The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (100 page)

Ratna
is associated with substance. It involves expanding to fill up and solidify every container. Ratna neurosis is connected with feelings of not being substantial or solid enough. The world in here is insufficient, poor. The richness, the substance is out there. So the tendency of the ratna neurosis is to expand its substance to incorporate the outside into its territory. There is a tendency to be overbearing, mothering, imperious—trying to be the center of one’s world, the principal object of affection, attention, approval. One is always hungry and needs the food of more possessions, more psychological gratifications, more confirmations of one’s richness. Intellectually, ratna neurosis manifests as indiscriminate collecting and spewing out of facts, words, ideas, contacts, an overstuffed mind. The emotion associated with ratna is pride. One is continually building monuments to oneself, reassuring oneself of importance and worth—you are heavy, significant, central in relation to your world. Physically ratna is very concerned about material comfort—ornate surroundings, much rich food, soft furniture. Life is a series of nourishing or unnourishing events.

In
padma
neurosis, one tries to draw things into one’s world, to seduce phenomena. There is a sense of incompleteness, a seeking of something to entertain or enrich ourselves. The basic quality of padma is relating to the immediate presence of “other.” While karma is associated with direct movement and vajra with clear seeing, padma is feeling presence. The more we panic about losing the presence of other, the more we struggle to hold on to other so as to feel its presence. We want to draw “that” into “this” area and keep it here, possess it in order to feel it. Intellectually, padma neurosis involves getting caught in a succession of unrelated details, scattering one’s attention. One gets lost in the surfaces. A project is started with great enthusiasm but one quickly loses interest and goes on to the next thing. Emotionally, padma neurosis involves passion, grasping desired objects and the frustrations of rejection or loss. There is a tendency toward continuous friendliness, sugary sweet kindness, and hypersensitivity to rejection or coldness, to any withdrawal of presence. Physically, one is preoccupied with pleasure and pain.

Karma
is associated with thrusting movement, jumping from place to place, trying to control phenomena by direct manipulation. It is symbolized by a sword and the wind. It is like an army thrusting forward by achieving a long, narrow penetration of enemy lines, trying to destroy the enemies’ headquarters. But since its thrust is narrow and long, it is vulnerable to attacks from the flank. At the head of the column, the general can only see ahead of him. He is afraid that the enemy will cut him off from his home base. Consequently the characteristic karma neurosis involves paranoia—fear of being attacked, fear of being inadequate, fear of being left out, fear of losing track. This leads to a preoccupation with controlling situations, with speedily busying oneself in organizing things, making things work efficiently. One must speed about to keep up with the continual changes that threaten disorder. The more preoccupied we are with order and control, the more disturbing and clearly defined chaos becomes and the more we must compulsively speed to recreate order. Intellectually, karma neurosis thinks compulsively in terms of means and ends, sequences of doing this and that to achieve something. There is also excessive concern with details to check that nothing was missed, no possible action undone. Furthermore, points of reference or comparisons are needed to frequently reassure ourselves that our position is secure, our identity is solid, our world safe. So envy and jealousy are important aspects of the karma neurosis.

Buddha
is associated with space and intelligence free of ego. It accommodates all phenomena, including the play of ratna, padma, karma, and vajra energies. Buddha neurosis involves the absence of spaciousness, the dulling of intelligence, and the freezing of the play of energies. The neurotic buddha world is like a small, thick, walled concrete box with no windows—a secure womb. Intellectually, buddha neurosis involves rigid habits of mind; fixed ideas; stubborn resistance to new information; a self-smug, self-righteous attitude. You just plod along oblivious to messages from the environment, following familiar habits. Intelligence and energy are ignored. Dirty dishes pile up, work is left undone, close personal relations are neglected, the same shirt is worn for a week. There is a tremendous fear of changes in rules, routines, views of right and wrong. Emotionally there is a dull neutrality and unresponsiveness to stimulation.

