The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (83 page)

So there can be a sense of enormous openness, which largely depends upon you being open, free, and highly disciplined. Therefore, precisely, meditation is not therapy. It goes beyond therapy, because therapy involves conforming to some particular area of relative reference. The practice of meditation is the experience of totality. You can’t regard it as anything at all, but it is completely universal. It covers all areas of your life: domestic, emotional, economic, and social situations, whatever there may be.

The notion of unconditional freedom is the notion of meditation from that point of view, and therefore freedom cannot be said to be therapy. If we regard the notion of freedom as therapy, we are already in trouble, because “I am supposed to get out of this mess.” So if the very meaning of therapy is regarded as freedom or the very meaning of freedom is regarded as therapy, then you are kidding yourself or somebody else is kidding you. It is like someone saying, “I tell you that you are free from now onward,” and then later they tell you, “What I said to you was therapy.” You feel that you have been completely deceived. [
Laughs
] You are no longer free at that point, because that approach of therapy is just purely trying to cheer you up so that you will get more involved in the mess, and you will have no hesitation about getting into the mess of confusion.

So therefore, if we say that meditation is therapy, that is an enormous disservice to the intelligence of the universe, to universal consciousness. If we say that meditation is not therapy, then we are contributing something to understanding the notion of unconditional freedom. Freedom in itself is not regarded as therapy, but it is regarded as the expression of openness and potentiality.

Question:
I was interested in your saying that therapy could cheer you up, only to make you get more involved in the mess. You do prescribe seeing your neurosis though. So, in that sense, how is therapy a problem?

VCTR:
What do you mean by therapy?

Q:
Something that makes you a more open person. You said that therapy could cause you to have more confidence—so that you would get into the mess more.

VCTR:
You could get into all kinds of trouble when you begin to use therapeutic practice. Often, when we use the term
therapy
, we are talking about how can we save ourselves from our problems. We are confronting our problems by using some kind of technique or medium. Could we wear plastic gloves, or could we use anesthetics so that we don’t have to face our problems? We are afraid to relate with what we are and what our problems are. We are embarrassed to work with all that or to confront it. Such an approach is the wrong usage of the word
therapy
. It is a kind of linguistic problem. Viewing it in such a way, if we are involved in therapy, that automatically means that we don’t have to face our wife or our husband. Instead, we go to a therapist who is going to create a kind of numbness between us. We begin to lose the sharpness we experience with our husband or wife, the sharpness and irritation. We would like therapy to help us to get together by putting some kind of numbness or lozenge between those sharp edges. We would like therapy to numb us to that sharpness we are experiencing so intensely, so that we never have static. We would like to join together with our husband or wife, but at the same time we would like the physician to put us on anesthetics so that we don’t have to go through the pain of being joined together. Then we could wake up very happy and feel ourselves already sewn together. It could work out and we could feel happy ever after. That approach has been the problem, I’m afraid. The word
therapy
has come to mean the notion of being joined together by anesthesia.

On the other hand, the word
therapy
could be used as skillful means or application for how certain parts of a jigsaw puzzle could fit together. Then therapy has the sense of application or method. In that sense, therapy should not become anesthesia, but instead is a method of sharp precision. It is the way you get yourself together, rather than a way of being anesthetized. The desire for anesthesia seems to be the problem, whether we use the term
meditation
or
therapy
. That attitude always becomes a problem.

In the true sense, therapy is not anesthesia but actual experience. That is very important. We should experience our own embarrassment, or whatever it may be, and try to link together another embarrassment, which is what the world is relating to us, rather than using any anesthetic or numbing agent to solve our problems. There’s no particular hospitality involved from that point of view. To be willing to experience our world directly is the mark of our courageousness, our openness—which actually means freedom. So in other words, we could say quite seriously that freedom cannot be bought by anesthetics.

Becoming a Full Human Being

T
HE BASIC WORK
of health professionals in general, and of psychotherapists in particular, is to become full human beings and to inspire full human-beingness in other people who feel starved about their lives. When we say a “full human being” here, we mean a person who not only eats, sleeps, walks, and talks, but someone who also experiences a basic state of wakefulness. It might seem to be very demanding to define health in terms of wakefulness, but wakefulness is actually very close to us. We can experience it. In fact, we are touching it all the time.

We are in touch with basic health all the time. Although the usual dictionary definition
of health
is, roughly speaking, “free from sickness,” we should look at health as something more than that. According to the Buddhist tradition, people inherently possess buddha nature; that is, they are basically and intrinsically good. From this point of view, health is intrinsic. That is, health comes first: sickness is secondary. Health
is
. So being healthy is being fundamentally wholesome, with body and mind synchronized in a state of being which is indestructible and good. This attitude is not recommended exclusively for the patients but also for the helpers or doctors. It can be adopted mutually because this intrinsic, basic goodness is always present in any interaction of one human being with another.

There are many approaches to psychology and some of them are problematic. From the Buddhist point of view, there is a problem with any attempt to pinpoint, categorize, and pigeonhole mind and its contents very neatly. This method could be called psychological materalism. The problem with this approach is that it does not leave enough room for spontaneity or openness. It overlooks basic healthiness.

