The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (53 page)

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, yes, that’s the whole point. You can regard the pain as pain or you can regard it as part of your projection, which is an entirely different area. If you regard pain as something coming from outside, challenging you from the outside, but still you give in to it, that is suicidal. But if you regard pain as something that is there, that is part of your state of mind, and you take the approach of not feeding the pain anymore, that is another matter altogether.

Student:
Since you’re saying that pain is there all the time, would that mean that when you’re not feeling the pain, the psychological pain, that you’re more asleep—that in a sense seeking the painful aspect of a situation would be moving toward being more awake?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, I suppose so. But that is very, very dangerous to say.

S:
What about the pain that has to do with the distance I feel between you and me?

TR:
That’s the same thing again, exactly. You are trying to live with your expectations of how that pain might not come about.

S:
Or the pain between the people in the house here.

TR:
Yes, it’s the same thing. Something is not feeding you, something is not comforting you. You feel that the discomfort is about to take you over and you are trying to fight that, rather than actually being concerned about the distance between you and the object of communication, such as the distance between you and me. That seems to be out of view at the time you are feeling the problem. Your relationship with the pain becomes the problem at that point, because of the pretense of some logic that is hovering about in your state of mind, which really has nothing to do with it, in fact. From that point of view, the problem is that we feel our pain is a problem.

Student:
Are you making a distinction between an active and a passive approach to pain? By active, I mean: I’m going to figure out a way of reacting to this pain so that I can become more aware; and passive would be just feeling it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think there is any difference. It seems to be the same thing, because wherever pain, or duhkha, happens, it always has entirely the same nature, the same style, and the same type of approach. The idea is always: something’s just about to take me over, now I have to resist that. And then there is logical mind: this is happening because somebody has ill-treated me or rejected me, or whatever. In fact, that logical mind is a facade. There is the sense that somebody might take me over and the challenge of how to regain my power in terms of my being and my consciousness, my emotions—that seems to be the crucial point. And the logic—such as, he killed my father, therefore I should try to kill him—is actually beside the point. It is just an excuse, in fact. It has nothing to do with the pain at all. The actual pain is that sense that something has to be overcome, to be conquered. In other words, the whole idea of pain is fighting yourself, fighting your concept with your intellect.

Student:
I feel that there is real suffering and misery in this world, and all of these things that we’ve been talking about sometimes feel to me like a thousand-dollar bill that I can’t spend to do anything about it. It feels like these points of view don’t enable me to do anything actual about pain and suffering in this world.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think you could do a lot. The reason why there is the chaos of struggling with pain in the world is that we haven’t come to terms with what pain actually is ourselves, personally. If we can come to an understanding of pain in our own innate nature, we will then be dealing with the situation directly, and there will be less pain. The pain becomes purely chaos, orderly chaos.

The pain doesn’t have to be there. If you want to stop the war in Vietnam, you have to stop
your
pain, your version of the Vietnam war. You have to relate with your own antagonism, your own innate war between you and your projections. If you solve that problem and relate with that transmutation process, then it will become much easier to solve the problem existing on the diplomatic or international level. That problem then becomes just purely a bundle of instances that occurred on the basis of orderly logic, the end result of which was chaos. It is the same orderly chaos that is happening all the time, and one can handle it beautifully at that point. The problem now is that we cannot keep track of the situation. We look at national or international things so much in terms of our own projections that we lose track of the actual political situation.

S:
On the whole, if we can let go of the reference point of the self and relate with the pain directly, we will end up creating less pain.

TR:
I think so, yes. But if you rely on that as a promise or reassurance, you end up destroying the whole thing.

THREE

The Portrait of Confused Mind

W
E HAVE DISCUSSED
the basic area of sitting on the razor blade, which is the area of passion, aggression, and ignorance. It is the basic area where the samsaric mandala can be established or constructed. We can now go into further details about the samsaric mandala itself.

Sitting on the razor blade in the manner of passion, aggression, and ignorance creates tremendous room for working with the next situation. The way we work with the next situation is not by trying to get rid of anything or to become a better person, but by finally acknowledging our actual situation.

What we discussed in the last talk was the area of the basic styles of all kinds that we evolve in relating with life situations so that we can accommodate mind’s neurosis. We have all kinds of styles of perching, sitting on the razor’s edge, and we also have developed the style of spiritual materialism, which is constantly trying to substitute one myth for another. Out of that level comes something else that goes beyond that level. There is a definite move in our confused mind, which happens in accordance with the basic character of the mandala: we decide to become deaf and dumb. We decide no longer to be sensitive to what our life situation is all about. In other words, the battlefield situation of fighting against something else is accepted without question. We feel that we have to get our money’s worth out of the struggle. We feel we have to continue until we get our reward for that struggle or until we have a sense that the struggle has been fulfilled. We are not going to accept just anything, because we think we are too smart to go along with things out of blind faith. We think we have to get something out of our situation, gain something. If we are practicing meditation or involved with spirituality, we want to attain enlightenment. We feel that if we do not attain enlightenment, we will have been cheated. And up to the point where it becomes clear that we have been cheated, we are willing to remain deaf and dumb. If we hear that we can attain enlightenment through a meditation practice that consists of standing on our heads twenty-four hours a day, we will do it. We will reduce ourselves to a state of deaf and dumb until we reach the end result and get our money’s worth. All the promises that are made to us target this kind of ignorance. We are blinded by the promises, by their glaring, flashing, colorful aspect. We let ourselves be blinded by the promises and go through the pain of being blinded by the promises. We are willing to let ourselves be reduced to a state of deaf and dumb.

