The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (20 page)

You invoke internal drala through your relationship to your personal habits, how you handle the details of dressing, eating, drinking, sleeping. We could use clothing as an example. For the warrior, clothing actually provides an armor of discipline, which wards off attacks from the setting-sun world. It is not that you hide behind your clothes because you are afraid to manifest yourself as a good warrior, but rather that, when you wear good, well-fitting clothes, your clothing can both ward off casualness and invite tremendous dignity.

Sometimes if your clothes fit you well, you feel that they are too tight. If you dress up, you may feel constricted by wearing a necktie or a suit or a tight-fitting skirt or dress. The idea of invoking internal drala is not to give in to the allure of casualness. The occasional irritation coming from your neck, the crotch of your pants, or your waist is usually a good sign. It means that your clothes fit you well, but your neurosis doesn’t fit your clothes. The modern approach is often free and casual. That is the attraction of polyester leisure suits. You feel stiff if you are dressed up. You are tempted to take off your tie or your jacket or your shoes. Then you can hang out and put your feet on the table and act freely, hoping that your mind will act freely at the same time. But at that point your mind begins to dribble. It begins to leak, and garbage of all kinds comes out of your mind. That version of relaxation does not provide real freedom at all. Therefore, for the warrior, wearing well-fitting clothing is regarded as wearing a suit of armor. How you dress can actually invoke upliftedness and grace.

Internal drala also comes out of making a proper relationship to food, by taking an interest in your diet. This does not necessarily mean that you should shop around for the best gourmet items. But you can take the time to plan good, nutritious meals, and you can enjoy cooking your food, eating it, and then cleaning up and putting the leftovers away. Beyond that, you invoke internal drala by developing greater awareness of how you use your mouth altogether. You put food in your mouth; you drink liquids through your mouth; you smoke cigarettes in your mouth. It is as if the mouth were a big hole or a big garbage pail: You put everything through it. Your mouth is the biggest gate: You talk out of it, you cry out of it, and you kiss out of it. You use your mouth so much that it becomes a sort of cosmic gateway. Imagine that you were being watched by Martians. They would be amazed by how much you use your mouth.

To invoke internal drala you have to pay attention to how you use your mouth. Maybe you don’t need to use it as much as you think. Appreciating your world doesn’t mean that you must consume everything you see all the time. When you eat, you can eat slowly and moderately, and you can appreciate what you eat. When you talk, it isn’t necessary to continually blurt out everything that is on your mind. You can say what you have to say, gently, and then you can stop. You can let someone else talk, or you can appreciate the silence.

The basic idea of invoking internal drala is that you can synchronize, or harmonize, your body and your connection to the phenomenal world. This synchronization, or connectedness, is something that you can actually see. You can see people’s connection to internal drala by the way they behave: the way they pick up their teacups, the way they smoke their cigarettes, or the way they run their hands through their hair. Whatever you do always manifests how you are feeling about yourself and your environment—whether you feel kindness toward yourself or resentment and anger toward yourself; whether you feel good about your environment or whether you feel bad about your environment. That can always be detected by your gait and your gestures—always. It is as if you were married to your phenomenal world. All the little details—the way you turn on the tap before you take a shower, the way you brush your teeth—reflect your connection or disconnection with the world. When that connection is completely synchronized, then you are experiencing internal drala.

Finally, there is what is known as invoking
secret drala,
which is the product of invoking the external and internal drala principles. Because you have created a sacred environment around you and because you have synchronized your body so beautifully, so immaculately, therefore you provoke tremendous wakefulness, tremendous nowness in your state of mind.

The chapter “Letting Go” introduced the idea of windhorse, or riding on the energy of basic goodness in your life. Windhorse is a translation of the Tibetan
lungta. Lung
means “wind” and
ta
means “horse.” Invoking secret drala is the experience of raising windhorse, raising a wind of delight and power and riding on, or conquering, that energy. Such wind can come with great force, like a typhoon that can blow down trees and buildings and create huge waves in the water. The personal experience of this wind comes as a feeling of being completely and powerfully in the present. The horse aspect is that, in spite of the power of this great wind, you also feel stability. You are never swayed by the confusion of life, never swayed by excitement or depression. You can ride on the energy of your life. So windhorse is not purely movement and speed, but it includes practicality and discrimination, a natural sense of skill. This quality of lungta is like the four legs of a horse, which make it stable and balanced. Of course, in this case you are not riding an ordinary horse; you are riding a windhorse.

By invoking the external and internal drala principles, you raise a wind of energy and delight in your life. You begin to feel natural power and upliftedness manifesting in your existence. Then, having raised your windhorse, you can accommodate whatever arises in your state of mind. There is no problem or hesitation of any kind. So the fruition of invoking secret drala is that, having raised windhorse, you experience a state of mind that is free from subconscious gossip, free from hesitation and disbelief. You experience the very moment of your state of mind. It is fresh and youthful and virginal. That very moment is innocent and genuine. It does not contain doubt or disbelief at all. It is gullible, in the positive sense, and it is completely fresh. Secret drala is experiencing that very moment of your state of mind, which is the essence of nowness. You actually experience being able to connect yourself to the inconceivable vision and wisdom of the cosmic mirror on the spot. At the same time, you realize that this experience of nowness can join together the vastness of primordial wisdom with both the wisdom of past traditions and the realities of contemporary life. So in that way, you begin to see how the warrior’s world of sacredness can be created altogether. In the following chapters, we will investigate that world more thoroughly.

FOURTEEN

Overcoming Arrogance

When you are fully gentle, without arrogance and without aggression, you see the brilliance of the universe. You develop a true perception of the universe.

