The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (81 page)

Basically, you have to just look into it with complete honesty and truthfulness. Open to it and look, and you will be able to find the substitutions that are made for the ego’s survival, and the ways you go wrong by playing all those games of being other people, clothing yourself with their robes, eating their particular diet, behaving according to their particular notions. To them it may not be a game, but it is to you. And here is an interesting point. One couldn’t say Tibetans behave or eat wrongly. Nothing is particularly wrong in their ways; on the other hand it is a game for you because you have another way to compare with it, and this makes you feel superior to your fellow man.

This patterning becomes very important. The whole process that we have been talking about is connected with working honestly with the pattern of ego. These operations on the ego are going to be very painful, without anesthetic, without any shield for self-embarrassment. Then, also, we do not merely want to go back and undo the process of ego with the intellect; we need a precise way of dealing with it. This is the teaching of the nowness of meditation. This means not even trying to humiliate yourself. The nowness of meditation is a precise way of sudden penetration into the heart of the matter. What must be penetrated? It is the idea of the past, the idea of the future, and the conception of achievement in either of these that you need to cut through. You have to forget all these ambitions and hopes, and just open, look directly and thoroughly into the situation of the nowness. It will leave you completely bland, purposeless, open, and speechless, because there is nothing to relate anything to, nothing to secure. Everything is direct, sharp, and precise. This experience is described as the sword of Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. There is the sudden penetration of cutting, one slash of the sword which may take a fraction of a second, but with each stroke the past and future networks are severed completely. It is a very sharp sword.

This is what meditation is. It cuts through the fascination of attaching ourselves to a particularly colorful scene, and cuts through the expectation of a final, ideal, and comfortable way of life, in this case spiritual life, which has confused us. Perhaps we have thought of a spiritual life as a life of being dressed up in some particular fashion and striving to reach some level of perception or another. I have heard people say that English is the language of barbarians and that is why we have to learn Tibetan or Sanskrit. If both languages convey what is, I see no reason to distinguish between them. In fact, what is more inspiring is that we transcend the racial and cultural divisions: as we are, we can penetrate directly into the heart of it. This is the penetration of wisdom cutting through the fascination. Once we are on the spiritual path, there can still be the demons of particular attitudes involved with further fascination. The sword of Manjushri cuts directly through that.

The Tibetan Buddhist Teachings and Their Application

A
CTUALLY, THERE IS
no such thing as Tibetan Buddhism. Rather there is the Buddhist tradition as it developed in Tibet, as Tibetans practiced it and applied it to their living situation. Buddhism does not belong to the Tibetans or any other nation. Buddhism belongs to all of us as individuals. That being the case, before we consider the application of the Buddhist teachings, we have to look into who is applying them and with what basic outlook. This background or attitude is, in fact, more important than the application itself.

When we listen to a speaker, for example, we are gathered and expectant. We expect an ideal message or certain edifying ideas from the speaker. Because of our need to satisfy our intellect and emotions and to get some security, we want to hear words of wisdom, and we remold the speaker’s words to satisfy that need. We shape them and reshape them, manufacturing fixed and definite impressions from the raw materials of the speaker’s words. The result is that we constantly have nothing but ourselves bouncing back on ourselves. That is always a problem. It is very difficult to find both an audience who will sit in no-man’s-land and a speaker who speaks from no-man’s-land. That kind of attitude is very difficult, extremely hard.

There are many types of Buddhist writings and many styles of Buddhist practice in this country and in the world in general, but the basic principles of Buddhism have not been properly understood or conveyed. The introduction of the Buddhist tradition in this country has been very confused and incomplete. We are fascinated by the glories of the Buddhist tradition, such as the mysticism and magic of the Tibetan vajrayana or tantra. We would like to build a golden roof, but we have not considered how to build a foundation, and when we begin to build our golden roof, we find we have nowhere to put it. That childish approach is quite prevalent. We are hungry for knowledge and want to get results immediately and automatically, but unless we give up that speed and urgency, we are not going to learn anything. The problem seems to be basically one of laziness. We are so lazy that we do not even want to bother eating our food; we would prefer to be satisfied just from reading the menu. And that laziness reaches the extreme when it comes to going further into relating with reality.

E
NLIGHTENMENT
I
S THE
A
BSENCE OF
P
ROMISE

The process of learning to wake up takes time and painful measures of all kinds. The learning process is not an easy matter. It is not easy, because we do not want to surrender our basic security. The teachings of Buddhism are not a source of security, such as “the freedom of nirvana” or something of that nature. The teachings do not present another form of security at all, but bring the absence of any kind of security. Enlightenment is the complete absence of any kind of promises. We have to give up the tendency to look for solid, serious, or magical results. We have to give up the tendency to look for solid, serious, or magical results. We have to give up trying to manufacture results through gimmicks. Somehow such neurotic psychological games do not apply.

Nevertheless, there is something extremely positive about our search for understanding, something that we could use as a stepping-stone. That stepping-stone is the chaos in our life, the pain and chaos and dissatisfaction and hunger and thirst. Those dissatisfactions and our search for something better—that psychological pain—is the beginning of the teaching. Unless there is pain and dissatisfaction, there is nowhere at all to begin. That pain is the direct experience of our basic insecurity. Looking for security and failing to find it is a glimpse of egolessness. We perceive possibilities—possibilities of failure, of losing our grip, of not being able to manufacture the ideal pleasurable situation. Such perceptions are extremely positive from the point of view of embarking on the path of buddhadharma.

