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

When you have children, you have to appreciate yourself as a mother or father and identify with being a parent. You are you, and you are a real parent, a good parent. Then you can relate with your children properly. It’s quite organic. Plants, trees, and vegetables treat us that way. First they grow, and then they yield their fruit or themselves to be eaten. We cook them and make a good meal out of them. But human beings are usually more fishy: We haven’t been able to yield to the fullest extent. We could actually become more like plants. First, just
be
—be a person—and then be a person to others. In that way, we can serve others and correct other people’s problems. That kind of wanting to share, wanting to work with others, is always there.

When you are willing to relate with a situation, there is lots of room to express yourself, thoroughly and fully. When you realize that you are not frozen or completely hardened at all, that makes you more soft, vulnerable, and gentle. So when you have experienced the dot and the willingness, then gentleness arises. The opposite of gentleness is doubt and lack of humor. Doubt takes a lot of forms. One of them is the fear that you’ll hurt yourself by going forward too much. That is doubt in the Great Eastern Sun principle, thinking that if you go forward, you might get hurt. Another form of doubt is feeling that you have fundamentally misunderstood your life. You feel that you are constantly making some kind of general mistake. You feel confused and condemned. In the middle of the night, if you have insomnia, you wonder when the sun is going to shine. Your clock seems to be made of rubber: Time stretches longer and longer, and the sun never shines. There could be many levels of doubt, but all of those are manifested in a long face without a smile.

Freedom from doubt is connected with humor, joy, and celebration. You trust the situation; therefore, you can afford to smile. You don’t have to hold back or be uptight. In that way, trust brings gentleness, doubtlessness, and relaxation. You experience the open sky.

This is all under the heading of that fundamental or larger vision of trust. We are not talking about a little trust, here and there, but we are talking about a big trust. In that connection, I would also like to talk about trusting yourself in the practice of meditation. The discipline of meditation is designed so that everybody can become a good person. Everybody should have a regal existence. When you sit on your meditation cushion, don’t hesitate: Try to be regal. Synchronize mind and body and try to have good physical posture. In meditation, you should keep everything very simple. Work with everything simply and directly, keep a good posture, follow the breath, and then project your mind. Work with your breath. Go along with the breath, which is simple and ordinary. Then include your discursive thoughts in your practice, and continually go back to your breath. At the same time, try to drive yourself. Be there as much as you can—on the spot. The sitting practice is not all that arduous. Just try to relate with the earthiness and ordinariness of it.

We are talking not only about the attainment of enlightenment but about becoming good human beings and good citizens. Goodness comes from your mind. The mind relates with your body, and the body relates with your circulation, breath, posture, and temperature. Try to combine all those things together. Try to have a very good, solid sitting practice. Be on the spot as much as you can. Breath goes out and dissolves. Another breath goes out. With good head and shoulders, open chest, you sit like a warrior. A sense of individual dignity takes place.

If you have any doubt about whether you’re doing the meditation practice right or wrong, it doesn’t matter all that much. The main point is to have honesty within yourself. Just do what you think is best. That is called self-truth. If truth is understood by oneself, then you cannot be persecuted at all, karmically or any other way. You’re doing your best, so what can go wrong? Cheer up and have a good time. You have your dot already, whether you like it or not, so you’re bound to do good. That is the saving grace.

1111 P
EARL
S
TREET

Off Beat

In the clear atmosphere,

A dot occurred.

Passion tinged that dot vermilion red,

Shaded with depression pink.

How beautiful to be in the realm of nonexistence:

When you dissolve, the dot dissolves;

When you open up, clear space opens.

Let us dissolve in the realm of passion,

Which is feared by the theologians and lawmakers.

Pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck the wildflower.

It is not so much of orgasm,

But it is a simple gesture,

To realize fresh mountain air that includes the innocence of a wildflower.

Come, come, D.I.R., you could join us.

The freshness is not a threat, not a burden;

It is a most affectionate gesture—

That a city could dissolve in love of the wildness of country flowers.

No duty, no sacrifice, no trap;

The world is full of trustworthy openness.

Let us celebrate in the cool joy

The turquoise blue

Morning dew

Sunny laughter

Humid home:

Images of love are so good and brilliant.

TWO

Working with Early Morning Depression

In the Shambhala tradition, we talk about how fearlessness comes out of the realization of fear. Similarly, when you experience morning depression, it is possible to cheer up. That situation is genuine and quite workable. From morning depression and its terror, we can step right into basic goodness. We learn to reject the terror of morning depression and to step into morning basic goodness, right on the spot.

T
HE WHOLE
S
HAMBHALA TRAINING PROCESS
is connected with how to
manifest,
so that people can do things without deception. We have to start right at the beginning, take it from the top, so to speak, or from the ground up. You are invited to join us. As they say, charity begins at home.

There are many international problems, and throughout the world, chaos is taking place all the time—which is obviously far from the expression of enlightened society. In the past, various disciplines or faiths—such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism—had great dignity. There were extraordinarily sane people among the ancients who worked to make the world worthwhile and passed down their wisdom generation by generation. But there has been a problem of corruption. The world has been seduced by physical materialism as well as by psychological materialism, let alone spiritual materialism! The world is beginning to turn sour. Our measures may be small at this point, but we’re trying to sweeten the world up. In the long run, we want to offer something beyond a token. We want to make a real contribution to the development of enlightened society. That begins right here.

