The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (54 page)

In many cases, people want something like this to happen, because they actually do regard themselves as insignificant. They want to be loved, they want to be sucked in. But even people who have esteem for themselves as individual entities cannot help themselves once they are confronted with the extraordinarily powerful suction of the western quarter of the mandala.

Next is the northern quarter of the mandala, from which jealousy comes. It is not exactly jealousy; we do not seem to have the proper term in the English language. It is a paranoid attitude of comparison rather than purely jealousy, and this becomes a very heavy-handed factor as you find yourself invited to compare yourself with
that
all the time. This sense of comparison becomes heavy-handed because you see
that
situation as richer than this one. One finds one’s own situation lacking and tries to bloat it up like a bloated corpse. There is a logical mentality of comparison. “Since that is bigger than me, I should build myself up until I am much bigger than that.” I try to build myself up to the point of being gigantic, huge, so that my sheer size can undermine the competition. So it is more than jealousy; it is a sense of competition.

Again, the game here is one of drawing the other in, rather than undermining or completely absorbing it. You do not want to absorb the object of jealousy, but you want to let it sit there and finally be completely undermined so you can crush it down. The sense of the jealousy says: That thing was bigger than me when we began, but now I’m becoming half its size, now I am its full size, and now I’m slightly bigger, now I’m much bigger, huge. Now I’m huge and great and gigantic and that thing out there has become insignificant for me. Nothing is threatening for me anymore at all.

Those five factors—ignorance in the center, anger in the east, pride in the south, passion in the west, and jealousy in the north—form a complete portrait of our world. From that point of view, we are the ideal mandala. In our limited way, we have all the richness and all the colorful and intelligent aspects of existence. Without discussing the negative aspects of the mandala, there is no way of understanding its positive aspects. The point now is to understand the complete psychological portrait of confused mind.

Student:
Could you explain pride a bit more. I didn’t understand it very well.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s a question of trying to extend your territory by disregarding the object you are relating with. In other words, you demonstrate your richness and create a claustrophobic situation for others.

S:
What is the honey symbolic of?

TR:
The potential for that kind of richness has a sweet and all-pervasive quality, and that sweetness is overwhelming, gooey. Honey is sweet and seductive, but we can only relate with it to a very limited extent. We don’t expect to
bathe
in honey. We just expect to taste a spoonful, which is already a lot. But when we find waves and waves of it descending upon us, it becomes extremely suffocating.

S:
So pride is extremely suffocating?

TR:
Yes.

S:
Do others relate with it?

TR:
We are already one of those others, and we are dying in it. The proud person himself or herself is expressing his or her death. But we are talking about it from the point of view of the other person at this point. That is the only way we can talk about it. That goes for all five principles. We have to talk about them from the point of view of the other person, the one who is watching, the victim of those things, rather than from the point of view of being in it. It is worthless talking about that. There’s no point in talking about how you feel about it from the inside. How you feel is like being sick in a hospital, having a terrible pain. The best way of explaining the pain is from the point of view of a witness of your pain rather than looking into how you would express it yourself. That goes for death as well.

Student:
Rinpoche, what is the relationship between the center, deaf and dumb, and the four quarters?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
All four quarters function and conduct their process by being deaf and dumb, by relating to their particular situation without being sensitive.

S:
Is the assignment of particular directions to the various qualities arbitrary, or is there some meaning to that?

TR:
There is a relationship between east and west, north and south. There are polarities of anger and passion, pride and jealousy. There are polarities and pulls of all kinds that happen according to that pattern. It is not just random.

Student:
I don’t understand why the portrait is so negative. Why are we taking this negative approach?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If you understand the deaf-and-dumb aspect, that is the key to the whole thing. When we discuss the various negative qualities, we do not particularly talk about how to overcome them, but about how to realize the heavy-handedness of each one. That brings some clue of how to relate with it. The alchemistic approach of base metal changing into gold comes later.

S:
Does one find oneself more in one of the areas of the mandala than in the others?

TR:
You have your own feeling of the mandala, which is related to one part, but it is still partly related to all the others. There is still the deaf-and-dumb quality always there. You are not willing to let yourself see what is happening as your game. That factor is always there. We could say that we have a certain potential. Because we are one of the four, we have certain characteristics. We are not transparent people, so we each have our own heavy-handedness, which is exactly what makes the path necessary. The path is for the use of heavy-handed people. Because of their particular heavy-handedness, they are on the path. So we should not regard that as something bad that we have to reject or destroy.

Student:
In our discussion group we were saying that no matter how heavy-handed we are, we do somehow perceive the game quality of our trip as we are doing it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Except that we decide to play deaf and dumb. Understanding is how we play the game in this case.

S:
What’s the alternative to playing deaf and dumb?

TR:
Not playing it.

S:
What do you do?

TR:
You don’t do anything.

S:
You mean being spontaneous.

TR:
Well, spontaneity has all kinds of derogatory connotations connected with being loose.

S:
I was thinking of the positive aspect of being spontaneous.

TR:
But even then, it can become quite trippy. When you talk about spontaneity, it seems to mean just doing what’s there, letting loose, which is a rather primitive and simple-minded idea of freedom. It’s not just a question of being spontaneous. You are spontaneous because there is a certain intelligence functioning with the spontaneity. We’ll come to that when we talk about the anti-ignorance aspect of the five principles. The idea of spontaneity involves being generous at the same time. But you could be overwhelmed by your generosity and get sucked into it. Then you might become frivolous rather than spontaneous. It’s extremely sensitive.

