The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (85 page)

Q:
If you’re doing something that will bring out the neurosis, being in a situation where you have to confront this neurosis, do you feel that’s valuable?

R:
It’s not a question of valuable or not. Relating with the neurosis becomes inescapable. So you have only one choice: choicelessness. So the path is the goal. You don’t have much chance to improve otherwise. As you begin to realize this, and that you have to take a leap of some kind in any case, then you do it. You have to be pushed into that kind of understanding, that you have no choice. You are constantly traveling in a vehicle without a reverse, without a brake.

Q:
Is saying you have no choice the same as saying you have no will?

R:
Not quite. Acknowledging the choicelessness is the will.

Q:
When we reach that point, we have no choice but to acknowledge it?

R:
Well, if you like.

Q:
Could you define egomania?

R:
A general definition of egomania, from this point of view, is that you are constantly looking for ultimate security and pleasure. So much so that in the end you become absolutely savage, to the point of self-destructiveness, or of encouraging others to destroy themselves.

Q:
To what end would they be destroying themselves?

R:
To seek pleasure, to be completely submerged into pleasure, like sinking into honey.

Q:
I wonder if your hopelessness is self-destructive?

R:
Well, if you really give up hope, completely give up hope, there’s no indulgence. Do you see what I mean? Hope is believing in possible pleasure, possible alternatives.

Q:
But doesn’t pleasure come from hope? Don’t we actually get happiness because we hope?

R:
Not necessarily, no.

Q:
Not necessarily; some have success and others fail, but it’s only the hope . . .

R:
Well, we don’t get a real pleasure out of the hope, but we get the fever out of it. It is only a fever, rather than real happiness, which is identifying with the real treasure, which in tantric tradition is called the mahasukha. We don’t get that. We just get a shadow of possible good feeling. We are just getting to the outskirts of pleasure, then we regard that as grace, which is hope.

Q:
It is a hope, but I wonder whether the hope is necessary. All the other creatures love life and strive for happiness. I don’t see why man should have no hope.

R:
Well, man predominantly misuses his power, and even enjoys his hopefulness in the wrong way. Man is the only animal that dwells in the future.

Q:
I don’t dwell in the future all the time. It’s only dwelling in the future somewhat. One has to plan. There is a future. It approaches one all the time.

R:
Well, that’s the whole point. You don’t have to be purely living in the present without a plan, but the plan in the present depends only on the future’s aspect within the present situation. You can’t plan a future if you don’t know what the present situation is. You have to start from now to know how to plan.

Q:
Can you find pleasure by living completely within the moment?

R:
Well, there’s no question of pleasure.

Q:
I find myself losing my ego and feeling less myself, and at the same time making decisions and being analytical and knowing myself, like you were saying, being cynical. That’s just like having ego. But then, also, I find myself losing my ego and becoming one with everyone and what’s outside instead of self. So I’m separating as well as coming together.

R:
It seems that everything comes from the problem of analyzing more than necessary. The thing is you can’t get cut and dried answers from every move that you make.

Q:
Does meditation practice help an individual lose desire?

R:
Lose desire? I suppose meditation practice is the only practice by which we can develop. That should also be accompanied by experiencing the daily-living situation as part of the manifestation of the teaching. This is the only process, confronting the chaos and working along with it, improvising each time.

Q:
Would you explain the difference between your concept of faith and hope?

R:
Faith and hope, did you say? Well, faith is a more realistic attitude than hope is. Hope is a sense of lacking something in the present situation. We are hopeful about getting better as we go along. Faith is that it’s okay in the present situation, and we have some sense of trust in that.

Q:
Could you tell me how a person could be more aware of his death?

R:
Well, there’s a sense of impermanence which happens constantly all the time. I suppose that’s the starting point, to realize that you can’t hang on to one continuous continuation, that things
do
change constantly, and that you have no permanent security. There’s only one eternity, that’s the eternity of discontinuity.

Q:
In my own spiritual search I find myself wanting to be more aware of my death. I find that I begin to live more if that happens.

R:
The idea of physical death, that one day you’re going to die, seems to be believing in an eternity of some kind. You’re going to die one day, but you’re still okay now. It’s so dependent.

Q:
Is there any way to develop that constant awareness that you are going to die?

R:
That doesn’t seem to be the point. The point of death is that constant death is happening all the time, that you can’t stick to one thing and stay with it all the time.

Q:
Do you have any reflections or interpretations of the spiritual currents in North America?

R:
I think I have already spoken about that in the talk. Generally what seems to be happening in America is that we involve ourselves in trying to find more happiness. Certainly America’s love affair with materialism provides a tremendous opportunity which is unique to this country. Other countries, such as India, for instance, haven’t experienced prosperous materialism in its absolute claustrophobia. We begin to realize that after all that isn’t the ultimate pleasure. There’s a further search, and we put further energy into it. American speed and its neurosis are being put into rediscovering spirituality. That’s a very interesting combination, but still it’s happening. I would say that America could become the world’s leading spiritual center fairly soon, as soon as we get out of spiritual materialism and begin to realize what its consequences are. All the spiritual shopping, spiritual supermarketing, and the ability to buy food from exclusive shops may cost people more money and energy, but it’s still worth it.

Q:
Would you state the relationship between entertainment and spiritual life? Both in terms of the entertainer who makes the entertainment and those who are entertained, as they relate to spiritual life or spiritual practice.

