The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (83 page)

Cynicism and Warmth

W
HAT
I’
M GOING TO
say tonight may be new or old. But disregarding the chronological background, we could look straight ahead in terms of spiritual practice.

It seems necessary in the beginning to develop some sense of an undoing process. This undoing process takes one general pattern, but with different shapes. The first style of undoing is simply unmasking what has been taught, what has been presented to you in terms of indoctrination. You set that aside or turn it off.

But other times, although you would like to set that aside, to turn it off, it won’t unstick. It hangs on to you like extremely powerful glue, stuck to you by suction. Then you have to use another means of undoing. You have to go so far as to perform an operation or use some kind of force. For the purpose of unmasking, that measure seems to be absolutely necessary.

So there are two kinds of unmasking. The first unmasking process is extremely easy. You begin to realize that everything in your spiritual practice is repetitious and familiar. It doesn’t make sense anymore. You’ve heard it over and over again. You’ve read it over and over again, and it doesn’t make any sense at all. So you grow tired of it.

But it’s not quite enough that you grow tired of hearing the same things over and over again. You have to develop a defensive mechanism so you won’t be tempted to listen over and over again—the second time or the third time or the fourth time. The mechanism of preventing yourself from doing the same thing over and over again is cynicism, the cynical attitude.

You have to develop a satirical attitude toward spirituality in general, as well as toward your own particular school of thought. Whatever you have learned, whatever you have studied, is futile because the effect has begun to wear off. The only thing left is a corpse, a mask, purely an image hanging out, which has ceased to have life to it. So the cynical attitude is not only willingness to unmask but willingness to defend yourself from remasking.

The point is that you are defending yourself from spiritual materialism so that you cannot be tricked again. You cannot remask in the same familiar pattern as before. You can’t be conned again. So there is a clear perception and understanding of spiritual materialism, as well as having an offensive approach toward it.

The intellectual approach to spirituality is seemingly delightful, sensible, and convincing. The rhetoric of the preacher is beautiful. The beautiful smile of the love-and-lighty person is exceedingly sweet. Often there is a big flicker of thought that goes: “How could I reject this beautiful man, who is actually asking me to accept him and join him? How could I reject such a beautiful thing?

“This man is good, basically. He’s spreading the message of goodness and has the invitation of a smile and everything, and he says, ‘Join us, we are one.”’ But your sense of cynicism triggers off a new sense of humor. At the beginning you see the sense of oneness that he’s speaking of, but then you also begin to see that there is a reason why he said, “We are one.”

Because he thinks there is a possibility or two, he is denying the two-ness of it, and therefore he says, “We are one.” All kinds of cynical attitudes develop. And once the sharpness of your cynicism develops, it is extremely uncompassionate and powerful. You cannot miss noticing that seemingly naive goodness is full of holes.

The second part of the unmasking process is more difficult. It’s not easy to unmask: you have to use force to unstick, to unglue yourself. The reason why it is so ingrained is that you took it so faithfully, so completely; and something slipped into your system before you knew where you were.

That kind of involvement comes from trusting enormously that such-and-such a spiritually materialistic trip will be able to save you. And you become part of some organization, some ingrown situation, because: “I feel there is truth. The truth came to me. And my total being is part of that truth, I’m completely soaked in that truth, that particular structure of whatever.”

You don’t realize that you have become a slave of that belief. And that makes it much harder, because there is less room for a sense of humor, since you are so honest and earnest. That whole system, that spiritual organization or philosophy, seeps into your system inside out, outside in. Because that system seems so helpful, unmasking is seen as almost a suicidal process of rejecting your blood system, your bones, your heart, you brain, and everything.

“How could I regard this as spiritual materialism, as just a trip, when the whole thing has become such an integral part of my existence?” Well, you may have made a tremendous relationship with something. Maybe it’s true that you have found the path. But at the same time, what is this approach of, “It will be good for me”? What is this falling in love with something?

