The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (66 page)

TR:
[It happens] once you begin to conceptualize, once you begin to elaborate on it.

S:
But just the perception itself is still very accurate. So are perception and experience equal in that sense?

TR:
Perception is experience if you are
there.
But perception cannot be experience if you are not there.

S:
If you include yourself in the perception.

TR:
There’s no self to include.

S:
Is the sense that we have of a self perceiving, itself a perception? I’m talking about the sense of selfhood that I experience in confronting reality, as if I’m a corporation that has to deal with what’s around me. Is that a perception?

TR:
No, because that needs second thoughts to confirm it. The actual perception is the first thought.

S:
How do we know if we can trust our perceptions?

TR:
If you know that there’s no “we” as such, then it seems to go very smoothly.

S:
Well, how do I know if I can trust my perceptions?

TR:
You can reword it any way you want; it’s still the same thing.

S:
Well, how can you tell the difference between perception and projection?

TR:
In the case of a projection, you’re waiting for something to bounce back and confirm your existence. Perception is just sort of an antenna that exists.

S:
It seems you are saying that the confusion, or distortion, of perceptions arises from the perceiver wanting to do something with the perception, wanting to act somehow on what he or she is perceiving. Does the primitive confusion you spoke of at the beginning arise from the same source?

TR:
That is what we are talking about, yes. When we talk about it as ego or self, we are talking about that primordial one, that primeval state of thisness, or solid fixation. So, yes, we are talking about that.

S:
You’ve talked about this primordial sense of thisness as some sort of nonconceptual reference point and have said that the mandala principle exists whenever there is a reference point. Is this sense of thisness the same type of reference point from which the mandala principle or perspective springs?

TR:
It gets a little complicated in that area. There is a twist there, which is that when there is a reference point, that is a kind of primitive belief; then you realize that there is actually no one to react to that reference point, and that brings you to a different or higher level altogether. Both levels are active ingredients in the realization of the mandala principle. But [we have to be clear that] we are talking about two levels at the same time: the primitive or primordial ego and the realization of the nonexistence of the reactor to that.

S:
Not solidifying that . . .

TR:
Yes, not solidifying that solidification, so to speak.

S:
You say that with that level of perception, the mandala principle is a simple sense of connections?

TR:
Yes.

S:
And you’ve spoken before about trusting the karmic reality of cause and effect. Is that related to the sense of connection?

TR:
Yes, because that is the ultimate karmic cause and effect, that of no action. It is the highest form of karma, akarma, non-karma.

S:
Are the connections of the mandala principle in this non-karma?

TR:
Fundamentally, although as far as the expressions are concerned, there may be various styles. But those expressions are based on certain fundamentals that make it possible for the mandala principle to come and go and manifest itself in different fashions.

Student:
You talked about recounting an experience, a real perception, without losing the energy of it. It seems to me that that is what underlies a work of art. It’s the ability to hold on to the energy even though the experience is in the past—a kind of working that is not ego-based but is very positive. Does that seem like a possible interpretation?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think the point here is that you can work on both levels at once: the level of the ego-based world with its energies, emotions, and so on; and the non-ego-based level. There is no conflict between the two, for the very fact that they are organically linked somehow. The non-ego-based level is more refined. The ego-based level is a crude form of that.

S:
So you don’t try to cut them off from each other and keep one and throw the other out.

TR:
No, not at all. It’s very natural from that point of view.

S:
It sounds to me like perception of experience, perception of emptiness, and perception of luminosity are successively deeper layers of the same thing. Is that the case?

TR:
I think you see all three of them at once, but with different accents on them, depending on the mood of the reality of the time.

S:
You’ve spoken about the gap before. We’ve discussed and thought about it a lot, and I’m still confused. I previously thought you meant that the gap was that time when you are directly experiencing something. You are not interpreting or laying anything on the experience; you are just right there, so there is a gap in your normal sense of awareness, because your normal sense of awareness is based on the continuity of interpretations and commentaries. But when you talked about the gap earlier on here, you talked about it as that space that is between your direct experience and your interpretation in which you lose or exaggerate something. I was wondering if perhaps you could clarify that.

TR:
I think we are talking about two different ways of looking at things. There is a contrast here between the mahayana teaching of shunyata, which is a gap; and the tantric view of gap, or the mandala principle. Those two are slightly different. According to the tantric teachings, the realization takes place in the moment when the boundary occurs, because you are working with the energy rather than purely working with the absence of something. You are not trying to see everything as empty as such, but you are trying to see everything as transmutable energy. And the transformation takes place at just that point when you reach the boundary.

S:
Just when you reach the boundary of what?

TR:
The gap is just a shift between two reference points. In this case, the gap is not particularly a big deal, like the shunyata experience. It’s just a gap with a small
g.
It’s a shift, a change. There’s just a journey and you reach halfway between this and that, which is not particularly a shunyata type of experience. I wouldn’t say that the gap has the quality of emptiness. It is just going away from somewhere and arriving at some other situation. If you combine this with the mahayana’s experience of shunyata, then the experience of shunyata is included in the boundary. According to the vajrayana, the shunyata experience is actually in the boundary rather than particularly in the gap.

