The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (66 page)

S:
Rinpoche, when you were analyzing this sudden glimpse the first time, you said that it has three stages: the first is warmth, or maitri; the second is cutting through neurosis; and the third is openness. Then a little later you went through it again and you gave the three stages slightly differently: the first as maitri; the second as gap or openness, tathagatagarbha; and the third as communication.

CTR:
Piercing the chain of karma is regarded as creating a hole, so to speak, creating a gap, which is openness. But at the same time communication is also a form of openness. It is openness in the sense of not just creating a gap between you and your neighbor but going out toward it, which is saying the same thing.

S:
Is the transition between the stages automatic?

CTR:
At this point it is almost useless to talk about three stages, because the glimpse is so quick and so sudden that there is no point in taking notice of it. There is no point in analyzing it. The nature of the experience is that it does have those three stages. But it’s not especially important to take notice of them. It just happens.

S:
It seems possible that the awareness of the open space might be so attractive that you would want to stay there.

CTR:
At that point you have to be able to give up. You have to deliberately push the experience away, disown it. That is extremely important. Otherwise you kill the whole thing. I mean, this glimpse is very simple. Just look! That’s it. There’s no problem with that.

S:
Are we cognizant of the glimpse?

CTR:
You are aware at the beginning and at the end, obviously. When somebody takes your photograph with a flashbulb, as it flashes you don’t think, “Now my photograph is being taken”; you are just dazzled by the flash.
After
, you say, “Now my photograph has been taken”; and
before
, you say, “My photograph
will
be taken.” But that is okay; we can’t start perfectly.

Recollection and the Sudden Glimpse

S:
Earlier you said that you just had to recall the idea, but later on you said that you can’t use the past to try to re-create the glimpse.

CTR:
The point is that you have a recollection that such a situation exists. Then you look, but you don’t hold on to it. Rather than trying to re-create the experience you had yesterday, thinking it was a better flash than today’s flash, recollection is a boundary, an outline. Deliberate action exists only at the boundary. Once you are
inside
the boundary, there is no point in making
further
boundaries. In fact, you can’t—it is so quick. Before you even think you have made a boundary, you have lost it already. You haven’t lost it, but it has passed away. It is very sudden.

S:
It seems to me that it is so fast that it almost has a foolproofness to it; it’s so fast you couldn’t do it wrong.

CTR:
That’s the whole point. You can only go wrong at the beginning, by preparing too much. In that case your flash would be a very clumsy one. Actually, you are fooling yourself, you are not flashing. And at the end, you may congratulate yourself, trying to hang on to the tail of it.

Vicious Circles

S:
When neurotic patterns get set up between people, they often become a vicious circle. All you have to do is cut that circle at one point, because once the circle is cut, there’s a way out.

CTR:
Once you cut the circle at one point, there is a possibility of setting chaos to the whole circle. But you still have memories of the circle, so you will still go on. The way out has to be repeated many times. The circle has to be sliced thoroughly all over.

Idiot Compassion

S:
Talking about idiot compassion, you were saying that you should
not
do everything for everybody. But Shantideva said he would do everything for everybody, more or less.

CTR:
Of course you should do everything for everybody; there is no selection involved at all. But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gentle all the time. Your gentleness could have heart, strength. In order that your compassion doesn’t become idiot compassion, you have to use your intelligence. Otherwise, there could be the self-indulgence of thinking that you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the other person’s aggression. If you go to a shop and the shopkeeper cheats you, and you go back and let him cheat you again, that doesn’t seem to be a very healthy thing to do for others.

Helping People

S:
Is it better not to help people if you are in a speeded-up state and you don’t have the awareness and the gap? Is it better to do nothing at all? Or is it possible that the gap can be created in the process of helping people?

CTR:
That’s it. You try to create a gap as you are helping people. You shouldn’t give up.

S:
You shouldn’t go away and prepare yourself?

CTR:
Everything happens on the spot, so there really is nothing to prepare. In any given situation, as things are exposed to you, the preparation and skillful means happen simultaneously.

Sudden Relaxation

S:
When you reach a climax of hope and fear, there’s a sudden relaxation. There’s a really vivid moment of intense relaxation and emptiness. You are only likely to stay in it for a couple of seconds. Although it is very dramatic, it might last only for a few moments, like a flash in sitting. Is that the kind of experience you are talking about?

CTR:
I think so, yes. It happens with any kind of clarity. The experience of clarity might last for half a day or half an hour, but you can’t repeat it. That sudden glimpse is an aspect of clarity. It has a similar quality to the sudden glimpse of compassion.

S:
Within the experience of clarity, are there gaps between the moments of clarity, or is it one whole thing?

CTR:
It is one sudden thing you can’t define. The scriptures talk about touching and penetrating and releasing compassion, but that almost becomes a myth because it happens so fast.

S:
Is the time between glimpses a state of pure hell?

CTR:
Whatever you would like to call it. It is
this
.

S:
Would you say that the glimpse is stepping out of the whole wheel of life?

CTR:
Not necessarily. The glimpse is just cutting the umbilical cord. Just that. Seeing the no-man’s-land.

S:
If you don’t let go of the experience, I suppose that would make everything worse afterward. You would be struggling to get back there.

CTR:
Yes, very much so. Then the experience becomes a trip. You keep trying to get higher and higher, better and better. Quite possibly we could categorize this by serial numbers—glimpse one, glimpse two, glimpse zero—which becomes a big trip.

Dhyana States

S:
How does this relate to the levels of absorption, or dhyanas, in hinayana?

