The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (11 page)

The spiritual friend becomes part of you, as well as being an individual, external person. As such the guru, both internal and external, plays a very important part in penetrating and exposing our hypocrisies. The guru can be a person who acts as a mirror, reflecting you, or else your own basic intelligence takes the form of the spiritual friend. When the internal guru begins to function, then you can never escape the demand to open. The basic intelligence follows your everywhere; you cannot escape your own shadow. “Big Brother is watching you.” Though it is not external entities who are watching us and haunting us; we haunt ourselves. Our own shadow is watching us.

We could look at it in two different ways. We could see the guru as a ghost, haunting and mocking us for our hypocrisy. There could be a demonic quality in realizing what we are. And yet there is always the creative quality of the spiritual friend which also becomes a part of us. The basic intelligence is continuously present in the situations of life. It is so sharp and penetrating that at some stage, even if you want to get rid of it, you cannot. Sometimes it has a stern expression, sometimes an inspiring smile. It has been said in the Tantric tradition that you do not see the face of the guru, but you see the expression of his face all the time. Either smiling, grinning, or frowning angrily, it is part of every life-situation. The basic intelligence, tathagatagarbha, buddha nature, is always in every experience life brings us. There is no escaping it. Again it is said in the teachings: “Better not to begin. Once you begin, better to finish it.” So you had better not step onto the spiritual path unless you must. Once you have stepped foot on the path, you have really done it, you cannot step back. There is no way of escaping.

Q:
Having stumbled around various spiritual centers, I feel that a personality like Marpa must be a very troublesome phenomenon for most addicts along these lines. For here is a man who seems not to be doing any of the things that everybody says will get you there. He’s not ascetic, he doesn’t abnegate. He looks after his everyday affairs. He is a normal human being and yet, apparently, he is a teacher of enormous capability. Is Marpa the only one who has made the most of the possibilities for a normal man without going through all the tremendous pain of asceticism and the discipline of purification?

A:
Of course, Marpa is an example of the possibilities open to us. However, he did experience tremendous discipline and training while he was in India. By studying strenuously under Indian teachers he prepared his path. But I think we must understand the true meaning of the words
discipline
and
asceticism.
The basic idea of asceticism, leading a life according to the dharma, is to be fundamentally sane. If you find that leading an ordinary life is a sane thing to do, that is dharma. At the same time you could find that leading the life of an ascetic yogi, as described in the texts, could become an expression of insanity. It depends upon the individual. It is a question of what is sane for you, the really solid, sound, stable approach to life. The Buddha, for example, was not a religious fanatic, attempting to act in accordance with some high ideal. He just dealt with people simply, openly and very wisely. His wisdom came from transcendental common sense. His teaching was sound and open.

The problem seems to be that people worry about a conflict between the religious and the profane. They find it very difficult to reconcile so-called “higher consciousness” with practical affairs. But the categories of higher and lower, religious and profane, do not really seem relevant to a basically sane approach to life.

Marpa was just an ordinary person, involved in living every detail of his life. He never tried to be someone special. When he lost his temper, he just lost it and beat people. He just did it. He never acted or pretended. Religious fanatics, on the other hand, are always trying to live up to some model of how it all is supposed to be. They try to win people over by coming on very strong and frantic, as though they were completely pure and good. But I think that attempting to prove that you are good indicates fear of some kind. Marpa, however, had nothing to prove. He was just a very sane and ordinary solid citizen, and a very enlightened person at the same time. In fact, he is the father of the whole Kagyü lineage. All the teachings we are studying and practicing spring from him.

Q:
There is a Zen expression: “At first the mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then the mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams. But in the end, mountains are mountains again and streams are streams again.” Well, aren’t we all in the stage where mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams? Yet you are emphasizing this ordinary quality. Don’t we have to go through this “not ordinary” period before we can really be ordinary?

A:
Marpa was very upset when his son was killed, and one of his disciples said, “You used to tell us that everything is illusion. How about the death of your son? Isn’t it illusion?” And Marpa replied, “True, but my son’s death is a super-illusion.”

When we first experience true ordinariness, it is something very extraordinarily ordinary, so much so that we would say that mountains are not mountains any more or streams streams any more, because we see them as so ordinary, so precise, so “as they are.” This extraordinariness derives from the experience of discovery. But eventually this superordinariness, this precision, becomes an everyday event, something we live with all the time, truly ordinary, and we are back where we started: the mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then we can relax.

Q:
How do you take off your suit of armor? How do you open yourself?

A:
It is not a question of
how
you do it. There is no ritual or ceremony or formula for opening. The first obstacle is the question itself: “How?” If you don’t question yourself, don’t watch yourself, then you just do it. We do not consider how we are going to vomit; we just vomit. There is no time to think about it; it just happens. If we are very tense, then we will have tremendous pain and will not really be able to vomit properly. We will try to swallow it back, try to struggle with our illness. We have to learn to relax when we are sick.

Q:
When the situations of life start to become your guru, does it matter what form the situation takes? Does it matter what situation you find yourself in?

A:
You have no choice at all. Whatever happens is an expression of the guru. The situation could be painful or inspiring, but both pain and pleasure are one in this openness of seeing the situation as guru.

Tilopa the Guru, the teacher of Naropa
.

