem. It is a matter of your concept. If you begin to think, even in the conceptual mind, that that particular space is no longer frightening, you could dive right in and swim in the space. You could swim beautifully, if you were not afraid of your environment. [
Laughs.
]

You see, an interesting point is that once you begin to get into big mind—as the Yogacharins or Zen call it, the BIG mind [
laughter
]—it extends your vision. But then, once you begin to get into VAST mind, even BIG mind is so small. At this point of our work in this particular age, so to speak, this particular year, and in the growth and aging of Buddhism taking place in the United States of America and North America at large, so to speak, people are frightened a lot these days. It is not because they are doing something wrong, but they begin to panic that they are getting into something large, something vast. It is more than just big mind, it is something large. That largeness is what we are going to talk about, what we are talking about actually, at this point.

That principle in question—
E
—has a lot of attributes according to the scriptures. It has been said that
E
is supremely unchanging, that
E
is basically empty, that
E
possesses immense power. In this case, when we talk about power, we are not talking in terms of bang-bang-bang, or the level of fistfights, for that matter. We are talking of power in the sense of how much power there is in outer space if you are an astronaut floating around in that space. There’s immense vision, immense power. Your little earth is over there in your vision, in the corner of your eye, and your little moon over there that you are trying to get to becomes irrelevant. You are just floating in this big space, which is deep blue and deep black, velvet black. You are floating in that space. Occasional sunlight glancing off your hand or your shoulder corners somehow makes a certain amount of confirmation that you are still seeing the same universe and the same sun. Nevertheless, you have nowhere to relax or nowhere not to relax. You are just floating in outer space, being an astronaut.

It is interesting how the American culture of space research has provided us more evidence about big mind—or vast mind. That is magnificent, actually. That’s precisely what they have been talking about for two thousand five hundred years. They didn’t have spacecrafts, they didn’t have anything of that nature but they still knew how that experience would be, and they did experience that themselves. At this point, we have thirty-three astronauts in the Kagyü lineage. [
Laughter
] If that’s the case, every one of them was successful; they never freaked out. They actually experienced [vast mind] and they managed to transmit their experience to the next generation. So, in fact, we are generations of astronauts—very enlightened ones, of course.