The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (24 page)

Sometimes it seems there is an opportunity to interrupt our confusion by taking a break, taking a rest here and there. As you drive along the highway, you see a rest area. How about turning in to that, pulling in for just a few minutes? Or there’s a sign, “food, gas, lodging.” How about taking a little rest? Those advertisements for a break, those signposts, in Buddhist terms are called the daughters of Mara. They slow your journey. Suppose you stopped for every one of those signposts, you turned off and stopped and then came back to the highway. Your journey would be delayed, would double and triple in length. You wouldn’t get to your destination on time at all. You would be delayed. As a matter of fact, you might not only be delayed. You might be seduced into stopping at a particular motel and fall asleep forever. Go to the Holiday Inn, celebrate life; go to the Ramada Inn, enjoy the salad bar of the spiritual feast. There are an infinite number of places where you can eat food and fall asleep forever.

What we are saying is we should try to be very practical—get on the highway and don’t stop anywhere. Before you begin your journey, fill up your gas tank to the top. Make the journey and don’t get tired. If you get tired of driving your vehicle, turn to your friends. Ask them to take the wheel. You become the passenger and
go on
. There’s no point in stopping at these places. This is the yana, this is the journey. None of those little seductions of spiritual materialism that are presented to us are worthwhile. Each one of them says to us, “Don’t go too far. Stay here with us. Stop at our place. Spend your money here.”

In this respect, the Buddhist path is ruthless, absolutely ruthless, almost to the point of being uncompassionate. What we could say is that we are not looking for pleasure. The journey is not particularly geared for finding pleasure; it’s not a pleasure trip. It is a visiting trip rather than a pleasure trip. By no means is it a vacation, a holiday. It is a pragmatic journey. You want to see your mother, your father. You undertake the journey to see them, and you keep driving constantly, maintaining your speed. You don’t make any of those roadside stops. You just go, you drive straight to your parents’ home.

One of the greatest misunderstandings people have is regarding the spiritual journey as a vacation trip with all kinds of nice things happening on the side. It is a direct journey, visiting our relatives. We don’t actually want to see them, but at the same time we are intrigued, fascinated by the possibility of seeing them. “I wonder what they’re doing. I wonder how they’re getting on.” That is precisely what our journey is about.

There is a Buddhist term,
dharmata
, which means dharma-ness, the isness of reality. Isness is the parents we are trying to visit. This isness might turn out to be chaotic, terribly embarrassing, or maybe fantastically beautiful and enlightening. All the same, we make our journey back home, back home somewhere, wherever it is.

We left our home a long time ago. We dropped out of college, and we’ve been wandering here and there, hitchhiking. We are leading our life of a hippie or a tripper, or whatever. We’ve been here, there, and everywhere. Some time ago, we started to think, “I wonder what my mother’s doing. Maybe I should phone her and find out.” We phoned her, and then we thought, “Now that I’ve heard her voice on the phone, I’m more intrigued to see her. Maybe I should pay her a visit. Also, maybe my grandmother would be an interesting person to meet again after all these years. Maybe I should go back and pay her a visit. Grandfather, too, maybe I should visit him.” That is exactly what our journey is like. Going back to our heritage, our origin, that is the meaning of “journey” here. So it is not a pleasure trip.

A journey like this can be painful. You wonder why you are taking such a journey. It was not long ago that you felt embarrassed by your family. They gave you enormous pain, real pain. There were all kinds of hassles connected with your parents and grandparents. Your memory of them and your memory of yourself in connection with them is painful.

That is the neurosis of our own basic being. It is highly neurotic, completely confused. We carry a fat body or a skinny body, and we have this big dictionary that we carry with us. Each time we open the dictionary we find a word, which is a piece of our subconscious gossip. And each time we find a word, we close down—we get anxious about the whole situation. Then we open this book again and find another word. This produces further anxiety, more subconscious gossip. We’re hampered: We’re completely crowded, confused, and claustrophobic with all the passion, aggression, and all kinds of other things going on in our minds bouncing back on us.

