The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (45 page)

Perhaps we should have some discussion.

Question:
Did you say that samskara is associated with neither nirvana nor samsara, or does that apply to all the skandhas?

Rinpoche:
To all the skandhas.

Question:
I am puzzled. You said that the good thoughts were somehow related to buddha nature.

Rinpoche:
Well, that is easily possible if there is underlying non-ego intonation. That is why they are called “good,” because they are not acts of egomania in the literal, ordinary sense.

Question:
Is there more possibility of buddha nature in the states of mind classified as good?

Rinpoche:
Yes, there is a tendency to be closer to the awakened state; but at the same time, if this good is being used by the ego, then it is not necessarily absolute good, but just sort of pseudo.

Question:
Then does it make any difference? That is, is it worthwhile trying to be a good boy?

Rinpoche:
I don’t think so, necessarily. Although these are said to be the good or virtuous ones, at the same time such thoughts—patience or nonviolence or whatever—cannot happen by themselves. They have to have the tinges of passion or aggression, as I said, or also ignorance. They cannot constitute the basic energy that has to go along with them for them to occur. So there is no such thing as 100 percent good in any case. The tendencies are sort of lighter and heavier rather than good and bad.

Question:
So they all come from ignorance, hatred, and passion.

Rinpoche:
They do, yes.

Question:
Is the thread that connects them perception, feeling, or both?

Rinpoche:
Quite likely it is form, the basic continuity, ignorance which makes it all possible for the others to continue.

Question:
I am confused about speed. There is a speed of the ego being driven, going faster and faster, and there is also a speed of universal energy, or something like that. There is an evil speed, but is there also another speed?

Rinpoche:
Well, I’m trying to use the word
speed
as a sort of driving aggression. But that is not purely pejorative. This has a positive aspect as well, because any kind of aggression, any kind of movement that there is, always has neutral energy that goes along with it. So speed is pure force, neutral force, which could be used for different purposes. The buddha wisdom of the accomplishment of all actions could also be called speed. But somehow that speed is not based on a target. Once you have a target, or criteria in terms of reaching somewhere from somewhere else, that makes the whole pattern of speed destructive. In the case of the energy without a target, without a relativity notion, that speed just happens and returns just by its own nature. It fulfills actions completely and comes back. Because fulfilling action in this case follows no criterion or model at all. The speed or energy just goes out and gets into the natural situation spontaneously, tries to bring the natural situation to its fullest state, and then comes back. This kind of speed does not behave in a dictatorial way. In the case of ego speed, you have a blueprint of what should be happening and you put out speed accordingly. You try to control situations or remold them. That leads to disappointment and confusion.

Question:
Wouldn’t these dogmatic beliefs that you talked about be beliefs on the part of the “watcher”?

Rinpoche:
If there is any tendency to get yourself to believe in certain ideas, particularly philosophical views such as the nihilistic and eternalistic ones, automatically you are aware of the learning process as being separate. You watch yourself in the process of learning and you use particular tools of different intensity, either gentle or aggressive ones, to bring about a certain result. So all these beliefs are, in a sense, very deliberate. It is a natural mind process, but that mind process involves deliberate effort—deliberately trying to be good or deliberately trying to grasp something and so on. Except for those four types of neutral patterns, sleep and the others: they are not deliberate, which is why they are called neutral. They can be influenced by either kind of deliberate thought pattern. They do not contain a watcher, actually. That is why they can be used by either kind of deliberate pattern or by ego or non-ego. But the rest of them are fixed and definite.

Question:
That watcher is the one that puts everything that happens into one of those categories, these samskaric types of good and bad?

Rinpoche:
Yes. That is actually a certain kind of common sense developed by the establishment of ego. By this time ego is so well established, it has developed its own regulations and rules. This becomes a kind of common sense. You see, as long as you are involved with the ego game, all these flashes of different types of thoughts and concepts are not independent ones at all. They are purely dependent on central headquarters. You always have to report back to yourself in order to define the ground. That is the watcher. And the watcher has a watcher as well.

Question:
Would you say a little more about doubt? You have just spoken of doubt as one of the negative factors. Previously you spoke about it in a positive sense.

Rinpoche:
We have been speaking about two quite different kinds of doubt. One kind is one of the six types of egocentric thoughts. This is ego’s tendency to have doubt in terms of the motivation of passion and anger and ignorance. It is a fear of losing ground, bewilderment rather than doubt in the intelligent sense. We fear we may not be able to survive to implement our ambition properly in the perspective of our egohood. It is more a fear of losing ground than doubt.

The intelligent doubt we were talking of earlier on is a general sense that there is something wrong all the way through, a sort of seed of doubt which runs right through the whole five-skandha process. It is the quality of inquisitiveness, questioning mind, which is the seed of the awakened state of mind. This is doubt or intelligence which is not protecting anything. It is purely questioning rather than trying to serve either the ego or non-ego state. It is purely a process of critical view which goes on all the time.

Question:
I’m trying to relate this to inner experience. Associations present themselves and many other things, you know, when one is sitting quietly. And then a thought happens and there is belief in it, and then remembrances, and then an impulse arises that this that I am believing is not necessarily so. It may or may not be. I think what I’m trying to ask is—is this still within the pattern of attachment, or is this in the direction of something a little bit more free?

Rinpoche:
You see, it is very difficult to make a generalization. What you described in itself could have different implications. The implication could be based solely on a survival notion; it could be based on a sense of “maybe that one, maybe this one”—ego jockeying for better position. Or there is the possibility of something else—that it could be based on a kind of open mind. It depends on your own relation to that.

Question:
You mentioned slothfulness as one of the neutral states. But I’m wondering in what way slothfulness can be converted. Can it be channeled in the same way that intellectual speculation could be clarified?

