The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (10 page)

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If one becomes involved in contemplative practices which entail contemplating all kinds of visual objects without first having developed basic shamatha and vipashyana, it could be quite dangerous. The scriptures say that if you become involved in visualizing without basic training of the mind, you could become Rudra, an egomaniac. Apart from that, if a person is following a very simple technique of meditation practice and has a background in the basic training, there’s no problem at all. That is why shamatha, for example, is called development of peace. It is harmless, very kind. That’s why vipashyana is called development of insight or awareness—because it sharpens your basic being. It is designed for those people who are following the first stages of the path.

According to the Buddhist tradition, there are five paths that make up the path: the path of accumulation, the path of unification, the path of seeing, the path of meditation, and the path of no more learning. So in this case, being a beginner, you are starting on the path of accumulation. Traditionally, a person on the path of accumulation should begin with shamatha practice, which is a harmless practice, but at the same time very fruitful. That’s how the Buddha designed the path. And it seems it has been working for twenty-five hundred years. Nobody has gone utterly crazy except those people who didn’t follow his path.

Student:
How do you reconcile what you said in your first talk about being willing to waste time and what you talked about tonight about 25 percent expectation? I mean, a rock doesn’t expect anything. It’s just sitting there. That’s what you said in your first talk. Then tonight, we’re expecting something.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s also wasting time. Expecting something is wasting your time as well, because you are not going to get anything.

S:
So wasting time is not part of your feeling, then. You don’t feel like you’re wasting time.

TR:
It doesn’t really matter what you do, you’re still wasting time. You don’t have to make a martyr of yourself, saying, “I feel great because I’m wasting my time. I’m being a perfectly good Buddhist and a good meditator, because I’m wasting my time.”

S:
So wasting time with that attitude . . . that really isn’t an attitude that you want to cultivate.

TR:
Wasting time’s not an attitude. It’s just a fact.

THREE

The Star of Bethlehem

T
O UNDERSTAND THE
relationship of awareness and being, we have to look into the notion of being at this point. There are all kinds of approaches toward being. Being good, being bad, being sensible, being crazy. Beatitude [be-attitude]. All kinds of notions of being. But when we talk about being in relation to awareness, we are talking about unconditional being. You just be. Without any questions about
what
you are being. It is an unconditional way of being.

Unconditional being is a state of mind that is involved with a certain attitude. You might say, “Could that be unconditional mind if it is involved with an attitude? If it is also an attitude, we couldn’t define it as unconditional being.” True. But oddly enough, even unconditional being requires an attitude in order to develop to the unconditional level. We have to make some condition in order to develop unconditionality. We cannot begin perfectly. Otherwise it would cease being the beginning and become the end, an achievement.

The reason we refer to this whole process as the beginner’s level is that it is the level of clumsiness, the level of messiness. It is unstructured, confused, and so forth. There is confusion, messiness, untidiness—and constant dichotomy, constant reference point. But at least we are moving in the direction of unconditional being.

We are gazing at the star of Bethlehem on the horizon. It is far, far away, but still there is hope. A spark of luminosity is there. The land may be dark, the sky may be gray and black. It might be chilly, and we might be cold, uncomfortable, tired, and restless. But nevertheless, the star of Bethlehem is over there. Human beings hope. The final hope that human beings could ever be hopeful of is enlightenment, the star of Bethlehem on the horizon.

The buddhas, tathagatas, and great teachers have developed skillful means throughout the ages. Their approach is to hold up enlightenment like a carrot in front of a donkey. There is a carrot thousands of miles away shining, and you have to walk and walk and walk and go get it. The donkey doesn’t have the carrot at this point, at the beginner’s level, but he has to be inspired. So a faraway inspiration is provided. Something is taking place way off there on the horizon. There is a big space, a huge desert landscape.

The point (apart from all this poetic imagery) is that we need hope, the powerful hope of attaining enlightenment in this lifetime. We need that hope because of having to relate with the constant chatter that goes on in our mind, the emotional ups and downs of all kinds that go on, the disturbances that we experience, the constant, ongoing process taking place in our state of being. We need a reference point connected with that.

