The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (43 page)

Student:
There seems to be a kind of similarity in the incommunicability of the asura realm and the hell realm. It seems that this one-upmanship game is very similar to the jealous god business. Is there a difference?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, the difference seems to be that in the asura realm you are trying to cover your area of jealousy constantly, whereas in the hell realm you don’t have to try to cover it, because your hatred has already covered that area. The only thing left for you to do is to relate with the temperatures or the textures, your aggression has become so powerful.

Student:
Rinpoche, you mentioned the physical characteristics of the hungry ghosts. Are there physical characteristics in each realm?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The particular physical characteristics of the hungry ghosts seem to be prominent; but except for the animal realm, the rest of them seem to have the same quality.

Student:
Rinpoche, how is the realm of hell connected with meditation? It seems as if much of our meditation is pretty aggressive. How do we get out of it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It seems to be that way, yes. There is a sense of struggle. You really would like to apply your exertion, and you have to produce something out of the meditation you are doing. You are supposed to achieve something; you are supposed to learn something; there is some kind of duty involved with the meditation. And the more you try to put forth that kind of regimented, duty-oriented meditation, the more you end up in the hell realm. I suppose that the only way to relate with that is to regard meditation as a living situation rather than purely duty-oriented.

S:
That would be a good way to avoid it, but if you find yourself there, then what?

TR:
Well, then you don’t regard yourself or your problem as a problem as such but as part of the general thought process, which happens automatically. Whenever any kind of ambition happens in meditation practice, it comes up in the thought process and the potential thought process, rather than anywhere else. So if you are able to see that kind of situation arising in meditation, if you regard it as thought process, then it becomes thought process. So it ceases to have a valuation of its own.

Student:
As a rule, does one experience all the realms before liberation comes, or how does this work?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We have been experiencing them for a long time—all the time. And each of the realms has the possibility of relating with the enlightened state.

Student:
Isn’t the feeling of hunger painful in the hungry ghost realm?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is painful and irritating, but at the same time there is a sense of hunger as a kind of occupation, which is a very optimistic and hopeful experience. For instance, if you are going to get your dinner at twelve o’clock, you begin to enjoy your hunger at eleven o’clock, knowing that you are going to get your dinner at twelve o’clock. So in that way you could consume more food.

Student:
Rinpoche, where does the quality of clear light fit into the hungry ghost realm and the hell realm?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think that all the realms have that quality in them, because clear light comes up in terms of subtle gaps of all kinds. In the hell realm, clear light happens in experiencing the textures of the pain, which automatically has to have some kind of space. In the hungry ghost realm, there is constant yearning and looking for ways to try to fulfill your desire. That effort of trying to fulfill your desire also has this gap or spacious quality in it. There is clear light principle automatically.

S:
Is this the relationship to enlightened gap that you mentioned?

TR:
Yes.

SEVEN

The Sequence of Bardos

T
HERE ARE SIX TYPES
of bardo experience connected with the six realms: becoming, birth, dream, death, isness, and meditation. A seventh bardo, the bardo of illusory body, points to the fundamentally shifty quality of experiences. Sipa bardo, which is the bardo of existence or becoming, stems from the current situation being manipulated by extreme hope and fear. So the birth of each realm is given by sipa bardo.

From that, because birth has been given already, that brings about another birth, or kye-ne bardo. The birth of kye-ne bardo is connected with manifesting that becoming process further. The bardo of becoming is more of a force of energy. But that energy has to materialize and function within some particular context or situation. So you have kye-ne bardo.

Birth and death are connected with the quality of circulation, which relates to birth and death together. Birth and death have to be regarded as definite events: birth is an event and death is an event as well. Those events could function according to their own nature. The continuity between birth and death is largely a survival process; that which builds a bridge between birth and death is the struggle for survival. The struggle for survival is based on administration, the maintenance of whatever solid characteristics you may have. Such maintenance is not necessarily physical maintenance alone, at all. If you want to maintain yourself, to begin with you have to have the politics or the philosophy of the maintenance. That philosophy and politics of maintenance introduces itself into domestic situations based on past experience bringing present experience, and present experience being dependent on what will be, or the future. So you have a past-present-future dwelling process. And both the past and the future could be said to be imaginary worlds. That is milam bardo, or dream bardo.

Dream bardo does not necessarily mean the quality of dreaming literally, but it has the style of imagination, or trying to instigate some activity. It has the quality of constantly trying to set the wheel in motion, constantly flowing. In order to set the wheel in motion, you have to have concepts and ideas, and those concepts and ideas are purely imaginary. It is a kind of guesswork in that sense—trying to achieve something as you speed along or trying to destroy something as you speed along. It is like the analogy of a cowardly soldier who runs away and throws rocks behind him, hoping that his enemies could be killed in the process of his escape. Without aim or direction, he just hopes that some particular rock he throws behind him, over his shoulder, will land on his enemy’s head. In the same way, the dream bardo has a quality of going along hoping things will develop in accordance with your wishes. It is not so much just dwelling on something. It is more like imagination being put into practice by another imagination. And that imagination speaks its own language, because you have created the projections. So in the end a whole solid world is built. It is like the bouncing backward and forward of an echo in a cave: each echo throws back its sound and the whole thing builds up into a crescendo. So the dream bardo seems to be the dream
of
dreams: on the ground of dreams, and dream bardo exists as a further dream.

