The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (25 page)

Antidotes are any notion that we can do what we want and that as long as we are meditative, everything is going to be fine. The text says to self-liberate even the antidote, the seeming antidote. We may regard going to the movies every minute, every day, every evening as our meditation, or watching television, or grooming our horse, feeding our dog, taking a long walk in the woods. There are endless possibilities like that in the Occidental tradition, or for that matter in the theistic tradition.

The theistic tradition talks about meditation and contemplation as a fantastic thing to do. The popular notion of God is that he created the world: the woods were made by God, the castle ruins were created by God, and the ocean was made by God. So we could swim and meditate or we could lie on the beach made by God and have a fantastic time. Such theistic nature worship has become a problem. We have so many holiday makers, nature worshipers, so many hunters.

In Scotland, at the Samye Ling meditation center where I was teaching, there was a very friendly neighbor from Birmingham, an industrial town, who always came up there on weekends to have a nice time. Occasionally he would drop into our meditation hall and sit with us, and he would say, “Well, it’s nice you people are meditating, but I feel much better if I walk out in the woods with my gun and shoot animals. I feel very meditative walking through the woods and listening to the sharp, subtle sounds of animals jumping forth, and I can shoot at them. I feel I am doing something worthwhile at the same time. I can bring back venison, cook it, and feed my family. I feel good about that.”

The whole point of this slogan is that antidotes of any kind, or for that matter occupational therapies of any kind, are not regarded as appropriate things to do. We are not particularly seeking enlightenment or the simple experience of tranquillity—we are trying to get over our deception.

5

Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence
.

The idea of this slogan is that in the sitting practice of meditation and with an understanding of ultimate bodhichitta, you actually transcend the seven types of consciousness and rest in the eighth consciousness, alaya. The first six types of consciousness are the sensory perceptions: [1] visual consciousness, [2] hearing consciousness, [3] smelling consciousness, [4] taste consciousness, [5] feeling or touch consciousness, and [6] mind consciousness, or the basic coordinating factor governing the other five. [Customarily, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind consciousness.] The seventh type of consciousness, nuisance mind, is a kind of conglomeration which puts energy into all of that. In Tibetan it is called nyön-yi:
nyön
is short for
nyönmong
[
klesha
in Sanskrit], which literally means “nuisance,” “defilements,” “neurosis,” and
yi
means “mind.”

The idea of resting one’s mind in the basic alaya is to free oneself from that sevenfold mind and rest in simplicity and in clear and nondiscriminating mind. You begin to feel that sight, smell, sound, and everything else that happens is a production of home ground, or headquarters. You recognize them and then come back to headquarters, where those productions began to manifest. You just rest in the needlessness of those productions.

The idea is that there is a resting place of some kind, which could be called primitive shamatha. There is a starting point, a returning point. You can look at me and as you look at me you might check yourself—but you might check
beyond
yourself and find that some homing device is already taking place. So the idea is to rest in alaya, to be with the homing device, to rest where the orders and information come from.

This whole logic or process is based on taking it for granted that you trust yourself already, to begin with. You have some kind of relaxation with yourself. That is the idea of ultimate bodhichitta. You don’t have to run away from yourself all the time in order to get something outside. You can just come home and relax. The idea is to return to home sweet home.

You try to give yourself good treatment. You do not follow fixed logic or fixed conceptual ideas of any kind, including discursive thought. Resting in the nature of alaya means going beyond the six sense consciousnesses, and even beyond the seventh consciousness, the fundamental discursive thought process which brings about the other six. The basic alaya principle goes beyond all that. Even in ordinary situations, if you actually trace back to find out where everything came from, you will find some primitive resting level. You could rest in that primitive basic existence, that existential level.

Starting from the basic alaya principle, we then develop alayavijnana, or alaya consciousness, which makes distinctions. We begin to create a separation between this and that, who and whom, what and what. That is the notion of consciousness, or we could even call it
self
-consciousness—who is on our side and who is on their side, so to speak. The basic alaya principle does not have any bias. That is why the basic alaya principle is called natural virtue. It is neutral. It is neither male nor female, therefore it is not on either side, and the question of courting is not involved. Alaya
consciousness
is biased. It is either male or female, because the courting concept is involved.

Basic wakefulness, sugatagarbha, is beyond alaya, but it goes along with alaya at the same time. It is pre-alaya, but it encompasses the alaya state. Alaya has basic goodness, but sugatagarbha has greater goodness. It is wakefulness in itself. From that point of view, even basic alaya could be said to be consciousness of some kind. Although it is not an official category of consciousness as such, it is a kind of awareness, or maybe even a kind of samsaric mind. But sugatagarbha is beyond that. It is indestructible—the ancestor, or parent, of alaya.

The process of perception, when you first perceive a sense object, has several components. You have the actual mechanisms which perceive things, your physical faculties such as eyes, ears, and so forth. Beyond that are the mental faculties which use those particular instruments to reflect on certain objects. If you go beyond that, there is the intention of doing that, the fascination or inquisitiveness that wants to know how to relate with those objects. And if you go back beyond that altogether, you find there is a basic experience underlying all of that, which is known as the alaya principle.

