The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (34 page)

You have to be qualified to be daring, to begin with, but then, once you are qualified as a daring person, you really have to push. The obstacle might be thinking, “I may not be ready to be daring; I’m still not qualified.” Such doubts happen all the time, but once you have made a basic connection to the notion of wisdom, you have to let go of those doubts. The Sanskrit term for wisdom is
jnana,
and the Tibetan term is
yeshe. Ye
means “primordial” or “intrinsic.”
She
means “knowing.” If you have that sense of primordially knowing what to do with your body, speech, and mind, then you should let go. Quite possibly you could surpass the levitation they practice in Transcendental Meditation, or TM. Of course, the Shambhala training is not about jumping up from our seats and glorifying
that
; we are concerned with floating properly. When you trust yourself, gravity is no longer a problem. Gravity is already trusted, and because of that, you can uplift yourself. Yeshe: “Wisdom” is the best English translation we’ve come up with. Yeshe is the achievement of wiseness or the craft and art of being wise.

Letting go is not that previously you were afraid and now you can relax or let go of your fear. It is something more than that. Letting go is being in tune with the atmosphere, the challenging world altogether. Our motto in Shambhala Training
²
is “Living in the Challenge.” That is letting go: living in the challenge. This does not mean constantly being pushed and pulled, that your banker calls and says you have to put more money in the bank and your landlord says that you are about to be evicted. You could be living in the challenge that way, but we’re talking about something better than that! The greater level of living in the challenge is that every moment is a challenge, but challenge is delightful. Letting go also means
daring
to go. It’s as if your life feels like a firecracker, and you are waiting for the boom. That is daring.

First, you have a dot of goodness. You might hear a high-pitched sound in your ear, and that might be the sound of the dot, that very high pitch.
Any
first thought is the dot. Then, after that, you learn to proceed. The practice of life, a sense of joy, sadness—everything comes out of that first dot. Then, finally, you discover letting go. However, you don’t just run wild. You learn the practical details of letting go: letting go in body, speech, and mind; letting go in your household and family conduct. Letting go is
manifesting
. It is giving up all your reservations. You may say, “Suppose I rent this apartment or this house. Will I be able to handle it?” Or, “If I move in with this man or woman, will the relationship be OK?” Any of those things is a challenge. Shambhala Training: living in the challenge!

I hope that people can appreciate their surroundings. Appreciate the autumn—which does not mean you have to go to New England to see the leaves. Appreciate winter, appreciate summer, appreciate spring. There are lots of things happening in your life. People’s lives are full of things, including their loneliness. People are leading very full lives keeping up their apartment, cleaning the house, relating with their friends. There is always something happening. Anybody who possesses the five sense perceptions always has feedback. If you’ve overslept, you might be awakened by a blackbird chirping outside your bedroom window. The world is not all that empty. There has to be a drama; there has to be gossip; there has to be a visit from somebody or other. We are always creating tea parties or cocktail parties, inviting people over. That’s a natural situation, which is very sacred and wonderful. Lately, we’ve been spoiled by television, whose creation is one of the worst crimes ever committed, I would have to say. When you watch TV all the time, you have your appreciation of self-exploration taken away. But apart from that, there are lots of situations of natural feedback. We hear sounds, if we are not deaf; we see visions, if we are not blind; we can talk, if we are not mute; and we can smell, and we can feel. All of those worlds around us are wonderful.

You can please yourself with the simplest detail, such as a fly landing on the tip of your chopsticks as you are about to eat. That is the best pun that one could ever think of. Life could be very simple and good in that way. When we appreciate such details, we are not becoming stupid or crazy or simpleminded, but we are becoming more visionary. One can imagine how Einstein would feel if he were eating with chopsticks and a fly landed on the tip of his chopsticks. He would probably have a laugh. So we don’t have to solemnize our world, and we don’t need a Merry-Go-Circus to cheer us up all the time.

B
ODY

The wisdom and daring of letting go come in three sections, which are very simple categories: body, speech, and mind. First is the body aspect of letting go. Usually, wisdom refers to being learned, roughly speaking. Here we are not talking about those logicians who have a logical answer to everything or about modern lawyers who can twist the truth to win their case. Rather, we are talking in terms of fundamental or
body
wisdom. Letting go is a sense of completely immaculate discipline, pure discipline. Why should we discipline ourselves? Not because we feel bad; therefore, we have to be disciplined like naughty children or, for that matter, like bad dogs who defecate on the rug and have to be whipped or have their noses put in the deposits. Discipline here is delightful.

This comes back to a topic that we’ve already discussed: working with early morning depression. That subject always comes back, I think. Sometimes you experience morning depression, and sometimes you might have early morning excitement, early morning vision. In either case, you don’t exaggerate the delight or just flop down and reduce yourself into a piece of charcoal and breathe out black air. The key to avoiding either side of that mentality is to take care of your physical body, whatever happens in everyday life. When you wake up and get out of bed, the first thing you do, perhaps, is to go into the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror. Your hair is disheveled, you look half asleep, and you see your baggy skin. You have a physical reaction. You say, with a big sigh, “Here we go again. I see myself once more today with a disheveled hairdo and bags under my eyes.” You already feel pressed to get to your first appointment. But right at that point, while you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, the discipline is to look yourself in the eye and pick up on the basic goodness possibilities. Then you can cheer up, as well as cheering up your inmate, your mate.

You see, creating enlightened society is not based on everybody riding on some big idea. Quite possibly, when terrorists have hostages, they wake up in the morning with a feeling of delight: “Oh, goody, we have
hostages
next door!” But in our case, we have basic goodness, not even next door but
in
us already. Our vision is not coming out of aggression, passion, ignorance, or any of those neuroses at all.