Then you have death, or chikha bardo. Death is the end of all those dreams, because your expectations, attempts, or desire to watch your own funeral party are impractical. You realize you cannot take part in your own funeral party; you cannot attend your own funeral. So there is a sense of the failure of continuing your existence. When you realize that failure to continue your existence, the dream begins to end. “I am really going to die, so I might as well regard myself as a dead person”—that is the end of the dream. Because it is the end of the dream, therefore you cannot relate with the mind-body physical situation at all. It is overwhelmingly loose and unclear. Death is the end of vision, the end of expectations, and the end of continuity. Death is, therefore, one of the outstanding experiences in the bardo. You cannot continue anymore; and not only that, but you realize that the games you developed through the dream bardo have not been all that realistic. One begins to realize the impermanent quality of all situations. In fact, the very idea of going from one experience to another experience is also seen as impermanent, as a continual death process. Then—because it is the end of all kinds of dreams, because you have experienced the living quality of the impermanence, the transitory nature of all beings—you begin to ask questions. That is where chönyi bardo begins to develop.

Chönyi
is a Tibetan word which literally means “dharmaness,” or “isness”:
chö
means “dharma”;
nyi
means “isness.” In Sanskrit it is called dharmata. The word
dharmata
is similar to the word
shunyata. Shunya
means “empty”;
ta
means “-ness”; so
shunyata
means “emptiness.” Likewise,
dharmata
means “dharmaness,” “the isness of all existence.” The bardo of dharmata is the awareness of the basic space in which things could function. In other words, a complete comprehension of the process developed through the bardo experiences is based on a pattern of relating with space. This process cannot function or happen as it is if you do not relate with space. So one tends to develop a certain sense of spaciousness, a sense of lubrication. Lubrication could develop because of that accommodating quality. And that lubrication, or dharmata experience, is what has been referred to in Evans-Wentz’s work as the clear light. In this sense, clear light is lubrication, accommodation, letting things follow their own course.

That brings us into the next situation, which is the bardo of meditation. Now that you have experienced birth and existence and death and everything, you begin to have a definite experience of what is called samten bardo, which is the meditative state in the bardo experience. The meditative experience of the bardo state is therefore based on the realization of the lubrication, or dharmata, as an object, as a particular situation. Essentially it is that wisdom becomes knowledge; jnana (wisdom) becomes prajna (knowledge). In other words, complete experience becomes knowledge. Complete experience has been perceived by criteria of some kind, by a certain perspective or view. Jnana has been seen as a learning process, as something we study. So jnana has become prajna. This is like the difference between somebody meditating and somebody studying the experience of meditation as a case history or as archeological intrigue.

The meditative experience of samten bardo is the microscope with which you could examine the clear light experience. It is also a way of accentuating the blackness and whiteness of the experience which happens within that accommodating open space. In other words, samten bardo, the meditative state of bardo, is not necessarily the practice of meditation as it traditionally has been taught; but it is seeing the clarity of situations as they are. For instance, if you realize you are imprisoned in the hungry ghost realm, you begin to realize the sharp edges of hungry ghost experience, as well as the space in which the sharp edges could exist in hungry ghost experience. And the same thing applies with any of the realms.

Samten bardo is a kind of watcher which transmits its message to the observer, as opposed to the watcher. So you have a double watcher in that case. You have one watcher who is like the spokesman who relates from one situation to another situation; you also have the person who appointed that watcher to his occupation, his job, his duty. In other words, you have intuitive insight, which has the ability to digest experiences; but at the same time, in order to digest experiences, you have to point them out to somebody who collects your food. That which is collecting the food is the watcher. And the food is being passed on to the central authority who appointed the watcher. This is extremely subtle. It is almost nonwatching—a perceiving entity, so to speak. So you have two types of intelligence there: crude intelligence and subtle intelligence. Crude intelligence is the watcher, the analyst: subtle intelligence is the intellectual, analytical conclusions transformed into experiential understanding. Those are the two types of intelligence—which is the samten bardo experience of the meditative state.

It seems that that kind of experience leads inevitably to the bardo of the after-death experience, which is called gyulü bardo.
Gyulü
means “illusory body,” “body of illusions,” so gyulü bardo is the bardo of illusion. That brings us to the point where finally we are suspended in the extreme experience of our life situation: the hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, or whatever. We realize that we are suspended: we haven’t really been born, we haven’t really died, we haven’t really been dreaming at all. We haven’t been experiencing clear light in a realistic way either, in actual fact. All of those situations are expressions of suspension between one experience of extremes and another. That sense of suspension seems to be the basic quality of bardo. You are in between, in no-man’s-land. You are between extremes, and you realize that that in itself is an extreme situation. If you are in the realm of the gods, for instance, you realize that there is really no need to maintain yourself. Instead your path has been taken over by the inevitability of that natural, organic, mechanical process.

I suppose the conclusion that we come to in this seminar is that the six realms are largely based on the six types of bardo experience. That enables us to relate with the realms not purely as suffering or as dwelling on something. In order to dwell, you have to play games with that occupation. For instance, if you are born as a human, you have to grow up; you have to have some occupation and lifestyle; you have to feed yourself; you have to experience old age; and you also have to experience illness and death. Human life—all of life—contains those developments. The six realms and the six types of bardo experience are similar: in each realm you have birth, you have death, you have suspension of those experiences, you have dreams. You experience that your life consists of both space and objects, form and emptiness, simultaneously—or maybe side by side. I hope I haven’t confused anybody by such a shocking conclusion.