The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (19 page)

The whole point is that we have grown up with a very strange relationship to society. Sometimes we like society and are trying to get into it and become a replica of everybody else. You do exactly the same thing as everybody else, and it feels good. You have a social standard to relate to and you have your M.A. or Ph.D. You are a professional person and you have a car of your own. You know how to cook food, entertain friends, and you are humorous and engaging. You are even eloquent and interesting. You are a good host, a good driver, an acceptable person, a nice guy.

But at the same time, you don’t want to be like that at all. Your complex about society takes all kinds of forms. Sometimes you want to be above society and bring society up to your level. You are part of an exclusive lodge or club. Only highly evolved people can work with you, deal with you. You are not like the rest of the world, not like the others. You are special, very special. You eat different food. You even drive differently, maybe. You break the law in a different way—with conscious effort. You cook meals specially, and you talk a special way; you articulate differently. You put the accent on the metaphysical or mystical, or on being zany. Society pushes people into this kind of attitude because there are so many repetitions taking place.

On the other hand, sometimes people have the feeling that they can’t even make it up to the repetitions level. They feel belittled, uneducated. But then, once you’ve gotten to that level and you feel you are just like everybody else, you want to rise above this and try to do special things. You acquire special art treasures, which you show. You develop a special handicraft or a talent that you have that is out of the ordinary. The selling point in all this is that it is very special, unlike anything else, that you are a very special person, which is another kind of neurosis that goes on in society. First you try very hard to be ordinary, and then, when you achieve that, you try to rise above the ordinariness.

There are all kinds of different levels and different approaches to trying to ignore the loneliness.

If you are like the ordinary person in the street, working a nine-to-five job, you feel very lonely. And also you felt very lonely before you got to the ordinary level. You felt you had to struggle, that you were wretched, outside of society. And then, when you try to step above the ordinariness into extraordinariness, you also feel lonely. All those attempts are made out of loneliness. The whole time the goal is not to be lonely, to achieve enormous security. So there are constantly inspirations arising out of the sense of loneliness. But at the same time, the loneliness is always rejected. You are always trying to achieve the opposite of loneliness, always looking for companionship. That seems to be the problem.

So we have two kinds of processes here. Rejecting loneliness by using the medium of loneliness; and trying to use the medium of friendship and companionship to arrive at the goal of loneliness. The second one is the dharma way. At the beginning you have your spiritual friend and your sangha that you work together with. It feels good, fantastic. But once you have been initiated into the path and style and practice of meditation, then your goal is loneliness. You begin to realize that.

Loneliness here is not meant in the sense of feeling alone in an empty room with nothing but a mattress. When we talk about loneliness here, we are talking about the fundamental starvation of ego. There are no tricks you can play; there is no one you can talk to to make yourself feel better. There’s nothing more you can do about the loneliness at all. So for that reason, there’s a need for a teacher, for the sangha, and a need for practice.

This is not based on a theistic approach—needing protection, needing a savior. As far as that is concerned, everybody is their own savior. The basic point is that the practice of meditation brings all kinds of experiences of uncertainty, discontentment of all kinds. But those experiences seem to be absolutely necessary. In fact, they seem to be the sign that you are on the path at last. So we can’t do publicity by having testimonials for meditation practice. If we did, it would be disastrous.

But this has been pointed out many times in the books and the teachings. It has been said over and over that this journey is not particularly pleasant; you have to shed your ego. And still at the beginning there is a certain fascination about it. You start to think, “I wonder what it’d be like without ego. That’s another point of view. Let’s try it. It might be exciting. After all, we’ve tried all the other things.” Such inquisitiveness is necessary. We have to start at a very primitive level. At the beginning, inquisitiveness of this kind is absolutely needed. We think, “I wonder what it would be like to have a spiritual friend. It seems it’s quite exciting. I’m going to go up to Vermont to see the guru. I’m going to pack my bag and go. It’s so exciting.” But then we are here and the truth of the matter begins to dawn on us. When we get back, people might ask us, “What did you get out of that? Did you learn anything? Are you enlightened now?”

Well . . . perhaps we should have our discussion.

Student:
It seems that meditation is a means for us to recognize habits and deal with them. Is that correct?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
What do you mean by “deal with”?

S:
Acknowledge them.

TR:
Yes, that’s right.

S:
Is our entire samsaric mind just habits?

TR:
Habits cannot exist without a reference point, the reference point being duality: if that [anything] exists, then I exist; if I exist, then that exists. That’s where the basic split begins to happen.

S:
Can you describe how shamatha and vipashyana relate to habit?

TR:
Habit comes from habit. You are told how to do meditation, and then you develop some new habits. But some new style develops, obviously, and those new habits are not so habit-oriented. In fact, it’s very difficult to make meditation into a habit. Even though you’ve been doing it for twenty years, still there’s constantly a certain sense of struggle involved. This shows that meditation is different from the rest of habitual things. It requires some kind of challenge, constantly.

Student:
The loneliness you’ve described is really nothing more than the root of the tree you were talking about earlier, except viewed from a slightly different perspective, right?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
What do you mean by “nothing more than”?

S:
Nothing really is, and so nothing can really be more, can it?

TR:
That’s right, yes.

S:
So loneliness and the root of the tree are describing the same thing.

TR:
Yes. I think as you go along, the rug is pulled out from under your feet. So there are different stages of that.

S:
But the thing that occurred to me that is kind of cute is that there’s no condition under which the root of the tree isn’t, which means that everything is the path. Okay?

TR:
Yes.

S:
If the root of the tree equals loneliness and loneliness equals the path, then you can’t really fall off, right?

