The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (64 page)

S:
But when people have been talking about splitting from the one, was that referring back to the alaya?

TR:
The alaya, yes.

S:
Why not from the dharmakaya?

TR:
We haven’t got to that level yet. We are just talking about halfway through the path, the territory of samsara, which is very personal for us. If we were to talk about dharmakaya that would be fictional. We are talking about the level we can actually experience, or grasp.

THREE

Instinct and the Mandala Perspective

L
ET US CONTINUE
by discussing the nature of the manifestation of emotional patterns that takes place in everyday life. There seems to be some conflict arising from the difference in the way those patterns exist and the way they manifest. We constantly have problems with that. Actually, there is no fundamental problem, but problems arise from the process of our reviewing what happens to us.

The way we exist is very plain and very simple. There is an influx of energies in the form of emotions and occasional flashes of ignorance and stupidity. And when a person is on the path of dharma, there are further occasional flashes of another kind of awareness that is sort of emptyhearted. This awareness takes place at the level where ego does not exist and where you cannot create further trips so as to entertain yourself with a sense of hopefulness. It is a kind of hopelessness that takes place.

As to what manifests, the way in which it manifests is very conditional. We receive some kind of a map, or pattern, some kind of data concerning how things work and how things happen. And at the same time, we try to interpret this. Between receiving the information and interpreting it, we tend to lose something. We tend constantly to exaggerate or miss something, so there is a big gap. Nevertheless, this is another form of truth. It is truth in its falsity, which is
some
kind of reality—we must admit that.

The end result of this whole process is that everything is extraordinarily complicated and detailed. And every bit of this is very meaningful to us. That seems to be the general pattern.

Though this process develops tremendous complexities, these nevertheless manifest in terms of certain forms or styles, all kinds of them. We cannot actually make systematic predictions as to exactly what is going to happen in this process and exactly how it will work; we cannot study the behavior patterns and put all the details down on an information sheet. But there are rough patterns. The only approach seems to be to try to the extent possible to perceive a generalized pattern without trying to interpret every detail.

We also have the distrustful quality of the judgment that goes on at the level of interpretation. The monitor, so to speak, or the commentator, has its tone of voice and its particular manner of expressing things, and its approach is extraordinarily distrustful.

One of the points in the traditional Buddhist way of viewing the question of what reality is or what truth is, is that in fact we cannot perceive reality, we cannot perceive truth. This is not to say that there is no reality or truth, but rather that whatever we perceive, if we happen to perceive anything, we see in accordance with some particular language or approach, and we color it with our own styles and ways of looking at things.

For instance, occasionally we have the experience of no ground, groundlessness, of no substance to our basic ego existence. But that groundlessness, that nonexistence, is not visible. Also, you cannot prove logically that such a thing as nonexistence exists and functions. Once you try to put the nonexistence of ego into systematic language or formulate it in any particular way in order to prove that that nonexistence does exist, this just becomes a greater [expression of] ego, a further way of proving some kind of existence, even though it is in the guise of nonexistence. So the process becomes very complicated and confusing.

Therefore, to realize the mandala perspective at all, we need some kind of aerial point of view, a way of seeing the whole thing totally and completely. In order to have that, we have to be willing to give up the details and the directions.

You might ask, What is left after we give up the details? Well, nothing very much, but at the same time quite a lot. But let us not even get into that question intellectually. It is a question of just doing it.

Understanding the mandala principle is not a matter of getting hold of a good-quality mandala, like the experts who appraise and buy and sell them. A mandala is something that is the product of nonthinking. At the same time, it is a product of enormous feeling, or rather, instinct. The perspective of instinct without logic is the perspective for experiencing the mandala principle.

We come back here to the practice of meditation. Meditation is a man-made thing, naturally; otherwise, there would be no such thing as meditation. It is a man-made version of enlightenment. But at the same time a sense of great ordeal and great hassle is present in the practice of meditation. It is not an easy matter. It is much more difficult not to do anything and just sit than to do something. Yet strangely, from the practice of meditation comes some kind of state of being. We realize a state of being that is utterly hopeless and has no chance of survival. From the practice of meditation, a sense of hopelessness and no chance of survival begins to occur, and sometimes there is even a sense of regression. Then, at some point, we begin to find a kind of a loose end, some area that we haven’t covered. That area that we haven’t covered is an interesting area. It has the qualities of instinct.

Instinct cannot be overpowered by efficiency. It has to be ripened through a natural organic process. So to come to a realization of the mandala principle, a person must go through the artificiality of something like the technique of meditation. Doing that, a person also begins to go through a sense of disappointment. This tends to bring a lot of space and exaggerate the sense of organicness, of instinct. That is the working basis for beginning our study of mandala and the five buddha principles. It is very important for us to know that this study is very closely linked with practice and that it involves a lot of discipline.

Student:
Is the mandala principle a process, or is it that you understand the mandala principle after you go through the artificial process of meditation and the disappointment and the coming to instinct?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The understanding of it is maybe a process. The product of the understanding is self-existent. It is like digging up a treasure from the ground. The treasure is there already. The digging process is an organic one; it involves work and labor. Then once you have dug the treasure up, it’s there. From that point of view, the process is just temporary.

