The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (88 page)

Q:
You’re not saying to suppress our feelings, are you?

CTR:
No, you don’t keep them down. Suppressing them is also doing something with them. Suppression involves a separation between you and your emotions, and therefore you feel that you have to do something with them. When energy is related to properly, it rises, peaks, and then returns back to one’s energy bank. A recharging process takes place.

Q:
Is that the transmutation process?

CTR:
Yes, transmutation is turning the lead into gold.

Q:
In Reichian or primal therapy they encourage people to let out all their anger or hatred. Their theory is that the reintegration of the ego will come by the expression of these energies. From your point of view, by merely relating to the energies, not expressing or repressing them, by just being with them, that a certain kind of change . . .

CTR:
Once you have developed a harmonious relationship with your energy, then you can actually express it, but the style of expression becomes very sane, right to the point. The idea is that expressing energy properly is the final crescendo, the final power; it is at the level of tantra. So from the Buddhist point of view, skillful, accurate expression is the culmination of one’s development. To do this you have to have a harmonious relationship to your energy, to be completely in your own energy. If you try to release your energy at an earlier point, you are wasting a lot of valuable material.

Q:
So in the meantime, while we are trying to make the relationship, do we just sit with anger if it comes up?

CTR:
Not necessarily. The question is whether the anger is part of you or something separate. You have to make a greater connection between the anger and yourself. So even just sitting with it is not enough. It could still be like a bad marriage where there is no relationship. Emotions are part of you, your limbs. If you don’t have energy or emotion, there is no movement, no way to put things into effect. You have to regard emotions as part of you to begin with.

Q:
There is a school of Western psychotherapy that doesn’t believe in expressing feelings. You just experience them and talk about them. And the interpersonal relationship with a therapist is very important in the process. I don’t see any conflict with your ideas and what they are saying.

CTR:
It’s not a doctrinal problem. It is a matter of how people actually relate to their emotions and each other.

Q:
How can I be graceful and totally aware all the time? It seems impossible.

CTR:
Awareness does not mean beware, be careful, ward off danger, you might step into a puddle, so beware. That is not the kind of awareness we are talking about. We are talking about unconditional presence which is not expected to be there all the time. In fact, in order to be completely aware, you have to disown the experience of awareness. It cannot be regarded as yours—it is just there and you do not try to hold it. Then, somehow, a general clarity takes place. So awareness is a glimpse rather than a continuous state. If you hold on to awareness, it becomes self-consciousness rather than awareness. Awareness has to be unmanufactured, it has to be a natural state.

Q:
What is enlightenment?

CTR:
The Buddhist method is to first find out what isn’t enlightenment. You begin to peel off all the skins and then you probably find that in the absence of everything, some sort of essence exists. The basic idea of enlightenment is the sanskrit word
bodhi
, which means “wakeful.” Ultimately, it is an unconditional state of wakefulness, which happens to us occasionally. Intelligence is present all the time, but it gets overcrowded. So one has to peel off the excess layers to allow it to shine through.

Q:
The initial impact, other than Maitri, which is a whole development of the application of Buddhism on therapy, will simply be the effect of Buddhist practices on the therapist and then maybe something will slip through no matter what the context is. Whether you are a behavior modification therapist or you’re a psychoanalyst, it doesn’t make any difference, it could have a really powerful effect.

CTR:
I don’t’ see any particular problems here. At this point we are talking about taking an attitude that is based on Buddhist experience. Out of that, any kind of style or technique will be used, as long as the presentation doesn’t become too dogmatic. In any case, in therapeutic situations you can’t always go by the books; you have to improvise a great deal when you are working with somebody else. So I think we are not so much talking about “should be doing this” or “should be doing that,” cookery book style. We are talking about developing some kind of insight. I think an understanding of the ideas of impermanence and ego is a very important contribution. Then everything is an individual application. Problems could occur if there is no relationship between the patient and the doctor. If there is no relationship, then all you can do is go along with the books, what the original prescriptions were. That seems like a second-rate therapy. If a real relationship takes place and everything becomes a part of one’s journey then I don’t see any problems.

Q:
Could I add another word to that? My hope when I think of what Buddhism can contribute is that it will soften or lessen the need that therapists I know seem to have which is to have a changing effect on their patients or clients. I think that is the most important part of the message. It goes along with everything you’ve said: you were spelling it out and I was generalizing it in terms of the tremendous pressure that the client and the therapist bring to the situation, to have something to change. And that is absolutely not what is necessary.

I was first drawn to you when I read one of your books, in which there was a voice saying just that: “Look at it, don’t try to change it.” It seems to me that Western therapy could go back to that. That’s what I think Freud was standing for in the first place. Freud was basically an investigator, he was much less interested in curing than in finding out. If we could only encourage our colleagues to go back to that position in itself, that would be a tremendous change in a very subtle way.

CTR:
Precisely.

Space Therapy and the Maitri Community

T
HE CREATION OF
M
AITRI
, a Buddhist community working in a semiclinical situation with Western neurosis, is a landmark in the growth of Tibetan Buddhist teachings in America. It marks a practical and potentially valuable application of the insights of vajrayana Buddhism to emotional disorders prevalent in American society. The Tibetan vajrayana teachings of the development of ego and the ego’s relationship to space have found fertile soil here. Though many people think Buddhism is concerned mainly with some kind of mystical enlightenment, the true ground for Buddhism is confusion, neurosis, and pain, as Buddha emphasized in his four noble truths. It is from the ground of neurosis that Buddhist psychology has developed. An understanding of this psychology as it has developed in Tibet is essential to understanding the work we are doing at Maitri.

