The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (47 page)

Rinpoche:
That painful experience is very good because that is the beginning of making friends with yourself. If you are really going to make a long-term friendship with somebody, probably the first thing that hits you about that person are the things that you do not like. That is the starting point that provides a foundation for your friendship. It is a really solid foundation, because having included those things, you will not be perturbed later by whatever may happen with that friend. Since you know all the negative aspects and do not have to hide from that side of the relationship, you are now completely open to find the other side, the positive side, as well. That is a very good way to start making friends with oneself or anybody else for that matter. Otherwise you feel cheated when you discover the faults later on.

Question:
How do the five skandhas tie in with meditation?

Rinpoche:
That’s a big question. The five skandhas are a process of five stages of psychological development, and meditation does not contain that development. Meditation is just dealing with the situation that exists before the development took place or just continuing to deal with that basic situation while this development is taking place. In other words, meditation means getting simple rather than getting involved with the five stages. These five stages become insignificant or just purely external. That means that you are getting to the basic quality of the five skandhas rather than trying to follow their implications as we ordinarily do in a sort of hunting process, as though we are going to reach some valuable conclusion. It is getting to the basic point of the process without getting involved in the sidetracks.

Still, of course, the discovery of five types of processes there already is kind of very amusing. Although you are concerned with the basic point, the presence of the five processes helps keep you smiling.

Question:
In the play between ignorance and intelligence that runs through the whole development of the skandhas, there seem to be moments where the skandhas are not occurring. There seems to be a very rapid buildup and then,
poof
, the process goes away. And then it starts again.

Rinpoche:
That is the whole point, there is a buildup and then this whole building-up process turns to dust. There is a gap, a space. And then either you build up again or you do not. But that kind of moment does happen. Automatically the process builds up; but before and after that, there is some space. It is like moving fast in one direction and having to turn and come back—you have to stop at the peak point. There is a moment of stillness; in the process of regenerating the speed, you have to stop at one point. That happens.

Question:
Does one pass backward through the skandhas? I mean if you were to sit down and meditate, first of all your mind would be full of thoughts. Then you meditate for a while longer and maybe your thoughts are not so discursively connected anymore so that then you relate directly to your perceptions. And then you reach a point where you are not so much relating to your perceptions anymore; they are not that important to you anymore. So then you feel just a vague sense of contact with your stream of associations. And then you have just a vague sense of sitting there. And then maybe you’re in a nondualistic state. Could something like that happen?

Rinpoche:
It sounds a bit fishy. You see, what you are talking about is going deeper and deeper, slower and slower. Somehow meditation does not happen that way. Once you go into the profundity, deeper and deeper and slower and slower, there is a possibility of being hypnotized by it so that you lose all contact with anything. You lose the dynamic quality of samskara, the dynamic quality of perception, the dynamic quality of feeling. And these are the only guidelines for buddha activity in a state of enlightenment. You do not want to push those out at all. You do not have to go into a process of going deeper. Rather, at the beginning when you are dealing with form, a certain funny thing goes on between awakeness and confusion. There is a certain funny moment. That is where you strike first, whether you are using the breathing or the walking. Whatever your technique may be, that is your starting point. And meditation happens
right there
. You do not have to go through a process at all. The process just happens by itself. But the important point is the precision and sudden quality of that flash, a kind of first questioning created between sanity and insanity. That first moment of black and white, dullness and sharpness, is the starting point from where you relate with your breathing and your walking. You do not have to slow down at all. Meditation has nothing to do with working with the metabolism of the ego in that sense.

Question:
In the
Heart Sutra
it says that Avalokiteshvara saw that the five skandhas were empty. Is that emptiness the same as the space you have just been talking about?

Rinpoche:
Yes. The idea is—just flash. That is why it is important for a person to be free from his meditation as a concept, free from the idea “I am going to meditate,” the sense of a ritual of any kind. You see if a person is able to relate with his practice of meditation directly and simply on an everyday level, a sane level, then there is a possibility of perceiving the five skandhas as empty. Otherwise once you take the wrong starting point of working on the skandhas one by one systematically, then the five skandhas develop a system as well.

Question:
Would the experience of emptiness be no less an aerial view than to see the minute workings of a situation, than seeing what is arising from moment to moment?

Rinpoche:
Once you have a good aerial photograph of the whole area, that means that you have all the details in it as well. It is the same thing. Otherwise it cannot be called an aerial view. It is just a blurry picture.

Consciousness

T
HE FIFTH SKANDHA
is consciousness. This involves a certain amount of explanation, since we already used the word
consciousness
at the beginning of the seminar in relation to the skandha of form as containing the eight types of consciousness. The consciousness of the fifth skandha is different from what we talked about before. Consciousness in the sense of the fifth skandha contains the final details of the process of the skandhas, the subtle fulfillment of the process. Consciousness in the first skandha is a sort of basic psychological background where the potentials of consciousness are present as eight types. Here, with the fifth skandha, we are talking about the fruition of those potentials. This is also described as eight types of consciousness, exactly the same categories in the same pattern as in the first skandha.

