The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (65 page)

Q:
Is this what you mean when you talk about working with negativity?

R:
That’s exactly what that is. The tantric tradition talks about transmutation—changing lead into gold.

Q:
When you meditate, are you just supposed to space out as much as you can, or ought you to go over your past experiences? It seems more interesting in the direction of spacing out.

R:
The basic chemistry of experience, the cosmic law (or whatever you’d like to call it), has its own natural balance to it. You space out, you dream extensively; but the dreaming on and on has no message in it. This is because you failed to relate to the actuality of dreaming, the actuality of spacing out. The point is that you can’t reach any sort of infinite point by spacing out, unless you experience the space of earth, which accommodates the actual, solid earthy facts. So the basic chemistry of experience brings you back altogether, brings you down. Buddha’s experience is an example of this. Having studied for a long time with mystical teachers, he came to the conclusion that there is no way out. He began to work his own way inward and found there was a way in. Enlightenment is more a way inward than a way out. I don’t mean to suggest cultivating a sense of inwardness, but rather relating with the solid, earthy aspect of your experience.

Q:
I used to think that there was a way out of conflict. But time went on and it was still there, so I figured there must be a way to live in the midst of conflict. But sometimes it’s exhausting trying to keep up with it.

R:
But what do you do if there’s no conflict?

Q:
I can’t imagine what it would be like without it. I guess it might not be very alive.

R:
It would be deadly. Working with conflict is precisely the idea of walking on the spiritual path. The path is a wild, winding mountain road with all kinds of curves; there are wild animals, attacks by bandits, all kinds of situations cropping up. As far as the occupation of our mind is concerned, the chaos of the path is the fun.

Q:
Since Buddhism is starting to be taught here in America, and it’s going to go through interpretations and changes, that being its nature, what pitfalls do you foresee for us in relation to it?

R:
There’s a danger that people might relate to various expressions about it they encounter rather than to their own experiences of the path. Commentaries and interpretations tend to be colored by sidetracks of all kinds. There is a tremendous danger of people relating to the views around the path rather than the path itself. This is because in the West the teaching is not seen as an understandable thing. It is seen as having some special mystery to it and people are frustrated feeling they’re not able to understand it. That frustration looks in all directions trying to find interpretations. When we look somewhere else for a way of interpreting our frustration, when we try to look around it, then the view of the path becomes very much a matter of the roadside scenery rather than the road itself. In the tradition of Buddhism in the past, the path has not been regarded as a sociological or archaeological study of any kind. It has been very much a matter of one’s own psychological portrait, one’s own psychological geography. If the path is approached in this manner, then one can draw on one’s own inspiration, even including the inspiration of one’s own cultural background. This does not, however, mean that one should involve oneself with elaborate interpretations relating one’s psychology to one’s cultural background. This would be another sidetrip. One has to keep to the straight and narrow, keep to the path. Having done that, then one can interpret, because at this point the teaching is no longer a foreign language; it’s a very familiar psychological portrait of oneself. The whole process becomes very obvious, very direct, very natural.

Q:
Then once you know the strict rules and laws and have the experience, you can start to branch out a little?

R:
You can start to branch out in terms of your experiences in daily living, rather than in terms of philosophy or other theoretical constructions. Philosophy or theoretical extrapolations of any kind have no personal relation with you at all. Dealing in terms of these is just collecting further fantasies.

Q:
Would you speak about laziness?

R:
Laziness is an extremely valuable stepping-stone. Laziness is not just lazy, it is extraordinarily intelligent. It can think up all kinds of excuses. It looks for all kinds of ways of manipulating the general situation, the domestic situation, the emotional situation; it invokes your health, your budget; it thinks around all kinds of corners just to justify itself.

At the same time there is a deep sense of self-deception. The application of the logic of laziness is constantly going on in one’s own mind. One is constantly having a conversation with oneself, a conversation between one’s basic being and one’s sense of laziness, setting up the logic which make things seem complete, easy, and smooth. But there is a tacit understanding in yourself that, as a matter of fact, this logic is self-deception. This under-the-surface knowledge that it is self-deception, this guilt or discomfort, can be used as a stepping-stone to get beyond laziness. If one is willing to do this, what it requires is just acknowledgment of the self-deception. Such acknowledgment very easily becomes a stepping-stone.

Q:
Do we know what we’re doing most of the time?

R:
We always know. When we say we don’t know what we’re doing, it’s a big self-deception. We know. As I said earlier, a bird can perch on a tree while he’s asleep. We know very well what we are doing, actually.

Q:
Awareness is always there, no matter what?

R:
There’s always ego’s awareness, yes. It’s always there, a meditative state of its own.

Q:
Why is it so hard to face up to that?

R:
Because that is our inmost secret, our ultimate treasure. It is that which makes us feel comfortable and vindicated.

Q:
Is what we need, then, to take responsibility?

R:
Self-deception doesn’t relate to the long-term scale on which responsibility is usually seen. It’s very limited; it’s related to current happenings, actual, small-scale situations. We still maintain our schoolboy qualities, even as grown-ups. There is that naughtiness in us always, a kind of shiftiness which is happening all the time, which completely pervades our experience.

