The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (19 page)

In the practical art of brush-stroke paintings, you might assume the painters are free and they can do what they want. The paintings are just blobs of ink put together, and it seems to be coincidental that they make some sense. But those brush painters had long, painful training at the beginning, all of them, in a very orthodox style. In that conservative approach, once the training is completed, then you can do what you want. So even the work of a seemingly freestyle person has its root in that conservative interpretation. I think that the tradition of the East has always been of that nature. But in the West, particularly in the twentieth century, people don’t always go through a thorough training process first. They purely use their talent, imitating the free style of trained people. And that’s very chancy—sometimes they hit and make a tremendous success and sometimes they miss, and the whole thing becomes a tremendous mess. So in order to develop a really freestyle work of art, you have to have the awkwardness of seeing yourself being awkward. That kind of watcher seems to be necessary, actually. We have no other choice. The only thing that makes things less serious is to have some kind of humor about the whole thing—not rebellious humor, but appreciating the games that are going on. And that creates further improvisation in brushing one’s teeth, or whatever.

Generally, the Tibetan approach is very conservative. Also, the cultural attitude is that there is no secular art in Tibet. If you’re going to paint even a freestyle thangka, the subject has to be a religious one: different gurus, different deities, or different protectors. So in Tibet you can’t have too much of a free hand; whereas in the Zen tradition of China and Japan, often people depict secular art in the language of Zen. As far as social psychology is concerned, their pattern of thinking was much superior to the Tibetans. They didn’t stick very faithfully to the doctrine, but they found a way of expressing the teachings in secular art, which seems to have different cultural implications.

The art of meditative experience might be called genuine art. Such art is not designed for exhibition or broadcast. Instead, it is a perpetually growing process in which we begin to appreciate our surroundings in life, whatever they may be—it doesn’t necessarily have to be good, beautiful, and pleasurable at all. The definition of art, from this point of view, is to be able to see the uniqueness of everyday experience. Every moment we might be doing the same things—brushing our teeth every day, combing our hair every day, cooking our dinner every day. But that seeming repetitivenes becomes unique every day. A kind of intimacy takes place with the daily habits that you go through and the art involved in it. That’s why it is called art in everyday life.

In this country there are many traditions and schools of thought in regard to awareness practice. Attempts are made to develop awareness through awareness of body, awareness of surroundings, and also through encounter groups of various kinds. Those could also be included as works of art. But there’s a problem if we are unable to relate with and appreciate the insignificant details of our everyday life. Doing special body awareness practices devoid of everyday life—going to class and doing your thing and coming back—might seem extraordinarily fruitful and liberating; nevertheless, there’s still a dichotomy in your life. You feel the importance and the seriousness of the artwork or awareness practice in which you’re involved, but, in fact, the more you feel that the whole thing is important and serious, the more your development of awareness is going to be destroyed. Real awareness cannot develop if you are trying to chop your experience into categories and put it into pigeonholes.

One of the things we should overcome in order to become a genuine artist is aggression. The attitude of aggression is one where everything’s the same, so what’s the difference? It brings with it an outlook on life that the whole world is involved in a plot against you and there’s no point even attempting to make it workable. There’s no point being involved in details. Everything is the same, so what? It’s the attitude of a street fighter. That attitude of aggression is the seed of crudeness, as opposed to artistry. Such crudeness is extremely dumb and blind and misses most of the subtleties of life and its interesting points. If we begin to see even a part of that, the attitude of aggression deliberately shuts us down. That attitude of aggression brings with it the idea of the needlessness of being meticulous or of repetitive effort in trying to relate with things. If you are not able to see a particular situation clearly the first time, you might go back a second time and third time and fourth time—but aggression kills that potential of going back and developing the patience actually to experience it. So we could quite safely categorize aggression and impatience as anti-art, the source of crudeness.

In the awareness experience, you are able to see the shadow of your watcher by being patient. You do not want to get hold of just one chunk of mindfulness and stick with it, but you experience the mindfulness
and
its shadow, the environment around it. There is a tremendous appreciation of life and of how to conduct one’s life. So awareness practice is not just formal sitting meditation or meditation-in-action alone. It is a unique training practice in how to behave as an inspired human being, or inspired sentient being. That is what is meant by being an artist.

While other artists take a deliberately artistic or exhibitionistic approach, with awareness practice your entire ability and all your potentials are completely opened. (I’m not using the term
exhibitionistic
pejoratively, but in a neutral way.) You don’t need very much inspiration at all. Actually, you don’t need that much vocabulary or tricks of any kind to create good works of art—poetry, painting, music, or whatever. You just simply say the experience you’ve experienced—just say it, just play it, just paint it. Once you’ve begun to break that kind of backwater, there are gushes of all kinds of energies. And since the first attempt was free and clear and resourceful, then the second and third and fourth creations of art are no problem at all. It comes naturally, quite simply. However, if you are concerned, thinking, “Oh, I can’t write poetry; I’ve never done it. I used to do it in school, but I was a rather bad one. I can’t even draw a circle. I can’t even sing”—that is simply hesitation. This has nothing to do with artistic talent. Professional, mechanical talent is not the obstacle—it is the psychological aggression that has to be worked on. When that psychological aggression is transmuted into the energy of artistic talent, you begin to realize that you can do all kinds of things—to your amazement.

