The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (18 page)

There are a lot of misunderstandings about this issue. People often feel that they have to be specially aware of what they are doing, and they walk that way and they sit that way. They behave as if they had a raw egg on their head. Consequently their life becomes lifeless, rigid like a dead body, and so solemn, so “meaningful.” And there’s no enlightenment in it; it’s all dead. Of course, there is some faithfulness in it, and some kind of joy or pride, but somehow even the presence of those don’t serve to cheer those people up. This has been a problem in the way people work with awareness.

When we talk about the process of developing mindfulness and awareness, we are talking about practicing a living tradition, not renewing an old culture, a dead culture. This is a living tradition that has been practiced for twenty-five hundred years by millions of people. It’s always up-to-date, and we can practice it the same way as those who came before us. It is a very personal experience, so personal that it is actually workable.

So that seems to be the basic idea of how to conduct one’s basic awareness program, so to speak.

Student:
I’m very interested in the distinction you made between ordinary absent-mindedness and this special absent-mindedness. I seem to have a great deal of ordinary absent-mindedness, and I was wondering if there was energy in that that could be transformed into the kind that provides the right background for mindfulness.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Forgetfulness is not being absent-minded in the true sense. In that case, you are so much involved in your own world that you lose loose ends constantly. In the true absent-mindedness we talked about, your mind is gone, properly and completely, without anything to occupy it. And I think the only way to shift from one kind of absent-mindedness to the other is the kind of vow we discussed. With that vow, you are making a definite step, a definite effort toward something else. You are already self-involved and forgetful, and this is a step toward something else. It’s not particularly a matter of solving the problem of our old-fashioned absent-mindedness by replacing it with a new one, but it’s a definite jump. You need some kind of commitment in your life that says, “Now I’m going to do this.” That should bring some kind of psychological change. Without that, you can’t change, because your habit pattern just goes on and on.

S:
It sounds as though the ordinary absent-mindedness is the opposite of the new kind. It’s turned inward on itself, whereas the new kind is more opened outward.

TR:
I think so too, yes. Well, I think some sort of personal influence is needed—an influence that moves you from one kind of message to another kind of message. If somebody tells you that if you eat a carrot you’re going to die tomorrow, that gives you a shock. Then you take a vow: “From today onward, I will never eat a carrot.” And then, whenever you think of a carrot, you think of that, and whenever you think of that, you think of a carrot.

S:
I’ll try not to eat carrots.

TR:
That’s not the point. Anyway, help yourself.

Student:
This commitment you’re talking about sounds like something conscious you would do, but it doesn’t seem that it could be conscious. It seems like it is something evolutionary. And if it is evolutionary, you can’t do it. So how does one make that kind of commitment? How does one approach it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I’m afraid this is very primitive, nothing very subtle. Because we have constantly been deceived by our subtleties. This is a very ordinary, rugged commitment, very low-class maybe, if you want to put it that way. “From now onward, I’m going to do this.” It’s very conscious. But then you don’t hang on to that. Once you’ve made the commitment, then you have that commitment there, transplanted into your mind already, and it begins to grow. So you have to have that primitive quality at the beginning. Otherwise, there’s no kindling wood to light the big logs. It’s very primitive and very literal, and perhaps very sudden as a highlight in your life. But obviously the effects that it has will not be very sudden. Obviously the effects happen slowly. You are not suddenly reformed in one second, but you have the potentiality of being reformed from then onward.

It’s like having a birthday party. You don’t suddenly go from twenty-one to twenty-two when you blow out the candles. Obviously not. You are becoming twenty-two as much earlier on as later, when your birthday celebration takes place. But all the same, you have to have some kind of landmark. Otherwise, we are too sneaky, and there’s no other way of dealing with that.

Student:
It’s like quitting smoking. You have to keep reaffirming your decision, but at one point, you have to say, “I’m going to quit smoking.”

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think it’s different from quitting smoking. That is giving up something, which has a lot of problems involved in it. In this case, you are taking on something new, which is something more positive than just being starved to death.

Student:
You talked about using all those little tricks that we have for resisting meditation as a stepping-stone. Say you notice yourself doing this number—you’re five minutes late and you’re still tying your shoes, or whatever—you’re aware of it and you just keep on doing it. So how does it become a stepping-stone?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Use the resistance as the starting point of your practice. Now you have the resistance and you are going to use the resistance as part of your meditation. You’re already meditating. You have awareness while you’re trying to delay, you have the wind of meditation already in you. You can’t even undo it. You’re already plugged in.

SIX

Loneliness

I
THINK WE SHOULD
realize that the practice of meditation takes us on a journey that is very personal and very lonely. Only the individual meditator knows what he or she is doing, and it is a very lonely journey. However, if one were doing it alone without any reference to the lineage,
⁸
without any reference to the teacher and the teachings, it would not be lonely, because you would have a sense of being involved in the process of developing the self-made man. So you would feel less lonely. You would feel like you were on the way to becoming a hero. It is particularly because of the commitment that one makes to the teachings and the lineage and the teacher that the meditative journey becomes such a lonely one.

That commitment does not particularly bring protection or companionship or feedback to clear away your doubts or resolve your loneliness. In some way your sense of loneliness is exaggerated by your commitment to the path. The path has been established and you start to take a journey on it. That journey is then up to you. You can read the map, which tells you how far along you are. You can stop at various places for rest and refreshment. But it’s still your journey.

Even if you are sharing the journey with other people, those other individuals’ experience is different, totally different, in terms of how the journey really affects them. So it’s a lonely journey. There is no support, no specific guideline. You may have been told to do this and do that, but that is just at the beginning—so that you know how to be lonely.

