The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (44 page)

Question:
So doubt is intelligence.

Rinpoche:
Doubt is intelligence, yes. That is really very powerful thinking actually. The chaos is intelligence and it is teaching. So you do not have to ward off anything at all.

Question:
Could you say something about pure pleasure and pure pain isolated unto themselves? How could they exist outside the body or mind?

Rinpoche:
They cannot exist outside the actual body and the actual mind, but they can exist outside our version of the body and our version of the mind. That is the most difficult thing of all—we say “body” and we say “mind,” but we have our own interpretation of them, our own concept of them, which constantly separates us from the reality of the body and mind, the bodyness, the mindness, the thingness of things as they are. This thingness of things as they are is what is called emptiness, shunyata, the actual isness quality of things. Things could be without us; they could remain pure and perfect as they are. But we put our own version over them, and we then amalgamate them all together. It is like dressing up dolls. We have the naked bodies and then we put on military costumes or monks’ robes or an ordinary tie and suit. We dress them up. Then suddenly we find that they are alive. And we try to run away from them because they begin to chase us. We end up being haunted by our own desire and perceptions, because we put so much onto them. Finally our own creation becomes destructive to us.

Question:
I really didn’t understand what you said about freezing space.

Rinpoche:
The basic ground is open ground, but you do not want to accept that. You want to solidify it to make it tangible, safe ground to walk on. So by freezing space, I mean solidifying that open space. There could be the experience of pain and pleasure as naked pain and naked pleasure without any problem of fixing them in relation to anything. We do not have to conquer our projections and our mind at all. We do not have to control anything. Things as they are can remain independent. Once situations are left open and fresh and naked, experience can become very flowing, real, living.

Question:
Where do pure pain and pleasure come from in this pure, open situation?

Rinpoche:
Well, they manifest by themselves. They are not dependent on anything. That is the whole point. We do not have to have a chain-reaction process. Each pain and pleasure can come as an independent package deal. The whole problem arises from relating with experience as something other than just what it is. Then it has to be maintained or controlled. If you have extreme spiritual pleasure, there is the possibility of losing it or its dying because you are trying to maintain it. But really you do not have to maintain it; it is an independent, self-sufficient experience. Therefore, in the tantric iconography, pain and pleasure and all these experiences have been described as divinities, independent persons dancing on lotus seats. They are independent beings. They are not being manipulated by remote control.

Question:
When you talk about pain and pleasure in their pure state, I think that if I tried to relate to that I would end up on a trippy imagination jag, leaving out the earth of the situation. I would just go off on a mind trip.

Rinpoche:
I think that you might well as long as you have the aim and object of trying to get pure pain and pleasure. When you have that idea in mind and try to go out and do it, then you have to do something extraordinary, either take an acid trip or freak out. And you never make it because you have the idea in mind already prepared. That means that ego planned it for you and sent you out with its consent.

Question:
Suppose you had a little flash of intelligence and then saw the whole process of ego starting all over again, the ego panicking and falling into a hungry-ghost mentality, cutting yourself off from the very thing that you want. What do you do with that process?

Rinpoche:
If you see it happening, that is the key point, and you find some spontaneous way of dealing with it. It is like learning to swim. If you are suddenly pushed into the water, you automatically swim; whereas, after a certain time being educated in how to swim by teachers, watching becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Once you see the key point of the situation, then you can relate to it properly, actually do it.

You see the teachings are not really like do-it-yourself books. They do not go through every point down to the last detail. They just indicate, give hints. The teachings are an awakening process to rouse you to the situation, rather than a compendium of step-by-step, specific guidance. The teaching gives hints, and you are inspired to go out and develop them. Then you find that you can do it. That is the whole process. Spontaneity and basic intelligence become extremely important. They begin to function independently when the confusions begin to arise. That is what is meant by the notion of the universal guru.

Intellect

L
OOKING AT THE GENERAL PICTURE
of psychology as we get involved with more and more complex patterns of the skandhas, it becomes clear that it is a pattern of duality developing stronger and stronger. The general tendency of ego is uncertain at the beginning how to establish its link with the world, its identity, its individuality. As it gradually develops more certainty, it finds new ways of evolving; it becomes more and more brave and daring in stepping out and exploring new areas of possible territory or new ways of interpreting and appropriating the world available around it. So it is a pattern of a kind of stubborn bravery making itself more complicated patterns. The fourth skandha, samskara, is a continuation of this pattern. It could be called “intellect.” Samskara is intellect in the sense of being intelligence which enables the ego to gather further territory, further substance, more things.

Samskara does not seem to have any good exact literal translation or equivalent term. The basic literal meaning has the sense of a gathering or accumulation, meaning specifically a tendency to accumulate a collection of mental states as territory. These mental states are also physical; they are mind/body states. So samskara has quite a lot of varieties of different types of classifications of mental patterns. But this is not just a series of names in a list; the patterns are related to each other in an evolutionary pattern they form together as well. The various aspects of samskara are mind/body patterns that have different emotional qualities to them. There are fifty-one general types of these. I do not think we have to go to great lengths here to cover all the types in detail, but let me try to give you some rough idea of them.

There are certain samskaric patterns or attitudes associated with virtue or religion or goodness, which we could say are the expression of basic intelligence, buddha nature; but they also are appropriated by ego and so help constitute its natural tendency of spiritual materialism. There are eleven of these types of good attitudes or tendencies among which are surrendering or faith, awareness, discipline, equanimity, absence of passion, absence of anger, absence of ignorance, humbleness or shyness, a tendency of nonviolence, a tendency of energy or effort or bravery. An important point here is that nobody had to invent these religious or spiritual ideas, but they are a natural part of human psychology. There is a natural sort of gentleness, absence of aggression and passion, a hardworkingness and a nonviolence; and these tendencies develop as part of samskara.