Everyone begins his journey on the path by experiencing dissatisfaction. Something is missing somewhere, and we are frantically looking for it. But even though we run faster and faster and faster, we do not discover anything at all. There is the constant sense that we are missing the point. So we start to ask questions. We question our whole idea of security and pain and pleasure. We question the validity of spirituality, how efficient, magical, or pleasurable it might be. And all these questions that we ask contain the knowledge that our ego-centered wishes may not be fulfilled in the end. We already have that impression, therefore we ask the questions.

The discovery that comes out of the questioning process is that there is something completely mysterious. At some stage we run out of questions. Something is completely blank, to the point where we cannot even think of questions anymore. We are completely bewildered and we wonder, concerning this questioning process that is going on, who is fooling whom? But if we look and investigate, we find neither the fooler nor the fooling process. When we try to pinpoint anything, it dissolves.

B
EWILDERMENT
I
S THE
B
ASIC
G
ROUND

A basic bewilderment takes place here, and that bewilderment is the ground that we could work on. Such bewilderment is not just passive bewilderment; it contains speed, grasping, and frantically looking for some answers. If we are able to realize and acknowledge all of the basic bewilderment and speed and grasping that we are experiencing—if we are able to relate with it as it is actually happening instead of just imagining something about it, then we are at least getting somewhere. We are starting from somewhere and we are making some kind of contact, intellectually, emotionally.

On the whole, it could be said that the discovery of confusion
is
enlightenment. When we discover confusion, the enlightened state becomes redundant. Discovering the confusion is the most important thing of all. It is facing reality and getting beyond the many kinds of self-deception. Whereas if we are purely searching for something glorious and pleasurable, if we view enlightenment as a promised land or treasure island, then it is just a myth. It just adds further pain. We cannot get to such a treasure island; we cannot get to such a promised land; we cannot actually attain enlightenment. The more we think about enlightenment, the more pain we feel because of the frustration of not getting there, which just creates further confusion.

So the Buddhist tradition tells us, and here all sects and schools concur, that if we are going to begin on the path, we have to begin at the beginning. We cannot begin halfway through and we cannot begin on the dream level. We have to face the reality of our actual living situation.

S
IDETRACKED BY
S
EDUCTIONS

This point is very relevant to what is happening in this country in relation to the spiritual search. We begin to search for something because our life situation does not satisfy us. Physically it might be luxurious, but psychologically something does not satisfy us. Therefore we look for some definite answer. But in the process of looking for this answer, we are sidetracked by all kinds of seductions and we begin to lose track of what we were searching for in the first place. We become involved with exotic practices or techniques, and they become like golden crutches. We become very attracted to the method itself, rather than seeing how it actually functions in our situation. That is because we are looking for an answer that will help us to relate to our pain and our pleasure as an occupation, as entertainment.

At the beginning of such an involvement, because of self-deception and because of strong desire to be satisfied with what we have discovered, these promises tend to be fulfilled—quite simply, quite easily. We tend to get all kinds of immediate results—physical and psychological bliss, visions and messages of all kinds. But as we continue on and on, sooner or later the raw and rugged quality of life begins to poke through; our graspingness and speed begin to catch up with us. Then we set off again to look for another technique that is more efficient or that will last longer. Perhaps we find something better and we go through the same enthusiasm. But then those new efforts being to wear out as well and we have to go on to something else. We could spend millions of years shopping for answers and promises. We have been doing that all along and we are still doing it, hoping that the next discovery will be something new. But I wonder about that.

The practice of meditation is relating with games such as this that we play. Actually, meditation is the only way to relate with neurosis and self-deception. In this case meditation does not mean concentrating on objects or trying to intensify certain psychic faculties or anything of that nature. It is just simply creating a space, a space in which we can unlearn and undo our subconscious gossip, our hidden fears and hidden hopes, and begin to bring them out. Meditation is simply providing space through the discipline of sitting down and doing nothing. Doing nothing is extremely difficult. At the beginning we can only try to do nothing by imitating doing nothing. And then hopefully we can develop gradually from there.

M
AKING
F
RIENDS WITH
O
URSELVES

So meditation is a way of permitting hang-ups of mind to churn themselves up. These psychological hang-ups are like manure. We do not throw away manure, we use it on our garden. In the same way, we use our hang-ups in our daily living situations. We use them as part of our path, not by rejecting them as a bad thing or by indulging in them, but by simply relating to them as they are. If we try to focus on our neurosis as a practice, that is an escape; and if we try to suppress it, that is also an escape. So the process is to relate with the neurosis as it is, in its true nature, the actual simplicity of it. Then we begin to make some progress, so to speak. As this process of relating to our hang-ups develops, at some point we at last begin to trust ourselves. We begin to develop some kind of faith and trust that what we have and what we are is, after all, not all that bad. It is workable, usable.

M
AKING
F
RIENDS WITH
O
UR
W
ORLD

And we might have something more in us as well—our world. We also possess that. So we also gradually begin to relate with our world situation, our friends, and so on. And slowly we begin to trust the world as well. We begin to feel that the world is not as bad as we thought—there might be something in it worth learning. But we cannot just go out and love the world. We have to start with ourselves because the world is our world. Running away from ourselves into the world would be like trying to accept the rays of the sun while rejecting the sun itself.

In this sense, therefore, meditation is developing ultimate compassion. It is an inexhaustible resource, because once we are on the path of meditation, every life situation teaches us something. If we go too fast, some incident takes place in our life to slow us down. If we are going too slow, our life begins to push us. Our life situation always contains a message. And that message can be understood, to begin with, if we realize that the resources we have are positive resources. They have nothing to do with destruction or original sin or any pain or misery that we have to reject. So the process of learning spontaneously from our life situation seems to be the starting point.