The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (41 page)

Rinpoche:
I think that is too abstract. You cannot deal with them purely individually. It is like looking at a person: if you look at a person from the point of view of how fat or how thin he or she is, you still cannot fail to see also that person’s head and toes and what clothes he or she is wearing. So in looking at experience from one perspective, you see the rest as well. Once we experience one sense consciousness, then what gives that particular sense consciousness the quality of consciousness relates it to the others. Each sense consciousness, to a certain extent, contains the overall picture. It must be what it is in relation to some background; it must breathe some air to survive. It is like seeing a flower growing—when you see the flower, you also see the ground it is growing out of.

Question:
Is everything we experience within the basic ignorance, within the eighth consciousness, including wisdom or higher states of meditation?

Rinpoche:
Yes. That is precisely why the whole thing is hopeful, precisely why it is worthwhile looking into our state of mind.

Question:
So then higher states of meditation don’t blank out the six senses, for example?

Rinpoche:
Not at all. Of course not. In fact, the six sense consciousnesses are heightened. If we regard meditation as just getting into a fog so that you do not see, you do not feel, something is terribly wrong. In that case meditation would reduce one to a zombie. The enlightened man would have to be rescued. Someone would have to feed him and take him to the bathroom. We would have to have an enlightenment ward.

Question:
Rinpoche, you spoke of ignorance as not being willing to go back. What is the way back; is it meditation?

Rinpoche:
One is not willing to trace back how one came to be ignorant. But actually one cannot go back literally. One does not really have to go back. Rather one discovers what one was by the process of going more deeply into the present situation. That is the difference between an intuitive approach and an intellectual one. You can go back intellectually, but that does not help; you remain stuck in the same point of view. The whole idea is that if you are able to realize what you are at the present moment, you do not need to try to go back. What you are at this moment contains the whole message of what you were. That is really the practice of nonduality in meditation—seeing your present situation and going with it, identifying with the particular sense experiences of sight, smell, and so on. Just experience the simplicity of them.

Question:
I don’t understand the first skandha. It seems it would be more basic than experience itself if it is more basic than the second and third skandhas of feeling and perception and the rest of them.

Rinpoche:
The first skandha of form is basic, yes. Feeling and perception and the rest of the skandhas are built out of that basic thing. They are different types of attributes of form, so to speak, that are around it.

Question:
Is there any activity within that world of form? It seems to me that the most basic activities I ever experience begin with feeling.

Rinpoche:
No, what you are talking about is what you might call “facade experience.” Fundamental experience begins with relativity, with the notion of comparison, which means ego and its projections. You cannot experience anything without a somebody to experience it and that is the starting point. That somebody is an unknown person, but experiencing it feels good. That is ignorance and the ego.

Question:
So the first step is naming and labeling in order to begin experiencing yourself.

Rinpoche:
Yes, yes—one’s own position. The starting point of comparison.

Question:
What is a skandha?

Rinpoche: Skandha
means “heap.” It is a collection, pile. That means it is not an independent definite object like a brick, but a collection of a lot of little details and aspects of psychological inclinations of different types. For instance, the second skandha, feeling, is not solid, not one feeling. It contains all sorts of feelings. The third skandha, perception, is the same—it is a collection. So ego is made out of a lot of particles rather than being one fixed thing that keeps going on.

Question:
You say that the six sense consciousnesses are in the first skandha, the skandha of form. In the ordinary understanding, when one speaks of the senses one is already talking about perception; and yet perception is the third skandha.

Rinpoche:
The senses are connected with perception; but there is more grasping and holding on involved in perception proper. Just the pure senses are very simple, mechanical almost.

Question:
Could you give us a concrete example showing how the skandhas come into play—form, feeling, perception, and so on? Something simple—for example, if I see a car.

Rinpoche:
The process that takes place here takes place in a fraction of a second of consciousness, that lasts something like a five-hundredth of a second. First you have an impression of something. It is blank, nothing definite. Then you try to relate to it as
something
and all the names that you have been taught come back to you and you put a label on that thing. You brand it with that label and then you know your relationship to it. You like it or you dislike it, depending on your association of it with the past.

Now the very, very first blank, which may last a millionth of a second, is the meditation experience of the primordial ground. Then the next instant there is a question—you do not know who and what and where you are. The next moment is a faint idea of finding some relationship. Then you immediately send your message back to memory, to the associations you have been taught. You find the particular category or the particular label you have been taught and you stamp it on. Then at once you have your strategy of how to relate with that in terms of liking it or disliking it. This whole process happens very quickly. It just flashes into place.

Question:
Are all five skandhas in there?

Rinpoche:
All five will be there, though I did not describe them all.

Question:
Could you say more about the cloudy mind and the difference between the eighth consciousness, the seventh, and the six sense consciousnesses?

Rinpoche:
We begin with the eighth consciousness, the background, and then the seventh is kind of a way of relating the eighth consciousness to the six sense consciousnesses. But it is a very random way of relating because you no longer have any sense of direction, you do not know how to proceed. If sight comes first or sound or smell—it just happens to you. You are just insensate, just crawling along. The seventh consciousness is more intelligent than the eighth, than the basic ignorance, but you are still only sleepwalking, almost awake but not quite.

Question:
Is that at all like when you find yourself walking in the garden and you hadn’t realized you were there? You’ve done something without realizing it?

Rinpoche:
Yes, it has actually been described that way. It is the subconscious feeling of a possible way of relating with the senses, but you have not quite worked it out properly yet. It happens in the midst of very precisely defined situations as well. It does not have to be a dreamy state at all. In those cases it is almost like the impact of the first bewilderment is coming to life again. But it still has a certain tinge of the dreamy quality and a potential of the six sense consciousnesses in it. It is a sort of no-man’s-land that you go through.