Sometimes, of course, we try to put this off on somebody else—kick somebody or make love to somebody. These involvements provide further fuel for the constantly ongoing fire of our emotions. Even trying to get away from it, to turn our minds toward the higher truths, only adds further fuel. We say, “Now I am getting rid of all that, because I’m getting involved with a higher truth. Whew!” But it comes back again. “Oh-oh,” we say, “here I go again.” And the same trip goes on again and again and again, constantly. An awareness of unending confusion begins to develop heavily in our state of mind.

We might say, “I’m a happy person. I’ve got my life worked out. I’ve found a certain truth that I can rest my mind in. I don’t have a problem anymore. My existence is very simple. I’ve paid my debts materially, psychologically, and spiritually.” The more we say and think things like that, the more there is a very subtle but fundamental pin piercing our heart. It says, “Am I doing the right thing? Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing.”

An endless journey of this and that, that and this, is going on all the time. We may think that we have encountered a greater truth, the greatest doctrine of all, or we may tell ourselves that we are just beginners—“I’m just a beginner, but I have found a solid point to begin from”—but whatever we think, whatever we tell ourselves, the whole thing is chaos, absolute chaos. We have question after question happening constantly, all the time. We have even lost track of where we’re going or of whether we’re coming or going. Having heard the truth, we think, “Is that really the truth?” We ask ourselves, “Do I exist or don’t I?” Or, “Who am I, what am I?” This kind of experience is not necessarily restricted to LSD trippers, not at all. Even people who are absolutely normal, in the ordinary sense of the term, who think they’re doing okay and are on the right track, have the same kind of confusion, a complete mingling and mix-up of this and that, continually woven into each other. It is fantastically confusing, absolutely confusing. We are confused to the extent that we do not even know who we are or what our journey is about.

This is particularly the case with well-known poets, writers, and psychologists. They seemingly work out their trip purely by writing a book or doing a poetry recital or by adopting the role of a teacher and instructing people. That is the only reference point they have. The rest of their mind is completely in turmoil.

The point is, we have to acknowledge this confusion. Let us acknowledge that it is actually there, that it is happening with us all the time. No matter how much we are confused, no matter how chaotic our experience is, we have some reference point that enables us to know that this is happening. There is some little secret corner in us that says, “This is actually happening to me.” That is there, even though we do not want to admit our confusion or tell anybody about it. Publicly or privately, we do not want to admit that this is happening, but personally, we know it. It’s because of this little secret of ours that we might get offended in the supermarket. The cashier says, “Thank you and take it easy. Take it easy, now.” We think, “How could he know? He doesn’t really know who I am and what I am. That was just a common phrase he used.”

What I’m saying is that though we think our confusion is highly secret, it’s actually highly public. In fact the secret is a secret only for us privately; the fact that such a secret is being kept is public. The self-deception is as outrageous as that. Our private parts are common knowledge, whether we believe it or not.

In Buddhist terms, that private-parts kind of pain is known as
duhkha
, which means suffering—the fundamental suffering. So you don’t have to ask anybody, not even a teacher or master, what is meant by pain, duhkha, suffering. You just have to refer to things as they are, this thing that we have, our familiar thing that we have. It’s this thingy-ness, which seemingly should be kept private and unseen and unknown even to ourselves. But it is public knowledge.

We should admit this infamous, familiar pain. This is the pain that is actually happening. We cannot say that it is just nothing. It is the biggest thing that we have to hide. We plan all kinds of ways to hide it, thinking that nobody will know. It is like the story of the man who was stealing a bell. He covered his own ears so that nobody would hear anything. A lot of people, including those who are supposed to be the smartest, do that. They turn out not to be so smart. We are so very subtle, therefore we end up being so very obvious. It is really very, very embarrassing; and that embarrassment is pain, duhkha, suffering. Trying to hide our private parts does not work out the way we wanted it to.

