The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (17 page)

Trungpa Rinpoche:
There’s something faintly suspicious there. It is possible that you become open and susceptible. But if you don’t have a sense of the atmosphere as filled with body, with texture, then you are spacing out rather than connecting with shamatha or vipashyana. There is a definite need for you to deal with the, so to speak, dense, humid atmosphere.

Student:
How does being aware of the body and texture of the atmosphere, as you just said we should be, differ from being aware of the theater backdrop?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s the same thing, actually. In the theater you see not only the stage alone, but you have already created your own texture around the theater hall, and that thing, the stage, is more or less a highlight. If it weren’t for that atmosphere, you wouldn’t bother going to the theater. You’d watch television instead, or a movie. There’s a difference between watching a movie and going to the theater. The movie has been produced already, and you are seeing the result. The play in the theater is being performed on the spot. Maybe the actors have their own stories, but still you are taking part in the performance somehow. Something might go wrong. Somebody might fall off the stage and break his neck. Whereas you can’t expect that in the movies. All that is part of the texture of the atmosphere.

Student:
Is the kind of boredom that develops in vipashyana a different kind of boredom from the irritating boredom you have when you first start sitting?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, I think it is a mixture of both. There are different kinds of boredom, obviously. The boredom that develops from irritation still has a reference point of
this
, whereas the boredom of boredom that develops in vipashyana is more all-pervasive, like having the flu.

S:
So this involves more willingness to go all the way with the boredom.

TR:
Well, that’s the idea.

Student:
I thought of the boredom that occurred in meditation as being a problem of relating with emptiness, a problem of not being able to relate to the space because the space is empty. But you seem to be saying now that the boredom arises because you’re relating to a space that is full, full of some kind of atmosphere.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Those two amount to the same thing, actually.

S:
I wonder how that is. There’s the sense of boredom because the space is full, like when you’ve got the flu. In some sense it seems to me there that your environment is full of you.

TR:
Which
is
emptiness.

S:
How so?

TR:
You see, when we talk about emptiness, we are not talking about a vacancy.

S:
Is this emptiness in the sense of meaninglessness or—

TR:
No, not even that. We are talking about emptiness as having a body or texture of emptiness, which is the same as saying it’s full.

S:
Well, does it have to do with the accommodation aspect? Is that what you mean by emptiness here, that there is something to hold the atmosphere?

TR:
It’s not the accommodation alone, but accommodation as well as the container that’s containing.

S:
You mean like the edges, the container itself that holds whatever’s in it?

TR:
Yes, which becomes the same thing as what’s in it. For example, if you have a cup full of water, that is the epitome of emptiness. In fact, it’s indestructible emptiness.

S:
Indestructible because whether it has water in it or not, there’s a space there?

TR:
No. There’s water already; you can’t change that. Whereas if it’s vacant, then you can fill it up with something else.

S:
So acknowledging the water would be like acknowledging space.

TR:
I don’t think so. It’s acknowledging the existence of the cup filled with water rather than any of those partial aspects. If you get involved with the aspects, then you have a problem. The boundary between them becomes problematic. If you acknowledge what is inside as nothing, then the boundary becomes troublesome. The boundary begins to haunt you.

S:
So it’s a sense of acknowledging the whole thing.

TR:
Yes. That’s what vipashyana is all about.

Student:
I wish you would be a little more specific about the boundary you were talking about. What were you referring to? Is it some sense of the limit of your horizon in the environment? Or is that your self-consciousness?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s the idea that you can get away from the boredom. You feel that there is this thing there, and you can deal with it.

S:
So this is the beginning stage of vipashyana, and making the boundary would be like the stronghold of ego—

TR:
Yes.

S:
Still trying to—

TR:
Still trying to escape, yes.

S:
Trying to contain it somehow?

TR:
Yes. Like thinking that if you know the blueprint for meditation, then you can get away from it. You know what’s supposed to happen to you, so you can tune yourself that way in advance so you don’t have to go through too much trouble.

Student:
Would a possible trick of the same sort be to just name your experience or go back to something you know, like a more shamatha-like approach? Just to try and get on top of your experience?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. Anything you can think of. Thinking about the hassles of life is another one. There are limitless outs.

Student:
Does that mean that a further vipashyana experience would be the breaking of the cup, breaking of the boundaries?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The cup doesn’t have to break. It dissolves. There is no warfare, particularly. The cup becomes water.

Student:
In that case, using the word
emptiness
seems to be very misleading. The opposite word would be even better:
fullness
.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Fullness means security to a lot of people. You know, for example, hunger is opposed to fullness. So
emptiness
may be the best word to express fullness.

Student:
You spoke of neurosis and you mentioned it in relation to self-existing suicide. I’m wondering whether everything, all neurosis, a person’s whole being, doesn’t always get back to the basic question of one’s existence.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Very much so.

S:
Everything I do or think is trying to establish an answer to that question.

TR:
Yes, definitely.

S:
And is neurosis the ego confusing itself to death?

TR:
It doesn’t quite die. It prolongs the pain and gives birth to further pain. That’s the terrifying part of it. Really stopping yourself completely, right down to nothing, wouldn’t be very easy. Somehow, even after suicide, you still have to make sure that you are dead. And then a further attempt to make sure you are dead comes on. So your suicide never ends. That’s the tricky part.

FIVE

From Raw Eggs to Stepping-Stones

I
N CONNECTION WITH
awareness, there is something we should understand about the relationship between open mind and discipline, maybe a difference between the two or maybe a cooperation between the two. In talking about open mind, we are referring to a kind of openness that is related with letting self-existing awareness come to us. And awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured: when there is a gap, awareness enters into us. So awareness does not require a certain particular effort. Such an effort is unnecessary in this case.

