The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (35 page)

You feel as if you are in exile. You are a great revolutionary leader. You had a lot of power and schemes and so on, but now you are in exile in a foreign country and you’re bored. Ego’s machinations and administration have no place in boredom, so boredom is the starting point of realization of the egoless state. This is very important.

Then at some point, within the state of boredom, one begins to entertain oneself with all kinds of hidden neuroses. That’s okay, let them come through, let them come through. Let’s not push neurosis away or sit on it. At some point, even those entertainments become absurd—and you are bored again. Then you not only draw out the discursive, conceptual side of hidden neurosis, but you begin to become emotional about the whole thing. You’re angry at yourself or at the situation you managed to get yourself into. “What the hell am I doing here? What’s the point of sitting here and doing nothing? It feels foolish, embarrassing!” The image of yourself sitting on the floor and just listening to your breathing—that you let yourself be humiliated in this way—is terrible! You are angry at the teacher and the circumstances, and you question the method and the teaching altogether.

Then you try more questions, seeking out another kind of entertainment. This involves believing in mystery. “Maybe there is some kind of mystery behind the whole thing. If I live through this simple task, maybe it will enable me to see a great display of higher spiritual consciousness.” Now you are like a frustrated donkey trying to visualize a carrot. But at some point that becomes boring as well. How many times can you seduce yourself with that? Ten times, twenty times? By the time you have repeated the same thing seventy-five times, the whole thing becomes meaningless, just mental chatter.

All those things that happen in sitting meditation are relating with ourselves, working with ourselves, exposing neuroses of all kinds. After you have been through a certain amount of that, you master the experience of breathing in spite of those interruptions. You begin to feel that you actually have a real life that you can relate to instead of trying to escape or speed [along without having to connect with it]. You don’t have to do all those things. You can be sure of yourself, you can really settle down. You can afford to slow down. At this point you begin to realize the meaning of pain and the meaning of egolessness and to understand the tricks of ignorance that the first skandha has played on you.

So shamatha meditation practice is very important. It is the key practice for further development through all the yanas of Buddhism.

Student:
Is the experience of boredom also an experience of egolessness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is an experience of egolessness rather than an egoless state.

S:
The ego is experiencing the boredom?

TR:
Yes, ego is experiencing its own hollowness. This is still experience, not achievement. If there is achievement, you don’t experience egolessness, but this is the experience of egolessness.

Student:
Doesn’t the boredom just become another form of entertainment?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think so. It’s too straightforward, too frustrating to be entertaining. I mean the idea of it might be entertaining now, but when you are actually experiencing it . . .

S:
Well, you were talking about pain being entertaining.

TR:
That’s different. In pain, something’s happening; in boredom, nothing’s happening.

Student:
Sometimes I’m sitting meditating and I notice strange neurotic things happening to me. I try to understand them, but as soon as I try to understand, I just get confusion. Is it best to just drop it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You don’t have to try to do anything with it, particularly. Just let it arise and fall away of its own accord. One of the important aspects of the proper attitude toward meditation is understanding that it is a very simple process that does not have any schemes in it. Of course sitting and breathing is a scheme to some extent, but in order to remove dirt we have to put soap on the body. So something has to be applied. You have put another kind of dirt on in order to remove the existing dirt. But it’s not very much and it’s the closest we can get to [no schemes at all].

Student:
What do you do with your emotions when they arise? What about anger, for example? Suppressing it just seems to be a cop-out.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If, when you’re angry, you just go out and have a fight with somebody, that’s also a cop-out. That’s another way of suppressing your anger. You can’t handle it, therefore you try some other way. Whether you do that or suppress, you are not relating with your emotions completely. The real way of relating with an emotion is just to watch it arise, experience its crescendo, and then find out if that emotion is threatening you in any way. You can do that if you are willing to do that. Of course, you could say you didn’t have time to do such a thing-before you knew it, you just exploded—but that’s not quite true. If you are willing to do it, you can relate with your emotions.

Emotions are not regarded as something that you should throw away; they are regarded as very precious things that you can relate with. The final frustration of the ego is the emotions. It can’t cope with itself, therefore it has to do something—become extremely jealous or extremely angry, or something like that. But one can really watch the emotion: Instead of relating with the end result of the emotion, relate with the emotion itself.

S:
Not watch what it does to the object of the emotion?

TR:
Yes, that’s right. You see, usually in talking about emotions, we completely misunderstand the whole thing. We just talk about the end results, which is also an expression of frustration that doesn’t solve your problem. It doesn’t release anything; it just creates further chain reactions.

Student:
Your emotion can be telling you things.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, but you don’t listen to it. You are just hypnotized by the emotion—that’s the problem. The emotion is telling
you
things. It is talking to you, but you are not talking to it. You just become something the emotion manipulates by remote control. You don’t have access back to its headquarters. That’s the problem, always. That’s why emotion is so frustrating. It finally gets hold of us and controls us completely. We are reduced to just an animal. That is why we usually find emotions uncomfortable.

Student:
How do you relate to the energy of your emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You see, there are two ways of relating to energy. You build up energy and then you spend it, or you build up energy and regenerate it. The second way, if you relate to the qualities of the emotions completely, you are able to retain the inspiration of the emotions, but at the same time you see the neurosis [that occasioned them] as blindness. Particularly in the tantric teachings, emotions are not regarded as something to get rid of but as something necessary. Also in the bodhisattva path, emotions are regarded as necessary. They become the seeds of the bodhisattva’s paramita practices.
³
Those practices are based on the chemistry of the different emotions and how they can be transformed into different things. In tantric practice, the emotions are transmuted into different inspiration. Emotions are the seed of compassion and wisdom. They are a way to attain enlightenment. So one wouldn’t try to get rid of them; one would try to relate to them. That’s the whole point.