How does one work with these neurotic styles of relating to space? The foundation of the Buddhist approach to unraveling neurosis is meditation. By sitting quietly and still for a lengthy period of time, one begins to see how the mind works. During that time “problems” are not confirmed or fed by the world around us. This allows an opportunity for gaps to occur in which we glimpse our struggle from the perspective of space, which contains fundamental intelligence. We step out of the I-other drama for a moment. So the practice of sitting meditation involves neither feeding nor repressing thoughts but clearly seeing them without getting caught up in them. Usually, techniques that cut the chain of thoughts are used as aids—attention to a sound (mantra) or the breathing process is most common. Gradually our world becomes more spacious, our dramas less intense and all-consuming. The sitting meditation carries over into everyday life and we begin to see more clearly how we create our worlds.

Unfortunately the sitting meditation discipline is not effective with highly neurotic people. Their mental processes are too speedy and confused to allow much space to develop. So Trungpa has adapted some specialized meditation techniques to substitute for sitting meditation. These techniques constitute space therapy.

In this therapy a person maintains a posture within a specially designed room for a lengthy period of time, usually two forty-five-minute sessions daily. Attention is focused on the space in the room. The rooms highlight the view of the world characteristic of each neurotic style, and the postures highlight the neurotic response to that world. Of course, the inside and outside, “my response” and “the world’s response to me” are intertwining parts of one process. To contract the space around you in response to claustrophobic surroundings intensifies the claustrophobic quality of the outside. To attack space in response to phenomena intensifies their resistance to your clutches, which intensifies your struggle to hold on to them. Likewise,
straining
to know panoramically narrows one’s perspective, which in turn leads to greater strain.

In each case, struggle intensifies the solidity of the barrier, the imbalance of inside and outside, and the vulnerability and impoverishment of inside. From moment to moment one is faced with the alternative of letting go, of opening to a saner, more balanced relationship to the world, or panicking and intensifying the struggle to manipulate it.

The long period of holding the posture, the monotony of the surroundings, and the task of attending to space allow the possibility of being less caught up in habitual thought patterns. Furthermore, the postures are all somewhat uncomfortable and therefore demand attention to the body and ground as well. These conditions can break the chain of thoughts sufficiently so that a person glimpses his neurotic relationship to space. He may come to realize that the “external world” is always the same in these rooms and therefore his shifting perceptions of the room are his own creation. This insight may allow him to relax his struggle with space sufficiently to glimpse a sane way of relating to it.

In the vajra posture one lies belly down, hands extended to the sides, palms flat on the ground, and face to the side. In the vajra room the windows are small slits along the wall. Since a person with vajra neurosis is always scanning his surroundings, facing the ground and looking at windows that only tease him can be very frustrating. He doesn’t know what is above him or outside the room. The positions and rooms thus force the practitioner to confront how he relates to his world by frustrating or exaggerating his ordinary style. The positive potential in the vajra posture is to discover that you don’t have to literally see what is above or around you. There is the conviction that you already know what is happening; excessive confirmation is unnecessary.

In ratna posture the arms are perpendicular to the body, legs are spread wider than in karma posture, and the hands are flat down against the ground. The ratna room contains a large circular window on one wall. Its color is gold. From the posture one sees the outline of the window without being able to see out. This suggests the possibility of expanding beyond the room, of incorporating the richness outside, but one cannot. Extending the arms and legs as much as possible also suggests expansiveness. But since the richness is outside one’s reach, it is very frustrating and poverty-stricken. This exposes the ratna tendency to compensate for feelings of poverty and insubstantiality by expanding its territory to feed itself. In the positive case, one feels rich, the external world doesn’t especially need to feed you.

Padma posture is lying on the side, one arm extended out fully and the other resting on the hip. The room is square with large windows on two walls. The room suggests something seductive outside it, and the posture suggests keeping your door open to seduce passersby to come and visit. But nothing passes by, nothing entertaining happens, there is no new presence to feel, your seductive gestures are futile. The positive potential is that one discovers an already existent presence to which nothing needs to be added.