The approach to working with others that I would like to advocate is one in which spontaneity and humanness are extended to others, so that we can open to others and not compartmentalize our understanding of them. This means working first of all with our natural capacity for warmth. To begin with, we can develop warmth toward ourselves, which then expands to others. This provides the ground for relating with disturbed people, with one another, and with ourselves, all within the same framework. This approach does not rely so much on a theoretical or conceptual perspective, but it relies on how we personally experience our own existence. Our lives can be felt fully and thoroughly so that we appreciate that we are genuine and truly wakeful human beings.

When you work in this way with others, it is very powerful. When someone begins to feel that he is not being pigeonholed and that there is some genuine connection taking place between the two of you, then he begins to let go. He begins to explore you and you begin to explore him. Some kind of unspoken friendship begins to develop.

Although I am speaking as a Buddhist teacher, I do not believe that therapy should be divided into categories. We don’t have to say, “Now I’m doing therapy in the Buddhist style,” or “Now I’m doing it in the Western style.” There is not much difference, really. If you work in the Buddhist style, it is just common sense. If you work in the Western style, that is common sense, too. Working with others is a question of being genuine and projecting that genuineness to others. The work you do doesn’t have to have a title or a name particularly. It is just being ultimately decent. Take the example of the Buddha himself—he wasn’t a Buddhist! If you have confidence in yourself and you develop some way of overcoming ego, then true compassion can be radiated to others. So the main point in working with people is to appreciate and manifest simplicity rather than trying to create new theories or categories of behavior. The more you appreciate simplicity, the more profound your understanding becomes. Simplicity begins to make much more sense than speculation.

The Buddhist tradition teaches the truth of impermanence, or the transitory nature of things. The past is gone and the future has not yet happened, so we work with what is here—the present situation. This actually helps us not to categorize or theorize. A fresh, living situation is taking place all the time, on the spot. This noncategorical approach comes from being fully here, rather than trying to reconnect with past events. We don’t have to look back to the past in order to see what people are made out of. Human beings speak for themselves, on the spot.

Sometimes, however, people are obsessed with their past, and you might need to talk with them about that somewhat in order to communicate with them. But it should always be done with a present orientation. It is not purely a matter of retelling stories in order to reconnect to the past, but rather it is a question of seeing that the present situation has several levels: the basic ground, which could be in the past; the actual manifestation, which is happening now; and where the present is about to go. So the present has three facets. Once you begin to approach a person’s experience in that way, it comes alive. At the same time, it is not necessary to try to reach a conclusion about the future. The conclusion is already manifest in the present. There might be a case history, but that history is already dying. Actual communication takes place on the spot. By the time you sit down and say hello to the patient, that person’s whole history is there.

You see, we are not trying to figure people out based on their past. Intead, we are trying to find out their case history in terms of who they are
now
, which is really the point. I always do that in interviews with my students. I ask them how old they are, whether they have been outside of America, whether they have been to Europe or Asia, what they have done, what their parents are like, and all the rest of it. But that is based on
this
person rather than on
that
person. It is quite straightforward. The people we are working with might be dwelling in the past, but we as their helpers have to know where they are
now
, what state of mind they are in at the moment. This is very important. Otherwise we may lose track of who a person is now and think of him as someone else, as if he were another personality altogether.

Patients should experience a sense of wholesomeness vibrating from you. If they do, they will be attracted to you. Usually, insanity is based on aggression, rejecting oneself or one’s world. People feel that they have been cut off from communication with the world, that the world has rejected them. Either they have isolated themselves or they feel that the world is isolating them. So if there is some compassion radiating from your very presence when you walk into a room and sit down with people, if there is gentleness and willingness to include them, that is the preliminary stage of healing. Healing comes from a simple sense of reasonability, gentleness, and full human-beingness. That goes a long way.

So the first step is to project ourselves as genuine human beings. Then beyond that, we can help others by creating a proper atmosphere around them. I am speaking literally here, extremely literally. Whether someone is at home or in an institution, the atmosphere around them should be a reflection of human dignity, and it should be physically orderly. The bed should be made, and good meals should be prepared. In that way, the person can cheer up and be able to relax in his environment.

Some people may regard the little details of the physical environment as mundane and unimportant. But very often, the disturbances people experience come from the atmosphere around them. Sometimes their parents have created chaos—a pile of dishes in the kitchen, dirty laundry in the corner, and half-cooked food. Those little things may seem incidental, but they actually affect the atmosphere a great deal. In working with people, we can present a contrast to that chaos. We can manifest an appreciation of beauty, rather than just pushing the crazy person into a corner. The appreciation of the environment is an important part of Tibetan and Zen Buddhist practice. Both traditions consider the atmosphere around oneself to be a reflection of one’s individuality, and so it should be kept immaculate.

The conventional therapeutic approach is to try to straighten out people’s minds first, then give them a bath, and finally help them get dressed. But I think that we have to work with the whole situation at once. The environment is very important, and yet it is often overlooked. If the patient is presented with a good meal and is acknowledged and received as a special guest, which is what he or she deserves, then we can work from there.

We are talking about creating an ideal, almost artificial life for seriously ill people, at least in the beginning, until they can pull themselves together. We may actually bathe them and clean their rooms, make their beds and cook nice meals for them. We can make their lives elegant. The basis of their neurosis is that they have experienced their lives and their world as being so ugly, so full of resentment, so dirty. The more resentful and ugly they become, the more that attitude is reinforced by society. So they never experience an atmosphere of compassionate hospitality. They are regarded as nuisances. That attitude doesn’t help. People are not really nuisances at all. They are just being themselves given their circumstances.