Student:
You mentioned watching your emotions. Even at the time of the emotion’s crescendo, there’s still a very strong watcher. Is it like riding them or watching them from the outside?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is not so much a matter of looking at them from the outside. It’s a matter of embracing them as something together with you. In other words, it’s trying to build a bridge. There’s a big gap [between you and the emotion], that’s why the emotion becomes uncomfortable. There’s a tremendous gap; the emotion becomes separate entertainment. It becomes a separate entity that is going to hit you back. You become small and the emotion becomes huge and begins to manipulate you.

S:
The larger the gap, the more it’s out of control?

TR:
Well, the more frustrating it becomes, anyway, because you can’t reach it, even though you are controlled by it. So the idea is to build a bridge, or take down the barrier between you and your emotion.

As long as you regard the problem as separate from you, there’s no way of solving the problem, because you are actually contributing toward the separateness. Your enemy becomes more and more terrifying. The more you relate to it as an enemy, the more the enemy can do to you.

Student:
I feel that my experience of boredom is very close to panic, like it has panic on the borders or is the other side of panic.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, obviously boredom is panic in the sense of not having a sufficient supply of entertainment. That’s why you panic, sure. But that sounds like a very good sign.

Student:
Rinpoche, how do you transform emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Transform? You don’t do it, it happens. If you are willing to do it, it happens.

Student:
When you talk about relationship with emotions, does that mean attention looking at the meaning of the emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It seems to be some kind of feeling of putting out a sympathetic attitude toward the emotions as being yours.

S:
Would you call that attention or awareness?

TR:
I think you could call it awareness. When the texts describe this practice, they speak of the emotions being self-liberated. In fact there’s no difference between you and the emotion, so the emotion is liberating itself. The sense of separateness is just illusion.

I think one of the biggest problems is that we are unable to develop compassion or a sympathetic attitude toward our projections, let alone toward things outside our projections—other people, other life situations. We can’t even take a sympathetic attitude toward ourselves and our own projections, and that causes a lot of frustration and complications. That is the whole point we are trying to deal with here. The boredom of meditation demands your attention; in other words, the boredom becomes the sympathetic environment in relation to which you can develop compassion. [In that boredom] you have no choice but to relate directly to what is happening to you.

THREE

The Dawn of Mysticism

T
HE HINAYANA APPROACH
, which we discussed in the previous two talks, is generally very factual. There is no room for mystical inspiration. It is very down to earth and very definite. In the third yana, the mahayana, which is also called the bodhisattva path, or path of the Buddhist warrior, some sense of a mysticism, just an element of it, begins to develop. Of course when we get to tantra, or the vajrayana, the mysticism becomes more obvious.

Let us discuss the meaning of mysticism from the Buddhist point of view. Here mysticism has more to do with the depth of the potentiality for enlightenment than with any sense of uncovering something mysterious. Mysticism is often associated with a mysterious secret doctrine. The relative truth cannot measure the absolute truth, and therefore the whole thing becomes mysterious. From a simple-minded, conventional point of view, mysticism is the search for magic, maybe not witchcraft or voodoo, but still magic in the sense that things will be changed from the ordinary way we perceive them. Another part of the conventional idea of mysticism is that ordinary human beings cannot achieve the heights of it, cannot create this highest work of art. Only a talented and highly skilled person is capable of that. This achievement is regarded as powerful and mind-boggling, like someone changing water into fire and going on to drink it and have it quench his thirst. These are the kinds of things we read about in the books about Don Juan. They are involved with the mystery of hidden forces and things like the magical transference of objects. We also read about that kind of thing in the stories of saints and great spiritual masters: Water is changed into wine, Milarepa flies through the air, Padmasambhava causes earthquakes.
¹
These kinds of ideas of powerful magic that mystics can develop are widely found in the mysticism of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, et cetera. Everybody looks forward with excitement to the possibility of becoming a super-practitioner, a complete adept of the practices, so that they can perform miracles. Wouldn’t that be fun? There is such a sense of envy!

Scientists also look for proof of spirituality in the same terms. If there is such a thing as high spirituality, if there is a supreme achievement like enlightenment, someone who has accomplished that should be able to perform a miracle. That would be regarded as proof of their spiritual attainment. Scientists prefer to remain skeptical, scientifically objective, but at the same time they look for such proofs.

There is great excitement and a tremendous sense of confirmation associated with this kind of magic. One imagines students comparing notes as to which guru performs the most sophisticated kinds of miracles. But from the Buddhist point of view, mysticism is not concerned with this kind of magic. We might describe the mahayana as the dawn of mysticism and the vajrayana as the sunrise of mysticism. And naturally mysticism in the mahayana and the vajrayana does have to do with uncovering the unknown. But it is not a question of receiving training in order to perform magic in the sense just described.

There seem to be two different approaches to magic. We could say that the attainment of enlightenment is also magic. Working on ego, which is anti-enlightenment, produces enlightenment, which is extraordinarily magical. But this is not magic in the style of the cartoons, involving supermen and so on.