R:
As long as you are entertained, you are fascinated by what’s happening rather than relating to what you have experienced, the facts of the scientific approach to life. So you don’t have any prajna, or wisdom, knowledge, intelligence. The whole thing becomes an act of very naively going to the theater, forgetting what you’ve seen outside, and coming back out after having passed several hours. I think that’s the spiritual materialism coming through. You could regard the practice as an escape from your boredom; you have nothing else to get into so you might as well get into these good things. Be entertained by them. You keep coming, you become a very successful regular member, but still you have no personal relationship with the teachings. Then if the entertainment stops and the surgery starts without any entertainment, you run away. That seems to be the problem.

Q:
Could you say what the nature of boredom is?

R:
Boredom could happen in different ways. It may be boredom in the sense that fundamentally, repetitious things are happening constantly. Or, possibly all kinds of things are happening, which help to keep you from boredom. You are looking for a slight challenge, but it is not a complete challenge which you might have to put more energy into. It’s just a little leap and doesn’t involve any great expenditure of energy. Then there’s another type of boredom, which is part of the discipline, such as the meditation practice, which I refer to as cool boredom, refreshing boredom. Boredom is necessary, and you have to work with it. It’s constantly very sane and solid, and boring at the same time. But it’s refreshing boredom. The discipline then becomes part of one’s daily expression of life. Such boredom seems to be absolutely necessary. Cool boredom.

Tower House Discussions I and II

I

Rinpoche:
You seem to want constant security—to name things, to make sure, to make your world very solid. You should just acknowledge without giving names. If techniques don’t have a name, if they’re just functional, that’s important. You shouldn’t respect them unnecessarily and make them solid, something more than techniques. If you name them they become part of your thoughts. You tend to get tensions all over your body or tightness, drowsiness, all kinds of things begin to come out. Any technique you use should become purely functional.

Student 1:
I notice that my technique has a tendency to change. If I’m watching the sensations of my body in vipashyana, sometimes I feel energy moving up and down my spine. Sometimes I resist it and return to what I was told about just feeling the sensations of the body. Sometimes the body has a way of going away, and I’m just watching this sensation of rising and falling, and it’s fine, easier to concentrate on. So I let it evolve and watch that. I wonder how much of my own intuition and feeling I can trust and how much I should rely on what I’ve been told.

R:
In the vipashyana practice, the idea of bare attention is not exactly watching but continually getting into it. The difference is that if you watch, then you have direction, you are looking into yourself. It becomes your possession. Whereas if you are just with it, you become the sensation itself. Then you have no direction; the body is neither here nor there. It becomes very impersonal. That’s the idea of relating with the sensations and feelings as if they belong to nobody. But they’re happening,
it
feels—but without direction, so you don’t generate extra energy. It belongs to nobody; it’s just purely the organism maintaining itself. The idea of complete mindfulness, perfect mindfulness, samyak, is being identified with that completely, without even a doer. That seems to be very hard to describe, and that particular thing hasn’t been mentioned enough in context with meditation. If energy doesn’t belong to anybody, then you can handle it. If energy is chained or labeled, then it plays tricks on you. It becomes the ego’s thing then, naturally. It seems to be very subtle.

Student 2:
Wouldn’t it be dangerous for a beginner, in the sense that just being with whatever comes up is very close to actually being identified with it, in a wrong way, in an egoful way? And the transition might have to be done when you do watch and establish a viewpoint, watching, in order to free yourself, free the ego from yourself.

Rinpoche:
Identify means almost a disowning at the same time, rather than getting in it. You don’t have to go through a sequence: “Be aware of me and I am therefore aware of my sensations,” which is the ego’s style usually. The vipashyana practice teaches: Don’t go through the sequence, just attend to the feeling. It’s very immediate, so for a little while the ego is forgotten somewhat. Because you are so much involved with what’s happening with your body, the ego doesn’t apply anymore. The only problem with that is if you try to recapture your experience, it becomes the ego’s thing. Whatever happens in the meditation practice should not be regarded as either a failure or a success but just happening from moment to moment. Any kind of reference point becomes a problem. If there’s nothing laid onto it, then you find that there’s no such thing as me, just things happening. But if you begin to analyze it, even if you try to analyze it as the nonexistence of ego, then that exactly becomes the ego’s act.

Student 3:
Another kind of ploy that the ego has is just barely maintaining itself.

Rinpoche:
The point is you don’t have to get rid of it. Just understand the subtleties of it, just purely that. In fact you need ego at some point, and you have to find out its fallacies, very simply. Ego seems to be the reference point of enlightenment. Without ego there is no enlightenment.

Student 4:
Is that true the other way around? Without enlightenment there is no ego?

R:
I don’t think so. Well, at some point it’s true. If enlightenment becomes a dogma or goal, then when there’s no goal there’s no dogma, and so no enlightenment—which is being without ego. It depends on your attitude of what is meant by enlightenment.

S3:
Sometimes Buddhism seems to be cold, it doesn’t work from the heart, from the bhakti. I was talking to Ram Dass, and he felt that many of your students have that attitude.

R:
Yes indeed.

S3:
I was wondering about that. Is that intrinsic to Buddhism, or maybe there’s a reservation about the emotional side in some way?

R:
You mean eventually Buddhism might come around to it?

S3:
Eventually? It seems that maybe it comes later, or that there’s some suspicion in the beginning—something too emotional, feeling too much.

R:
The emotional approach is a very familiar one. Since we are all brought up by parents, devotion comes easily, so we don’t have to surrender, give away anything. The Buddhist approach at the beginning is from an entirely new angle. It is almost a foreign approach from the point of view of ego. There’s no warmth; it’s been cut down. Then, having prepared enough ground, the devotional bhakti approach eventually becomes a spacious one without possessiveness. We begin to develop the universality of bhakti, rather than personal longing. This is the real meaning of bhakti. The space which was left by cutting down becomes warmth in itself. As you approach tantra, emotion and bhakti become more prominent, but you can’t start right away.