That is the ignorance that constitutes the central part of the samsaric mandala. We are willing to give in to everything as long as there are promises that are seemingly worth giving in to. Having heard some “word of wisdom” telling us that it is worthwhile to give in, we forget the experiential path. We walk the path like a blind man. We avoid being sensitive to whatever life situations we encounter on the way.

This ignorance forms the basic structure of the mandala that is the ground for both spiritual and psychological materialism. Spiritual materialism develops because we are willing to take a chance on all kinds of trips, like holding a grain of sand in our hand and meditating on that for three months, or fasting for ten months. We fall for all kinds of promises. It is true, if you keep holding that grain of sand, when the time is up, obviously you will have accomplished that. It is a tremendous accomplishment—you will become an enlightened grain-of-sand holder. That is certainly an accomplishment, undoubtedly.

There is also an element of ordinary psychological materialism that develops as part of the mandala experience. This takes the form that, in order to work toward a goal, we are willing to ignore the nature of the path to it, the eccentricity of that path. For example, in order to become president of the country, you have to go through all kinds of eccentric trips. You have to make all kinds of promises and keep changing your mind back and forth in order to seduce the voters. Whatever you have to do to win, you go through the whole thing and make a fool out of yourself, because if you are willing to make a fool out of yourself, an absolutely perfect fool, then you get to become president. So there is that kind of bravery, being willing to insert yourself into those kinds of situations and getting involved in their speed. There are all kinds of examples of this. Needless to say, people are quite familiar with this whole approach.

The eccentricity trip that a candidate for president goes through involves believing in the deaf-and-dumb aspect of the journey. We ignore everything except what we come out as in the end when we become president. Whatever we have to go through in the process is acceptable. We reduce ourselves to a state of deaf and dumb. We become hardened, hardened travelers. That can be seen as making us even greater, and we tend to become heroes of some kind because of our hardened quality of being deaf and dumb.

This kind of approach provides the central part of the samsaric mandala. Then there are the four quarters of the mandala.

Aggression is connected with the eastern quarter of the mandala. Aggression in this sense is based on intellect and analytic mind. You cannot become an aggressive person unless you know what to be aggressive about. Being aggressive automatically entails some kind of logic. Whether that logic is logical or illogical makes no difference. Your logic is founded on a platform that you can land on or crash on, which is basic aggression. Aggression involves an extremely severe attitude toward yourself. You are not willing to entertain yourself, enjoy yourself, treat yourself well at all. You constantly have a war going on between that and this, so in order to defeat whatever it may be, you have to be aggressive, pushy; you have to come down heavy and sharp all the time. Whether you are involved in spiritual or psychological materialism, the basic approach is the same. There is a kind of austerity.

We find that many of the aggressive people in history have been very austere. Aggressive people will not let themselves be entertained. They are willing to sacrifice their health and their comfort as part of being aggressive, pushy, penetrating, cutting, destructive. They would rather stick with that than let anyone touch them in a gentle and loving way. If you are such a person, and you get near any loving situation—for example, someone wants to stroke your head—you regard it as an insult: “Don’t touch me, I’m on this logic trip. Don’t try to mind my business.” It is a very individualistic approach. There is no room for compromise, because logic is saying yes or no constantly, all the time.

The southern quarter of the samsaric mandala is connected with pride. It is actually more arrogance or a self-enriching quality than pride in the ordinary sense. Ordinarily, when you say you are a proud person, there is an element of confidence involved. But the pride we are talking about is without dignity or confidence; it is simply self-assertive. It is arrogant in the sense that you are not willing to let yourself be regarded as needing to be rescued or saved. Not only that—you want to be acknowledged. You want people to acknowledge your richness or your potentiality for richness so that you can march into other people’s territory. If necessary, you are willing to roll into their territory, expand into it.

The image of this type of arrogance is a gigantic tank of honey being released. Waves and waves of sweet, gooey honey roll in your direction as you relate to an arrogant person of this type. There is no question about it, the honey is going to come. Slow and dignified in its own limited way, it is coming toward you. This is a perverted way of demonstrating richness. There’s no room for questioning—this richness simply descends on you. The person might constantly give you rich gifts of food and money. You are presented with gifts until you have to run away from the horror of this generosity. It becomes outrageous, overwhelming, demonic. There is no element of basic intelligence; it is simply heavy-handed. There may be some element of sharing, because that person also needs some comforting, but the approach to that becomes very heavy-handed too. Any sense of comfort or entertainment becomes more than is needed. It becomes uninviting and claustrophobic.

In the western quarter of the mandala is passion, or grasping. This is a mentality of tremendous suction. In relating to a seducer who is manifesting this passion, you get sucked in constantly. Your existence becomes less meaningful, because the existence of the seducer becomes more powerful than yours. You begin to regard yourself as just an insignificant snowflake that automatically melts when you get near the source of this suction. You are completely seduced, reduced to nothing, sucked in. The seduction of this passion asks you to become part of the seducer’s territory rather than a partner. There is no element of dance at all. Everything is continuously sucked in. There is no room for love in the sense of free exchange. Love becomes overwhelming. You are reduced to a part of the other person’s love rather than having the free choice of making love yourself. Your beauty and dignity and glamour become part of the other person’s power of suction. You become just a grain of metal with this gigantic lump of a magnet drawing you in, and you have no hold on anything. There’s no room for questioning. You are completely melted, sucked in.