If you look at the heart of that from a subtle point of view, the basic fact is that you have fallen into a gigantic trap of needing a rescuer, needing a savior. Also, you adopted the message of this particular doctrine to suit your own needs rather than hearing the doctrine as speaking the truth. You are a spokesman for the doctrine for your own sake; therefore you have manufactured the truth of the doctrine.

So it’s not so much that the doctrine has converted you, but that you have converted the doctrine into your own ego. Therefore it becomes an integral part of your being. Of course, at the same time there is a sense of separateness, that you are seeking various attainments: happiness, enlightenment, wisdom and so forth.

If you’re told: “I think you’re on some kind of trip. Why don’t you relax the seriousness of it and develop some sense of humor, some cynicism?”—that becomes almost an insult. The obvious answer is, of course, “You don’t know what I’m into, and therefore how could you say such a thing? You’re tripping, not me. You are just a pure outsider who doesn’t know the intensity of this integral feeling.” But no matter how much of a layman the other person may be, there is still a grain of truth in his criticism.

At this point, a sense of humor has become a tremendous threat. Taking something lightly seems almost sacrilegious. But nevertheless, that sense of humor is the starting point of the ultimate kind of savior. You could develop an extraordinarily cynical attitude when you begin to realize your own foolishness, then you can begin to turn around and see the whole plot: how you are sucked into this and used, and how all the juice of your energy is taken out. And you see that your conviction and your approach to a savior and liberation are being distorted.

All of this is because the teaching has taken advantage of you, rather than your relating to the teaching as a freeway or highway. And when you begin to realize that, you turn around completely and take the revengeful, cynical approach, extremely super-revengeful. You bounce everything back, and nothing is accepted. Everything is a world of cynicism. When someone says, “This is good for you,” even that is questionable.

If you are extremely thirsty, and before you even ask for anything, someone offers you some water, saying: “Would you like some water? I see your thirst.”—you are extremely cynical. “Oh, oh, there it goes again.” You become extremely unyielding to any kind of help, any kind of forward gesture. You are like a highly paranoid squirrel that is paranoid of the sound of its own chewing of nuts—as if somebody else were doing it.

You see, the psychological development is that at the beginning you are domesticated into this very snug, beautiful, and smelly stable or nest, which is very homey. You’re thriving there and appreciating it, when someone tells you how dirty the place is—and you begin to have second thoughts about it.

And when you begin to see that this message makes sense, you begin to react to everything the other way around completely. So then any suggestion, even to sit on a chair or get into any kind of comfortable situation, is also regarded as smelly and dirty. Now, instead of things being snug and cozy, they are very sharp and brittle. Things don’t bend, they only chip.

Such a cynical approach is exceedingly powerful and, we could say, somewhat praiseworthy, but nevertheless you are being too harsh on yourself. You become so smart that you even exceed the smartness itself. At that point you begin to bite your own tail. In your cynicism, you are somewhat reliving the past, rather than approaching toward the future.

So that cynicism is a kind of weakness: since you are so defensive and so extremely paranoid toward the rest of the world, you are afraid to create your own world. You may have been criticized by somebody else; in turn you are being critical toward others—you are all the time tiptoeing. It is such a heavy-handed approach.

At that point it is time to develop some element of warmth. That world of cynicism is not the only world, and, as we already know, creating a cozy nest is also not the only world. Other possibilities exist. There could be a world of complete warmth and complete communications, which accommodates the cynical as well as the primitive mind. The world is not necessarily a big joke, but it is also not a big object to attack. So there is another area of newfound land, an entire continent that we haven’t looked at, we haven’t discovered. We might have found it, but we haven’t looked at it. This is the world of mystical experiences. [
Laughter.
]

Mystical experience in this case has nothing to do with astral traveling or conjuring up ritual objects in your hand or turning the ceiling into the floor. Mystical experience in this case is discovering a hidden warmth—the larger version of home, the larger version of new realm. An analogy for that is the pure land that traditional Buddhism talks about: the land of Amitabha, which is the land of the padma family. It is filled with padma-ness, richness. Everything is inviting, drawing in, seductive.