In contrast to the traditional medical model of disturbances, the Buddhist approach is founded on the belief that basic sanity is operative in all states of mind. One could say, that is, that confusion is not exactly ignorant; it is actually very intricate and detailed; the confusion has a particular style that may differ from person to person. More important, confusion is two-sided: it creates a need, a demand for sanity. This hungry nature of confusion is very powerful and very important. The demand for relief or sanity that is contained in confusion is, in fact, the beginning point of Buddhism. That is what moved Buddha to sit beneath the bodhi tree twenty-five hundred years ago—to confront his confusion and find its source—after struggling vainly for seven years in various ascetic yogic disciplines.

Basically we are faced with a similar situation now in the West. We are confused, anxious, and hungry psychologically. Despite a physically luxurious prosperity, there is a tremendous amount of emotional anxiety. This anxiety has stimulated a lot of research into various types of psychotherapy, drug therapy, behavior modification, and group therapies. From the Buddhist viewpoint, this search is evidence of the nature of basic sanity operating within neurosis; almost an ape instinct to find an answer to our confusion. This confusion is the situation in which psychotherapy efforts are growing today, and appropriately, it is the basic ground of Buddhism and Buddhist psychology.

The approach of tantric Buddhism or vajrayana Buddhism, however, is not one of looking for a way out of this confused or neurotic situation. Instead, we stop our motion toward finding cures and examine our present state of being and work backward, looking closely at the sources of our very desire for a cure. We must, therefore, start with what we are and why we are searching.

T
HE
S
TRUCTURE OF
E
GO
: T
HE
F
IVE
S
KANDHAS

Buddhist psychology works with the psychological awareness of the space between the perceiver and the perceived. It is the distortion of this space by various types of ego fixation which leads to neurotic patterns of perception of the external world and thence to neurotic behavior which is more or less dysfunctional. In order to understand what is meant by psychological space and its neurotic distortions, it is worthwhile looking at the structure of ego according to Buddhist psychology. Ego is seen as a kind of filter network through which energy is constantly being channeled and manipulated rather than being able to flow freely in unrestricted space. It is not a solid entity but a moment-to-moment process of birth, evolution, and death. In Buddhist terminology, this evolutionary process of the ego is divided into five stages known as the five skandhas.

1. Form

Psychologically, the background from which ego arises is a basic feeling of spaciousness which contains energy and is not limited by any boundaries. There is a sense of being able to move around, of an open gap. It appears as a question which already contains the answer. This openness is basic intelligence, boundless and unlimited by ego. On the most profound level, it questions the very existence of ego, but openness and the sense of insecurity and doubt which goes with it should be said to be the mark of intelligence on any level. However, while openness is intelligence, it is also confusion. We recognize that there is doubt and insecurity, and panic arises. Maybe there is no answer to our problem. At this point we freeze, trying to make something solid and definite. We refuse to make any further move or even to bother with the question anymore. Having established ourselves on solid and familiar ground as a definite and well-known “I,” we now solidify our immediate environment as well and cultivate a sense of familiarity toward that. It is very self-satisfying, yet flat and uninspired.

2. Feeling

This solidification of ourselves and our environment is the fundamental distortion of perceptual space. However, it is at a very primitive level. There is still a large area of insecurity and the ego has to develop further structures in order to control these areas. At the next stage, there is tremendous pride at having thoroughly established ourselves and our basic territory. But it is a shaky, adolescent pride. It feels fundamentally poor and weak. It therefore sends out tentacles of numbness, not really wanting to feel the situation it is in. Out of its sense of poverty, it also grasps whatever seems to feed it and repels whatever seems to attack it. The entire psychological space, rather than being perceived equally in all directions, is seen purely in terms of its friendly or hostile qualities; there is a bloated feeling of the richness of these qualities.

3. Perception-Impulse

Feeling the situation in terms of friendly or hostile is not quite enough. A more definite sense of the center is needed. Self-consciousness develops and everything is perceived in relation to the center. We validate the basic feeling through criteria—everything is perceived as big or small, negative or positive, in relation to “me.” The sense of the poverty of the center leads to an emphasis on surface qualities and a constant attempt to magnetize whatever is perceived as potentially nourishing. Neutral space takes on the qualities of potential pleasure; every corner holds a promise. Creative energy is constantly being diverted to feed our sense of ourselves.

4. Intellect

At this stage, the need to control our overwhelming hopes and wants brings in the intellect. A sense of power begins to develop because we can name our feelings and thereby manipulate them. At the same time, naming brings the possibility of comparison. We need to get to the top, comparatively speaking, so that there will be no one above us with whom we can be compared unfavorably. A competitive spirit develops which creates tremendous psychological speed in an attempt to cover all possibilities of attack. There is a highly efficient awareness of the tiny details, which gives the sense of complete control of the situation. At the same time, the lack of any wider view gives the sense of a tremendous need to get above these details. The feeling of openness at this point closes down to a totally narrow view in terms of up or down, higher or lower.

5. Consciousness

The final stage of ego is known as consciousness. It is the limited form of consciousness whose function is purely to preserve the facade of ego. It has a sharp, aggressive quality to penetrate to even the smallest crack in this facade. It is the circulatory system of ego which links together all the fragments into a logical whole, which must be invincible, since any failure would be a weakening of the defense. It is therefore prepared to argue endlessly its own point of view and to give meaning to every perception in accordance with its own system. This need to give its own meaning to everything leads the ego to fragment space and therefore to feel a tremendous need to make new connections.