The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (64 page)

Jnana transcends the learning process, transcends a struggle of any kind; it just is. Jnana is a kind of a self-satisfied samurai—it does not have to fight anymore. An analogy used to describe jnana by the Tibetan teacher Paltrül Rinpoche is that of an old cow grazing in the meadow quite happily—there is total involvement, total completion. There is no longer any need to sever anything. So jnana is a higher state. It is buddhalevel, whereas prajna is bodhisattva-level.

Q:
Does prajna include both intuitional insight and the knowledge that comes out of the rational mind?

R:
You see, from the Buddhist point of view, intuition and rationality are something quite different from what is generally understood. Intuition and intellect can only come from the absence of ego. Here it is actually
the
intuition,
the
intellect. They do not relate with the back-andforth of comparative thinking, which comes from the checking-up process of ego. While you are making the comparative journey, you get confused halfway through so that you lose track of whether you are coming or going. Real intellect skips this entire process. So the ultimate idea of intellect, from the Buddhist point of view, is the absence of ego, which is prajna. But here, in contrast to jnana, there is still a delight in understanding.

Q:
Would visualization be on the sambhogakaya level of teaching, since it is based on the experience of shunyata?

R:
The practice of visualization is on the dharmakaya level, because until you have reached that level you have not yet worked with the play of phenomena. You have not yet encountered the reality of phenomena as what it is. Up until the shunyata level, you are making a relationship with the phenomenal world; after that, you begin to see the colors, temperatures, textures within the shunyata experience. This is the first glimpse of the possible seed of visualization. Without this foundational development, the practice of visualization could lead to making use of the past and the future, fantasies and memories of shapes and colors. The romantic qualities and desirable aspects of the deities could be focused upon to the extent of losing contact with your basic being. Visualization then becomes a sort of re-creation of the ego.

Q:
Is it good practice to meditate while listening to someone speak, you or someone else? Is meditating while listening a contradiction? How should one listen?

R:
The traditional literature describes three types of listeners. In one case, one’s mind is wandering so much that there’s no room at all for anything that’s being said. One is just there physically. This type is said to be like a pot turned upside down. In another case, one’s mind is relating somewhat to what’s being said, but basically it is still wandering. The analogy is a pot with a hole in the bottom. Whatever you pour in leaks out underneath. In the third case, the listener’s mind contains aggression, jealousy, destruction of all kinds. One has mixed feelings about what is being said and cannot really understand it. The pot is not turned upside down, it doesn’t have a hole in the bottom, but it has not been cleaned properly. It has poison in it.

The general recommendation for listening is to try to communicate with the intelligence of the speaker; you relate to the situation as the meeting of two minds. One doesn’t particularly have to meditate at that point in the sense that meditation would become an extra occupation. But the speaker can become the meditation technique, taking the place of, let’s say, identifying with the breath in sitting meditation. The voice of the speaker would be part of the identifying process, so one should be very close to it as a way of identifying with what the speaker is saying.

Q:
Sometimes I have the strange experience in meeting someone, supposedly for the first time, that I’ve known that person before—a kind of déjà vu experience. And even, in some cases, that person will say that it seems to him the same way. It’s as though, even though we’ve never seen each other in this particular life, that we’ve known each other somewhere before. How do you explain these phenomena?

R:
It seems that successive incidents take place and that each incident in the process has a relationship with the past. The process just develops that way. It seems quite simple.

Q:
Is it that you bring with you some sort of hangover from the past, some sort of preconception, and it’s that that makes you think you’ve seen that person before?

R:
You do that in any case. You bring some energy with you that makes you able to relate to situations as they are. Without that, you wouldn’t be here anyway. But there doesn’t seem to be anything the matter with that. That energy of being here in the way that we’re here is something we have to accept. Partial realization of this might provide you some inspiration. But it doesn’t exempt you from having to go through your situation.

Q:
It seems very mysterious.

R:
If you see the situation completely, somehow that mystery isn’t a mystery anymore. It seems mysterious because we don’t perceive all the subtleties of things as they are. If you accept the situation it ceases to be a mystery.

Q:
You begin to cease in some way to see other people as being completely different people, separate from yourself. At times it seems almost like yourself looking at yourself. Almost, but not quite.

R:
At that moment there seems to be a direct contradiction. You see people as separate, but at the same time you see them as part of your innate nature. Somehow the validity of the situation doesn’t lie in the logic, but in the perceptions themselves. If there is an actual happening which goes directly against logic, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Q:
Can you give an example of things going against logic? I’ve never encountered that.

R:
There are all kinds of things like that. You’re trying to be an ideal person, trying to bring about ideal karma for yourself, to be good to everybody, etc. Suddenly, you’re struck with a tremendous punishment. This kind of thing happens all the time. This is one of the problems unsolved by Christianity. “My people are good Christians; how come they were killed in the war? How does that fit with the divine law of justice?”

Q:
I wouldn’t say that’s a question of logic. Logic doesn’t reveal anything about what ought to happen in the world. It has nothing to do with that.

R:
Logic comes from expectations. If I fall down I should hurt. We think we should feel pain because if we fall down we
expect
to hurt ourselves. We have set patterns of mind that we’ve followed all along. We’ve been conditioned by our culture, our traditions, whatever. This thing is regarded as bad; that thing is regarded as good. If you consider yourself good, then, by this logic, you consider yourself foolproof good. All kinds of good things should happen to you. But there is no fixed doctrine of anything, no kind of exemplary case history of what should be, no manual, no dictionary of what should take place in the universe. Things don’t happen according to our conceptualized expectations. That is the very reason why we hasten to make rules for all kinds of things. So if you have an accident, that might be good. It might bespeak something else besides disaster.