Altogether the general nature of this particular group of samskaric tendencies is absence of aggression. They are a sort of dharma mind. By dharma we generally mean passionlessness in the sense of nongrasping or nonclinging. That which has a context of passion is nondharma. So these tendencies are characterized by an absence of speed or aggression. These thoughts are generally considerate thoughts. They contain a certain amount of conscience. They do not just exist arbitrarily, but they have some reason to be. For one thing there is the absence of aggression, openness, and for another thing this kind of mind/body pattern carries a high degree of awareness of the situations outside oneself. In other words, there is an absence of ego in the superficial sense; in the ordinary sense they are not egocentric. But this is not a question of the fundamental ego; such thoughts are not necessarily egoless. This depends on the user of the thoughts. However, the general quality of them reminds one of a good person, considerate and not egocentric in the ordinary, popular sense.

Then there are the six opposite types of thoughts, the egocentric thoughts. They are ignorance, passion, anger, pride, doubt, and dogmatism. These are considered to be the absence of the virtues of the kinds of thoughts we have just discussed.

Here again, the ignorance in question is quite different from the basic ignorance that constitutes the ego, that sort of fundamental ignoring of oneself. The ignorance we are referring to here is the source of all the other kinds of evil thoughts, those which are not considerate, those which are the absence of the spiritual type of thoughts. They are characterized by a sort of sudden boldness which acts without considering the situation. They just act out on impulse, without any sharpness and precision. They are wholly intoxicated by a sense of whatever one wants to accomplish, so they act brashly without seeing one’s relationship to the situation.

And passion here is also actual passion rather than the fundamental passion of grasping. It is the actualized passion of desire. Whereas the fundamental passion is sort of an innate quality of grasping within ego, this is the actual active movement of grasping. On this level, passion, hatred, and pride are all directly active qualities rather than fundamental ones. Pride here is the sense of preservation of oneself in relationship with others. Doubt is the sense of not having enough security in oneself. Dogmatic belief is clinging to a particular discovery that we have made and not wanting to let go of that idea because we feel if we did there would be nothing left to cling to.

Dogmatic belief itself is divided into different types, for instance, the philosophical beliefs in eternalism and nihilism. Eternalism is the idea that everything in the worldly or spiritual spheres is continuous and permanent. Part of this is the notion that there is a permanent significance to our experience, that there could be an ultimate and permanent salvation within the realm of the experiencer. Nihilism is the opposite extreme. It is the fatalistic belief that everything has no value and is meaningless. Another of the dogmatic tendencies is the false belief in morality or a particular discipline that one follows, dogmatically clinging to it and trying to hold on to it as a philosophical view.

Then there are four types of neutral thoughts; sleep or slothfulness, intellectual speculation, remorse, and knowing. These are neutral in that they can fit in with different patterns, the virtuous or the evil ones. Theoretical intellectual speculation is obviously neutral in that it functions in the service of either kind of tendency. Remorse is, in a sense, a questioning process that further clarifies a situation: you have done something wrong and feel doubtful about it, which leads you on a kind of a process of rediscovery. That is neutral in that that process of discovery could function in relation to either the considerate or egocentric patterns. Knowing is a neutral state because when you learn something you have a sudden open attitude to it at that moment, before you get into the next double take, that is, before ego appropriates it as territory. There is that momentary open feeling of acceptance of whatever you heard, whatever you understood. Sleep or slothfulness is of course also neutral, since it also contains that kind of possibility of belonging to an open or egocentric context.

Now all these kinds of thoughts are further classified according to the instinctive behavior connected with them, how you project them to the world outside. That is done on the basis either of hatred or desire. Hatred in this case is a natural kind of aggression, and desire is a natural kind of longing. All these thoughts are motivated either by instinctive hatred or desire. Even apparently good thoughts—compassion, for instance—on the level of ego, would have an underlying sense of hatred or of passion. It depends on whether the thought process is originally based on speed or on a kind of starvation, which is the need to grasp something, to absorb oneself in something. In addition, some thought patterns have ignorance as underlying motivation.

The study of the samskara skandha can teach us that all the phenomena of human psychology, whatever types of thought patterns occur, all have these good and bad and indifferent qualities. Therefore we cannot really define one thought pattern as being the only right kind—there is no such thing as absolute aggression or absolute passion or absolute ignorance. All of them have the slight tendency of the other types. The whole idea is that therefore one cannot just condemn one type and totally accept another, even if it is the spiritual virtuous type of thoughts. They are questionable as all the other kinds of thoughts are questionable. That is a very important point—nothing is really to be condemned or accepted.

On a larger scale, the whole pattern of the five skandhas is also neutral, rather than belonging particularly to samsara or particularly to nirvana. But one thing is quite certain and constant about the five skandhas—they manufacture karmic chain reactions all the time. That is always, unquestionably the case. The karmic pattern cannot exist by itself, of course, since karma is not some other kind of entity that exists independently. Karma is a creative process which brings results, which in turn sow seeds of further results. It is like an echo process. You shout and your voice bounces back on you as well as being transmitted to the next wall, and it goes on and on. And the skandhas could be said to be the horse of karma. The speed of karma is based on the five skandhas. The natural, sort of chemical cause-and-effect pattern remains within karma, but the speed that the cause-and-effect process requires in order to function is the skandhas.