Hope can be categorized into two types. Spiritual aspiration is one, and the hope of gaining power is another. As far as aspiration is concerned, the students need to relate with a spiritual friend,
kalyanamitra
in Sanskrit,
gewe she-nyen
in Tibetan. A spiritual friend is very important. You cannot start even at the beginning of the beginning without relating with a person who has gone through this particular journey and achieved results, enlightenment. It is necessary to have that kind of reference point, a lineage holder, a craftsman. You have to have information. You have to gather information about the handicraft—how the knowledge is passed down. You have to relate with somebody who knows how to make the dharma part of a visible world rather than letting it remain a myth. The spiritual friend, kalyanamitra, is a person who avoids a speculative attitude toward the teaching. He keeps it from being mythical. He brings it about in reality. He has done it, you can do it. It is possible and visible. It is obvious.

Such a relationship could begin purely through the fame of a certain spiritual friend, or guru for that matter, a person who is reputed to have power over other people’s confusion. Confusion doesn’t exist when you meet a certain guru. You could follow such a person by faith, or else you could have a personal experience. You could experience that meeting such a person is very powerful. You could actually experience that in the presence of such a person, you experience your own basic sanity, a sense of solidness. A sense of reality actually takes place.

So there are two choices. Either you could be the blind-faith type, who just believes and worships without logic. Or else you could be the type of person who doesn’t believe, who is extremely skeptical, highly opinionated, full of his own philosophies of all kinds. A person like that could still meet a spiritual friend on an eye-level basis and could explore how he is, why he is, and what level of spiritual operation he is performing. That doesn’t mean to suggest that to pass your examination the spiritual friend has to be levitating three inches above you or constantly emanating sparks of enlightenment in the form of fireworks. It is the personal relationship that is very important.

Traditionally the guru is described as like the sun shining on the earth. Every aspect of this earth—every flower petal, every leaf, every blade of grass that grows—is related to the sun in accordance with the four seasons. Each flower on this earth has a personal relationship with the sun, although the sun does not particularly personally direct its attention with any bias, does not actually shine more on the rosebush than on the poppy or anything like that. The whole process depends on how much receptivity there is, how much openness.

So personal openness is the important thing, rather than purely living on faith. Faith can be blind or intelligent. Open faith is intelligent, being willing to include one’s confusion and one’s understanding at the same time. Blind faith is purely going by facts and figures; thinking in terms of quick results; depending on fame, reputation, and so forth. It is like saying you should read this book because this book is a best-seller. Five million copies have been sold, therefore it must be good. It is possible that five million stupid people bought it and read it. But that’s the kind of reference point followed by blind faith.

So in following the spiritual path it is very much necessary to have a personal relationship with a teacher, a kalyanamitra,
gewe she-nyen
. The spiritual teacher presents you with the star of Bethlehem. He takes you out of your cozy home. Maybe outside, it is brisk or even biting cold. He says, “Shall we put our coat on? Let’s just step out and take a look at what’s happening in the universe.”

So it is a cold winter night and your spiritual friend decides to take you out on a walk. He says, “Put on your boots. Don’t punish yourself. Wear a coat, a warm coat. If you like, take a cigar along with you. Now let us take a walk, step out of our mud house or our plastic house or whatever we are living in, and walk around. Watch the steps at the door when you go out. It’s rather dark out. Give your eyes time to adjust from the light inside to the dark outside. Let’s step out, but be careful, watch your step. Don’t tread on the dog shit on the sidewalk.” He’s very practical, very careful. He takes you out on this cold winter night, and you can hear every grass stalk covered with frozen dew crunching under your feet. Then, once you have made a relationship with your ground and your vision has adjusted to that kind of night light—maybe it is a new moon and there is no moonlight—then the stars appear very bright. There may be occasional clouds at the edges of the horizon, but there is the star of Bethlehem shining, shivering because of the cold weather.