Question:
Is this state characterized by a sense of tension between opposites, such as when for a minute you are confused between sweet and bitter? You are vacillating back and forth between the two and then you realize that the taste is just what it is?

Rinpoche:
That sounds like when you have already gotten to the sense consciousnesses. But at the beginning you are not sure, you are just feeling around it. The seventh consciousness is like putting something in your mouth; chewing and tasting is on the level of the six senses.

Feeling

W
E SHOULD PERHAPS
go on to the next state—the second skandha, feeling. Feeling consists of the pleasurable and the painful. In the usual psychology of people, pleasurable experiences are related to as positive and creative, and painful experiences are related to as negative and destructive. This development of relating to things in terms of positive or negative value is an extension of the basic pattern of ego established by form, the first skandha. Having already the basic form, something definite and solid to hold on to, we go a little beyond that to trying to identify that form as friend or enemy, hostile or welcoming. This has the effect of solidifying whatever it is even further as something that defines ego’s position by implication. Form provides a background which is composed of rudimentary names and concepts—positivity, good feeling, godliness, cleanliness, beauty, power, and so on on the one hand; and the negative, painful, evil, dirty, destructive, and so on on the other hand. The first is connected with birth, the second with death. These dualistic criteria, or others such as hot and cold, are the starting point for feeling. Feeling, in the sense of the second skandha, cannot function independently of them.

Feeling in this sense is something much more fundamental than just pure sensation. All kinds of concepts develop on the basis of feeling’s basic dualism. Fundamentally it is of the nature of positive and negative, but feeling also has the third possibility of indifference.

The positivity and negativity of feeling is elaborated in terms of the mind/body situation. Feeling solidifies itself in terms of these two fields of experience. Feeling relates to mind as emotions and to body as clusters of instincts, things, thingness. Understanding of the mind/body pattern of feeling is very important in connection with meditation. We can meditate either intellectually or intuitively. Meditation on the intellectual level is involved with the mind side of the mind/body; it is very imaginary. Intuitive meditation engages the body level of feeling, particular bodily sensations—pleasurable sensations, pain in the legs, hot and cold temperatures in the room, and so on.

Mind is the emotional, imaginary, or dream quality. And body, in this case, is also a quality of mind. That is, we do not, in feeling, experience body as it is. We experience
our version
of body. The fundamental point of view of ego based on comparative criteria, the definite separation between this and that, is already operational at this point. That basic twist is already there with the first skandha, form. The unobstructed space of things as they are is already distorted by the time we get to feeling. We cannot help anyway working along with this situation as naive people confronted by what has happened already. Still, looked at from a very basic point of view, the whole involvement of feeling is very childish. In fact, when we really see it, we see it is fundamentally deceptive.

When we talk about feeling, we usually think in terms of feeling toward someone else: you fall in love with someone, you are angry with someone. In that imagery the other person is all-important and you are insignificant. On the other hand, you feel slighted or you want to be loved. In that case you are all-important and the others are insignificant. Feeling plays that introvert-extrovert game of making itself important by reflecting off of “other.” But in reality all that is very remote. Nobody is actually involved but yourself. You are alone and are creating the whole game by yourself.

So understanding feeling is very revealing about how you relate with things. Feeling involves the pretense that you are involved with somebody; but actually you are just beating your own head against a wall. You constantly search further and further thinking you are going to get at something, but ultimately, you are still beating your head against a wall. There is no answer to feeling’s search, no savior for it.

That is why the buddhadharma is an atheistic teaching. We have to accept that ours is a lonely journey. Studying the second skandha of feeling can be extremely important in helping us to realize that the whole journey is made alone, independent of anybody else. Still we are trying to beat ourselves against something all the time.

So to return to the mind/body development of feeling, the mind aspect of it provides tremendous resources for this delusive process, inexhaustible sources of dreaming and imagining. This extends to the situation of using drugs such as LSD and others which can produce all kinds of seemingly visionary and creative experiences. Experiences of perpetual unfolding of sight, smell, sound—beautiful like the continuous unfolding of a flower—can be produced. This kind of feeling on the mind level—in ordinary situations, in the drug experience, in meditation—provides all kinds of occasions for dwelling on spiritual materialism. Spiritual materialism means relating to experiences in terms of their possible benefit to ego, which is a quality of all the skandhas. Spiritual materialism tends to associate anything to do with spirituality with a dream world or heaven, with something that has nothing to do with the body situation, with something that altogether bypasses the kitchen sink.

The body aspect of feeling is associated with actual relationship with things. This element becomes much more vivid in the next skandha, perception, which we will discuss further on. This experience of actual things, thingness, of solidity and stability—as I have already said, this is not solidity and stability as it is, but our version of it. We
think
it is solid, we
think
it is thing. Still, relating with this body aspect of feeling is spiritually very provocative and open.

Suppose suddenly we get sick and feel pain in our body. The body is a thing made out of all kinds of things; therefore pain in us makes us feel a relationship with actual reality rather than imagining anything beyond it. Of course in this kind of situation there is always the likelihood that somebody will come sit by our bed and read us prayers of how beautiful the beyond would be if we could only get out of this shameful, raw physical situation. Talking about the beauties of heaven and spirituality, the person hopes to get us drunk on it and get our mind off the bodily situation of pain. But that does not work. Once we are into the world of imagination in which we can imagine how beautiful beyond-the-body could be, we are also connecting up with the imagination of how terrible the pain could become. We are lost in the world of wishful thinking or unwanted thoughts. Somehow relating directly with the body aspect of feeling goes much more in the direction of what is.