DRAWING BY GLEN EDDY.

Initiation

M
OST OF THE PEOPLE
who have come to study with me have done so because they have heard of me personally, of my reputation as a meditation teacher and Tibetan lama. But how many people would have come had we first bumped into each other on the road or met in a restaurant? Very few people would be inspired to study Buddhism and meditation by such a meeting. Rather people seem to be inspired by the fact that I am a meditation teacher from exotic Tibet, the eleventh reincarnation of the Trungpa Tulku.

So people come and seek initiation from me, initiation into the Buddhist teachings and the sangha, the community of meditators on the path. But what does this initiation really mean? There is a long and great tradition of handing down the wisdom of the Buddhist lineage from one generation of meditators to the next, and this transmission is connected with initiation. But what is it all about?

It really seems worthwhile to be cynical in this regard. People would like to receive initiation: they would like to join the club, receive a title, obtain wisdom. Personally, I do not wish to play on people’s weakness, their desire to get something extraordinary. Some people will buy a painting by Picasso simply because of the artist’s name. They will pay thousands of dollars without considering whether what they are buying is worthwhile as art. They are buying the painting’s credentials, the name, accepting reputation and rumor as their guarantee of artistic merit. There is no hard intelligence in such an act.

Or someone might join a club, be initiated into a particular organization because he feels starved, worthless. The group is fat and wealthy and he wants someone to feed him. He gets fed and becomes fat as he expected, but then what? Who is deceiving whom? Is the teacher or guru deceiving himself, expanding his ego? “I have such a large flock of followers who have been initiated.” Or is he deceiving his students, leading them to believe that they have become wiser, more spiritual, simply because they have committed themselves to his organization and have been labeled monks, yogis, whatever titles they may have received? There are so many different titles to receive. Do these names, credentials bring us any real benefit? Do they really? Half an hour’s ceremony does not bring us to the next stage of enlightenment; let’s face facts. I personally have tremendous devotion to and faith in the Buddhist lineage and the power of the teachings, but not in a simple-minded way.

We must approach spirituality with a hard kind of intelligence. If we go to hear a teacher speak, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by his reputation and charisma, but we should properly experience each word of his lecture or each aspect of the meditation technique being taught. We must make a clear and intelligent relationship with the teachings and the man teaching. Such intelligence has nothing to do with emotionalism or romanticizing the guru. It has nothing to do with gullibly accepting impressive credentials, nor is it a matter of joining a club that we might be enriched.

It is not a matter of finding a wise guru from whom we can buy or steal wisdom. True initiation involves dealing honestly and straightforwardly with our spiritual friend and ourselves. So we have to make some effort to expose ourselves and our self-deceptions. We have to surrender and expose the raw and rugged quality of our ego.

The Sanskrit equivalent for “initiation” is
abhisheka,
which means “sprinkle,” “pour,” “anointment.” And if there is pouring, there must be a vessel into which the pouring can fall. If we really commit ourselves by opening to our spiritual friend properly, completely, becoming a vessel into which his communication may fall, then he will also open and initiation will occur. This is the meaning of abhisheka or “the meeting of the two minds” of teacher and student.

Such opening does not involve ingratiation, trying to please or impress our spiritual friend. The situation is similar to that in which a doctor, realizing that there is something wrong with you, takes you from your home, by force if necessary, and operates on your body without an anesthetic. You might find this kind of treatment a bit too violent and painful, but then you begin to realize how much real communication—being in touch with life—costs.

Monetary donations to a spiritual cause, contributions of physical labor, involvement with a particular guru, none of these necessarily mean that we have actually committed ourselves to openness. More likely these kinds of commitment are simply ways of proving that we have joined the side of “right.” The guru seems to be a wise person. He knows what he is doing and we would like to be on his side, the safe side, the good side, in order to secure our well-being and success. But once we have attached ourselves to his side, the side of sanity, the side of stability, the side of wisdom, then to our surprise we discover that we have not succeeded in securing ourselves at all, because we have only committed our facade, our face, our suit of armor. We have not totally committed
ourselves.

Then we are forced to open from behind. To our horror we find that there is no place to run. We are discovered in the act of hiding behind a facade, exposed on all sides; the padding and armor that we have worn are all stripped away. There is no longer any place to hide. Shocking! Everything is revealed, our petty pretense and egotism. At this point we might realize that our clumsy attempt to wear a mask has all along been pointless.

Still we attempt to rationalize this painful situation, trying to find some way to protect ourselves, some way to explain our predicament to ego’s satisfaction. We look at it this way and that way, and our mind is extremely busy. Ego is very professional, overwhelmingly efficient in its way. When we think that we are working on the forward-moving process of attempting to empty ourselves out, we find ourselves going backward, trying to secure ourselves, filling ourselves up. And this confusion continues and intensifies until we finally discover that we are totally lost, that we have lost our ground, that there is no starting point or middle or end because our mind has been so overwhelmed by our own defense mechanisms. So the only alternative seems to be to just give in and let be. Our clever ideas and smart solutions do us no good, because we have been overwhelmed with too many ideas; we do not know which ideas to choose, which ideas will provide us with the best way to work on ourselves. Our mind is overcrowded with extraordinary, intelligent, logical, scientific, and cunning suggestions. But somehow there are too many and we do not know which suggestion to take.