So the spiritual friend’s role is to take you out for a walk to look at the star of Bethlehem. “Take a look. We are going to go out
there
. Our trip begins tomorrow. Maybe we should walk or maybe we should drive or fly or take a train to see the star. Whatever.” Then you get a personal experience, which is mutual between you and the spiritual friend, and then you have a goal, the idea that you want to get to the star of Bethlehem—enlightenment. It is a real experience at that point, no myth. It is not an optical illusion at all. There is the star of Bethlehem out there shining, and it is not a matter of conmanship at all. It’s a real experience, very real. According to the Zen tradition, it is known as a satori experience. Or it can be called the meeting of two minds. A person has shown you a certain way of handling yourself, your emotions, disciplines of all kinds. But the main point here is making enlightenment real, rather than purely a myth.

Until we’ve had this experience we might think, “It might work, let’s take a chance.” But somehow it doesn’t become practical enough. We’ve been taking those kinds of chances for a long, long time, since we became involved in the circle of samsara. We thought we were going to be made happy one day through our striving, speeding, trying to grasp, trying to create a comfortable nest. We have done all kinds of guesswork, and we are hoping still. We never gave up hope. But somehow it actually didn’t work. It wasn’t a brilliant scheme, shall we say. It was rather a dumb and stupid one, in fact. We can’t blame the historians or the philosophers or the scientists, particularly, or the creator of this universe. We can’t even blame ourselves. It happened by accident, through karmic chain reactions. So let us not take a vengeful attitude toward anybody: “My mother messed up my life; my father messed up my life.” Those blamings and pathetic gestures are becoming old hat and unreasonable. So back to square one. Meet a spiritual friend who shows you the star of Bethlehem, enlightenment, and then start the journey immediately.

Here the sense of being is that having shared a mutual experience with your spiritual friend, there is something taking place. That’s the sense of being. Whether that sense of being is created artificially or very naturally and organically doesn’t really matter. It
is
an experience already. It
is
an experience in any case. Let’s not question its validity from a metaphysical point of view or philosophically, scientifically, or domestically. We don’t have time to make sure, to get a signature on the dotted line, to take out an insurance policy. And it is not only that we don’t have time, but there is something more than that. This is not a business transaction. It is personal experience.

If you are a mother who has borne a child and the child is starving, you cannot blame your child, your infant, saying, “It’s because you didn’t bring any money along with you when you were born.” That would be absurd: “We are starving because you didn’t bring any money along with you.” It is a karmic situation that is taking place, all along, throughout the whole thing. We are confused, utterly, as far as we know. We are confused to the point where sometimes we don’t even know that. But we are confused in any case. Trying to find out who we can blame our confusion on is a further act of confusion. That takes us away from the practice of the actual discipline of meditative training, just takes us away from it.

It boils down to this: nobody has fucked up your life, really. The only thing that fucks up your life is that you actually feel somebody has pulled a trick on you or that you have pulled a trick on yourself. And as a matter of fact, there’s no you. You don’t even exist, you don’t exist at all. So nobody’s pulling a trick on anybody. Even you don’t exist. You are just a myth, a mythical truth.

Within that understanding of mythical truth, we practice meditation. We sit at the level of the myth of freedom. That might be a myth—the star of Bethlehem might be a myth—but we have seen it, we have experienced it.

So you need enormous discipline, committing yourself to a spiritual friend and committing yourself, because of the spiritual friend, to yourself. And sitting practice provides an enormous help. You can’t even begin to call yourself a follower of buddhadharma if no basic training of the mind is involved. In order to perceive buddha and dharma, one has to have devotion. In order to have devotion, one has to train to develop devotion. This may be very clumsy at the beginning, but it is necessary. Starting with the hinayana level of discipline, satipatthana and vipashyana practice are extremely important and powerful. They are absolutely necessary if you want to follow the path properly, thoroughly, and completely. Enlightenment is very complete, total. There’s no such thing as fake enlightenment. It’s real experience. It’s real life.