The karma position is lying flat on the back, hands close to the sides, the back of the hand flat on the ground, legs spread apart. In this posture, unlike the others, attention is directed to the arms and legs. The room has a four-by-four-foot square window on top and is colored green. Attending to the limbs accentuates the karma tendency toward movement and the window high above invites thrusting movement toward it. Thus, the karmic tendency to speedy movement is exaggerated. Furthermore, being forced to lie on the ground, motionless, frustrates the impulse to activity and heightens the karma fear of vulnerability. The space seems to be cutting through you. The positive potential in this posture is that one gives up the struggling to defend oneself by jumping about and realizes that space is not attacking one and one need not attack space.

Buddha posture is resting on one’s knees and elbows, chin between the palms of the hands. The room is small with no windows, a low ceiling, dim light, and is colored white. The posture suggests contraction, drawing inward, protecting by closing up. The room reflects the ignoring of environment, the creating of a closed, secure space to cope with an acute sense of claustrophobia. Positively, one discovers the possibility of being open even in such a potentially claustrophobic situation.

The diagnosis to determine suitable rooms and postures is based on principles of Tibetan yoga. Specific areas of the body are associated with particular buddha families. The limbs and genitals with karma, the lower abdomen with ratna, chest and heart region with vajra, the neck and throat with padma, and the head with buddha. A neurotic problem manifests physically as an intensification of energy in a particular area. This intensification is a compensation for feelings of vulnerability in that area. Before the diagnosis, the staff member sits quietly for a short period to increase his sensitivity. The patient lies with his back to the ground and a staff member moves his hands slowly from head to toe about two inches above him. He looks for areas of greater and lesser resistance to his hands. Increases in pressure suggest intensified energy, solidified defenses against vulnerability. Since staff members have neurotic association with particular body areas themselves, a consensus of all staff members is used in determining the diagnosis. During the week in which the diagnosis is conducted, the staff observe the patient in the daily life situation but no attempt is made to observe symptoms in terms of buddha families. The insecurity and uncertainty of the therapist concerning who the new person is and how he will deal with him can lead to prematurely defining the situation. Instead the staff is encouraged to respond to the person as a totality, rather than a set of familiar traits.

Dealing with the fundamentals of the mind needs to be supplemented with daily-life practice in which the historically unique blocks and deceptions of a person are worked through—his relation to work, parents, sex, identity, hopes and fears, etc. The key to an effective daily-life practice is the development of an environment of sanity. The basic premise is that if the staff can act sanely in relation to each other and patients, then the social milieu will be therapeutic. An environment of sanity breaks the reciprocal buildup of neurosis. The high percentage of staff in the community facilitates this process.

To realize a sane community, the staff must practice a very demanding discipline. In addition to participating in sitting meditation and space therapy, the staff must discipline themselves to work with their own neurosis as it arises in daily life. The staff discipline is to not get caught in the neurotic games that the patient is trying to play with them. This requires, on the part of the therapist, an acute sense of his own vulnerability to seduction or irritation. Much of the energy of staff, therefore, is directed to working with each other’s neuroses. The usual ego props of therapists are stripped away. The staff is sensitive to any tendency to secure territory. On a social level, jobs are rotated and decisions are made democratically. More subtly, the tendencies toward status building and rationalization are guarded against.

Patients are included as part of the community, sharing work and decision making with the staff. The tone of the community is not that sick people are being helped by sane people, but rather, that people with different kinds and degrees of neurosis and sanity are sharing their lives together. Maitri staff see elements of sanity in the patient’s actions as well as elements of insanity in their own actions. Moreover, they are willing to open themselves to the patient’s neurosis. They find that they take on the patients’ neuroses collectively to some extent and cure themselves of it—thereby helping the patient. The Maitri staff consider themselves neurotic people working on their own neurosis by helping others. The idea that helping others is a vehicle for one’s own development is deeply rooted in the Buddhist teaching of compassion. Traditionally the Buddhist practitioner takes a vow, the bodhisattva vow, that he will abandon preoccupation with his own development in order to help all sentient beings achieve sanity. He does not protect himself from being contaminated by his patient’s neurosis or try to build up a self-image of being superior.