Student:
In that case, where does discipline fit in?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Precisely there. You have to discipline your spontaneity with intelligence. That way spontaneity has an element of orderly chaos in it. In talking about orderly chaos, we could say that
orderly
is disciplined, awake, and
chaos
is acceptance of the energy that happens within that realm.

Student:
You seem to be describing the situation of one person in relation to the space around him or her. I was wondering at what point in our discussion of mandala we are going to talk about reciprocity, interaction. I’m talking about, instead of waiting for later when things will be transmuted, seeing that they are already transmuted.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s a question of how much you are willing to give in as opposed to wanting to learn something out of this. When you want to learn something out of it, that is very fishy. You have an ulterior motive of wanting to do something with your learning that automatically puts the whole thing off balance. If you are willing to just give in without learning, if you are willing to become rather than learn, that clears the air entirely. At that point, the whole thing becomes a total expression of freedom rather than a student situation. You see, when you want to learn something out of it, you are relating to knowledge as something other than you. When you are willing to
be
with the situation—when you don’t give a shit whether you learn or not but you want to be in what is. . . . That is very difficult, but it is very simple at the same time.

S:
It seems to me that you have to start by learning, because you are not able to just be right away. If you start by learning, there’s some chance to develop an intuitive feeling of things. Then you might be able to just be at that point.

TR:
The question is whether you regard learning as something extraordinarily precious or as just something matter-of-fact. You could have the matter-of-fact attitude at the beginning as well. Then you would not have the attitude of being starved, therefore dealing with knowledge as a foreign element coming to you, feeling that knowledge is coming to you and you have to take the whole thing preciously. Instead, as much as possible, you can relate to the whole thing experientially. That way learning becomes matter-of-fact rather than extraordinary.

Student:
Where does faith come in?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I suppose in this case faith is the whole approach. If you have faith in yourself as a working basis in a very basic way, you feel that you can handle this whole process. If you don’t have faith in yourself, then your relationship to the path becomes living in a myth.

Student:
I still don’t understand why we have to talk about the five principles from the point of view of a witness. Why can’t we talk about it in terms of ourselves?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You are relating with your projections anyway. In any case, you need a formula in your head in terms of language, which automatically means this as opposed to that. So seeing it from the point of view of the other amounts to the same thing.

FOUR

The Watcher’s Game

T
HERE SEEMS TO BE
more to the five types of samsaric patterns than five heavy-handed styles of existence that are unrelated to each other. The question arises as to how and why these five types of eccentricity occur. This is very important to know, not from the point of view of how to solve the problem, but rather from the point of view of understanding why and how things function together as part of the mandala situation. We are not looking at this whole situation with the idea of getting rid of the problem, because it is an inescapable situation. We cannot get rid of it. It seems to be deep-rooted and completely ingrained in our individual styles. So at this point, I would like to present the active force that relates with basic being and with the five samsaric principles.

The basic being we are discussing here has an element of clarity to it. This is clarity in the sense of not expecting anything at all, just waiting to relate with the next situation. But along with that clarity, there is also a sense of security that would like to capture something, make a record out of the whole situation, make it into a workable situation from the point of view of maintaining ego’s existence. That workable situation that we deliberately manufacture out of nothingness, out of the openminded situation, is known as watcher.

We are not satisfied with ourselves and therefore we try our best to satisfy ourselves, which is the activity of the watcher. It is a self-defined, dead-end way of surviving. In order to maintain ourselves, we keep track of the limitations of that maintenance, and because we know the limitations of that maintenance, we try to maintain something more. It is a constant, ongoing situation almost like that of fighting death. We might know that death is coming very soon, that it is very close, but still we do not accept death; somehow we try to make a living out of death itself. In fact we could say that the whole samsaric structure, samsara and its seductions, is based on making something eternal out of something impermanent and transitory. Things are transitory—they cease to exist because they have been born. But by a twist of logic, we come to the conclusion that this transitoriness is happening all the time, and we try to make the transitoriness into eternity. In the Buddhist tradition, we do not talk about the soul as a continuing entity. The reason we do not is that it would be the ultimate hypocrisy—believing in nonexistence as something that exists, believing in transitoriness as something that is continuous. And that is watcher. The watcher validates its existence out of falsity; it tries to manufacture falsity as truth.

Believing in eternity seems to be the core of the matter for watcher and for the five aspects of the samsaric mandala altogether. We see the texture of vajra aggression or the texture of ratna richness. In order to maintain that texture and prove that there is something happening, we have to develop a certain way of seeing that texture. It consists of gaps, unconditioned gaps, and conditioned points. It is like an enlarged photograph in which you can begin to see the grain of the film. Both the grains and the space in between the grains are constituents of the photograph. What we try to do is convert the unconditioned space into conditioned dots or points. And we each have our own style of doing that, of looking at things that way. There is the aggression of the vajra family, the pride of the ratna family, the passion of the padma family, the jealousy of the karma family, and the stupidity of the Buddha family. In whatever style, we try to hang on to
something
out of nothing.