Student:
I don’t understand what a mandala is. I know it is not just the pictures in the books. Is it the imagery of that process you just described?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We have the symbolism of the mandala and we have the basic principle of the mandala. As a basic principle, mandala is that which is contained in everyday life. That includes the animate and the inanimate, form and the formless, emotion and non-emotion. Wherever there is relationship, there seems to be the mandala principle—wherever there is connection with any kind of reference point. I am not speaking of reference point at the conceptual level, but of reference point on the level of things as they are. For example, light and darkness are not influenced by concepts, particularly, but are a natural organic thing. Whenever there is this kind of reference point, there is mandala principle.

Mandala
literally means “group,” “society,” “organization,” that which is interlinked. It is like the notion of an accumulation of lots of single details, which, put together, make a whole. In the books, it is described as like a yak’s tail. There are lots of single hairs that make up the tail, but what you see is a big bundle of hair, which constitutes a yak’s tail. You cannot separate each hair out of it.

Student:
You talked about giving up details and direction and having an aerial perspective. It seems to me that that might get tricky. One might get stuck in ignorance or some kind of zombie state.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The point here seems to be that if you are already at the ignorance level, you have nothing to give up, because you are not aware of the details in any case. Whereas if you do have something to give up, that is to say, if you have developed some kind of awareness of the existence of details, then you bypass or transcend it. This actually makes the details more real. The more you give up, the more they arise. And you cannot give it up just like that; it’s not possible. Constant practice is needed.

S:
Would that somehow be related to, in working with emotions, trying not to make use of them, but just letting them take you over. Or in dealing with panic, just letting it take you over. Would it mean not being concerned with this and that with regard to the emotions, not trying to do something with them or give them direction? Would that be like an aerial point of view in regard to the emotions?

TR:
Yes, I suppose, to some extent. But letting them take you over here would not so much mean purely becoming subject to them. Then they would not be taking over but invading. That would be an inward direction rather than an outward direction. On the other hand, if you suppress them, that would also be a process of rejecting. So I suppose it is a question of completely letting be. That way, the emotions can function freely, free from any burden whatsoever, from anywhere, physically and psychologically. Then they function in a way traditionally described as like a cloud arising in the sky and then dissolving. Letting be in this way is not exactly just doing nothing; it is also a way of experiencing the emotions. Unless you let them be as they are, you cannot experience them.

S:
What one gives up is the tendency to do something with them?

TR:
Yes, that’s right. Once you begin to do something with them, there’s no freedom. It is imprisonment—you are imprisoned by them.

Student:
How does the freedom you just described relate to the freedom you were talking about before? You said that the way the five buddha principles relate to the basic ignorance is a kind of freedom, a freedom of being able to move around because of being totally with the ignorance. How does that relate to the freedom you were just describing of letting things be?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think it’s the same thing. Is there any problem?

S:
I’m just somehow very confused. I’m trying to put things together and—

TR:
Well, I wouldn’t try to put things together too neatly.

Student:
Could you explain a little further what you mean by “instinct”? Is it like what animals are considered to have—just doing the appropriate thing automatically? Or is it something else?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Instinct in this case is not purely a physical or biological effect that reflects onto the state of awareness or state of mind. Instinct here is an experience in which you feel that you are completely adequate, that you do not need the aid of conventional logic or any proof of anything. It is a sense of a firsthand account, firsthand experience, actually experiencing. At that point, you do not watch yourself experiencing, you simply just do experience. It is very straightforward. The closest traditional analogy, which a lot of people like the siddhas Saraha and Tilopa have used, is that of a mute man tasting sweetness, intense sweetness. It is delicious to taste. The mute has a real taste of this sweetness, he tastes it magnificently, but he can’t describe it because he is mute. Muteness here refers to the absence of intellectualizing, of describing the details and facets of this sweet taste. It is a total experience. This is quite different from animal instinct, which is driven by conditions or physical situations or relationship to physical situations. In this case, it is a firsthand account of things as they are.

Student:
You were talking about the gap that occurs between the receiving of the data and the interpretation of it. You said that the interpretation was false but that there was a truth in that falsity. Could you say more about that? It is inevitable that that discrepancy will be there, isn’t it? That discrepancy is there in every case, right?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes, definitely. It is not a question of trying to avoid that. Things do happen that way. That kind of gap is there. One has to develop a sort of overview of the whole thing. Then quite possibly there would be the tendency to not separate between the way things are and the way they manifest. Both become the same thing. That does not mean that that will free you from the second type of thing [the interpretation] happening. It will still happen in any case. But the idea is that some kind of trust begins to develop somewhere, trust that even though there is a gap, it doesn’t matter.

S:
Is that the same idea as what you were saying about overlooking the details, or rather taking an overall view of them? You said that to see the mandala, you would have to overlook the details and adopt an aerial perspective.

TR:
Yes, that’s it. Yes. Because if you begin to see the way it manifests, there are a lot of details in that.

Student:
You used the phrase “empty-hearted awareness.” Could you say more about what that is?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is not supposed to be a metaphysical term. It is an experiential expression. It refers to a sense of the rug being pulled out from under your feet, along with a sense of nondwelling—not exactly a sense of floating, but of nondwelling. It’s a stillness, not a pulsating, flickering kind of thing. It is as though you have suddenly been exploded and then you dissolve into the atmosphere, slowly. It is sort of an evaporation of something or other.