CTR:
The dhyana states are less abrupt—they are different intensities of rest. There is no flash of clarity, simply a kind of absorption. It’s like being concerned with whether you had a good sleep, a bad sleep, or a relatively good one. The sudden glimpse cuts through those absorptions as well. So there are two levels: developing the experience of the realm of the gods, which is the dhyana states, and transcending the dhyana states, which is the development of wisdom. According to Buddhism, wisdom transcends the god realm. From this point of view, it is nirvana experience, rather than samsaric experience.

FIVE

Leap of Confidence

S
O FAR, WE HAVE NOT
studied the bodhisattva path thoroughly; we have just had a preliminary glimpse of the bodhisattva path. We have an idea of the basic psychology of the bodhisattva, or the bodhisattva’s mentality, and how one develops it. Now we could discuss the idea of commitment to the bodhisattva path and the bodhisattva vow.
¹

The bodhisattva’s mentality consists of two aspects. The first aspect is the
general meditative state of mind
, the awareness or glimpse that we discussed in chapter 4. That is referred to as the absolute aspect. The second, or relative, aspect is
the actual application of this in our day-to-day life
. So the commitment of a person’s whole being to the bodhisattva path involves not only a commitment to the basic sanity of the bodhisattva, but also the commitment not only to contemplative practice, but to working with situations that require decisions and the function of discursive thoughts to make the right decisions.

Joining the bodhisattva path is not by faith alone—there should be a sense of conviction and intelligence, almost to the level of intellect. It is important to be able to sort things out, to distinguish between skillful means and unskillful means. You need to know how to work with situations, how to handle them. If you regard the bodhisattva path as purely following some preexisting law, with headlines of this and that, unless you know the bodhisattva’s bible by heart, you cannot keep track of all that. But if you begin to see the bodhisattva path as an existing feeling or basic understanding, you realize that skillful means is not based on prescriptions in books but on prescriptions given by your own innate nature or basic understanding.

Having taken the bodhisattva vow and committed yourself to the bodhisattva path, there’s a tremendous sense of excitement. You want to do everything and handle every situation extraordinarily. You feel that you could save people on the spot, that you could help people by sacrificing your next meal or your next nap. But that doesn’t seem to be quite enough. In fact, quite possibly, if you do not take care of your own body and energy, your bodhisattva action will become very sloppy and tedious as a result of your being too tired. You have been putting too much energy into working with other people without regard to your own basic health. So the bodhisattva’s skillful means does not only go outward; it also involves tremendous concern for one’s own body, one’s own basic being. There is a sense of responsibility in all directions.

The sense of excitement can be an obstacle on the bodhisattva path. You feel so excited that you want to convert everybody to your trip. You would like to make everyone a replica of yourself. This is one of the first big mistakes that an adolescent bodhisattva can make. There is so much inspiration, so much energy, that you begin to feel that you could conquer the whole world. There is so much conviction that the bodhisattva could be blinded by it. You are not able to see the situation beyond that emotional conviction and sense of excitement.

At the same time, that conviction should be nursed. The idea is not just to play it safe. Security is not in question, particularly. What is lacking in that approach is vision. Your vision is limited; you are unable to see. Rather than developing the panoramic vision to see how the whole thing works, you are purely interested in converting other people to the bodhisattva path. But in the bodhisattva path there is a sense of totality. There is
comprehensive
vision, seeing what needs to be done in the present situation, but at the same time, not being rushed into it. There is a sense of experiencing what comes next, an emphasis on the future and on creating the right atmosphere or working base for that. It is about relating with other people.

The question is whether or not the bodhisattva’s attitude is involved with the ambition of ego. Even if the bodhisattva’s ego is associated with enlightenment, it is still ego; so it is subject to spiritual materialism. On the bodhisattva path there is a sense of giving away and destroying your ambition at the same time as you are building your inspiration. That is one of the basic points of skillful means: you have enough power to exert your energy, but at the same time you have enough gentleness to change your decisions to suit the given situation.

The bodhisattva’s approach is a gentle but powerful effort, which is based on prajna. Here prajna involves both skillful means and knowledge. Developing basic prajna is almost like becoming an enlightened politician. You are aware of the surrounding situation, but at the same time you are also aware of your version of it. So you don’t just give in to what is happening, but your version has something to do with it as well. Every corner has been seen with the skillful means of the bodhisattva approach.

Texts such as
Forty-six Ways in Which a Bodhisattva Fails
,
²
which describe the bodhisattva discipline, talk about not presenting the dharma if the listener is uninterested; not associating with heretics; and not refusing an invitation to teach. All those guidelines, if you look at them very generally, may seem to be illogical and confusing. But once you begin to look at them as they apply to real, definite situations, you can see that they have a logical working basis. When there is a pull toward ego, that could be cut. When there is hesitation to step outside of ego, to loosen one’s grip, one could let loose and go. When there is hesitation about not being able to make a correct decision, one could push oneself into the situation so that the direction comes about naturally.

Skillful means, from the point of view of prajna mentality, could be said to be slightly paranoid or fearful of consequences. This is a product of egolessness, because if you have nothing, if there is no project to achieve, if you are not drawing things in your direction, then there is a sense of ambition. That empty-heartedness could be said to be paranoid. At the same time, there is the inspiration to deal with situations perfectly and directly. So there is also a sense of pride. This is not pride in the pejorative sense, but pride in the sense of clear perception—seeing what needs to be done, what should be fulfilled. So the bodhisattva mentality of skillful means consists of a sense of ambition and also a sense of tentativeness. Tentativeness means allowing suggestions to come to you from outside, so that you can utilize situations. You are not afraid to do so, because that whole process is one’s basic inspiration.