Q:
You mean that if we have suffering in our lives, that can be a good thing because it provides us with the opportunity to meet the challenge of it and transcend it? That it could stand us in good stead in terms of rebirth?

R:
I don’t mean to say that things are always for the best. There could be eternally terrifying things. You could be endlessly condemned: Since you are suffering in this life, that could cause you to suffer in the next as well. The whole thing is not particularly geared toward goodness. All kinds of things might happen.

Q:
When you have partial experiences of nonduality, do you think it’s in any way harmful to talk about those experiences? Do you think labeling them can be destructive?

R:
I don’t think it’s particularly destructive or unhealthy, but it might delay the process of development to some extent because it gives you something to keep up with. It makes you try to keep up all the corners and areas of your experiences. It makes you try to keep up with your analysis of the situation; without being poisonous, it is a delaying process. It sort of makes you numb toward relating directly with actual experiences. You don’t relate directly because you’re wearing a suit of armor. Then you act in accordance with the balance of comfort inherent in the suit of armor. “In accordance with my suit of armor, this experience has to be this way or this way.”

Q:
How do you take off your armor?

R:
It’s not exactly a question of taking it off. It is a question of seeing the possibility of nakedness, seeing that you can relate with things nakedly. That way the padding that you wear around your body becomes superfluous at some stage. It’s not so much a question of giving up the mask; rather the mask begins to give you up because it has no function for you anymore.

Q:
Is the urge to explain somehow a function of the ego’s wanting to freeze the situation? Establishing where I’m now at rather than just going on and experiencing? What is that? Why is it happening?

R:
Essentially because you’re relating with some landmark. As long as you’re relating to any landmark, any point of reference for comparative study, you’re obviously going to be uncomfortable. Because either you’re too far from it or you’re not too close to it.

Q:
A lot of problems in dealing with other people seem to be emotional. Sometimes feelings that are not appropriate to the immediate situation—that are appropriate to something else—just won’t disappear. You can know intellectually that they are not appropriate to the situation, but still . . .

R:
“Appropriate to the situation” is a questionable idea. To begin with you have to relate to the situation as you see it. You might see that you’re surrounded by a hostile environment. The first thing necessary is to study the hostile environment; see how hostile, how intensive it is. Then you will be able to relate with things.

When you talk about situations, it’s quite tricky. We have situations as we would like them to be, as they might be, as they seem to be. It’s very up in the air. Situations are not really certain. So before you dance on the ground, you have to check to see if it’s safe to dance on, whether it’s better to wear shoes or whether you can dance barefoot.

Q:
About speaking about one’s experiences—if it were in any way harmful to you, would it also be harmful to the person you were talking to? In some circumstances, might it not be a generous thing? It might be useful to them even though it gets you unnecessarily into words. Or would it be harmful to them at the same time?

R:
Basically the situation is that there are no separate realities, yours and his, for instance. There’s only one reality. If you’re able to deal with one end of reality, you’re dealing with the whole thing. You don’t have to strategize in terms of the two ends. It’s one reality. That might make us very uncomfortable, because we would like to be in a position to manipulate and balance various factors so that everything is safe and stable, with things neatly territorialized—his end of the stick, my end of the stick. But basically it’s necessary to give up the idea of territory. You are not really dealing with the whole territory anyway, but with one end, not with the peripheries but just with one spot in the middle. But with that one spot in the middle the whole territory
is
covered. So one doesn’t have to try to maintain two sides all the time. Just work on the one thing. Reality becomes one reality. There’s no such thing as separate realities.

Q:
Would you say something about developing mandala in the living situation?

R:
That’s really what we’ve been discussing. The complexities of life situations are really not as complicated as we tend to experience them. The complexities and confusions all have their one root somewhere, some unifying factor. Situations couldn’t happen without a medium, without space. Situations occur because there’s fertile oxygen, so to speak, in the environment to make things happen. This is the unifying factor, the root perspective of the mandala; by virtue of this, chaos is methodically chaotic. For example, we are here and there are many people, a crowd. But each person is coming to some conclusion methodically in relation to the whole thing. That’s why we are here. But if an outsider were to pass by and look at the spectacle, it would look like too many people, too complicated. He wouldn’t see that there is one situation that we’re all interested in, that we’re all related to. This is the way it is with everything that happens in life situations. The chaos is methodically chaotic.

Q:
You mean it’s a matter of different perspectives? Each person has a different reason for being here; if a person looked at it from the outside, he’d see us all sitting here and maybe wouldn’t know why. And then . . .

R:
I mean we are trying to unify ourselves through confusion.

Q:
The more confusion, the more unity?

R:
That’s what tantric people say.

Q:
You mean the more confusion there is, the more difficult it is to stamp a system on reality?

R:
You see, chaos has an order by virtue of which it isn’t really chaos. But when there’s no chaos, no confusion, there’s luxury, comfort. Comfort and luxury lead you more into samsara because you are in a position to create more kinds of luxurious possibilities, psychologically, philosophically, physically. You can stretch your legs and invent more gadgets to entertain yourself with. But strangely enough, looking at it scientifically, at the chemistry of it, creating more luxurious situations adds further to your collection of chaos. That is, finally all these luxurious conclusions come back on you and you begin to question them. So you are not happy after all. Which leads you to the further understanding that, after all, this discomfort has order to it.