Awareness is like a wind. If you open your doors and windows, it is bound to come in.

As far as discipline is concerned, sometimes we have problems or hesitation in relation to the experience of awareness not being desirable. We feel somewhat uncomfortable about being in the state of awareness. It makes us unable to indulge in the usual neurosis, which is seemingly more pleasurable—or at least it occupies our time. But a state of awareness somewhat creates a sense of alienation: we are unable to keep going with our ego’s hang-ups and with our ego itself. Therefore, there is often a natural repulsion of the potential of enlightened mind or of enlightened mind itself.

This kind of discomfort always follows a state of awareness, and in many cases it could become quite exaggerated. You deliberately try to cast off that potentiality of enlightenment and a certain sense of fear connected with it that you don’t want to get into. You might call this effort being conscious of yourself or being religious or whatever terminology you might come up with. But the whole thing boils down to this particular hesitation—you don’t want to get into the state of awareness.

There is a definite psychological blockage here with a well-known case history, so to speak. There is a desire for the neurosis and less desire for the sanity. However, all the same, when we have been completely eaten up by insanity or neurosis, tremendously hassled by it, a superficial desire does arise to make a long journey to find basic sanity, a desire to seek out a teacher and read books about the spiritual path. But then, when we begin to do it, to put the teachings into practice, the same resistance is still there. It always occurs; it is a common psychological hang-up.

For example, there is the naughty schoolboy mentality. You try to find all kinds of excuses so you won’t have to sit and meditate. You constantly cook up excuses to evade the practice. “I have to tie my shoelaces. Let’s take some time on that. I know eventually I have to go sit and meditate, but let’s just take a little time.” Or, “I have to make a quick phone call.” All these kinds of little hesitations have their root in a neurosis of a particular type that doesn’t want to give in to the possible state of awareness. That is the natural situation concerning obstacles to openness.

Discipline cuts through that—but not by regarding it as a big problem or a big hang-up. It just simply uses the resistance as a stepping-stone. From there you walk into the state of awareness. That way the resistance becomes more of a help or a reminder than an obstacle. This is a question of a real, direct attitude.

Openness and awareness, as I have explained many times before, is a state of not manufacturing anything else; it is just being. And there is a misunderstanding, particularly in connection with vipashyana, which regards attaining awareness as an enormous effort—as if you were trying to become a certain unusual and special species of animal. You think now you’re known as a meditator, so now you should proceed in a certain special way, and that way you will become a full-fledged meditator. That is the wrong attitude. One doesn’t try to hold oneself in the state of meditation, the state of awareness. One doesn’t try painfully to stick to it.

If we take the term in a positive and creative sense, we could say that awareness is a state of absent-mindedness. The point here is that when there is no mind to be absent, energy comes in, and so you are accurate, you are precise, you are mindful—but absent-minded at the same time. So maybe we can use the term
absent-minded
in this more positive sense, rather than the conventional sense of being forgetful or constantly spaced out, so to speak. So whenever there is a message of awareness, then you are in it already. There is the state of absent-mindedness and mindfulness at the same time.

Absent-mindedness in this case acts as the instigator or evoker of the background, and mindfulness is the occupant of that background. So you are there, but at the same time you are not there. And at the same time you can fulfill your daily duties, relate to your living situation, your relationships, carry on conversations, and so forth. All that can be handled mindfully as long as there is absent-mindedness as the background. Which is very important.

Approached in this way, mindfulness is no longer a problem, a hassle, or a big deal. For that matter, it is not energy-consuming at all. This is a matter of taking a different slant in your attitude. The first step is that you are willing to be mindful. You have to commit yourself. In some sense, you have to take a kind of vow that you are willing to be mindful and aware. This is like saying to yourself, “This is my work for today and for the rest of my life. I’m willing to be aware, I’m willing to be mindful.” When you have such a strong and real conviction to begin with, there are no further problems at all. Any further problems are just some kind of frivolity, which tries to overrule your memory that you should be mindful. So once you have taken that attitude of commitment, that commitment automatically brings absent-mindedness, which then results in your being mindful constantly.

So it’s a question of commitment, which is also known as discipline.

You might ask, “What kind of commitment are we talking about? Am I supposed to sign on the dotted line? Am I supposed to join the club?” For the most part, neither of those approaches works. Once you join a club, that’s it. Your name is on the membership list and the mailing list, and they do the job for you. You really have nothing to do. If you feel bored, you come to the club and you do their little things—ceremonies, dinner parties, celebrations, whatever they have. And you feel nice that you have your private club. You might receive a certificate with the name of the club, or a certificate with your special title done in calligraphy and with seals or whatever they have. That’s nice to have around the house, but it doesn’t really do anything for you. It’s just a piece of paper. It was another ceremony that took place in your life. It’s gone, it’s empty.

So if it’s not this join-the-club approach, what kind of commitment are we talking about in this case? It is actual commitment that requires constantly living in a special way. And what is that special way of living? It’s just a memory that is a living memory rather than a past memory: the memory that you took a vow that you were going to be an aware person, that you were going to develop awareness throughout your life. That memory. And when you have that memory, it’s not dead. It’s really a living memory; it’s a situation in your life. Having that kind of memory is a present situation, an up-to-date situation. Because of that memory, absent-mindedness occurs, and from that absent-mindedness, mindfulness develops. That is the basic instruction for how to handle mindfulness.