The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (16 page)

According to history, at the very moment of enlightenment, Buddha experienced hosts of maras both attacking him with aggression and trying to seduce him with beautiful girls. That is a peak point, or moment of bardo experience. The point is that once we have achieved some higher state, a so-called higher state or more profound state of something, the negative aspect, or the mara aspect, is also going to be there—equally, exactly the same. And they both become more subtle. The subtleties of awakeness are exactly the same as the subtleties of sleepiness or confusion. Such subtleties continue all the time, side by side. Therefore, samsara and nirvana are like two sides of a coin. They occur together in one situation, simultaneously.

Such bardo experiences happen all the time with us. We don’t have to have a peak experience or a dramatic experience—in ordinary everyday situations as well, we are not quite certain whether we are learning something or whether we are missing something. There is that particular point of doubt. If you are more paranoid, you will think you are missing something; if you are more confident, you will think you are learning something. But there is also the awareness of the learning and missing qualities occurring simultaneously in experiences all the time. This experience is very common and very obvious. In many cases, we don’t have to ask any more questions: what is real, what is not real; what is safe, what is not safe. But when we are just about to approach safety, we are not quite certain whether it is really true safety or not. There is some faint suspicion of danger; at the same time we feel tremendous safety. The more we feel tremendous safety, the more we feel danger. That double take takes place all the time. It is a kind of supposing, or looking back again. That is the basic experiential factor connected with bardo.

Student:
What’s a good attitude to take to that ambiguity?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You see, at that point you can’t control the situation—you are the situation. So it depends on the technique or practice that you have already gained experience in. It really depends on that. You can’t correct or change course at all. In fact, the idea of a change of course doesn’t occur at that particular moment because you are so much into it: you are the situation rather than the situation being something external.

Student:
Is there any difference between the feeling of confusion and the feeling of confidence?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is the same thing. The same experience happens at exactly the same level. Fundamentally, at an experiential level, our perception is extremely fantastic and possesses all sorts of attributes. It is really fantastic to discover that perception has such a wide range, as well as a narrow range and a penetrating range. It has the capability of seeing a hundred things at the same time. That is why things are referred to as wisdom and things are referred to as confusion.

That’s a very important point. It is really the key point when we talk about madness and about sanity. It is extremely important. Everybody should know that that is
one
point, rather than that you belong to either of those groups. You don’t have to belong in order to become mad or in order to become wise or liberated. You don’t have to associate yourself with either the good or the bad, but you become the one. And that one possesses both good and bad simultaneously. That’s a very important point in terms of experience. It is extremely necessary to know that.

S:
Whenever that happens, I feel there’s something wrong. Doubt always occurs—always, always, always.

TR:
Yes. It occurs always.

S:
So there’s no point expecting it to diminish?

TR:
No. You don’t have to make the distinction as to whether you belong to that group or to this group, but you see the situation as it is—that’s the important point. You can’t change that particular situation at all. You can only divert it through some kind of chain reaction process: you can impose your experience prior to that by becoming familiar with sanity or, equally, by becoming familiar with madness or insanity. Either way is safe and instructive, and either of them could be said to be insight. And then one-pointedness switches you into the awake or enlightened state automatically.

S:
Is that awake state free of doubt or uncertainty?

TR:
Yes, of course. The reason it is free of doubt is that there’s so much reinforcement from what you have already worked with before that experience. You are quite familiar with what you’ve gone through. But I would like to say something else on this particular point. That is, when we talk about self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-observing—often that self-observing awareness is negative. When you try to work on self-observing or self-awareness in a self-consciousness way, then the reason you’re being self-aware is that you are purely trying to ward off danger. It is sort of a conservative attitude.

In the general philosophy of conservatism, you don’t think about what could go right, or what is the best thing for you to do; often the inspiration of conservatism starts with what could go wrong with you, what’s a bad thing to do. Because of that, you give guidance to other people in a conservative way, saying “I am trying to talk to you in terms of safe and sound, so that what you’re doing is not a mistake.” The first statement comes from a negative view: “. . . so that what you are doing is not a mistake.” That approach to the fundamental basic subtlety of self-awareness is not looking at the positive and healthy aspect of that state of mind, but constantly aggravating the negative “What could go wrong?” state of mind. That could pile up in the process of the path. And it’s quite likely that when such a person is in the peak state of mind of both sanity and insanity happening simultaneously, then the immediate first flicker of mind will reflect back naturally to what’s bad, that sense of paranoia. Then you could flip back into madness. It sounds quite dangerous.

Student:
Do you have to be a warrior?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, I think the point is that you are willing to see the creative aspect rather than the negative aspect. The whole process is one of going along rather than looking back at each step.

Student:
Is this doubt a result of an impending sense that the peak experience is going to deteriorate and return to a less profound state of consciousness, or is it a result of a sense that perhaps the peak experience won’t end, and you won’t return?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think you will return. Once you’ve had it, you’ve had it. That doesn’t mean to say there will be only one peak experience. There will be a succession of peak experiences—which happens with us anyway, all the time. I’m not talking purely theoretically. In our own experience of everyday life, flashes happen all the time, peak experiences. Doubt is not being able to match yourself with a prescribed goal. Whenever there is doubt, you also have an ideal concept of the absence of doubt, which is the goal.

