The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (86 page)

Environment is extremely important, not only in how you treat your children but in how you treat yourself. It includes both animate and inanimate situations: your physical living situation as well as the people around you—your parents, teachers, students, maids, governesses, or whatever. Environment includes your relationship with your business partners, your driver, your waitress, whomever you meet. To be sane and to provide a ground of sanity for others, you need to be sensitive to environment. If you create an unbalanced or aggressive environment, it will produce a sense of separation between you and others—you and your world. Then you tend to blame everything on somebody else, which in turn brings blame onto yourself as well, at the same time.

Western education has taught us to think of ourselves as free men and women, which can be distorted into thinking that we have a perfect right to do anything we want. If anything goes wrong, we feel that we can blame somebody else, rather than ourselves. Similarly, Western psychological theories of ego have sometimes been used by psychologists to tell patients and students that they should build up their egos in such a way that they blame somebody else when things don’t go their way. This is not at all being sensitive to environment.

The Western tradition has taught us that we have a tremendous personal dignity and confidence. The distortion of this is to feel that if anything goes wrong, we can find a scapegoat somewhere outside of ourselves. We say, “This went wrong; it must be somebody’s fault.” When people do that consistently, then it can lead to demands for rights, riots, and all sorts of complaints, which are always based on blaming somebody else. But we never blame “me.” The extreme outcome of this approach is that we feel we want to rule the world, and in doing that, we display a tremendous personal ego. Ultimately, we could become someone like Hitler or Mussolini. These people represent the ego of an entire nation, which says, “It’s not our fault. It is our nation’s pride; we have our pride and glory and dignity. We are in the right.” It is a gigantic ego world based on a fundamental separation from our environment. This is an extreme example, but distorting dignity into egotism can have these results.

The question for us as psychologists is how to work with people who have been brought up, to some degree, in this way of thinking, and who have developed deep mistrust and resentment of the world. How can we help them to let go of their aggression, which is self-aggression as well as aggression toward the world?

The key point in overcoming aggression is to develop natural trust in yourself and in your environment, your world. In Buddhism, this trust in yourself is called maitri. Maitri is natural gentleness and friendliness to yourself, which very much includes gentleness and absence of aggression in relating with the world. Maitri can actually be cultivated in yourself and in other people; you can cultivate gentleness and warmth. When you express kindness to others, then they in turn begin to find natural warmth within themselves. So the Buddhist approach to working with people—especially those who have been brought up in bad environments—is to provide a gentle, accommodating environment for therapy and teaching.

According to the Buddhist teachings, although we acknowledge that people’s problems may have been caused by their past upbringing, we feel that the way to undo problems is to cultivate that person’s maitri on the spot. This is done by working with the person’s immediate environment rather than by delving into his or her past. Buddhism does not use the Western analytical approach of tracing back to the roots of neurosis in a person’s past. Neither are such things as encounter therapy or primal therapy used. Buddhist psychology works with cultivating good behavior patterns, rather than trying to analyze the person’s problems. At the same time, we could say that any capable Buddhist master, or teacher, including the Lord Buddha himself, acts in the best sense as a psychologist. However, instead of attempting to analyze a person’s problems in terms of his or her internal psychology, a Buddhist teacher might be more apt to try to improve his student’s table manners. So the Buddhist psychological approach looks at a person’s state of mind in terms of a person’s behavior and the larger world around the person. When a student has bad table manners, that usually reflects a general lack of environmental awareness. This is usually corrected directly, either by means of the sitting practice of meditation or else by teaching the student to be generally more mindful of what he is doing.

This approach is similar to that of the early Buddhist monastic tradition. The monks and nuns were supposed to have thirteen articles or possessions when they took ordination, and they were supposed to keep those thirteen articles clean and good. Those thirteen possessions were everything they had; they were not supposed to lose any one of them or mismanage any one of them. The point of those rules was to teach them how to become sane by dealing with the environment—and dealing with your own state of mind comes naturally out of that.

A story is told about Ananda, the Buddha’s personal attendant, who had the desire to engage in a long period of fasting. He began to grow feeble and weak; he couldn’t sit and meditate, so finally the Buddha told him, “Ananda, if there is no food, there is no body. If there is no body, there is no dharma. If there is no dharma, there is no enlightenment. Therefore go back and eat.” That is the basic logic of the Buddhist teachings and of Buddhist psychology. We can actually be decent and sane on the spot, not through extreme measures but by managing our life properly, and thereby cultivating maitri.

One of the fundamental problems seems to be that people feel they are unable to be gentle and relate with the world, with their environment. At Naropa Institute in the psychology program, our foundation is that we can trust our own basic goodness. Human beings are capable of expressing maitri. They are capable of opening themselves up. Basic goodness is the potential that every human being has to express gentleness and warmth in themselves. Basic goodness is not necessarily
solid
goodness, but just
basic
goodness, unconditional goodness. If people can experience that personally, then they find they really don’t have any fundamental argument or resentment. We
can
be open to situations; we can relate with our environment, our world, in that way. And from that, the neurosis in the world can be reduced: because
we
don’t put aggression out into the world, therefore the world does not feed back any further aggression toward us.

As psychologists, we have to realize this for ourselves first; then we can work with others in this way as well. We can provide a gentle, nonaggressive, warm environment for disturbed individuals. It is a question of feeling a fundamental connection to others. You have to be a people-loving person to begin with. That means you have to love yourself as well, which is maitri: you don’t just regard psychology as a J-O-B. You don’t say, “I have to go to my job, my work, and suffer sweat and tears.” Rather you just do your work with people as if you were cooking for yourself, as if you were peeling potatoes and cooking vegetables and boiling your rice, chopping your meat. When you prepare a good meal, you don’t regard that activity as a J-O-B.

