The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (18 page)

These seem to be problems that run right through the human realm, that we all face. But then how do we work with them? How do we see a glimpse of transcending them in terms of bardo experience? When we talk of illusory body, it is obviously illusory, not the physical tangible body. It is a mind/body situation always. This illusory body is based on a very healthy attitude: these confusions and polarities are being worked with at a realistic level in which we are willing to face the illusory aspect, the mirage quality, that hallucinatory quality.

So the human realm and its bardo experience has a hallucinatory quality, or illusory body. This illusory body is precisely the transparent nature of experiences: that we see, yet we don’t see. We see something, yet at the same time we are not quite certain whether we are seeing the background or the scenery itself. Uncertain hallucination, ultimate hallucination. And that ultimate hallucination acts as a bardo experience. It is the choice between real and unreal—is this illusory body illusion itself, or is it pure imagination? One begins to question whether the illusion or mirage exists or not. And a person again begins to be involved with this threshold between the transparency of the figure and the solidity of its background. One begins to have a very confused attitude about this. It is exactly the same thing as we were talking about yesterday and the day before—the uncertainty as to truth and falsity. You are not quite certain whether you are actually getting somewhere or whether you are being fooled by something.

That uncertainty always happens, of course. We could use the analogy of our being here together: we are not quite certain why we are here; we are not quite certain why I am talking or why others are listening—but at the same time, it happens that way. It may have happened in the magical sense or the accidental sense, but it did happen, we can’t deny that. It is quite certain, as far as we are concerned, that we are not going to wake up and find ourselves in our parents’ house with breakfast ready for us—that’s not going to happen. We are here. You may not know why you are here, what the hell you are doing practicing Buddhist meditation and listening to a Tibetan freak. But it is happening nevertheless.

That peak point of not being certain why, but things just happening, is the bardo experience of the human realm. Again, it carries the same sense of possibilities: I’m not quite certain why I am here, but if I pass that level of uncertainty, maybe after all there is something—or maybe after all there isn’t something. It is the very threshold of not knowing who’s fooling whom—but at the same time, something is fooling something. That foolishness is the illusory quality, of course, not knowing. There’s nothing tangible at all. It is completely loose, irritatingly loose. I mean, it is worth getting aggressive about it. It is like trying to pin up a poster, to paste it on the wall—but somehow the wall doesn’t exist and the poster doesn’t exist. It shifts all the time; you can’t fix it.

Realize this foolishness of who’s fooling whom, which is the illusory body, the bardo experience of the human realm. It is desire which drove us into this particular experience, and which is the background of the human realm. In other words, we find ourselves here because the river of human consciousness, human passion, drove us here. And so we find ourselves here. But at the same time, having found ourselves here and then not knowing what we are doing is the peak experience of the bardo of illusory body, which is very important to realize.

The illusory body is made out of both yes and no; it is both negative and positive. You are not quite certain where it is, how it is—it is ambiguous, uncertain. At the same time, there is a general feeling or perception of the transparent quality of the body or, you could say, realizing the foolishness of us. It is like the analogy of us being here together and fooling each other: that uncertainty or vagueness, not knowing exactly whether you are going or coming, is the illusory aspect. But I wouldn’t say this is confusion in the pejorative sense. It is seeing the abstract quality of nature as it is—maya, the dance of illusion.

The actual practice in everyday life is just to acknowledge that transparent uncertain quality as it is. There’s no point in trying to stay back or run away from it—in fact you can’t; you are in it. And you can’t force its development either; it has its own pattern. The only way to work or deal with this bardo experience of the human realm is just to proceed along. Depending on your previous training and meditation experience—or your training in aggression and passion—you just go along. It’s the karmic pattern: you got onto this particular train, and the train is going to go on and on and on. There’s no point in panicking. You just have to accept it and face it and go along with it. All the bardo concepts that have evolved have that unchangeable quality, that natural powerful quality. Once you are in that state, you can’t change it. The only way you can deal with it is to see its background quality.

Student:
I’ve heard you use the term
mind/body
before, and I’m still struggling to grasp this. Is it comparable to the concept of shunyata?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In a sense it is comparable to the idea of shunyata, but the whole idea of mind/body is that every perception has its solidity as well as its loose quality. In other words, you can’t fight it or destroy it, and you can’t embrace it or cuddle it. It’s a loose pattern of perception. Our version of body.

Student:
What do you mean by background quality or background?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It seems that once you have gotten into something, the idea of undoing it is very much based on the idea of panic. So the idea is just to accept, ultimate acceptance of the whole situation. At the same time, asking questions doesn’t help. The possibility is that once you begin to ask questions—“Why is this so?,” for example, or “Why are we here?”—we are just here and questioning doesn’t clarify it at all. In fact, it confuses you more, unless you are actually willing to accept that you are treading on this particular area, you are eating this food, you are sleeping under this particular roof—it is so. It’s the unchangeable quality of situations.

There is the possibility that people might think: “I’m not going to accept it; I’m going to change it.” But there again, you are involved with another experience—you are
in
here, and you can only change
from
here to something else. So you’re still governed by the situation where you are, and your changing can only take place by relating with that place and accepting it. It’s a question of seeing the whole background as it is and accepting it.