So loneliness is one of the basic points. It means not having any security on this path of meditation. One can’t even say that you get moral support. For one thing, as we discussed earlier on, you don’t exist; and because of that, security doesn’t exist. The only thing that is visible, that apparently exists, is the journey, the loneliness itself. That is a very important point for us to see and realize.

On this path, we are not looking for the grace of God or any other kind of saving grace. There is no sense that we are going to be saved, that someone is going to keep an eye on us so that if we are just about to make a mistake, someone will fish us out. If we had that sense, the journey would become a very sloppy one, because we could afford to play around. We would think that in case we did the wrong thing, we could be fished out or saved. But instead of relying on outside help, in this case, the impetus has to be a very personal impetus. Nobody is going to save us and nobody is going to protect us, so this journey has to be a very personal, individual journey. That’s a very important point.

Now, the next question is the role of the teacher, the guru. How is he or she going to affect this process? There is no contradiction whatsoever between being on a lonely, personal journey and relating to a teacher. The role of the teacher is to teach the students what direction to take, to teach you a certain attitude and how that attitude might develop further. And the role of the teacher is to show you that the path is lonely.

In order to hear the clear message from the teacher without any misunderstanding, you have to have a sense of commitment and openness toward the teacher, who in this case is known as a “spiritual friend.” He is not regarded as a learned professor, a mad scientist, or a magician, for that matter. Rather, the teacher is a friend who has conviction and enough openness toward himself or herself. Because of that, the teacher can be blunt and direct in pointing out the disciplines of the path. So to hear the clear message from the teacher, you have to have a sense of openness and surrender.

But this does not mean worshiping or adoring the teacher. You just need a sense of basic openness, a feeling that the teacher’s approach to the teaching is accurate. The idea is not that it
has to be
accurate, but it happens to be accurate because of a certain relationship of commitment that evolves between you and your teacher. Because of that, the teacher’s words become real to you; it’s not like listening to a tale or a myth. What the teacher has to say becomes relevant to you.

That is what’s called the meeting of two minds. What you experience and what the teacher has to say make sense together. A definite link of understanding develops. Though the dharma may be only partially understood, it still makes sense, it still becomes some kind of truth.

Your teacher has to be someone who lives on this earth at this very time. One shouldn’t kick around such ideas as “I have a heavenly teacher who tells me when I’m in trouble, sends me messages in my dreams, in my fantasies, and in my daydreams. I get these messages flickering through my subconscious jingle bell. The teacher is always there when I need him because he is a heavenly teacher, a celestial teacher.” Ideas like this are quite deceptive. You always hear what you want to hear. Nothing is told to you about maybe some things needing correction. And certainly that heavenly teacher wouldn’t talk about loneliness and aloneness. He wouldn’t give you the teachings of aloneness and loneliness, because that heavenly teacher is a production of your mind. So for that reason it is necessary to have as a teacher a person who lives on earth, who is your contemporary, who shares the same world with you, the world of human beings. It is necessary to make a relationship with such a teacher in the sense of developing an understanding of each other.

Then there is another notion, which is the sangha, the community of practitioners working together. The sangha is also the creation of the teacher and the teaching in a sense. You get information, messages, from being among friends who are also doing the same practice as you at the same time. You might feel that you can take off by yourself whenever you want, that you can maintain yourself without having to be hassled by the sangha, without going through the painful problems of dealing with the rest of the community, these friends around you. But this is partially not accepting the world of the teachings. You want just to have a summit meeting with your teacher and to try to avoid the rest of the flock. You go off in order to be saved from the hassle of relating with anybody else. This is also in part looking for something other than loneliness—looking for security. Although your style of dealing with the whole thing is the style of loneliness, actually dealing with the sangha would make you feel more lonely. And that is very painful.

The sangha carries the atmosphere of the teacher and the teaching and the lineage. Sharing that experience together makes more sense. Relating with the teacher becomes also relating with the community, the sangha. But although this process is very necessary, it should not be regarded as a source of security. The idea is not that if you feel strange and odd, you feel better if you see someone else strange and odd. The idea is not “Misery loves company.” The idea is not that because there are a hundred or a thousand or a million people doing the same thing as you, you feel secure because you’re not the odd man out. The idea is more that you are the odd man out in any case, and there are lots of odd men out together. You don’t confirm each other’s paranoia or shyness or sense of insecurity, but the sangha helps—in the long run or even in the immediate situation. For example, if you want to chicken out of your sitting practice and you are in the midst of seventy or a hundred people sitting together, when you are about to get up to walk out, you feel somewhat strange, uncertain. And that kind of very simple and literal encouragement to practice is necessary.

People often have a certain kind of attitude toward the others: “I am above them. I have special credentials, a special intelligence. I don’t want to be completely associated with the mass, the flock. When I feel bored or lonely, I would like to chat with them and be nice to them. They’re interesting people to talk to. But when I feel really edgy and needy, the sangha freaks me out, so I should avoid them. I should have a summit meeting with my guru in his den.” That attitude is problematic. Avoiding pain, avoiding loneliness is a problem. A lot of problems come from avoiding the sense of loneliness, of aloneness, from avoiding the sense of losing the ground of ego.

So it is necessary to have a spiritual friend who can work with you. And also around you and your spiritual friend, there are other, so to speak, lesser spiritual friends who are known as the sangha. They do not take on the role of instructors, but they do assume the role of friends—who are sometimes not particularly overwhelmingly friendly. Or at other times they may be rather kind. But that kind of relationship is necessary.