Realizing this fundamental suffering, the private parts that we stupidly try to hide—being so intelligent and so stupid at the same time—is the first step of the journey, the first step of Buddhism. Buddha taught about this in his first sermon, calling it duhkha satya, the truth of suffering. This is the first of the four noble truths. To realize it is a very noble thing, fantastically noble. It is the highest thing you can discover. This most terrible thing that we are trying to hide more than anything has been exposed as the truth, as dharma, as doctrine. The absolute truth we have discovered is that hiding it doesn’t work. Discovering that this hidden factor is exposed already is the highest thing of all. It is the real truth, and if we acknowledge it, it is a beautiful truth, a fantastic truth. The hypocrisy of the whole universe, not just of this world but of the whole universe, of this entire cosmic system, has collapsed—by realizing its own hypocrisy. Acknowledgment of our thingy factor as pain is the highest truth, the most powerful weapon of all. It is a fantastic discovery. Once we have acknowledged that, we have no solid ground to stand on anymore. That is the starting point of all the yanas, the foundation.

Student:
You seem to advise against resting when you are tired and want to rest. But pushing yourself is spiritual aggression. Where is the medium between those two?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Taking a proper rest is quite different from taking a break from your embarrassment. Usually when we want to take a rest, it means we don’t have enough strength to continue our hypocrisy. But taking an ordinary proper rest is quite different from maintaining the showmanship of your hypocrisy. While you are taking a proper rest is the best time to expose your hypocrisy. You can expose your hypocrisy by falling asleep. You can expose yourself simultaneously with whatever else you are doing all the time.

The point is that there is a very abstract feeling that the whole world is my embarrassing private parts and that I don’t want to let go of relating to things that way. So I just take a rest so I can maintain my shield, the curtain of my hypocrisy. A person cannot rest in that properly. People work hard even while they sleep, maintaining their hypocrisy. A real rest, a real break, comes from letting go of that heavy labor.

Student:
So we try to maintain the fiction that we’re not suffering, that we’re okay?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s more than that. When you say you’re okay, that means you’ve been able to conceal yourself. Nobody has seen your private parts, therefore you’re okay. This is all because you don’t want to expose yourself. Real okay would be the result of letting go. That is the meaning of the truth of suffering. It is painful to see yourself letting go and everything being exposed. This is not particularly pleasant. We wouldn’t call it blissful, but it is blissful to the extent that it is being truthful. When you realize the indestructibility of the truth, you connect with an entirely different dimension of reality and security. You have nothing to lose, therefore you’re okay. This contrasts with the sense of having lots to gain.

Student:
Then why does pain and suffering intensify so much as you progress along the path?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Because you are continually realizing that you have further subtle games; you keep uncovering them all the time.

Student:
You spoke about going along the highway not looking at the opposite lane, not getting sidetracked. Isn’t that a sacrifice of the panoramic awareness you often talk about?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Looking at the opposite lane could hardly be called panoramic awareness. With panoramic awareness, you see the whole scene. There are no sidetracks. Looking at the opposite lane is just one-sided vision, being distracted by one highlight. You lose the rest of the panoramic vision, which can cause an accident.

Student:
Does the pride in being a Buddhist that you talked about at the beginning of the lecture have anything to do with the discovery or unmasking of suffering?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That pride is a kind of conviction, a sense of certainty, the sense that you are taking a definite, particular journey, one which does not provide false hospitality or false pleasures, because it’s so real. In that perspective, the sense of security is a sense of the groundlessness of security as opposed to a sense of security based on ego’s clinging. You have pride in that kind of security, because you begin to have a sense of the looseness of the air you are flying in as you fall to the ground. You begin to realize that the air is a very secure place; the air is what makes it possible that you
can
fall.

Student:
Is that the kind of pride that makes the discovery so real?