In other words, in human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are at and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This applies to the practice of meditation, for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “I’m going to give up my job. When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and
then
I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate.” Things never happen that way.

Student:
Is physical pain an instance of this particular bardo?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Using the analogy of mind/body, usually physical pain is translated by the mind; mental pain has been translated into physical pain. So often there’s not really such a thing as actual physical pain per se; it’s mind pain, mental pain.

Student:
If somebody is meditating and having a lot of confused distorted thoughts, would you consider it good meditation to regard everything as really not there, solid but kind of floaty?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, if you are clinging or trying to solidify thoughts, then the basic idea of meditation is lost completely, because you fail to see the illusory quality of thoughts. But you see, fundamentally, in terms of meditation, such ideas as good meditation and bad meditation are a child’s game. They don’t exist. Meditation is just so. Once you try to put it into categories then you are already lost. Meditation becomes a giant thought process in itself. But if a person is able to open completely to the situation of meditation, then anything which happens within that realm is usually transparent or translucent anyway.

Student:
If you feel close to a bardo experience, then there’s really nothing you can do except try not to clothe it or put projections on it?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Just go along and don’t panic. Just go along.

Student:
When you’re in the awakened state of mind and there’s no identification of the ego with the mind, is the mind still there? Do thoughts come? Are the mind processes still there?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That depends on the level of confidence in yourself. At the beginning, mind is very much there. Meditation is a mental game to start with, but at a certain stage you begin to accept and you begin to relax more and go along with the pattern of practice. Then there is less mind and more space. (I am talking in terms of the grasping quality of mind, in this case, rather than consciousness or intelligence.)

S:
So the proper attitude to meditation is that you just sit down and there you are, and everything sort of goes through?

TR:
Exactly, yes. Just sitting there. Absolutely doing nothing.

Student:
If the mind is as important as the body—if you are here and your mind is in New York, for instance—then how can you be sure where you are?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In exactly the same way that you are here, because your attitude to things is still here. Whether the temperature is hot or cold, your mind attitude of being here still continues. But the imaginary quality of memories goes along as well.

S:
But at a given moment you can be somewhere else.

TR:
You could be, yes, but you are still here as well. You see, mind has such an expansive range: all kinds of memories, including childhood memories or memories of several thousands of years ago, as well as presently being here.

Student:
Are you not tending to solidify our thoughts by answering our questions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. We have to speak the language of confusion—that is what has been happening. But once you begin to go along with it, then it is possible that the language of confusion, the language of samsara, begins to be seen as absolute truth.

S:
Then we wouldn’t be here?

TR:
Then you wouldn’t be here. Our method is very primitive; that’s the only way, it seems.

Student:
Are we living in a bardo state now, and if we are, is this part of the illusory mind that you’re talking about?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Definitely.

S:
Where does the awakened state of mind relate to this?

TR:
Within illusion. If we are able to understand the illusory quality as it is, then that is a glimpse of the awake state as well, at the same time. In other words, we are operating on the illusory body level along with some seed of wakefulness, otherwise we wouldn’t be discussing the subject at all. The intelligence to talk about this subject, work on this subject, meditate with it, is the awakened state of mind.

Student:
How do you put together the illusory state and the structure of Buddhist thought—which lays all sorts of trips, on me anyway, about higher states and goals and the aim of relieving all suffering and so forth. It seems to me that there is a rigidity, or something concrete there. Yet all the practices that lead you there are so illusory, as you say. How could I come to terms with what I consider to be a complete dichotomy?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I suppose the only way to relate with that, or to understand it, is purely by not trying to categorize it. That’s where the acceptance comes from. The methods or techniques put out are dualistic ones, illusory ones; but at the same time, the inspiration for these techniques is the inspiration of awake. So the way to work with it is not to put things into pigeonholes anymore at all—a noncaring quality as to whether it’s illusion or not.

S:
They coexist, then.

TR:
That is so, yes. But we are not trying to put them into categories.

Student:
Is this like saying that when you meditate, after a while the thoughts are still there, that they’ll always be there?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Exactly, yes.

S:
But they won’t be there?

TR:
Exactly, yes. That’s a good one.

Student:
Rinpoche, the buddhas are often called “conquerors,” or
jina.
What is it that they conquer?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
They conquer the limitless range of self-deceptions. It has been said that they destroy the seven great mountains of conceptualization. This comes up in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna. In a dialogue called
Vajra Spark
, the vajra spark destroys nine gigantic mountain ranges, which are a succession of mountain ranges one after another, each protecting the previous mountains—it’s the succession of self-deceptions.

Student:
During meditation, if at one point you’re seeing the solidity of thought and at another point you see the space in between them and the looseness, and you’re not doing anything, isn’t there still that witnessing quality?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
There is that witnessing quality, yes.

S:
Should one try not to be a witness?

TR:
You don’t try to do anything; you just accept and go along with it. That’s the whole point, you see. Then, at a certain stage, you begin to realize that any techniques or frameworks that you put things into are also foolish things. So you drop them. But until you actually see that foolish quality, you just go along with being a fool.