Student:
Is this particular experience between sanity and insanity ever resolved by what’s known as surrendering or openness to the guru?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I would say both yes and no. You see, at that very moment nobody can save you. At the same time, at that very moment, things could be inspired—somebody could push you overboard. Both situations are possible. But fundamentally nobody can save you. You have to make your own commitment to the situation, that’s for sure.

S:
Then there’s no surrendering.

TR:
Surrendering happens early on. If you surrender, that means you are associating yourself with positive experiences and you are not trying to hold back and be careful and conservative, as I have been saying. Surrendering to the guru is a very positive thing; therefore, it proceeds with inspiration rather than by holding back and checking the danger. You see, the idea of the term
surrender
is that once you surrender—that’s the whole thing! You don’t surrender because of something. Surrendering to the guru is quite different from an insurance policy. In the case of an insurance policy, you write down a list of all sorts of dangers, up to the point of the will of God or “acts of God.”

Student:
You talked about the nirvanic and the samsaric worlds as being coexistent. Autobiographically speaking, I am very much aware that in certain chemical states the reality of the world of physics is revealed to me, the world of wave patterns and whirling molecules and whatnot. It seems to me this world, which modern physics has revealed to us, very often is equated with the nirvanic state, where you as an ego, as a separate item, cannot exist. Do you see the nirvanic state as I described it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The state of nirvana or freedom cannot be described in any way. If you are trying to describe it, then you are involved with wishful thinking of some kind more than natural reality—because immediately when you begin to describe it, you are separating the experience from the experiencer. Nirvana is something quite different from that.

S:
But people still say they have seen nirvana, so they must have been aware of something.

TR:
Yes, definitely.

S:
Then the split remains. As you come out of nirvana, there is a moment where your senses react to the high state you’ve been in and say, “I come from nirvana.”

TR:
Once you’ve gotten into it, you are in it already—you can’t come out of it.

Student:
Is there only one bardo experience associated with each world, or is it possible to have any of the bardo experiences in any of the worlds?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. Yesterday we discussed the bardo experience associated with the world of the gods, and today we have been discussing the bardo connected with the world of the asuras, or jealous gods. Each bardo experience is connected with a particular sphere, so to speak, or world.

S:
Then there’s a one-to-one correspondence between bardos and worlds?

TR:
Yes, but these corresponding experiences happen irregularly within one’s own experience, all the time. You may begin with hell and continue with the world of human beings. From the world of human beings you could go back to the world of the pretas, the hungry ghosts, and so on. This could happen continuously. The whole point I’m trying to make is that bardo experience is a peak experience where you are not quite certain whether you have completely gone mad or you are just about to receive something. That particular peak point is the bardo experience. And the bardo experience cannot be resolved unless there is training. Without lifelong training in the practice of meditation and in accordance with the practice of meditation, putting the skillful actions of a bodhisattva into practice, you cannot have a complete bardo experience.

Student:
Rinpoche, what is madness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s a good question. At the experiential level, madness begins with some kind of confusion between the experience of reality and the experience of the perceiver of reality, a conflict between the two. Then, further on, one tends to go on with that confusion and try to discover some ultimate answer to pinpoint what is reality and what is the perceiver of the reality. You try and you struggle more and more—up to the point where you cannot discover the answer unless you give up the idea of the existence of both the experiencer
and
the experience.

At that level, you are so overwhelmed by such experiences that you make up all sorts of ways of convincing yourself. You either try to rationalize that there is such a thing as a self, that things outside are dangerous or seductive, and that “me” is the rightful person to experience that. Or, on the other hand, you begin to feel that you are out of control. Then you become ultimately mad.

You are so confused as to what is the experiencer and what is the experience. The whole thing is completely amalgamated into the one or the many. It is confusion between the one and the many. You don’t have the earth-grounding process of seeing “that” as opposed to “this” anymore at all, because the whole thing is so overwhelming. You are completely sucked into it. You have all sorts of experiences of being claustrophobic, because the whole situation around you is so overwhelming. You experience paranoia because such overwhelming experience could try to suffocate you, destroy you, destroy the experiencer. And at the same time you would like to act as though nothing happened. You begin to play the game of deaf and dumb, but you pretend you actually never heard of it. Hundreds of millions of tactics begin to develop because of this overwhelming suddenness, this overwhelming crowdedness.

S:
Is it possible to achieve enlightenment without becoming mad?

TR:
We are mad anyway, in different degrees. We may not become completely mad unless we are maniacs—religious maniacs or political maniacs, whatever—unless we lose control of the situation. We have a sort of medium madness going on all the time, with the possibility of absolute madness. You see, that is samsara—madness. And that which is not madness is called enlightenment. Because such an idea as madness exists, therefore automatically there is that which is not madness, which is enlightenment. So once you begin to talk about enlightenment, or freedom, that means you are speaking in terms of madness.

Student:
Rinpoche, it seems that one thing you were saying is that when you approach this peak experience of the bardo, if you’re not prepared for it, it’s too sudden and you go mad.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That seems to be the point, yes. That’s the whole idea of why we mention bardo at all, because it is connected with the teachings, with the path.

Student:
Could you describe the bardo in the asura world again? I don’t have any feeling for that at all.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is trying to give birth and at the same time trying to dwell on it. Suddenly, at the peak experience, you try to force things—you try to push your situation because you are about to reach some experience. That experience is pushed by a certain effort, extreme effort, and you would like to retain that particular effort.