The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (49 page)

Rinpoche:
It has to remain a dualistic relationship still. Nothing is wrong with that at all. But in the case of compassion the process does not become centralized. You see, duality in the ultimate sense consists of wisdom and compassion; the two poles are necessary. If your five skandhas develop into the five tathagatha principles, you still have duality, but you are not baffled by it at all. It is a natural function. When we talk about nonduality, we mean it in contrast to the bewilderment by duality that is the ordinary case.

Question:
So the process of meditation is trying to cut the link between the skandhas? And a man who has done enough meditation, let us say, would have all the skandhas but they just would not be connected?

Rinpoche:
Would not be connected, that is right. That is what is meant by cutting the karmic chain. The chain of karma is the five skandhas. And even after the links have been cut, the skandhas continue running, the process keeps running through. Actually the skandhas are not really linked; it is more that they are pushed one against the other. By meditating, you are slowing down the process. When it has slowed down, the skandhas are no longer pushed against one another. There is space there, already there.

Question:
When the five skandhas are functioning independently, what happens to memory?

Rinpoche:
Memory becomes a sort of inspiration to each of them in their skillful activity. There is skillful activity because you do not have to refer back to memory anymore. You see, memory is a very cowardly way of dealing with a situation. Since you are not in direct contact with the present situation, you have to refer back to what used to be. And you work that way. Whereas if you are relating directly to the present situation, as is the case with inspiration, then you do not require memory to work your way through the situation. You can tell everything from the present situation. Still you have the information of the past because of the present situation, in terms of the present situation rather than purely in the form of what was.

Question:
In working on separating the skandhas, are they pushed apart one at a time, slowly, or does it happen suddenly all at once?

Rinpoche:
It is an extremely gradual process, like a wound healing. On the whole, there does not seem to be such a thing as sudden enlightenment as it is ordinarily understood. Of course there is sudden discovery of the different stages. This is like your discovering that your hair has gone gray or that you have become fat.

Question:
You have said that we begin to meditate with ambition. The consciousness is still in control of everything. And at some point, you said the bank of subconscious thoughts comes up and consciousness is no longer in control. This seems to me to be on the way toward enlightenment. What I wonder is, until we are enlightened, do we always meditate with ambition?

Rinpoche:
You begin with ambition of some kind. Then at a certain stage meditation becomes instinctive. Then you cannot not meditate—it happens to you.

Question:
But when the process of the skandhas starts reversing itself and consciousness is losing control, you have lost your original incentive. What you are doing no longer makes sense from the point of view you started from.

Rinpoche:
Exactly, yes. That is the point at which the techniques begin to drop away, as well as the games that are involved in pretending to yourself that you are meditating.

Question:
Well, during the gradual process that still goes on, what is it that becomes attractive about meditation, that replaces the ambition? People still want to sit down and meditate even if they are almost enlightened.

Rinpoche:
You start with ambition and then meditation begins to seep into your system, so to speak. Gradually your system begins to require meditation. It is sort of an addiction, sort of an infiltration of your system begins to happen. That is what happens with bodhisattvas. They take a vow not to attain enlightenment, but they find one day that they have attained enlightenment anyhow because the practice has thoroughly infiltrated their system. Their behavior has become the complete embodiment of the dharma.

Question:
In getting beyond duality, beyond criteria, there is still relativity and still form. There is still some kind of distinction between this and that. Wouldn’t there then still be preference, say, for bliss, understanding, clarity? Or does it get to the point where it no longer makes any difference whether the forms are heavenly or demonic?

Rinpoche:
There is a stage at which all of these sort of heavy-handed dualities dissolve. There is a very, very heavy-handed and solid duality in which without that, this cannot survive; because of this, that happens to be. You reach the stage of losing this sort of concept. And then you are conscious that you have lost that, got beyond it: you feel freer, but at the same time you feel that you have gained something. But this is not quite final. You still have the memory that you have relinquished that heavy duality, that you used to have such ideas but you have lost them now. But a person gets beyond even that. One reaches a point where even the sense of the absence of duality no longer applies. The whole thing becomes very natural and obvious. On that level, a person really begins to perceive things as they are. A sort of transparent experience of duality begins to develop in which things are really precise without depending on each other. There is no sense of comparison, just precision. Black is black and white is white.

Question:
I’m a little confused about the distinction between panoramic awareness, which does not have the definite quality of mindfulness, and a kind of blurry state which comes up. I’m talking about the kind of blurry state in which one leaves tools all around, leaves one thing half finished to start another, etc. That seems to be the kind of dreamy state that frequently comes up just after one has finished meditation. It just does not seem to matter where you put your tools. Is panoramic awareness that kind of a blurry thing?

Rinpoche:
The panoramic awareness of meditation in action contains textures. Texture are part of its scope. You see things in the right shape, in their own right shape, their own right situation—which is a kind of precision, sharpness. That sharpness and precision comes from experiencing the distance, proper distance, that we were talking about earlier on. You feel immediately the right skillful and active relationship with things or people. You experience them as they are, completely—so the tools belong to the toolshed. They are not knives and forks or anything else. You would not use the toilet to bathe and the basin to defecate. A sense of the proper relationship of things is included in your panoramic vision. You just would not do things the wrong way around. In the case of the blurry state, this is cloudy mind on the instinctive level. One is so much wrapped up in oneself that there is no chance for panoramic vision at all. There is nothing to be panoramic about. One is totally wrapped up in one’s own little world. Others see you moving very slowly, very gently, saying very little, doing very mysterious things—but still that could hardly be described as a contemplative state of mind. It is more what has been described in the scriptures as a drunken elephant.

