The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (15 page)

In vipashyana, you as the practitioner experience the game that you are playing in setting up your theater. From that you pick up a new way of dealing with the whole thing without its being a game. This is the sitting practice of meditation. When you sit, you don’t sit for the sake of creating a display or a particular effect. It’s a very private thing in some sense. In sitting practice, you relate to the radiation you are creating. Before you begin sitting, this radiation was being created purely in order to impress or overpower the audience. In this case, the situation is reversed. You experience your own radiation face-to-face rather than playing with it in order to impress or overpower your audience. You have no audience when you sit and meditate, or you are your own audience.

Even in this situation, however, it is possible for subtle little tricks to take place. You congratulate yourself for sitting and being such a good boy or good girl, and try to make that into a display. It’s very subtle. The games can be peeled away one after the other like the layers of an onion. The games continue to happen, obviously, but somehow you can deal with this.

You have had the basic training of shamatha practice and from there you begin to expand. I would like to stress again that the shamatha experience is extremely important. Without that foundation, the practitioner is not at all in a position to experience vipashyana. But with that foundation, the practitioner can begin to expand the meaning of mindfulness so that it becomes awareness. Mindfulness is being fully there, and awareness is a total sensing. In awareness, all happenings are seen at once. This could also be called panoramic vision.

Panoramic vision, in this case, is having a sense of the entire radiation that we create. We possess a certain mannerism or a certain style that is reflected outward. When you sit, this becomes purely a thought process. You develop a sense of appreciation of things around you, not one by one, but totally. It’s like light radiating from a flame or a light bulb that expands outward. However, we find that this radiation has no radiat
or
. If you look into who is doing all these tricks, producing this display, this radiation, there is nobody. Even the
idea
of somebody doesn’t exist. There is a pure sense of openness, a sense that you can relate with the living world as an open world.

At this point, we are only just introducing the vipashyana experience. Later we will go into it in greater detail. What it is necessary to understand now is that the vipashyana experience does not proceed to the level of a game, but remains purely at the level of experience, the living experience of awareness (as opposed to mindfulness).

Awareness, in this case, is not awareness of self but awareness of the other. The difference between the two is that if you are aware of yourself, it is awareness of yourself being aware of yourself aware of yourself aware of yourself aware of yourself. There is some kind of incest taking place. Whereas if you are just being aware, that is openness, a welcoming gesture. You include your doings within your realm of awareness, so you don’t punish or you don’t watch. You don’t question, particularly, but you just be. That seems to be the basic approach or the basic policy in insight meditation, vipashyana.

Do you understand what I’ve been saying?

Student:
I don’t understand about the radiation without a radiator.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If you have a radiator, the radiator has to work itself up to the level where there is enough radiation to be expanded or reflected outward. It remains tied up with that, so there is really no radiation.

S:
Doesn’t radiation cease to exist if there is no radiator?

TR:
Radiation can only exist if there is no radiator. Things can only flow if the flow is the process that’s happening rather than somebody instigating the flow. Then it’s deadly.

Student:
You said that awareness is not awareness of self but of other. Do you mean that the actions and reactions coming from oneself have no greater priority or value than what seems to be occurring in the outside world? That it’s all one field?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Awareness of other is the same idea as radiation without a radiator. Awareness takes place, and that awareness is 100 percent all by itself. There is no need for you to watch your awareness as a careful speculator or instigator. One of the problems is, if you have a very efficient instigator, then your product is killed. That’s the kind of self-existing suicide that takes place all the time, which is known as neurosis.

Student:
So if you have a man standing by a mountain, his awareness would be purely of the mountain.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. He’s not important because the mountain is around him.

Student:
If you draw attention to the mountain as opposed to the self, you are assuming that there is still a self to be gotten rid of. I thought that a truly open awareness would be directed toward the mutuality of this self and the other, or their mutual nonexistence. I can’t see singling out the other at the expense of the self or vice versa. Isn’t that giving a sort of negative importance to the self?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think there’s any problem there, particularly. You could be open to the mountain and see the mountain more freely without you. On the other hand, if you have a stomach upset or a headache and at the same time are trying to look at the mountain to cheer yourself up, you somehow have a problem trying to maintain your suffering and trying to look at the mountain. You have a complete experience neither of your headache nor of the mountain.

Student:
But I always have something going on like a headache. I never have a perfect condition for just looking outward. There’s always something going on with me. I may feel joyful, for example, and then the mountain reflects that joy. It’s not that I’m projecting it in an egocentric way, but my joy, my happiness, my tranquillity, and the mountain are in a mutual intercourse. I don’t know what a mountain is by itself or what I am by myself.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You do admit that if you have a stomach upset, the mountain also has a stomach upset.

S:
Yes, but I don’t know what the mountain would be or anything would be without there being that process of intercourse.

TR:
That’s not a problem. You’re not going to lose your world if you don’t have this definite intercourse. You don’t have to extend your belly button into an umbilical cord. That was cut a long time ago, when you were born. It would be too complicated to renew your umbilical cord. Approaching things that way is part of the problem, in fact: if I have a world, is the world my prey? Or is it that the world is just the world and you’re just you? There is a separateness that is in fact more of a grand union than anything else could be. Because of the separateness, there could be unity. Unity doesn’t have to be glued together. In fact, that’s what’s known as imprisonment. You don’t have to keep track of yourself particularly. You see the reflection of yourself anyway; the mountains are you anyway. If you get a headache, the mountains get a headache too, in your way of looking at them.