Q:
In meditation, can it be beneficial to try to relax?

R:
From the Buddhist point of view, meditation is not intended to create relaxation or any other pleasurable condition, for that matter. Meditation is meant to be provocative. You sit and let things come up through you—tension, passion, or aggression—all kinds of things come up. So Buddhist meditation is not the sort of mental gymnastic involved in getting yourself into a state of relaxation. It is quite a different attitude because there is no particular aim and object, no immediate demand to achieve something. It’s more a question of being open.

Mgon-Po-Legs-Ldan (the “Grandfather” Mahakala)
.

DRAWING BY GLEN EDDY.

A
N
I
NTERVIEW WITH
C
HÖGYAM
T
RUNGPA

Things Get Very Clear When You’re Cornered

I
N
1938
THE TENTH
Trungpa Tulku, abbot of Tibet’s Surmang monasteries, died. Shortly thereafter, the Gyalwa Karmapa was shown in a vision the circumstances of Trungpa’s reincarnation. The child was discovered and tested. Offered various objects, he correctly chose those used by him in his previous life. At thirteen months, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (“Precious One”) was installed as the new Surmang supreme abbot.

After the Communist invasion of Tibet and his escape to India in 1959, Trungpa Rinpoche attended Oxford and founded a Buddhist center in Scotland. In 1970 he came to the United States and established Nalanda Foundation, which now consists of The Maitri Space Awareness Training Center in Connecticut, the Mudra Theatre Group and Naropa Institute in Colorado, and Vajradhatu, an association of Tibetan Buddhist meditation and retreat centers in nine states and Canada.

Trungpa Rinpoche is a very busy man. After waiting several months for an opportunity to interview him, I received a phone call from his secretary on December 8, 1975, indicating that I could interview him before he left for Vermont on the 12th. Two days later, I was in his office in Boulder setting up tape-recording equipment.

Trungpa Rinpoche entered the room so casually it seemed as though he were already in it. There was nothing contrived about him. He wore a Western business suit with a tie and greeted me openly, in a most ordinary and understated way. The only thing that belied his modest manner was a humorous, almost waggish smile. Speaking very softly, he seemed supremely relaxed. His face never showed a trace of concern. As I directed a series of often complex questions to him, Trungpa Rinpoche never became academic or theoretical. He responded directly to the point, and not from memory. His answers seemed to me to be a spontaneous expression of the centuries-old Tibetan wisdom he represents.

—C
RANE
M
ONTAÑO
,
The Laughing Man
magazine

The Laughing Man:
What liabilities do Americans, as typical spiritual materialists, face over against a Tibetan’s more natural talent for practicing the Tantric path?

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:
All Buddhist countries are having political and spiritual difficulties, so practice becomes less important. Some corruptions are taking place. Despite the fact that our country has been completely desecrated, we Tibetans have been very fortunate. A few of us have survived with hot blood, a training and spiritual understanding which will allow Tibetan Buddhism to carry on. Otherwise the whole affair would become slow death.

Here in America we are not concerned with adapting across cultural barriers but with handling the teaching here in a skillful way. When Tibetans began to present Buddhism in this country, we did it in keeping with the people’s mentality and language. As people understand it more and more, it begins to take a real traditional form. If we were to present all the heavy traditional stuff at the beginning, then all sorts of fascination with Tibetan culture and enlightenment would take place, and the basic message would be lost. So it is good to start with a somewhat free form and slowly tighten it up. This way people have a chance to absorb and understand.

LM:
In your book
Born in Tibet
, you described how, when you made your own cultural adaptation, taking off the monastic robes and so forth, there were devastating karmic effects in your own life, represented particularly by your severe automobile accident. Do you see any such liability in your continuing work?

CTR:
Tibetans generally have to break through the cultural fascinations and mechanized world of the twentieth century. Many Tibetans either hold back completely or try to be extraordinarily cautious, not communicating anything at all. Sometimes they just pay lip-service to the modern world, making an ingratiating diplomatic approach to the West. The other temptation is to regard the new culture as a big joke and to play the game in terms of a conception of Western eccentricities. So we have to break through all of that. I found within myself a need for more compassion for Western students. We don’t need to create imposing images but to speak to them directly, to present the teachings in eye-level situations. I was doing the same kind of thing that I just described, and a very strong message got through to me: “You have to come down from your high horse and live with them as individuals!” So the first step is to talk with people. After we make friends with students, they can begin to appreciate our existence and the quality of the teachings. Later, we can raise the eye level of the teacher in relation to the students so that they may appreciate the teaching and the teacher as well.

LM:
Your writings seem to provide a progressive description of the guru from a spiritual friend to a more and more intense confrontation with a very high form of function, the buddha-mind itself. What is that relationship to the guru?

CTR:
There seem to be traditional approaches at three levels. At the beginning the guru is known simply as a wise man, a teacher. At that level the student regards the guru as a kind of parental figure. It is the toilet-training stage; the student is just learning to handle life. Then a relationship develops, and the guru becomes a spiritual friend. At this level he offers encouragement rather than criticism.