The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (33 page)

That is the end of our discussion of the discipline of carrying whatever occurs in our life onto the path, which is connected with patience and nonaggression.

*
A more literal translation of this slogan is “Contemplate the great kindness of everyone.”

POINT FOUR

Showing the Utilization of Practice in One’s Whole Life

P
OINT
F
OUR AND THE
P
ARAMITA OF
E
XERTION

The fourth point of the seven points of mind training is connected with the paramita of exertion. Exertion basically means being free from laziness. When we use the word
lazy
, we are talking about a general lack of mindfulness and a lack of joy in discipline. When your mind is mixed with dharma, when you have already become a dharmic person, then the connection has already been made. Therefore, you have no problem dealing with laziness. But if you have not made that connection, there might be some problems.

We could discuss exertion in terms of developing joy and appreciation for what you are doing. It is like taking a holiday trip: you are very inspired to wake up in the morning because you are expecting to have a tremendous experience. Exertion is like the minute before you wake up on a holiday trip: you have some sense of trusting that you are going to have a good time, but at the same time you have to put your effort into it. So exertion is some kind of celebration and joy, which is free from laziness.

It has been said in the scriptures that without exertion you cannot journey on the path at all. We have also said that without the legs of discipline you cannot walk on the path—but even if you have those legs, if you don’t have exertion, you can’t take any steps. Exertion involves a sense of pushing yourself step by step, little by little. You are actually connecting yourself to the path as you are walking on it. Nevertheless, you are also experiencing some sense of resistance. But that resistance could be overcome by overcoming laziness, by ceasing to dwell in the entertainment of your subconscious gossip, discursive thoughts, and emotionalism of all kinds.

The fourth point of mind training deals with completing your training in your life altogether, from the living situation you are in now until your death. So we are discussing what you can do while you are alive and when you are dying. These two slogans are instructions on how to lead your life.

17

Practice the five strengths
,

The condensed heart instructions
.

We have five types of energizing factors, or five strengths, so that we can practice our bodhisattva discipline throughout our whole life: strong determination, familiarization, seed of virtue, reproach, and aspiration.

Strong Determination

Number one is strong determination. You are determined to maintain twofold bodhichitta. The practitioner should always have the attitude of maintaining bodhichitta—for this lifetime, this year, this month, this day. Strong determination means not wasting your time. It is also making it a point that you and the practice are one. Practice is your way of strengthening yourself. Sometimes when you get up in the morning, particularly if you have had a late night or you have been partying, you feel very feeble, somewhat uncertain. Quite possibly you wake up with a hangover, feeling very guilty. You wonder whether you were foolish the night before, whether you did absurd things. You wonder what other people think of you and begin to be afraid that they might have lost their respect for you or that they might have confirmed your feebleness. You do a lot of worrying in that kind of situation.

The idea of the first strength is that as soon as you open your eyes and look out the window, as soon as you wake up, you reaffirm your strong determination to continue with your bodhichitta practice. And you do the same thing when you lie down on your bed at the end of the day, as you reflect back on your day’s work, its problems, its frustrations, its pleasures, and all the good and bad things that happened. As you are dozing off, you think with strong determination that as soon as you wake up in the morning you are going to maintain your practice with continual exertion, which means joy. So you have some sense of looking forward to tomorrow, an attitude of looking forward to your day when you wake up in the morning.

Strong determination is connected with developing an attitude toward your practice that is almost like falling completely in love. You would like to go to bed with your lover; you long for it. You would like to wake up with your lover; you long for that too. You have a sense of appreciation and joy; therefore, your practice does not become torture or torment, it does not become a cage. Instead, your practice becomes a way of cheering yourself up constantly. Your practice might require a certain amount of exertion, a certain amount of pushing yourself, but you are well connected, so you are pleased to wake up in the morning and you are pleased to go to bed at night. Even your sleep becomes worthwhile; you sleep in a good frame of mind. The idea is one of waking up basic goodness, the alaya principle, and realizing that you are in the right spot, the right practice. So there is a sense of joy in strong determination, which is the first strength.

Familiarization

The second strength is known as familiarization. Because you have already developed strong determination, everything becomes a natural process. Even if you sometimes are mindless, even if you lose your concentration or your awareness, situations will remind you to go back to your practice. This is a process of familiarization in which your dharmic subconscious gossip has begun to become more powerful than your ordinary subconscious gossip. Bodhichitta has become familiar ground in whatever you do—whether vice, virtue, or in between. So you are getting used to bodhichitta as an ongoing realization.

Again, this process is analogous to falling in love. When somebody mentions your lover’s name, you feel both pain and pleasure. You feel turned on to that person’s name and to anything associated with him or her. In the same way, the natural tendency of mindfulness-awareness, when the concept of egolessness has already evolved in your mind, is to flash on to dharma. You familiarize yourself with it. In other words, you no longer regard dharma as a foreign entity, but you begin to realize that dharma is a household thought, a household word, and a household activity. Each time you uncork your bottle of wine or unpop your Coca-Cola can or pour yourself a glass of water—whatever you do becomes a reminder. You cannot get rid of it; it becomes a natural situation.

So you learn to live with your sanity. That is very hard for many people at the beginning, but once you begin to realize that sanity is part of your being, there shouldn’t be any problem. Of course, occasionally you want to take a break. You want to run away and take a vacation from your sanity. You want to do something else. However, your basic strength begins to become more powerful, so that your basic wickedness or insanity is changed into mindfulness and realization and familiarity with wakefulness.