Rinpoche:
Slothfulness could be sort of infiltrated rather than changed or channeled into something else. This is because slothfulness does not contain any definite thing. It is a process, a mind process of not having made up your mind quite. You are just trundling along. So it has the possibility of being infiltrated from any side.

Question:
Is slothfulness synonymous with laziness?

Rinpoche:
Well, the words are complicated in this case. Somehow, laziness could have the connotation of being a naughty boy. You know, you should be doing thus and such, but you do not want to do it. Sort of stubbornness. But sloth is a general heaviness or being sleepy rather than game playing. It is just quite honest and ordinary.

Question:
So in that sense slothfulness may be more receptive, more passive?

Rinpoche:
Precisely, yes. It could be infiltrated.

Question:
Insofar as you try to be something, wouldn’t it be better to try to be honest instead of trying to be good? I mean honest in the sense of trying to abandon one’s own pretensions. Isn’t that the basic effort?

Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. The reason why all these different types of thoughts and ideas are being introduced, in fact, is so you can see your psychological picture in its fullest perspective; so that you do not try to regard one kind of thought pattern as good or another as bad; so that instead you regard everything directly and simply.

Question:
I have an image going in my mind that the skandhas represent energy which has gone astray from the awakened state of mind and has taken on various forms. Lost from its origin, it has taken on various forms. And it seems that spiritual understanding would return this lost energy to its origin in some way. But also I have another image from when you pointed out that ignorance or form has the thread that holds all the skandhas together. Then I had the thought that it is simply a question of not operating ignorance—if you’re just completely still and unconcerned, it will all just blow away. And the two images give me two different attitudes. Do you know what I mean?

Rinpoche:
Well, I don’t see any difficulties there. Ignorance is the binding factor for all the skandhas in their minute detail, but ignorance cannot exist by itself without relative situations, and the relative situation of ignorance is the awakened state of mind, intelligence, which makes ignorance survive or die. In other words, we could say that the awakened state of mind is the thread also, in the same way as ignorance. It runs right through the skandhas.

Question:
But it wouldn’t be awakened if it were doing that.

Rinpoche:
It would. Ignorance feels the other, the awakened, aspect of the polarity; therefore it does what it does. There is some subtle relationship ignorance is making with the basic intelligence of buddha nature. So ignorance in this case is not stupid, it is intelligent. The term for ignorance in Tibetan,
marikpa
, means “not seeing, not perceiving.” That means deciding to not perceive, deciding to not see, deciding to not look. Ignorance makes certain decisions and, having already made a certain decision, it tries to maintain it no matter what. Often it faces a hard time keeping to that decision constantly, because one act of ignorance cannot persist indefinitely, once and for all. Ignorance also is based on sparks or flashes of ignorance operating on some ground, and the space between two sparks of ignoring is the intelligence that this process of ignorance is operating on. It also happens occasionally that ignorance forgets to maintain its own quality, so that the awakened state comes through. So a meditative state of mind occurs spontaneously when, occasionally, the efficiency of ego’s administration breaks down.

Question:
Would you explain what you mean by “ego game”?

Rinpoche:
I think that is what we have been discussing all along in this seminar. The basic notion of ego is the notion of survival, trying to maintain oneself as “I am,” as an individual. Now, as we just said, there is a tendency for the coherency of that occasionally to break down. Therefore one needs to find all sorts of means of confirmation, of confirming a coherent, consistent me, a solid me. Sometimes, quite knowingly, ego has to play a game as though nothing had gone wrong with it. It pretends seeing through ego never happened, even though secretly it knows better. So ego trying to maintain itself leaves one in the strange position of trying to indoctrinate oneself oneself. This is a false pursuit, of course. But even knowing it is false does not particularly help, because ego says, “That’s not the point. We have to go on trying to learn to survive, playing this survival game of grasping, using any situation available in the present moment as part of the survival technique.” This involves a power game as well, because at a certain stage the defense mechanisms you have set up become more powerful than you are. They become overwhelming. Then, when you become used to the overwhelming quality of the defense mechanisms, when, for a moment, they are absent, you feel very insecure. That game of polarities goes on and on. On the whole, ego’s game is played in terms of ignoring what is really happening in a situation. You constantly, quite stubbornly want to see it from your point of view rather than seeing what really is happening there.

Question:
You spoke of an aerial view of the five skandhas. Do you mean that with the development of meditative awareness one can actually experience the development of the skandhas in oneself?

Rinpoche:
Yes. In a sudden glimpse of awareness, or in the meditation state, one sees the ups and downs of the five skandhas taking place and dissolving and beginning to develop again. The whole idea of meditation is to develop what is called the “wisdom eye,” prajnaparamita, transcendental knowledge. It is knowledge, information, at the beginning, when you are watching yourself and beginning to discover yourself, your psychological pattern. And suddenly, strangely, that watching process begins to become an experiencing process, and it is, in a sense, already under control. That does not mean to say that the development of the five skandhas would stop taking place. The skandhas happen continuously until they are transmuted into what are called the “five tathagathas,” the five types of awakened being.

You see, at the beginning, we have to develop a very sharp, precise mind to see what we are. There is no other way of sharpening our intelligence. Pure intellectual speculation would not sharpen it at all, because there you have to introduce so much stuff that blunts, that overclouds. The only way to do it is just to leave intelligence as it is with the help of some technique. Then the intelligence begins to learn how to relax and wait and allow what takes place to reflect in it. The learning process becomes a reflection rather than creating things. So waiting and letting what arises reflect on the intelligence is the meditation practice. It is like letting a pond settle down so the true reflection can be seen. There are already so many mental activities going on constantly. Adding further mental activities does not sharpen the intelligence. The only way is just to let it develop, grow.