The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (11 page)

Student:
Which world are you in now?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Woof, woof.

S:
But you said these are not states of the awakened mind—they are only confusion!

TR:
Yes, confusion. Sure. [
Laughter
]

Student:
Do the six bardos go around in a circle like the six realms?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Somehow it isn’t as methodical as that.

S:
Is it one continuum? How does one move from one to the next?

TR:
It’s the same as the different types of emotions, which change from one to another, like temperament. Each bardo is individual, an independent thing, like an island; but each island has some connection with the other islands. The presence of the other islands allows us to see the perspective of any one island. So they are related as well as not related.

S:
Is it the water that connects them?

TR:
I think so, yes.

Student:
Could you say that each experience has its root in one or another of the bardos?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, definitely.

S:
Is it a good thing, as one is experiencing, to try to hold that view?

TR:
Well, one doesn’t have to acknowledge them on the spot necessarily, not intellectually, but from an experiential point of view, this happens and one can acknowledge it, so to speak. It is not necessarily healthy to speculate or to try to put it into categories intellectually. You see, meditation is a way of providing a clear perception of these experiences, so that they don’t become confusing or inspire paranoia. Meditation is a way of gaining new eyesight to look at each situation, to feel situations. And often the hidden aspect of these states or worlds is brought out by meditation. If there’s a tendency to try to hide from yourself the suppressed elements of these worlds, then meditation brings them out. If your experience is constantly destructive, then meditation brings out the friendliness in these situations and you begin to see that you don’t have to regard them as external attacks or negative destructive things anymore. Meditation is a way of seeing the perfect value of them, in a sense, the perfect relationship of them. The whole thing is that you have to work from within. Unless you are willing to go back to the abstract quality, the root, judging the facade doesn’t help at all. So meditation brings you back to the root, dealing with the root of it.

Student:
Does meditation mean nothing but simply sitting still quietly for forty-five minutes?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In this case, it is not necessarily only that. It’s the active aspect of meditation as well as the formal sitting practice. All aspects.

Student:
Everybody seems to have different interpretations or opinions as to what you feel about drug addiction or alcoholism in relation to the Buddhist path. Can you relate drug use or heavy drinking to bardo experience?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, it seems to be connected with the idea of reality, what is real and what is not real. Everybody tries to find what is real, using all sorts of methods, all sorts of ways. A person may discover it by using alcohol or by using drugs, but then you want to make sure that discovery of reality is really definite, one hundred percent definite. So you go on and on and on. Then somehow, a sort of greediness takes over from your discovery at the beginning, and the whole thing becomes destructive and distorting.

This happens constantly with any kind of experience of life. At the beginning, there’s a relationship; but if you try to take advantage of that relationship in a heavy-handed way, you lose the relationship absolutely, completely. That relationship becomes a destructive one rather than a good one. It’s a question of whether the experience could be kept an actual experience without trying to magnify it. At a certain stage, you begin to forget that the usage is not pure experience alone; it begins to become a built-up situation that you require. And then there will be conflict. In terms of LSD, for instance, a person has an experience for the first time, and in order to confirm that experience he has to take LSD again—a second, third, fourth, hundredth time—and somehow it ceases to be an experience anymore. It isn’t exactly a question of middle way or happy medium, but somehow trusting oneself is necessary at that point. One doesn’t have to be extremely skeptical of oneself. You have one experience, and that experience
is
experience—you don’t necessarily have to try to make it into a clear and complete experience. One experience should be total experience.

Student:
In meditation, how does one get these glimpses of clarity?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In a sense you can create a glimpse by being open to the situation—
open
meaning without fear of anything, complete experience. A glimpse just takes place; it takes shape of its own and sparks us. But in many cases, when a person tries to re-create that glimpse he or she had already, that sudden flash, it doesn’t happen at all. The more you try, the less experience you get—you don’t experience open space at all. And the minute you are just about to give up, to give in and not care—you get a sudden flash. It’s as if a person is trying very hard to meditate for a set time—it could be in a group or it could be alone—and it doesn’t go very well at all. But the minute you decide to stop, or if it’s group practice, the minute the bell is rung,
then
the meditation actually happens, spontaneously and beautifully. But when you want to recapture that, to re-create that situation, it doesn’t happen anymore. So it’s a question of trying to recapture experience: if you try to recapture an experience, it doesn’t happen—unless you have an absence of fear and the complete confidence that these experiences don’t have to be re-created, but they are there already.

S:
Supposing what you think you want more than anything is openness, but you don’t know how to open?

TR:
There’s no question of how to do it—just do it! It cannot be explained in words; one has to do it in an instinctive way. And if one really allowed oneself to do it, one could do it.

Student:
People seem to want to be happy, but it doesn’t work out.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Happiness is something one cannot recapture. Happiness happens, but when we try to recapture it, it’s gone. So from that point of view there’s no permanent happiness.

Student:
Are the six worlds always happening, and do you attain them in meditation?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, the six realms seem to happen constantly; we are changing from one extreme to another and going through the six realms constantly. And that experience takes place in meditation practice also. Therefore, the whole idea of trying to create a fixed, ideal state of meditation is not the point. You can’t have a fixed, ideal state of meditation because the situation of six realms will be continuously changing.

S:
I mean, we’ve spent all our lives in these six realms, but through meditation we can learn to see which realm we’re in, and how to deal with them?