Another point that needs to be made clear here is the distinction between “mind” and “consciousness.” In the Buddhist tradition, mind is purely that which perceives. It does not require brainwork; it is simple perception, just on the level of the nervous system. This simple instinctive function is called mind. The Sanskrit term is
chitta
, which literally means “heart,” but it also means “essence,” that basic essence of mind which contains the faculty of perception. This kind of perception called mind—reacting to hot and cold, favorable and unfavorable, and so on—is very direct, simple and subtle at the same time. Consciousness, on the other hand, is articulated and intelligent. It is the finally developed state of being that contains all the previous elements. It contains all of the fundamental subtleties of mind, the instinctive aspects on the level of feeling, and it also includes thought patterns. It includes any kind of thinking process. But here the thinking process is on a subconscious level, whether it be discursive, pictorial, or instinctive. Consciousness is that sort of fundamental creepy quality that runs behind the actual living thoughts, behind the samskaras. The explicit thoughts, the samskaras, are the actual grown-up thoughts, so to speak; whereas the thoughts produced by consciousness are the undergrowth of those thoughts. They act as a kind of padding. The whole pattern of psychology works in such a way that it is impossible for the explicit thoughts—virtuous thoughts or evil thoughts or neutral ones—to be suspended in nowhere, without any context whatsoever. The subconscious thoughts make the context that is necessary for the explicit ones. They constitute the sort of padding or background texture which permits the process to function in such a way that the next appropriate thoughts in the explicit sequence can come through. They are in a sense a kind of kindling.

So, you see, the whole pattern is now very efficiently set up. Now even if the second skandha of feeling does not operate quite completely, or if perception does not function quite properly, consciousness with its subconscious gossip can supply the missing element and keep the whole process in action. It acts as sort of an ignition. It starts up on a particular theme and then sends its message back to the other skandhas so as to activate the skandhic process, to get the whole mechanism going.

So consciousness constitutes an immediately available source of occupation for the momentum of the skandhas to feed on. And, as we discussed before, meditation provides almost the only occasion for that momentum to stop. That is exactly where meditation plays its very important role. Meditation provides some gap in the movement of samskara-type thoughts and even in the fabric of consciousness-type thoughts. It provides a gap which contains no kindling twigs. That gap creates a sort of chaos in the psychological process, chaos in the mechanism of building up karmic situations. That chaos helps to see what is underneath all these thought patterns, both of the explicit and subconscious types. It begins to reveal what is underneath.

What is underneath may not necessarily be particularly appealing. We might theorize that, according to the Buddhist teachings, what ought to be underneath is, of course, enlightened mind. But that is not quite so. At this point what is underneath is the collection of hidden suppressed thoughts. This layer is like the cloudy mind we talked about earlier on, but this time on the fifth skandha level. This is another bank of collected memories that have been placed there. Any kind of thing that you wanted to ignore, did not want to encourage, or are ashamed of yourself about is put into this bank of confusion—the cloudy mind. The cloudy mind acts as a container for these collections. Ashamed thoughts, irrelevant thoughts, all sorts of unwanted material has been put aside there. And meditation provides the situation which brings these thoughts up because meditation goes right through the thought pattern and touches the ground of cloudy mind. In this way the bank is broken open, the container is broken open.

Because of this, the probability is that the beginning practitioner of meditation will have to go through all sorts of emotional and aggressive thoughts. Particularly those thoughts that one does not want to see or hear anymore come first. In meditation, consciousness acts as a starting point. One cannot meditate without consciousness. At the beginning one has to practice meditation purely on a thought level, a daydream level. It is only a pretense of meditation; one is pretending to meditate. But consciousness is being transformed by this pretense, by the suggestion that you are practicing meditation. In this way, the subconscious network, as well as consciousness itself, is gradually broken through. The speed of consciousness itself is slowed down and then gets through to underneath.

So consciousness in the sense of the fifth skandha can be said to have two aspects—the subconscious aspect and the active aspect of the six senses and cloudy mind in action. This actualized functioning of cloudy mind is on another level altogether from the cloudy mind of the first skandha which was purely embryonic.

Maybe we should have discussion.

Question:
Where does memory come in? Is it inherent in all the skandhas?

Rinpoche:
Memory is connected with putting things into the cloudy mind. It is an active process in which consciousness picks certain themes and classifies them into particular connections and then sends that over to the cloudy mind, puts it in the bank of cloudy mind along with the collection of wanted and unwanted thoughts that already exists there. What is in the cloudy mind is not only thoughts you dislike and have suppressed, but also content that you would like to play back again in the future for whatever purposes. It could be technical information, experiential material, pain and pleasure, hysterical things. Whatever it is, it is picked up by consciousness and put into that bank of cloudy mind.

Question:
Why does it have to be “cloudy” mind? Why can’t it just be mind?

Rinpoche:
It is just mind, but mind cannot survive without relating to something, without relating that to this. Mind does not mean anything if there is no context of relativity. So that context of relativity which must be maintained in order to survive, that process of maintaining its consistent pattern
is
uncertainty,
is
confusion. The process of maintaining a sense of relativity is what confusion is. Because in order to keep something for future purposes or in order to hide from seeing it, we have to put it into a no-man’s-land, an unresolved space. We have to put it away from the current focus of clarity. That
is
the cloudy mind, which does not have particularly sharp delineations of this in relation to that, but is just generally confusion.

Question:
What is it that does the sorting, that suppresses things so that they get into the suppressed collection?

Rinpoche:
It seems that consciousness picks out something and then hands it over to samskara and then that sends it to perceptions and feelings and then it is processed through and finally sent back to the bank. Consciousness sort of works like chopsticks. It picks an impression up and passes it to where it can begin to be chewed. It is not quite enough just to pick it up, it has to be refined in a sense, it has to pass through the process of all the skandhas.