You may be living in a very difficult situation. Maybe your apartment is purely plastic, flimsy, and artificial, built by the setting-sun people. You don’t have to live in a palace all the time. Wherever you are, it is a palace. About three months ago, I and some of my students conducted what is known as the Magyel Pomra Encampment
³
at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center.
⁴
We were living in tents, and there wasn’t any running water. Of course not! We were camping out. At one point, there was a possibility that water would not be available to us at all. But we were able to enjoy ourselves anyway. We would wake up and wash in a basin; we did our exercises, hoisted our flags, blew our bugles, and we were
there
.

In North America, most places have quite a good plumbing system, which is a big advantage. Jumping into the shower or taking a good bath can be helpful in the morning. When I lived in England, the plumbing system was not all that efficient. Still, we made a good job of it. There’s an English tradition that you can take an entire bath using one cup of water, particularly in the desert. You can be dignified, wear a nice uniform, and wash up with one cup of water, without wasting anything. There is a certain wisdom in that. In that case, it’s based on survival, obviously. At the same time, there is a sense of how to utilize your environment and do things properly.

We are not talking about buying Buckingham Palace so that we can relax. We can relax wherever we are. If you see an apartment where the previous tenants left a mess, if the rent is decent and you want to move in, you can spend at least fifteen minutes to clean it up. By spending lots of fifteen minutes, you can make quite a palace out of that situation. The idea of dignity is not based on moving into a red-carpeted situation. That will never happen. It
might
happen to people who can spend lots of money to make their homes into palatial situations, but even that is deceptive. If they have to do that, then they are creating an artificial court, an artificial palace. Things have to be worked on and done with our own bare hands. We have to do things on the spot, properly, beautifully, nicely. Even in the worst of the worst situations, still we can elegantize our lives. It’s a question of discipline and vision.

The physical wisdom of taking care of yourself and your body is very, very important: what kind of food you eat, what kind of beverages you drink, how you exercise. You don’t necessarily have to jog or do pushups every day. But you should take the attitude that you do care about your body. The body is the extension of basic goodness, the closest implement, or tool, that you have. Even if you have physical defects of all kinds, I don’t think there should be any problem. We don’t have to feel imprisoned by disease or sickness. We can still extend ourselves beyond. In the name of heaven and earth, we can afford to make love to ourselves.

Sometimes people are very shy about that, particularly if they make too much reference to what is known as the doctrine of egolessness in Buddhism. People have heard about the renunciation of great yogis like Milarepa, and sometimes they think that, if they torture themselves, they will be following Milarepa’s example. Somehow things don’t work like that. The asceticism of practicing meditation in a cave is part of the yogic tradition. You can do that, but
before
you do that, you have to have enough strength and self-respect to starve to death in a cave in the name of the practice of meditation. One cannot use one’s sloppiness as part of indulging in asceticism and self-denial. Living in the dirt does not work.

Many world religions have encouraged individuals to become monks or nuns. Although monasticism is very natural, in some sense, it’s also a heightened or rarefied level of existence. In the Shambhala teachings, our main concern is working with society. We want to develop an enlightened society that will be based on the idea of pure letting go: the best society, where people will tell the truth, be genuine to themselves, have physical discipline, and take proper care of their children, husband, wife, brothers, sisters, and parents. There has never been proper instruction in how to become the best business owners, householders, parents, laundrymen—whatever you have. So we are talking about how to become a real person in the world and how to have a real enlightened society. There
is
such a thing as the Shambhala style of how to treat ourselves. That is learning how to be a warrior. I don’t want to purely present philosophy, but I want to share my own training, what I do myself. I would like to tell you how you can actually become warriors, practically speaking, and how you can treat yourselves better so that we can have an enlightened society.

Self-respect is wonderful and glorious, absolutely excellent. Sometimes you get dressed up for special events. When you go to work the next day, you are bound to change into jeans, T-shirts, and overalls or whatever your work clothes may be. Please don’t regard that as switching off your Shambhala dignity. You don’t have to change your psychological approach due to a job situation or a shortage of money. You might think that you’ll end up doing the “setting-sun trip,” although you don’t like it, because of economic problems. But you can still manifest fantastic dignity and goodness. You should have respect for your dirty jeans and five-times-worn T-shirts and your messy hairdo. Be in accordance with the notion of basic goodness and there’s no problem. We could say quite safely that everything’s in the mind.

The other day, several people came to me to receive a blessing. They came straight from work, so they had on their work clothes, and they were disheveled; but they had tremendous presence and grace. It was very beautiful. I was quite moved by it, actually. It is an interesting logic: Physical appearance, treating your body well, and eating proper food are all very important, but at the same time, you don’t have to overstate those things. You can be quite lovely and natural wearing jeans and T-shirts. On the other hand, there is the basic American Sportsman look. All these mail-order catalogs show you how to look nice while you’re shoveling mud. Perhaps they’ve got something there, but obviously, the whole thing has become commercial. You can be a dignified person wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, as long as there is a
spirit
of sportsmanship in the work that you’re doing.

You might wake up in the morning feeling depressed, look around on the floor, and find the first clothes available to put on. That is a problem. You should have a wardrobe of some kind, based on what the occasion is. Animals don’t have this problem. They are always prepared. When you are a dog, you’re always a dog. When you are a horse, you’re always a horse. Animals always look fine; sometimes we bathe them, but they don’t have to choose their wardrobe. At the same time, their nakedness is different from human beings’ nakedness. Human beings were corrupted a long time ago by putting on their pretense, costumes of all kinds. The American world is particularly conscious of that. You see signs in restaurants saying,
COME AS YOU ARE.
But then, they have to amend that with another sign that says,
NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SERVICE.
That is a very interesting sociological dilemma. I think that’s where the Shambhala teachings come in, with the understanding that dignity in one’s physical appearance is very important.