But at the same time, that which makes this seduction different from samsaric seduction is the quality of spaciousness in it. The ordinary sense of seduction automatically suggests that you are trapped in a two-way journey: either you have to be sucked in or you have to reject it. But in this case, in the land of Padmapani or Amitabha, while there are possibilities of seduction everywhere, at the same time there are punctuations of space all over. So at least you can read the whole pattern intelligently.

You might say this is a kind of a new phase. We seem to have gone from extreme cynicism to believing something, developing some kind of devotion, the bhakti approach. At some point the extremely cynical vajra-style approach becomes a process of eating your own body, biting you own tail again and again. You don’t get anywhere.

Whenever you feel comfortable, you have one more bite of your tail to make sure you are awake and critical. But in this case you are giving up that continual biting, that continual punishing of yourself. You let the snowflake fall on your head and melt. You do not just brush it off, but you let something relate to you. That does not mean that you have to con it or to go forward and try to grasp it at all. You are simply accepting the existing situation. The idea of bhakti or the devotional approach is the same.

It is not a question of developing faith in someone’s mystical power or believing in some person as a savior, a magician. Instead, the idea is that you manufacture the whole world. And since you manufacture the whole world, you don’t have to regard it as something bad, just because
you
made it. Why don’t you manufacture a world that is okay? Get into your own dream, there is nothing bad about it. You are a manufacturer, you don’t have to get imports from foreigners. Live your own production, enjoy your own production.

There is a message coming out of all this. In other words, you can be kind to yourself. In that case, surrendering to a teacher or lineage is not shifting gears into a new approach. The lineage is an example, from this point of view. The lineage is an example of successive people surrendering to themselves and beginning to find the expression of the guru in themselves.

And finally the expression of the guru in themselves turns into universality, naturally and automatically. It is not that you have a guru and then, because he can’t give time to you or because he is too busy or distant physically and you can’t communicate to him, deciding from sheer frustration to regard the universe as your guru.

There’s a different way of looking at things, if you look very closely. The whole approach here is that you have extremely adequate resources within yourself, whether you regard yourself as insane or sane. You have tremendous resources in any case. Whether you take advantage of your insanity or sanity is up to you. Relating with the insanity is extremely powerful, mystical; and at the same time, relating with the sanity is mystical as well.

So the approach here is that in going from extreme cynicism to warmth, finally you are not biting your own tail in order to keep awake. Instead you feel comfortable with your body and falling asleep. Not analyzing what kind of body you have, you are comfortably sleeping: huge tusks, big tail, fat belly, or whatever.

Dome Darshan

I
SUPPOSE THE QUESTION
which concerns us most is the spiritual search. We’re trying to find some means to learn the whatever. That’s very well. It’s good that we are concerned with something other than purely gaining a physical and economic pleasure. It seems that’s a starting point; we have begun to be concerned with the meaning of life, which is something more than the ordinary situation. But still there are all kinds of dangers, so that it is worthwhile to question again and again what our style of spiritual search is. By what method and what means are we trying to get to the realization? It is futile to talk about the nature of realization, at this point anyway. Instead we might discuss our relationship toward the search. The general style of searching for some sense of sanity turns out to be a businesslike approach. We are still collecting more possessions, more information, still involved in a search for happiness, ultimate pleasure of some kind. It’s exactly the same as if you are a businessman searching for ultimate pleasure. The spiritual search takes on similar techniques and the same pattern of achievement as a businessman’s approach to being successful. So we are in trouble. We know sacrifices can be made to achieve a high spiritual state, but this sacrifice has its root in working toward ultimate pleasure, in a confused way. So we are bound by ego’s collecting and ego’s approach toward ultimate happiness, goodness.