There’s always the primordial dot—that spark of goodness that exists even before you think. We are worthy of that. Everybody possesses that unconditioned possibility of cheerfulness, which is not connected purely with either pain or pleasure. You have an inclination: In the flash of one second, you feel what needs to be done. It is not a product of your education; it is not scientific or logical; you simply pick up on the message. And then you act: You just do it. That basic human quality of suddenly opening up is the best part of human instinct. You know what to do right away, on the spot—which is fantastic. That is what we call the dot, or basic goodness and unconditional instinct. When you have an instinct of the real instinct, you don’t think: You just feel, on the spot. Basic trust is knowing that there is such a thing as that spark of basic goodness. Although you might be in the worst of the worst shape, still that goodness does exist.

From trust comes renunciation.
Renunciation
is traditionally a term for rejecting or giving something up. But in the Shambhalian use of the term, renunciation is not giving up something like alcohol or cigarettes or sex. Renunciation here is connected with
knowing
—or with a general sense of discrimination.
Discrimination,
from the dictionary’s point of view, might mean throwing away something bad and picking up on something good. But
discrimination
in the Shambhala world means clear seeing or clear thinking. What it boils down to is precision. Anything that is not precise is rejected. When we talk about a Shambhala style of livelihood or about synchronizing mind and body together, those points are connected with how to
be there,
how to be precise. By means of discipline and training, mind and body can be well groomed. Renunciation doesn’t mean that you develop one-upmanship and criticize or reject others who haven’t practiced. We simply take pride in our own life, our own existence, our sparkiness, brilliance, fearlessness, and warriorship. The joy of basic goodness is the key to that.

Having experienced that first dot, what comes next? What comes next is the
appreciation
of that first good thought, which is called the stroke. Coming out of the first dot is the brushwork, just as when you touch an actual brush and ink to paper. First, you touch the ground, the canvas or the paper, and then you create a stroke, a calligraphy or a painting. The stroke of goodness is connected with second thought. From the first thought, the dot, you extend the second thought, which arises from gentleness. You are not trying to fight with your world or to destroy anything, nor are you trying to gain anything personally. There is just the first flash, and then there is the sense of continuing that.

The author executing calligraphy of
lungta
, or windhorse
.

PHOTO BY ANDREA ROTH. FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE SHAMBHALA ARCHIVES.

If you’re true to yourself, as you draw out your stroke, you begin to realize what is good for you and what is bad for you. We’re talking here about working further with our basic instinct as human beings rather than operating on a purely materialistic, scientific, or analytical level. However, we’re not saying that human beings are animals who need to be made into human beings. That is not the idea of enlightened society. Rather, we’re saying that you have yourself, your existence as a human being, and you can work with what you have. You can develop that sense of basic instinct, which is pure and absolutely immaculate. There will be obstacles—questions, criticisms, moral and ethical choices—but you can overcome the obstacles by acting as a true human being, which is bound to be good. You are a dignified and capable person already. So why don’t you do it? That’s the idea.

The starting point, that first delight, the dot, could be anything in your experience. Suppose you are very thirsty, and you are presented with a glass of ice water. The first thought, or the dot, occurs when you hold the glass of ice water and you are about to drink, knowing that it is the real thing and that it will quench your thirst. Then, holding the glass in your hand, you bring your arm close to your mouth, you bend your neck, you raise the glass, and you begin to drink. Having had the idea, the connection, the first delight, the stroke is that you proceed with the appreciation of that basic goodness. Strangely enough, when you are very thirsty, while you are drinking a glass of water, your mind is almost completely without anxiety at all. You can try this yourself. While you’re drinking a glass of water, you have no thoughts. You are purely synchronizing your mind and body together in drinking that nice, cool glass of water. That is the concept of the stroke.

The stroke is the smoothness that comes along with the appreciation of basic goodness. With anything in life, it works that way. The closest analogy I can think of at this point is the general basic goodness of drinking a glass of ice water. It might be the wrong season to discuss this, but you can imagine it, I’m sure. You have an idea, and then you proceed with it. When you go along with that process, there is nonthought—almost. The joy of goodness. That goodness means that you are not creating pain for others and you are not indulging yourself either.

Then we have the second part of renunciation, which might be slightly painful. It is a sense of being put off, joined together with a sense of sadness, toward what is known as the setting-sun world. In that world, there is no perpetual vision, no forward vision, and your vision is purely connected with death and with things ending. Everything is getting dark. Dark pitch-blackness is about to come along, and we can’t even see each other in this pitch-darkness without sunshine. The setting sun is the notion of eternal depression. When you feel depressed, when you feel bad, it is sometimes for no reason at all. You wake up in the morning and feel hopeless, terrible. We may use our experiences to justify that feeling: I feel bad—because I don’t have any money. I feel bad—because I don’t have any friends. I feel bad—because something has gone wrong in my life. I feel bad—because I’m not up to the challenge of firing someone at work this afternoon. I feel bad—because my husband left me.