Seed of Virtue

Number three is known as the seed of virtue. You have tremendous yearning all the time, so you do not take a rest from your wakefulness. It means not taking a break from your practice, basically speaking, but continuing on—not being content with what you are doing and not taking a break. You do not feel that you have had enough of it or that you have to do something else instead.

At that point, your neurosis about individual freedom and human rights might come up. You might begin to think, “I have a right to do anything I want, and I want to dive to the bottom of hell. I love it! I like it!” That kind of reactionism could happen. But you should pull yourself back up from the bottom of hell—for your own sake. You should realize that you cannot just give in to the little claustrophobia of your own sanity. In this case, virtue means that your body, speech, and mind are all dedicated to propagating bodhichitta in yourself.

Reproach

Number four is reproach, reproaching your ego. It is revulsion with samsara. Whenever any ego-centered thought occurs, you should think, “It is because of such clinging to ego that I wander in samsara and suffer endless pain. Since ego-clinging is the source of pain, if I try to maintain ego, there can be no happiness. Therefore, I must try to tame ego as much as I can.” If you even want to talk to yourself, you should talk in this way. In fact, sometimes talking to yourself is very highly recommended, but it obviously depends on what you talk to yourself about. In this case, you are encouraged to say to your ego, “You have created tremendous trouble for me, and I don’t like you. You have caused me so much trouble by making me wander in the lower realms of samsara. I have no desire at all to hang around with you. I’m going to destroy you. This ‘you’—who are you, anyway? Go away! I don’t like you.”

Talking to your ego, reproaching yourself in that way, is very helpful. It is worth taking a shower and talking to yourself that way. It is worth sitting on the toilet seat and talking to yourself in that way. It would be a very good thing for you to do when you are driving. Instead of turning on the rock-punk, just turn on your reproach to your ego instead and talk to yourself. If you are being accompanied by somebody you might feel embarrassed, but you can still whisper to yourself. That is the best way to become an eccentric bodhisattva.

Aspiration

Number five is aspiration. The practitioner should end each session of meditation practice with the wish [1] to save all sentient beings—by himself, single-handedly; [2] not to forget twofold bodhichitta, even in his or her dreams; and [3] to apply bodhichitta in spite of whatever chaos and obstacles may arise. Because you have experienced joy and celebration in your practice, it does not feel like a burden to you. Therefore, you aspire further and further. You would like to attain enlightenment. You would like to free yourself from neurosis. You would also like to serve all “mother sentient beings”
¹
throughout all times, all situations, at any moment. You are willing to become a rock or a bridge or a highway. You are willing to serve any worthy cause that will help the rest of the world. This is the same basic kind of aspiration as in taking the bodhisattva vow. It is also general instruction on becoming a very pliable person, so that the rest of the world can use you as a working basis for their enjoyment of sanity.

18

The mahayana instruction for ejection of consciousness at death

Is the five strengths: how you conduct yourself is important
.

The second slogan of the fourth point of mind training is dealing with the future—our death. The question of death is very important. Realizing the truth of suffering and impermanence is a very important first step in realizing the Buddha’s teaching altogether. All of us will die sooner or later. Some of us will die very soon and some of us might die somewhat later, but that is not particularly a reason for relaxing.

I would like to discuss the idea of making friends with our death. According to the tradition of ego-oriented culture, death is seen as a defeat and as an insult. Theistic disciplines try to teach us to develop a sense of eternity. But the basic Buddhist tradition, particularly the mahayana, teaches us that death is a deliberate act. Because we have been born, we have to die. That is a very obvious and sensible thing to say. But beyond that, we can make friends with our death and see how we can die as we are.

People usually try to ignore their death completely. If you say to somebody, “Do you realize that you could die tomorrow?” that person will say, “Don’t be silly! I’m okay.” That attitude is an attempt to avoid the fundamental ugliness existing in us. But death need not be regarded as the ultimate ugly situation that happens to us; instead it can be regarded as a way of extending ourselves into the next life. In this case, death is seen as an invitation to allow this thing we cherish so very much, called our body, to perish. We shave and we take showers and baths and we clothe ourselves quite beautifully, or somewhat beautifully. On the whole, we try to take very good care of this pet called our body. It is like having a little puppy—we don’t want our pet to die. But this little pet called our body might leave us sooner or later—
will
leave us sooner or later.

So to begin with, we have to realize that anything could happen to any one of us. We could be very healthy—but we might not die from ill health, we could die from an accident. We could die from sickness, from terminal diseases of all kinds, and sometimes we die without any reason at all. Although we have no external or internal problems—we just suddenly perish. We run completely out of breath and drop dead on the spot. So the point is to familiarize ourselves completely with our own death.

You want to live so much, and in order to live you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You cannot even sit on a zafu [meditation cushion] properly because your fear of death is so strong that you think the circulation in your legs might be cut off. You are so afraid to die that any attack that comes to you, even a little splinter in your finger, means death. So this instruction on how to die is not necessarily only about how to die when your death comes to you, but it is also a question of having to realize that death is always there.

One of the Kadam teachers who did these practices always put his drinking cup upside down on his table when he went to bed. Traditionally that means you are not going to be at home. You put your cup upside down so it won’t get dusty. In that way you keep it clean and pure, so that somebody else can use it. The point is that the teacher always thought he might die that night; therefore he turned his cup upside down. You might think that is rather an eccentric way of going about things, but still, you should think twice or thrice when you say good night to somebody. You don’t know whether or not you are going to see him or her tomorrow. That is a somewhat grim approach, if you view death as a disaster. But if you say good night nicely to somebody, that is a nice way to get out of your life, your body. It is a very humorous way of ending your life. There is a glory and humor in it. You don’t need to die filled with remorse; you could die happily.