Auspicious Coincidence

W
E HAVE RUN OUT
of scheduled subjects to talk about, and that in itself might be an interesting point to work on. The idea that applies here is what is known in Tibetan as tendrel [brten ’brel].
Tendrel
literally means “coincidence” or “chance.” This is something that very much underlies the functioning of the psychological movements described in the abhidharma. Tendrel is also the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit
nidana
. The twelve nidanas are the twelve conditions in the chain-reaction process of causation. The nidanas, like the skandhas, begin from ignorance and include feeling, perception, touch or contact, feeling, craving, grasping, intercourse, birth, old age, and death.

The process of coincidence, the coming together of situations that happens through the nidanas, can be described as auspicious. We are familiar with the idea of an “auspicious occasion.” Such and such thing happened, such and such people met, and all this combined so that such and such a fortunate event took place. This idea of auspiciousness is usually either regarded as just a form of speech or associated with superstition. It involves a sense of power. The word for “auspicious” as it relates with this notion of coincidence or tendrel is, in Tibetan,
tashi
[bkra.shis]; in Sanskrit,
mangalam
. Auspiciousness is an aspect of coincidence, of this meeting together of conditions. The movement of ignorance and feelings and perceptions and so on is an auspicious one, in a sense, an appropriate one, because all of these twelve causal links are related to each other continuously, infallibly. In other words, there is no mistake about what is happening. Everything is right and appropriate at that very moment. That is what mangalam is, or tashi—a blessing. The Tibetan word
tashi
is composed of
ta
, which means “bright,” and
ski
, which means “fitting” or “good,” “appropriate.” So it means “precisely fitting to the situation.”

An example of this is our being here together. We all took a chance coming here. Nobody knew what this particular seminar was going to turn out to be like, but everybody did take that chance, made that commitment, and here we are. All the necessary conditions came together.

From this point of view, confusion, wandering in the samsaric realm of pain and misery, is not a punishment, not a mistake, but it is fitting, appropriate. It is an absolutely ideal situation. Of course, we could come to this conclusion by a kind of indirect reasoning based on a long-term view, saying that because of the samsaric situation we have an opportunity to study nirvana and liberation: without samsara there would be no nirvana, therefore samsara is an ideal situation. But our thinking need not take this long way around. If we really look directly, fundamentally, we can say that we need not have either samsara or nirvana. That is quite true. We need not have either. The whole situation need not exist. But it happens to be the case, so it is fitting.

This is not particularly an attitude of optimism. It is an attitude of pessimism and optimism together: the situation is fitting in that it is right and it is fitting in that it is wrong, both at the same time. The two poles are constantly present. “Right” is in its own way a healthy situation because it happens to be there. And “wrong” is also, in its own way, a healthy situation because it happens to be there. So the quality of tendrel and tashi, coincidence and auspiciousness, is inseparable from the karmic structure, the impetus that develops through the five skandhas and the twelve nidanas, inseparable from that whole apparatus which brings us into a situation.

So what we are actually studying is the whole process of karmic development without particular reference to which developments are the good ones and which are the bad ones. We are just studying the karmic situation as it is. It is fitting; all aspects of the process coincide in their particular unique ways in each and all situations.

This does not mean that everything is prearranged, that you have no choice at all—because everything happens in the present moment. Buddhist philosophy says that the future is vacant rather than prearranged. You cannot have a prearranged future; “future” means nothing has happened yet. Everything, as far as it exists, is in the present situation. The potential of the future is in the present moment. Therefore nothing can be prearranged or predestined. On the other hand, the whole thing is to a certain extent predestined because it is the past that presents us with the present situation. Predestination does go as far as that, to the present moment, and does not go beyond. Therefore there is room for the effort involved in the practice of meditation and in the commitment to spirituality to be important. That effort is helpful because it is a way of learning about the present situation and relating with it. If a person is able to meet the present situation, tendrel, the present coincidence, as it is, a person can develop tremendous confidence. He begins to see that no one is organizing the situation for him but that he can work for himself. He develops a tremendous feeling of spaciousness because the future is a completely open one.

This awareness of the auspiciousness of the karmic situation of the present moment is also, to a certain extent, a perception of the future. We may even perceive certain connections. But each case is an individual case. We can talk about having a karmic link with someone, but that link could not exist unless the two people involved were independent as well. Otherwise we could not speak of “link” it would be one thing. Even if there is a link, it means that there are two independent people who have some connection with each other. So, even in that case, the whole process of this journey of involvement with the situation at that present moment is a lonely journey. Nobody can save you, help you. You yourself have to develop an appreciation and understanding of the process of chain reaction that happens. Looking at it in terms of the twelve nidanas is one way of seeing that.

There is the story of a certain arhat who is born into the particular karmic circumstances of a country without either teacher or teachings. As he grows up he develops questions about life. He takes long walks and at one point comes upon a charnel ground and finds an old piece of human bone. Picking it up and examining it, he questions where this bone comes from. The bone comes, obviously, from death. Where does death come from? Death comes from illness, old age. And he goes on in his reasoning, back and back—old age comes from birth and birth comes from intercourse and intercourse from feeling, touching, grasping, and so on. He goes back, back, back. Finally he finds that the whole source and basic root is ignorance. He arrives at that conclusion just by looking at the bone and reasoning back. It is a kind of auspicious coincidence, a karmically auspicious chain reaction—you find a certain bone and you happen to sit down and look at it and think about it. This is an intellectual approach, it could be said, and also an intuitive one. It is not particularly extraordinary. Anyone could do it. Anyone could go back, step by step, finding some source for the previous conclusion, some obvious answer.