The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume One (73 page)

I am sure that a lot of people have read and heard about the practice of meditation over and over again, but when I talk about meditation in this case it is not that of the mind pondering on different subjects, nor is it some means of achieving power, psychic power or the power of concentration, nor for that matter is it the business of trying to become a successful mentally controlled person. The meditation I am talking about is connected with life itself. Supposing that everybody has a tremendous urge to practice meditation and so they go off to retreats and become sannyasins or bhikkus or hermits and so on—there would be no one left to run this world. However much we may say we have independence, however much we think we ourselves are independent and self-sufficient, we still share and we still need what one might call the karmic link and the national karma of where we live.

And now with the structure of all countries being Americanized, with things developing as they are—vast machinery, vast organization which transcends the individual mind so that they can only be grasped in terms of computers, the whole thing has grown so big that to some people it is very frightening. Yet I would not say that this was particularly good, or for that matter particularly bad. The point is we cannot fight against it, and therefore our meditation has to be translated in terms of our pattern of life.

Living in such a world we really have to be practical for we cannot afford to divide society up into those who practice meditation and those who are workers, those who work in the factories and those who are intellectuals and spend most of their lives in books. We can’t afford to anymore—the world is too small. Once we have grasped this we see that we can only develop by understanding ourselves—that before we blame the world and before we try to save the world that first of all the whole question has to come back to us—
ourselves
—starting on the nearest one, that is—me, you, us. Now in order to start this change it is going to be necessary somehow to recreate the tribal structure that has been dissolved. The tribal structure that once existed.

For instance, if you are in a big city you may feel that there is no kind of link at all. Just one person or a couple of people walking in a street, or getting on a bus, can seem kind of desolate. There is nothing as a binding factor. The only binding factor may seem to be money, but even that is not a binding factor at all. This need to recreate the tribal structure can only be understood, of course, by those who live in the West and so have gone through the various stages of fascination for machine culture that the geographical East is going through at the moment, and of course we still are involved in it ourselves. Then comes the inevitable second stage. We feel we have no alternative, we are drawn into it and we have no control. I am sure that in the East when the technology is developed and this gigantic machinism and material force has invaded completely that they too will understand. So you see that the negative happenings of the new age also have a tremendous creative and positive element to them as well. One can’t try to abandon one life and try to create a new one, but rather let us try to work with it. Let us make a beginning.

Let us take a group of ten friends—in the sense that ten must have started with one. Without one there would be no two, no three, no four. Start with one of us. Now, how A will communicate to B, and how A will understand the A-ness of himself, say, before he has any idea of B—that is the real problem. This is the problem of communication. Now we have a tremendous problem of communication. In Buddhist terminology this is called duality. There is a tremendously thick wall built between us, between you and me, each of us like animals in a zoo. All of us in cages. There is a monkey from China here—and a gorilla from Africa next door—somehow we have to remove the bars. But if we are going to remove the bars then we have to develop some kind of strength within us. This is what is really lacking. And this strength comes from faith, real faith. And faith is quite different from pride or being self-centered. This faith comes from a willingness to open out. The whole trouble stems from here. The structure of the future depends on us individually. We have arrived in an age where the study of the great wisdom of the world, religion, and tradition however important they are, are not enough. There is one more urgent thing we have to do. We must create a structure which allows a real communication. At the moment we merely have glimpses of communication that open and close. There is one person outside us and there is another busy monkey working inside us—this is known in Buddhist tradition as the monkey mind. The five senses are like five windows. The consciousness is like a monkey restlessly looking first in one window and then in another. But that is not enough.

There has to be real communication. And someone has to start. If no one begins nothing will happen. And having started and developed and been able to contact one person then one is able to communicate to a third person, and then a fourth gradually develops, and so on.

It’s no use individuals trying to search for happiness in the beginning, only to find that there’s no one to share their happiness with at the end. For, in the process of finding happiness we forget what we were looking for, and we find something else, and then we go on and on and on—and it is exactly that causes the confusion. We have to see that the answer is not one of spirituality alone any more than it is one of politics alone. Some people may believe that if the whole world practiced meditation, suppose the whole world meditated for two hours every morning then went to their jobs and continued in business peacefully—some people think that would be enough. Other people think that we are fine as we are—some people live, some people die, in any case I have security, insurance, work, everything—as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t affect me. Others among us think that there should be some kind of revolution, perhaps Communism, or let us say pure socialism is the only answer because the structure is wrong. And so you see there are many conflicting ideas coming in. But altogether—there is violence. There is war in Vietnam. There is protest against the war in Vietnam, so one violence has started another violence. There is war in Europe and in America too. One violence creates another. And what Buddha teaches us is not just specifically to accept it, but to understand the cause of it and try to do something creative about it. We really must try to see through events to their source. A window is smashed. All right, we’ve done it. Next week the window is repaired again. We smash it again, and in a few days there’s a big article in the newspaper. Then something else comes in the newspaper. People have forgotten about what happened because no positive contribution had been developed. So before we start the protest or if you like the anarchy we must first of all within ourselves try to overcome this need for an unnecessary kind of outlet of desire to do something. Turn this energy into opening up communication instead of just using it as aggressiveness. The world is changing at tremendous speed and I would like to end by saying that I realize that we cannot recreate another kind of life by settling whole populations in the countryside with everybody doing manual work and handicrafts and so on, with all the wonderful things that people have forgotten. What we have to deal with is the kind of psychological materialism in our heads. We are allowing ourselves to be fed ideas and concepts from outside in a way that never lets us really be free anyway. It is inward materialism that we have to deal with first. It is the war that is going on inside our own heads to which we have to call the truce. Having done so doesn’t mean that everyone has to become an enlightened person by any means. But at least if one person made an attempt at it and then began to work with someone else there would soon be a kind of communal work together.