TR:
That’s right. And you see, that then gives the understanding that once you are on the path, you can’t shake it off, so to speak. It becomes part of you, all the time, whether you like it or not. Once you begin to join in, you can’t undo it, because you can’t undo your basic being.

S:
Thank you.

TR:
So there’s no need to look for security.

S:
It’s not there. I mean, there’s no security anyway.

TR:
It’s not there, right. That’s right. That’s a good one.

Student:
My connection with the word
loneliness
has to do with different emotional states like sadness and all that sort of thing. It seems that you’re talking about something different, but if so, I don’t understand it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Maybe it is an emotional state of some kind, but not in the sense of the highlight when your emotion reaches its peak. Rather, it’s a self-existing situation. Whenever there is uncertainty and threat, there is loneliness, which is the fear of no companionship and the fear that nobody understands you—which is very simple. At the same time, it’s a fear that you might possibly not exist, that there’s nothing to work on, nothing to work with. We might even go so far as to say that it’s a sense of total nonexistence or total deprivation. A feeling that whatever direction you face, you’re facing the world rather than the path. Things are being pushed back on you. It’s some subtle state of wretchedness. I mean, it’s a heavy one. It’s a very total wretchedness, all-pervasive. It’s not just one-directional, such as “Because he treated me badly, therefore I feel lonelier, and I’m sobbing.” It’s not just him alone, but it’s the whole orchestra that is not playing your music.

Student:
To go back to the idea of not being able to fall off the path, it seems to me—and you’ve written this too—that it is possible to get sidetracked. Even more so the further along you are on the path. So in a sense you can fall off the path, even for a long time.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You could, I think, if you are distracted unconsciously, without the help of meditative awareness. On the other hand, if you are very deliberately, very consciously trying to give up the path, you can’t. Therefore, there is a need for constant awareness practice. It’s a way of checking, so to speak. Not checking up for the purposes of security, but just to be there. And if you get fed up with that and decide to give it up, you can’t do it. But it’s true, you can get caught by sidetracks that come as a product of unawareness. That’s why, you know, everything has been thought out about the path. That’s why meditation is prescribed, why mindfulness and awareness are prescribed. So awareness is a way to keep straight on the path.

S:
So you keep coming back to your original practice.

TR:
Yes, but not in order to be a good boy or anything like that. Just to be yourself properly.

Student:
I’d like to ask a question about loneliness and love. In my experience, the kind of love where two people try to be together in order to protect themselves from loneliness hasn’t worked out too well. When you come in contact with the loneliness, it seems to destroy a lot of things you try to pull off in trying to build up security. But can there be love between two people while they continue to try to work with the loneliness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s an interesting question. I don’t think anybody can fall in love unless they feel lonely. People can’t fall in love unless they know they are lonely and are separate individuals. If by some strange misunderstanding, you think you are the other person already, then there’s no one for you to fall in love with. It doesn’t work that way. The whole idea of union is that of two being together. One and one together make union. If there’s just one, you can’t call that union. Zero is not union, one is not union, but two is union. So I think in love it is the desolateness that inspires the warmth. The more you feel a sense of desolation, the more warmth you feel at the same time. You can’t feel the warmth of a house unless it’s cold outside. The colder it is outside, the cozier it is at home.

S:
What would be the difference between the relationship between lovers and the general relationship you have with the sangha as a whole, which is a whole bunch of people feeling desolateness to different degrees?

TR:
The two people have a similarity in their type of loneliness. One particular person reminds another more of his or her own loneliness. You feel that your partner, in seeing you, feels more lonely. Whereas with the sangha, it’s more a matter of equal shares. There’s all-pervasive loneliness, ubiquitous loneliness, happening all over the place.

Student:
Would you say that loneliness is love?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think we could say that.

Student:
You’ve indicated that as we got into this loneliness, there would be a lot of wretchedness as well. Now I’m wondering how compassion fits into this picture. How does one practice compassion with that loneliness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think loneliness brings a sense of compassion automatically. According to the Buddhist scriptures, compassion consists of shunyata, nothingness, and knowledge, prajna. So that means the ingredients of compassion are the experience of non-ego and a sense of precision, which is often also called skillful means. You can’t have compassion unless you have egolessness and the sense of precision at the same time. The sense of egolessness, obviously, comes with loneliness. And the sense of precision is seeing the wretchedness and at the same time seeing through oneself, so that everything’s been examined and looked at. That becomes compassion. That’s unconditional love, unconditional loneliness. Then even after you’ve reached that point, the loneliness principle goes on. But then you are not lonely anymore; it becomes aloneness as opposed to loneliness, which brings a sense of space.

Student:
You have talked a lot about boredom in meditation. You even said somewhere that if you were not bored, you were stupid, or like a cow. And now you’ve just said that even after twenty years, meditation would always be a challenge. I’m having trouble following what you mean by boredom. Is the boredom a kind of touch-and-go thing where sometimes you’re bored and when you’re bored it causes you to act; and then you act for a while and get bored again? Or are you talking about a continual boredom?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We are talking about a continual boredom.

S:
Then what about the challenge that keeps coming up?

TR:
Boredom has different textures. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but it’s just a challenge rather than anything extraordinary. It’s not a challenge in the sense of having a vision or a mystical experience in which an actual demon comes and tries to attack you. We are not talking about those kinds of challenges. We are talking about a very ordinary challenge, a very boring challenge. But still you have to do something about it. It’s like if you swallow a bug in your soup. It’s a challenge afterward. But it’s not extraordinary that there’s a bug in your soup. You’ve known bugs for a long time. You’ve known soup for a long time. Those are very boring things. But the combination of the two makes interesting boredom.