TR:
That isn’t the purpose of meditation, but somehow it happens that way. Actual meditation practice is a constant act of freedom in the sense of being without expectation, without a particular goal, aim, and object. But as you practice meditation, as you go along with the technique, you begin to discover your present state of being. That is, we could almost say, a by-product of meditation. So it does happen that way, but is no good looking for it and trying to fit it into different degrees or patterns. That doesn’t work.

Student:
When you just perceive something—smell, hear, see—and you don’t have any thought about anything for a very brief time, what world is that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Any world. Sure, any world.

Student:
Are people born with a quality of one of the worlds as predominant?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It seems there is one particular dominant characteristic—which is not particularly good and not particularly bad, but a natural character.

Student:
Would sense perceptions be the same in all six realms?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The sense perceptions will be different. We are talking about the human situation, and in human life the six experiences of the world will be the same, of course, but your impressions of them will be different. Each thing we see, we see purely in terms of our own likes and dislikes, which happen all the time, and our associations. Certain trees, plants, and things may be irritating for some people; whereas for some other people they may be a good experience.

D
ISCUSSION
N
EXT
M
ORNING

Student:
Would you discuss briefly the similarities and differences between Zen practice and mahamudra practice?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, that has something to do with the evolutionary aspect of the teachings. The Zen tradition is the actual application of shunyata, or emptiness, practice, the heart of the mahayana teaching. Historically, the Zen method is based on dialectical principles—you engage in continual dialogues with yourself, asking questions constantly. By doing that, in the end you begin to discover that questions don’t apply anymore in relationship to the answer. That is a way of using up dualistic mind, based on the logic of Nagarjuna. The interesting point is that the practice of traditional Indian logic used by Hindu and Buddhist scholars is turned into experiential logic rather than just ordinary debate or intellectual argument. Logic becomes experiential. In other words, the subject and object of logical discussion are turned into mind and its projections—and that automatically, of course, becomes meditation. Once you begin to follow the whole endless process, everything begins to become nothing—but nothing becomes everything. It’s the same idea as the four statements of
Prajnaparamita:
form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form.
²
It’s kind of using up the abundance of hungry energy. Or, it could be said, self-deception is exposed by realizing that you don’t get any answers if you purely ask questions, but you do get answers if you don’t ask questions. But that in itself becomes a question, so in the end the whole thing is dropped completely: you don’t care anymore.

S:
In Zen they talk about abrupt realization.

TR:
That abruptness is referred to in the Zen tradition as the sword of Manjushri, which cuts through everything. It is symbolized in Zen practice by the stick (kyosaku) carried in the hall during meditation (zazen) practice. If a person wants to have sudden penetrations, or if a person is off his pattern, he’s reminded by being hit on the back—the sword of Manjushri.

In the case of mahamudra, the application or the technique is not quite like the Zen approach of logic, questioning, or koans. It is, in a sense, a highly extroverted practice—you don’t need inward scriptures, but you work with the external aspect of scriptures, which is the phenomenal world. Mahamudra has a cutting quality as well, but that cutting or penetrating quality is purely based on your experiential relationship with the phenomenal world. If your relationship to the phenomenal world is distorted or if you are going too far, then the sword of Manjushri—the equivalent of the sword of Manjushri, which is the phenomenal world—shakes you and demands your attention. In other words, the situation begins to become hostile or destructive for you if you are not in tune with it, if you are dazed or if you’re confused. If you are not willing to put your patience and discipline into practice, then such situations come up. In this case, mahamudra is very much purely dealing with the phenomenal world aspect of symbolism. So mahamudra practice contains a great deal of study of events or situations, seeing them as patterns rather than using logical, koan types of questions—which brings us to the same point.

These two practices are not polarities. You have to go through Zen practice
before
you get to mahamudra practice, because if you don’t realize that asking questions is the way to learn something, that the questioning process is a learning process, then the whole idea of study becomes distorted. So one must learn to see that trying to struggle for some achievement or goal is useless in any way. You have to start by learning that such a dualistic notion is useless; you have to start from the Zen or mahayana tradition. And after that, you realize that asking questions is not the only way, but being a fool is the only way. If you see the foolishness of asking questions, then you begin to learn something. Foolishness begins to become wisdom.

At that point, you transform yourself into another dimension, a completely other dimension. You thought you had achieved a sudden glimpse of nonduality, but that nonduality also contains relationship. You still need to relate yourself to that sudden glimpse of beyond question. That’s when you begin to become mahamudra experience. In other words, the Zen tradition seems to be based on the shunyata principle, which is a kind of emptiness and openness, absence of duality. The mahamudra experience is a way of wiping out the consciousness of the absence: you begin to develop clear perceptions beyond being conscious of the absence. If you feel that absence, voidness, or emptiness is so, then you are dwelling on something, on some kind of state of being. Mahamudra experience transcends that consciousness of being in the void. In that way every situation of life becomes play, dance. It is an extroverted situation.

I suppose you could say that Zen and mahamudra are complementary to one other. Without the one, the other one couldn’t exist. As experience, first of all you clear out the confusion of duality. And then, having cleared that out, you appreciate the absence of the blindfold in terms of appreciating colors and energies and light and everything. You don’t get fascinated by it at all, but you begin to see that it is some kind of pattern. The whole process of mahamudra, in other words, is seeing the situation of life as a pattern. That’s why the word
mudra
is used, which means “symbolism.” It doesn’t mean ordinary symbolism; it isn’t a question of signifying something, but it is the actual fact of things as they are. The pattern of life
is
a pattern. It is a definite pattern, a definite path, and you learn how to walk on it. I think this particular topic needs some kind of actual experience or practice; you can’t really explain it in terms of words.