According to this text on lojong, that experience is known as basic goodness. So this slogan refers to an experience, not simply to the structural, mechanical process of projection. We could describe that process with the analogy of a film projector. We have the screen, the phenomenal world; then we project ourselves onto that phenomenal world; and we have the film, which is the fickleness of mind, constantly changing frames. So we have a moving object projected onto the screen. That moving object is mechanically produced by the machinery of the projector which has lots of teeth to catch the film and mechanical devices to make sure that the projection is continuous—which is precisely the same situation as the sense organs. We look and we listen, therefore when we listen, we look. We connect things together by means of time, although things are shifting completely every moment. And behind the whole thing is the bulb, which projects everything onto the screen. That bulb is the cause of the whole thing. So resting in the nature of alaya is like resting in the nature of that bulb, which is behind the machinery of the film projector. Like the bulb, alaya is brilliant and shining. The bulb does not give in to the fickleness of the rest of the machine. It has no concern with how the screen is coming along or how the image is coming through.

Resting in alaya is the actual practice of ultimate bodhichitta, what happens during sitting practice. You experience ultimate bodhichitta at that level. Ultimate bodhichitta is purely the realization that phenomena cannot be regarded as solid, but at the same time they are self-luminous. In the analogy of the film projector, you have to work with the lamp. You take the lamp out of the projector—there’s no monkey business with your projector—and you just screw that lamp onto your regular old-fashioned fixture and look at it. That is the self-liberating alaya.

It may be an embarrassing subject to discuss, but this book is designed for the ordinary practitioner. We are not believing in or cultivating alaya, but we are using it as a stepping-stone. It would be dangerous if you cultivated it as an end in itself. In this case it is just another step in the ladder. We are talking very simply about alaya as just a clear mind, a basic clear mind. It is simplicity and clarity and nondiscursive thought—very basic alaya. It may not be completely free from all the consciousnesses, including the eighth consciousness itself, but it is the alaya of basic potentiality.

We have to be very clear on this, generally speaking. We are not trying to grasp the buddha nature immediately at this point. This instruction on resting in alaya is given to somebody who is at the very beginning level. A lot of us have problems; we have no idea whether we are sitting or not sitting. We have struggles about that. So we are trying to work on our basic premises. It is a slowing-down process. For the first time we learn to slow down.

6

In postmeditation, be a child of illusion
.

Being a child of illusion means that in the postmeditation experience there is a sense that everything is based on creating one’s basic perceptions out of one’s preconceptions. If you can cut through that and inject some basic understanding or awareness, you begin to see that the games going on are not even big games but simply illusory ones. To realize that requires a lot of mindfulness and awareness working together. Here we are actually talking about meditation in action, or postmeditation discipline.

Illusion does not mean haziness, confusion, or mirage. Being a child of illusion means that you continue what you have experienced in your sitting practice [resting in the nature of alaya] into postmeditation experience. Continuing with the analogy of the projector, during postmeditation you take the bulb out. You might not have the screen or the film at this point, but you transfer the bulb into your flashlight and carry it with you all the time.

You realize that after you finish sitting practice, you do not have to solidify phenomena. Instead, you can continue your practice and develop some kind of ongoing awareness. If things become heavy and solid, you flash mindfulness and awareness into them. In that way you begin to see that everything is pliable and workable. Your attitude is that the phenomenal world is not evil, that “they” are not going to attack you or destroy you or kill you. Everything is workable and soothing.

It is like swimming: you swim along in your phenomenal world. You can’t just float, you have to swim; you have to use your limbs. That process of using your limbs is the basic stroke of mindfulness and awareness. It is the “flash” quality of it—you flash on to things. So you are swimming constantly in postmeditation. And during meditation, you just sit and rest in the nature of your alaya, very simply. That is how we can develop ultimate bodhichitta. It is very basic and ordinary. You can actually do it. That’s the whole idea.

It is not abstract, you simply look at phenomena and see their padded-wall quality, if you like. That’s the illusion: padded walls everywhere. You think you are just about to strike against something very sharp, while having a cup of tea or whatever, and you find that things bounce back on you. There is not so much sharp contrast—everything is part of your mindfulness and awareness. Everything bounces back, like the ball in one of those little television Ping-Pong games. When it returns, you might throw it out again by not being a child of illusion, but it comes back again with a beep, so you become a child of illusion. It is “first thought, best thought.” When you look at things, you find that they are soft and that they bounce back on you all the time. It’s not particularly intellectual.

This slogan is about learning how to nurture ultimate bodhichitta in terms of mindfulness and awareness. We have to learn how we can actually experience that things in the postmeditation situation are still workable, that there is room, lots of space. The basic idea of being a child of illusion is that we don’t feel claustrophobic. After your sitting practice, you might think, “Oh boy, now I have to do the postmeditation practices.” But you don’t have to feel that you are closed in. Instead you can feel that you are a child of illusion, that you are dancing around and clicking with those little beeps all the time. It is fresh and simple and very effective. The point is to treat yourself better. If you want to take a vacation from your practice, you can do so and still remain a child of illusion. Things just keep on beeping at you all the time. It’s very lucid. It’s almost whimsical.

Being a child of illusion is very simple. It is being willing to realize the simplicity of phenomenal play and to use that simplicity as a part of awareness and mindfulness practice. It’s a very strong phrase, “child of illusion.” Think about it. Try to be one. You have plenty of opportunities.

R
ELATIVE
B
ODHICHITTA
S
LOGANS

7

Sending and taking should be practiced alternately
.

These two should ride the breath
.

Sending and taking is a very important practice of the bodhisattva path. It is called tonglen in Tibetan:
tong
means “sending out” or “letting go,” and
len
means “receiving,” or “accepting.”
Tonglen
is a very important term; you should remember it. It is the main practice in the development of relative bodhichitta.

The slogan says: “These two should ride the breath.” We have been using the breath as a technique all along because it is constant and because it is something very natural to us. Therefore, we also use it here, in exactly the same way as we have been doing in shamatha discipline.