Like in London it’s not so much the colors, the chairs, the walls of the Underground which depress us but the faces, the people moving like ants, people moving in and out, in and out, each with their own depression. Let us begin to create a body of people moving about and carrying their own light.

T
HE DEFINITIONS
that appear here are specific to the use of the terms in this book and should not be construed as their only or even their most common meanings. For additional information on terms defined here, the reader may wish to consult the glossary in
The Rain of Wisdom
or other books by Chögyam Trungpa.

amrita
(Skt.): Ambrosia, food of the gods; the elixir of immortality; also a metaphor for spiritual healing.

anatman
(Skt.): Selflessness or egolessness.

anatta
(Pali):
See
anatman.

atiyana
(Skt.): “The ultimate way”; the last and highest vehicle of spiritual instruction.

bardo
(Tib.; also
pardo
): The indeterminate state intermediate between death and rebirth.

bhikshu
(Skt.): A Buddhist monk who has received the higher ordination; a full member of the sangha.

bodhisattva
(Skt.
bodhi
= “awakened state of mind”;
sattva
= “being” or “essence” in the sense of being without hesitation): One committed to following the path of compassion and the perfection of the six paramitas. The characteristic of bodhisattvas is that their actions do not refer back to a center or ego; they do not dwell in the absorption quality of meditation, which is without clarity or inspiration.

Bön
(Tib.; also Pön): The old religion of the Tibetans prior to the coming of Buddhism; a form of shamanism.

buddha
(Skt.): “The awake,” one who has won the victory over ignorance (here likened to a sleep full of good and bad dreams) and attained enlightenment. Shakyamuni Buddha is the historical buddha of this age, according to Buddhist belief.

buddhamandala
(Skt.): A symbolic representation of various levels and aspects inherent in buddhahood.

chakra
(Skt.): A wheel or circle. Used in certain centers or focal points of the human body, with their special subtle and spiritual correspondences, which figure in various forms of yoga.

chöten
(Tib.):
See
stupa.

crazy wisdom
: Personified as Vidyadhara, the holder of scientific knowledge. In this case, knowledge is not impersonal and abusive but plays a compassionate role. This is outrageous wisdom devoid of self and the common sense of literal thinking. Crazy wisdom is wild; in fact, it is the first attempt to express the dynamics of the tenth stage of the bodhisattva, to step out with nakedness of mind, unconditioned, beyond conceptualization. In this state, one acts purely on what is, with the qualities of earth, water, fire, space, and stormy air.

dakini
(Skt.): The feminine principle associated with wisdom, or prajna. One finds many references to the dakini as prajnaparamita, the mother of the buddhas. It is pure knowledge, sharp intelligence, which can create chaos or harmony. As has been cautioned by Nagarjuna, misconceptions about prajnaparamita or shunyata are lethal because the excitement of theoretical discovery is not in harmony with fundamental energy, particularly when one abuses these energies. But when the marriage of knowledge and intuitive skillful means takes place in conjunction with the perfection of the six paramitas, then everything is buddha activity; the dance begins.

dana
(Skt.): Generosity, giving without expectation, or opening, welcoming others. In other words, one does not establish the animal instinct of territory in oneself, but allows others to help themselves “to me.” As is said in the bodhisattva disciplines, welcoming is the first gesture of the bodhisattva. Without this, none of the other perfections could be put into practice.

dharma
(Skt.): The religion founded by the Buddha, his doctrine; the law or “norm” governing all existence; any particular entity, thing, or being. The dharmas are the innumerable things composing the universe. (
Dharma
comes from a root out of which a whole series of related meanings can be drawn.)

dharmakaya
(Skt.): The “body of quiddity” or “essential body” of all the buddhas; the “body of the norm”; the inexpressible reality underlying everything.

dhyana
(Skt.): Meditation or concentration. It means being watchful with that basic panoramic awareness that characterizes all the other paramitas. Dhyana is the means of stabilizing oneself within the framework of seeing relationships and thereby seeing that one can afford to open. This openness and keen meditative intelligence bring one to deal with the nowness of each new situation.

drokpa
(Tib.): A Tibetan highlander; an alpine herdsman.

dütsi
(Tib.):
See
amrita.

EH
: The seed syllable for all-encompassing space, the womb that accommodates all creations, the mother principle. It is passiveness or emptiness.

garuda
(Skt.): A symbolic mythical bird, or celestial hawk, used in iconography. According to the story about the garuda, it nests in the wish-fulfilling tree of life, is full grown in the egg, and subdues the viciousness of the nagas (snake deities symbolizing the swamplike quality of passion). Since it is mature from birth, it signifies absolute confidence.

Gautama Buddha
: The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who came to be known as Shakyamuni Buddha.

Geluk
(Tib.): The latest of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, founded early in the fifteenth century by Lobsang Trakpa, surnamed Tsongkhapa. In this school great emphasis is laid on scriptural study and learning generally. Both the Dalai and Panchen lamas belong to this school.