There are a lot of implications of art in vipashyana experience, not only for painting and other artistic media, but also for relationships generally—how to communicate, how to speak, how to cook, how to choose one’s clothes in a shop, how to select food at the supermarket—all those little details. Some people get extremely paranoid because they weren’t brought up in cultured society, so to speak, and did not have any opportunities for learning how to go about such things. People become paranoid, aggressive, and “hufty-pufty” and come down on gentility as just being another trip: “I don’t have to do that, I’m quite happy with my crudeness.” But again, the aggression is the problem. It is not that you have to tune in to special information or a certain tradition, a particular style of eating, a particular style of dressing. This has nothing to do with a particular culture; rather, it has something to do with your instinct—that your instinct is open and has the room to exercise its potentialities into action. Then, for the very fact of being a genteel animal, human beings bring out their own man-animal-like, apelike, or genteelape tastes, whatever comes through.

Particularly in this country, the present conventional art is concentrated on the mere representation of sarcasm and crudeness, and it is ultimately unbearable, ugly, dirty—and thought provoking, no doubt. It seems that artists find it comfortable to produce that kind of art, because they are afraid to put a positive message out to the masses. Any positive messages they might have are a problem. The safest way of putting out some kind of artistic message is to do so from the angle of criticizing the existing flow of society, which is very safe. That might be said to be the same trick as Nagarjuna’s logic, which is that one should not dwell on anything, one should not have any philosophy at all. If we don’t have any philosophy, we are safe, and we could criticize the nihilist and the eternalist and even those who dwell in the middle—and that’s our philosophy. But somehow there’s something not quite straightforward about that. After all, as Buddhists, we are followers of the Buddha, the Maharishi, the Great Rishi who followed the straightforward path. Likewise, in art, it seems to be necessary and important that we create a target of ourselves. We may become a target of criticism by presenting positive art, but that might be the best approach. It is the same thing in our daily life: not negating everything that happens in our lives, negation being a lifestyle, but getting into and presenting certain positive steps, like an appreciation of beauty. So art in the transcendental sense becomes the real practice of awareness, or vipashyana.

In the past we have talked about becoming good students of a tea maker, learning how to make a perfect cup of tea and how to entertain friends. From the ordinary way of looking, that seems to be just like parents’ wishes that their children grow up and become society boys and society girls—that you entertain your friends ideally and occupy them and say the right things at the right moment, and everything runs smoothly. But in this case, it’s much more than that. If you link that with the idea of awareness practice, then it is becoming a bodhisattva, which is the highest, most supreme society person that we could ever imagine. The bodhisattva is known as the great host, the ship, the bridge, the highway, the mountain, the earth—all of which deal with interactions with people. So there is a lot of potential in us. And that element could be applied at the beginning level of vipashyana practice as well; we don’t have to start on such a big scale. Our energy and money and space and experience may be limited, but at least we can start on the practical level of developing an awareness of that potential.

We can start with the possibility of vipashyana experience, which is that everyday life is a work of art if you see it from a point of view of nonaggression. That point is extremely important, particularly in order to overcome clumsiness and crudeness, which in this case is not ordinary clumsiness and crudeness, but fundamental, phenomenological clumsiness and crudeness. Aggression is anti-art. If you are not in an aggressive state of mind, you feel you are rich and resourceful and infinitely inspired. When somebody is angry and uptight—even such ordinary, literal aggression as anger—then it cuts all possibilities of improvising what exists in your life as part of your artistic talent. It is not there anymore, because if things potentially improvisable come up, you become angry at them and they become a nuisance. You would like to kick them out, destroy them. It is like an angry person who comes home and, not finding a way to express his anger, starts throwing chairs and hitting the table. That is a very unartistic thing to do and, to say the least, rather pathetic.

At the same time, anger and aggression are different. If you relate with your anger in such a way that it also inspires a work of poetry, there must be some generosity involved, or at least some kind of awareness. So art is not just creating beauty; it is anything workable and rich. And as far as art in everyday life and the awareness experience is concerned, transcending aggression is the root of all the artistic talent one can ever imagine.

Ordinary Truth

There is symbolism when you wake up, when you feel dirty and wish you could take a shower, when you take your shower and feel refreshed, when you feel hungry, when you eat your breakfast, bacon and eggs sunny-side up, toast and marmalade, quite possibly a waffle or pancakes, and when you are willing to face the day after a hearty breakfast and coffee. That is all symbolism
.

P
EOPLE
’
S USUAL IDEA
of symbolism is that it is something outside them, like a signpost or billboard, that gives them signs, perhaps of religious significance. That’s not quite true. Symbolism is connected with your self, your inner being. In other words, you are the biggest symbol of yourself. That is symbolism. Often you don’t want to listen to yourself talking on tape, and if you see photographs that have been taken of you, you get embarrassed. You think they could be better, and you don’t want to see what you look like from somebody else’s point of view. But maybe you should look into that more. You are a caricature of yourself and a symbol of yourself. Everything is its own caricature, by itself. That is symbolism on its own, the symbolism of experience itself. For instance, when you create a visual symbol, first it presents itself. Ideas come afterward. That’s the whole point. If you do interior decoration in a room, it speaks for itself. Later, people may get conceptual or metaphysical feelings about it. So everything stands by itself, and as far as you are concerned, you are a symbol of yourself. Symbolism is based on what we experience personally and directly in our lives: pain, pleasure, or whatever. From that point of view, symbolism is a state of mind.

First of all, before we know anything about anything, we have problems with motivation. If we view the whole world as raw material, like a simple sheet of canvas, a simple piece of wood, or a simple piece of clay, what is its relationship with ourselves? That piece of canvas or clay, being an inanimate object, has no particular personal interest or desire to form itself into a painting or a sculpture. But as human beings, we
do
have ideas about how our life should be, how our understanding should take place. So we are caught in a double bind: we want to understand, but we would also like to reshape the universe according to our own expectations.