[Even in the mahayana,] the shunyata symbolism is that of a mother who gives birth. It is connected with the mother principle, the creator. So the idea here is that the creator is the boundary—the shunyata experience gives birth to the boundary. Here the gap has more energy in it than the Mahayana version of just shunyata, emptiness alone. Here shunyata is something to play with. Finally, shunyata finds a playmate, a lover, and therefore becomes more dynamic than the straight version, the straight, simple mahayana version where everything is transcended.

S:
It seems, then, that the Mahayana shunyata is an incomplete perception, something unreal created by the practitioner. If shunyata is really in the boundary where there’s lots of energy, the mahayana shunyata would be just a man-made thing.

TR:
You can’t say that exactly. If you are in it, you feel very complete. This approach contains a reference to further realities, so to speak. The very fact that more emphasis is put on transcendence creates a sense of still overcoming, still going beyond. Whereas in the vajrayana, going beyond is not important; the boundary, or the ridge, itself is important, rather than going beyond it. So it’s not getting inside the room from outside that is important; it’s not a question of climbing over the doorstep to get inside. It’s the doorstep itself that is important in the vajrayana. The boundary itself is very important, and it does not refer to transcending anything, particularly. It is regarded as energy rather than as an obstacle.

S:
Why do we need the mahayana conception of shunyata? Why don’t we just try dealing with the boundary from the beginning?

TR:
The boundary is regarded as an obstacle from the mahayana point of view. In the mahayana, you can only overcome the notion of the boundary by using the experiential logic that the inside of the boundary is the same as the outside of the boundary and that therefore there is no boundary—rather than regarding the boundary itself as a great thing.

S:
So is it necessary to go through the mahayana version of shunyata before indulging in—

TR:
The interesting point is that, although we may be talking about the vajrayana version of shunyata on the linguistic level, we might still be perceiving in a purely mahayana fashion. You can’t just suddenly make a policy change. It depends on the level of one’s growth.

Student:
Earlier you said that meditation is a bridge over the gap. If the gap is important, why would you want to bridge it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
To make the whole thing into a big boundary rather than having a gap.

S:
With the bridge the gap itself becomes obsolete?

TR:
The bridge is the boundary, so you have a very thick boundary, rather than there being a gap and then you come to a no-man’s-land and then to somebody else’s land. That’s the way it happens in Texas anyway.

S:
I am confused, because when you were talking about the mahayana symbolism of shunyata, you seemed to say both that the mother, or the creator, is the boundary and that she gives birth to the boundary.

TR:
Well, if you are relating to that, you are the boundary maker as well as the boundary itself.

S:
Oh, I see. The tantrics by not making that differentiation—

TR:
That’s right.

FIVE

A Glimpse of the Five Buddha Families

H
AVING DISCUSSED THE
three aspects of perception, we could perhaps go on to a more elaborate level of experience than that discussed in connection with them. Perceptions are a kind of kindling wood that brings us to a certain state of awareness of experience, which then becomes the experience of what is known as
isness.
This is a particular term that has been developed as part of the Buddhist vocabulary. I have not seen it used in this way anywhere else. In terms of actual experience, starting with perception, isness is the experience of things as they are, but not only that: that experience also confirms itself by itself. So we see things as they are—or maybe I should say, as they is—and then isness comes from seeing it as it is and tasting it.

In tantric language, this particular taste is known as
one taste
or
one flavor.
When we talk about one flavor, we do not mean abandoning everything but one particular situation and developing an allegiance to that particular one thing among many. It has nothing to do with there being a lack of many and therefore we happen to end up with one. It has nothing to do with making a choice or rejecting something else. In fact, it is the opposite: because there are no rejections, it is possible to stick with that one, which means all.

We have already talked about [the way in which] all and one could be similar. When we talk about many, generally it means covering many areas, accumulating a lot of stuff, a lot of pieces of information. But when we talk about all, that automatically means covering a large portion of the atmosphere of a situation. In this case, we are talking about a greater-area atmosphere, which is a state of experience of the world of reality.

[Ordinarily,] reality can be qualified by giving it various functions. But in this case, there is no function, there are no qualifications. All we can speak of here is nakedness, unclothedness. It is experience that is free from the clothing of conventionality, free from the clothing of relative truth. It is also free from all the other things that come from that—ego-orientation, orientation toward security, and orientation toward eternity.

Eternity here is the sense that one’s life can last forever. We hope that any kind of spiritual experience we might be able to have will make it worth living longer and might also help us to live longer. We hope that we will be able to live longer and longer and longer, that we will be able to survive eternally without having to face the truth of death. But this is a kind of simple-minded approach that I do not think is worth discussing at this point.

Beyond the level of that primitive approach, there is a sense of experiencing reality in its true nakedness—but not for any particular purpose. The conventional question at this point is, “Having discovered this, what am I going to get out of it? What is going to happen to me?” But the truth of the matter seems to be, nothing is going to happen to you. That’s it. There is nothing more. If I have disappointed you, I’m sorry, but we cannot do anything about it. That’s things as they are, or things “as it hangs.”

So we make successive attempts to get to unqualified experience, realization without any tail attached to it, without any confirmation or promises attached to it. And then we might begin to accept things as they are in a really simple, ordinary way; we will probably be able to perceive some glimpse of reality without conditions. At that point, we might say that we are experiencing the five types of buddha intelligence.