I
N THE LAST CHAPTER
we discussed ways to invoke the drala principle. In this and the next chapter we are going to discuss the obstacles to invoking drala, which must be overcome before we can master the disciplines of invoking external, internal, and secret drala. One of the important points in invoking drala is to prepare a ground of gentleness and genuineness. The basic obstacle to gentleness is arrogance. Arrogance comes from hanging on to the reference point of
me
and other. You may have studied the principles of warriorship and Great Eastern Sun vision, and you may have received numerous teachings on how to rest in nowness and raise your windhorse, but if you regard those as your personal accomplishment, then you are missing the point. Instead of becoming gentle and tamed, you could become extremely arrogant. “I, Joe Schmidt, am able to raise windhorse, and
I
feel good about that. I am beginning to accomplish something, so I am a big deal.”

Being gentle and without arrogance is the Shambhala definition of a gentleman. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
one of the definitions of a gentleman is someone who is not rude, someone whose behavior is gentle and thoroughly trained. However, for the warrior, gentleness is not just politeness. Gentleness is consideration: showing concern for others, all the time. A Shambhala gentlewoman or gentleman is a decent person, a genuine person. He or she is very gentle to himself and to others. The purpose of any protocol, or manners, or discipline that we are taught is to have concern for others. We may think that if we have good manners, we are such good girls or good boys; we know how to eat properly and how to drink properly; we know how to behave properly; and aren’t we smart? That is not the point. The point is that, if we have bad table manners, they upset our neighbors, and in turn our neighbors develop bad table manners, and they in turn upset others. If we misuse our napkins and our silverware because we are untrained, that creates problems for others.

Good behavior is not meant to build us up so that we can think of ourselves as little princes or princesses. The point of good behavior is to communicate our respect for others. So we should be concerned with how we behave. When someone enters a room, we should say hello, or stand up and greet them with a handshake. Those rituals are connected with how to have more consideration for others. The principles of warriorship are based on training ourselves and developing self-control so that we can extend ourselves to others. Those disciplines are important in order to cultivate the absence of arrogance.

We tend to think that the threats to our society or to ourselves are outside of us. We fear that some enemy will destroy us. But a society is destroyed from the inside, not from an attack by outsiders. We may imagine the enemy coming with spears and machine guns to kill us, massacre us. In reality, the only thing that can destroy us is within ourselves. If we have too much arrogance, we will destroy our gentleness. And if we destroy gentleness, then we destroy the possibility of being awake, and then we cannot use our intuitive openness to extend ourselves in situations properly. Instead, we generate tremendous aggression.

Aggression desecrates the ground altogether: the ground that you are sitting on, the walls around you, the ceiling and windows and doorways. In turn, you have no place to invite the dralas to come in. The space becomes like an opium den, thick and heavy, and the dralas say, “Yuck, who wants to go in there? Who’s inviting us? Who’s invoking us with their deception?” They won’t come along at all. When the room is filled with
you
and your trip, no sensible person is attracted to that space. Even
you
aren’t.

When the environment is stuffy and full of arrogant, self-styled men and women, the dralas are repelled. But then, what happens if a warrior, someone who embodies nonaggression, freedom from arrogance, and humbleness, walks into that room? When such a person enters an intense situation full of arrogance and pollution, quite possibly the occupants of the room begin to feel funny. They feel that they can’t have any fun and games anymore, because someone who won’t collaborate in their deception has walked in. They can’t continue to crack setting-sun jokes or indulge and sprawl on the floor, so usually they will leave. The warrior is left alone, sitting in that room.

But then, after a while, a different group of people may walk in, looking for a fresh room, a clean atmosphere. They begin to assemble—gentle people who smile without arrogance or aggression. The atmosphere is quite different from the previous setting-sun gathering. It may be slightly more rowdy than in the opium den, but the air is cheerful and fresh. Then there is the possibility that the dralas will begin to peek through the doors and the windows. They become interested, and soon they want to come in, and one by one they enter. They accept food and drink, and they relax in that atmosphere, because it is pure and clean. Because that atmosphere is without arrogance, the dralas begin to join in and share their greater sanity.

When the warrior-students experience an environment where the dralas are present, where reality is present, where the possibility of sanity is always there, they can appreciate the mountains, clouds, sky, sunshine, trees, flowers, brooks, the occasional cries and laughter of children. That is the main point of invoking drala: to appreciate reality fully and properly. Arrogant people can’t see intensely bright red and blue, brilliant white and orange. Arrogant people are so involved with themselves and they are competing so much with others that they won’t even look.

When you are fully gentle, without arrogance and without aggression, you see the brilliance of the universe. You develop a true perception of the universe. You can appreciate green, nicely shaped blades of grass, and you can appreciate a striped grasshopper with a tinge of copper color and black antennae. It is so beautiful sitting on a plant. As you walk toward it, it jumps off the plant. Little things like that are not boring sights; they are new discoveries. Every day you see different things. When I was in Texas a few years ago, I saw thousands of grasshoppers. Each one of them had its own approach, and they were striped with all sorts of colors. I didn’t see any purple ones, but I saw copper, green, beige, and black ones, with occasional red spots on them. The world is very interesting wherever you go, wherever you look.

Whatever exists in our world is worth experiencing. Today, perhaps, there is a snowfall. There is snow sitting on the pine trees, and we can watch as the mountains catch the last rays of sun above their deep iron-blue foreground. When we begin to see details of that nature, we feel that the drala principle is there already. We can’t ignore the fantastic situations in the phenomenal world. We should actually take the opportunity, seize it on the spot. Invocation of the drala principle comes from that fascination that we have, and that we
should
have—without arrogance. We can appreciate our world, which is so vivid and so beautiful.