Approaching your livelihood as purely a “job” is particularly a problem in American culture. People regard their work and their family life, home life, as very separate. But if you like people, then you like to work with them. And if you like them, you can help them to like themselves. You find that you miss them; you actually want to be with them. They might be quite demanding, but still you are not tired of them. Liking others is also based on maitri: because you like yourself, therefore you like other people, and you are willing to open yourself and invite everybody in. That brings tremendous fresh air into your system. So it is very important to develop friendliness toward yourself, or maitri; then you like others, and you can proceed along.

There are no tricks involved. We are not trying to talk people out of or into anything. We are not trying to talk people out of their insanity or talk them into sanity. In any therapy session, if the therapist feels he has the answer, and he is going to tell it to the patient who doesn’t have it, that is a problem. On the other hand, we are afraid to say to somebody, “I think you need to shape up!” We think we should have all the answers, but at the same time, we are afraid to tell the simple truth. We try everything so that we don’t have to tell the truth.

The main point is to learn to tell the truth to your patients. Then they will respond to you, because there is power in telling the truth rather than bending our logic to fit their neurosis. Truth always works. There always has to be basic honesty; that is the source of trust. When someone sees that you are telling the truth, then they will realize further that you are saying something worthwhile and trustworthy. It always works. There are no special tips on how to trick people into sanity by not telling the truth. I don’t think there can be such a thing at all. At least I haven’t found it in dealing with my own students. Sometimes telling the truth is very painful to them, but they begin to realize it is the truth, and they appreciate it sooner or later.

It is also important to realize that you don’t have to have control over others. You see, that is exactly the truth situation: you do not have all the answers; you are not assuming control over people. Instead, you are trying to tell the truth—in the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. You may hope that you can produce results, that there will be some progress from telling the truth, but it is important to relate openly with a person, without expectations. To begin with, you can say things like, “How are you? Who are you? How are you behaving yourself?” That is important, rather than what results you get.

This is not a linguistic twist of any kind: just be honest and straightforward—and be good at it. In some ways, disturbed people are the most intelligent people. They can tell right from left the minute you open your mouth. Right away, they have an idea about you, they know you, and usually they are extremely accurate—and they are profound. So you have to learn to trust their intelligence as well. You can’t think that somebody is just crazy, and therefore you have to reshape him and make him into an acceptable person in society. The enlightened approach is to work with patients, channel them,
as they are
. The approach is to respect their ability to express accuracy. Sometimes, when people have psychological problems, they give up on conventional logic and come up with their own neurotic logic. Nevertheless, there is still truth in them. They are very accurate. It is very stunning sometimes: you wonder who is sane, who is not sane. You have to trust and be willing to let go and take a chance.

If you are not willing to open yourselves fully in dealing with the neurosis of the world, then you begin to develop a system to put people into pigeonholes. It is very dangerous for a therapist, or for anybody who is working with psychological situations, to put people in pigeonholes. “If patients shake, that means this. If they stutter, that means that.” Pigeonholing behavior patterns in people is not helpful. Instead you should look into a person’s basic healthiness; you should look for a person’s basic goodness. You should ask, where is that? You should look into where the patient’s
health
is coming from. No matter how energetic and crazy a person is—where is that energy coming from? Someone might be acting paranoid and critical, but where is that accuracy coming from? They could be extremely neurotic and destructive, but where is the basic pinpoint of that energy? If you can look at people from that point of view, from the point of view of basic goodness, then there is definitely something you can do to help others.

One method of working with basic healthiness that is used in the Buddhist tradition is to give people meditation instruction. This can be a very good technique for helping people with psychological problems, depending on the severity of their disturbance and whether they are open to meditation. Through meditation, you are trying to help people ride on the energy of their minds, which is very, very powerful. If you can tell them how to do it properly, it can be fantastic. But without proper training, introducing the technique of meditation can be problematic. So you should be very careful that you don’t become gurus to your patients. However, I think that introducing the sitting practice of meditation is an excellent idea in many cases.

The point of introducing sitting practice to a person is that there is always
some
little connection to basic goodness that a person can contact on the simple level of their sense perceptions. Even without meditation practice, that contact can be made. If our patients are artists, musicians, or connoisseurs of food, or if they even like food or like buying clothes, there is something to work with. As long as there is a connection through any sense perception, any touching of any kind, it involves the person with the world, with their environment. This is the basic approach we discussed earlier: cultivating people’s awareness of their environment in which they can learn to appreciate themselves. Everyone has some connection with his or her environment, and any connection they may have to the world should be cultivated and awakened further.

In the early level of therapy, we cannot work only with the emotions. We have to work with a person’s connection with the real world, with the environment. For example, people’s relationship with their husband or their wife can be approached in terms of how they touch their husband, how they touch their wife, how they kiss, how they hug, rather than how you as the therapist can transform or solve the problems in their relationship. Just work at the concrete level. You might even talk to someone about how she takes her husband’s shirt to bed and how she smells it, how she feels it. Anything—as long as it is concrete.

Basic sanity applies to every person, no matter how disturbed he or she may seem. It is not true that, if someone has seemingly gone too far into neurosis, we can’t do anything. We
can
help people, even those who have gone too far, beyond the regular channels of communication. The basic point is to evoke some gentleness, some kindness, some basic goodness, some contact. When we set up an environment for people to be treated, it should be a wholesome environmental situation. A very disturbed or withdrawn patient might not respond right away—it might take a long time. But if a general sense of loving-kindness is communicated, then eventually there can be a cracking of the cast-iron quality of neurosis: it can be worked with. This can be arduous. But it is possible, definitely possible.