S:
So there’s no need to emphasize the belly button connection.

TR:
That’s right, that’s right. If the mountains have a headache, just let it be that way.

Student:
How do you stop yourself from giving the mountains an aspirin?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Is there any problem? Well, I’m not saying that you should feel pain and that therefore you should torture yourself. You can take an aspirin and, if you’re severely sick, you can go to the emergency room at the hospital. There’s no problem. I don’t see any problems. We are not talking about starting a revolt against the world, guerrilla warfare against the rest of the world. We are talking about how to look at how to be with it, and I don’t see any particular problems. You take aspirin, which is also sick at the same time. Because you are sick, your aspirin is sick as well. And then you take it, and because misery loves company, aspirin cures your headache.

Student:
Could you talk about the vipashyana experience in terms of the analogy of the tree we were using before?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We are beginning to work on the level of minding the tree’s business. We are at the point of picking up a pair of secateurs and beginning to crop the foliage leaf by leaf. This is the point we’re at, but we haven’t gotten into the details yet.

Student:
You’ve talked about panoramic awareness mostly in terms of awareness of environment. What I’m wondering is whether the vipashyana mode of operation would alter one’s way of experiencing one’s own thoughts or one’s experience of, for example, the dream state. Would that be altered at the level of panoramic awareness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Those experiences are also your environment. There is no environment other than your thoughts. Let’s say you hit somebody, and this enemy of yours is approaching you again. You create a hostile environment, which is your thinking, your doing. If you get highly inspired by seeing some object associated with enlightenment, you create an environment of inspiration. Thoughts are your environment from that point of view, and there’s no other environment besides that. You see, the whole thing is not really mysterious. It’s always there, and it’s very literal and very obvious.

Student:
In meditation, I become aware of my theater performance, my lighting, my acting, and so on. Then I stop meditating and I’m back in the theater again.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
What’s the problem?

S:
Well, I thought there was some implication that from going and meditating and becoming aware of that theater, something would change. Or do I simply come back into the theater and be theatrical again?

TR:
Well, not quite the same way. I think the real point is that we’re talking about discipline. Actually, in a real theater group, in the Open Theater or other avant-garde theater groups, people feel they are disconnected from the theater world when they have to undergo some disciplined practice, which they usually call warming up. The term
warming up
is a euphemism. In fact, warming up is a demand. There is the demand that before you turn on to performance, you warm up. The name deceives you, because while you are engaged in this discipline, you lose your theater.

S:
Is theater going on here right now?

TR:
Yes, but that’s because you’re not going through any particular training at this moment. You’re just listening. It’s very convenient and entertaining. But when you sit and meditate and you have an ache in your legs or a stiff neck, then the beautiful theater world begins to diminish.

Student:
May I say something? I’m enjoying this theater. This is a real experience for me, as real as meditation, and you’re here doing theater, and I’m imagining that this is a real experience for you too.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s not enough.

S:
What are we doing here, then?

TR:
We’re regrouping. At this point, we’re regrouping rather than this alone being the goal. That is by no means true. What we’re doing is not the goal. It’s not the final product—as though you paid your money, got your ticket, and you’re here watching, beautifully experiencing the final product. No.

S:
It is part of the process.

TR:
Part of the process, obviously.

S:
Just as important as the discipline.

TR:
Sure. But it’s necessary to have the personal experience of facing yourself, which brings a reduction in your sense of showmanship. Meditation is the only way. Write that down.

Student:
Isn’t what creates the theater the sense of one’s own importance? If you think you’re someone very important doing something very important, you have a tendency, as you say, to overwhelm the audience with your presence. But if you’ve got no sense of self-importance, or if you can manage to lessen your sense of self-importance, there’s no theater. Who are you acting for? You’re just here.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I’m afraid it doesn’t work as simply as that. Even if things are unimportant, you make theater out of the unimportantness. You always do that.

S:
Why does theater always imply something contrived, not spontaneous, rehearsed?

TR:
It does because there’s a sense of self-consciousness and a sense that you are the center of the game.

S:
That’s because you think you’re important.

TR:
Not necessarily. You might think you are terribly unimportant, but you can still sit on your toilet seat. And make yourself the center of the universe.

S:
Why would you want to do that?

TR:
That’s it! That’s it! That’s the big question. We have to find out by sitting and meditating. That’s the only way.

S:
Well, I think—

TR:
You can be told why you’re doing so-and-so, but then you create further theater in relation to having been told that, you see?

S:
You mean everything we do is theater.

TR:
Yes, except meditating.

S:
Why isn’t meditating doing theater?

TR:
If you meditate long enough, you find out that it’s not so pleasant.

S:
Doing theater isn’t so pleasant either.

TR:
It gives something.

S:
It’s horrible.

TR:
It gives you some sense of survival.

S:
You’ve got a sense of survival anyhow. You’re here, you’re surviving. I don’t understand where the theatrics come in.

TR:
They come in. That was a very theatrical remark you made.