The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (41 page)

Student:
Rinpoche, what is the difference between moving forward one-pointedly in the style of the animal realm and the confidence that you like to see in your students, the acceptance of oneself? You say we have to accept ourselves, make friends with ourselves, and learn to trust ourselves as we are.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
There seem to be two different styles of confidence: the security-minded confidence that whatever you do, you are going to achieve something out of it in order to benefit yourself; and confidence in the sense of carelessness, that you are allowing things to happen by themselves and not trying to secure situations of any kind. This second kind of confidence, where any associations to security do not apply any more, is the highest confidence. In fact, it ceases to be confidence at that point, because you don’t have a target or criteria of any kind.

Student:
You talked about doubt as being a way out of these realms. I don’t see how to reconcile that with having confidence.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If you have a short glimpse of doubt as to your animal realm struggle, that this may not be the right style of pushing yourself; then at the same time, there is also confidence, that you don’t need a comforter anymore. If the doubt is overwhelmingly powerful, you may find that security does not apply. Security is an important point for you—if you give up that sense of security, then you develop the confidence that you do not need security anymore. In other words, there is a sort of trust in the doubt, and that in itself becomes a sense of security.

Student:
Rinpoche, it sounds to me that seeking after personal comfort and removing yourself from a potentially harmful situation are both paranoid actions, motivated by ignorance. Is this correct?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Ignorance is the sense of having one particular aim and object and goal in mind. And that aim and object, that goal-mindedness, becomes extremely overwhelming, so you fail to see the situation around you. That seems to be the ignorance. Your mind is highly preoccupied with what you want, so you fail to see what is.

Student:
Rinpoche, where is the opportunity or space to communicate with someone who is absolutely determined not to see what they’re doing, and beyond that, is into justifying that they don’t see?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is precisely the animal realm style of thinking: either subconsciously or consciously you ignore the whole situation, and deliberately make yourself dumb.

S:
I can see that, but is there any place where you can communicate with somebody who is trapped in that situation?

TR:
Well, one could try one’s best to try to remind that person that such a situation is happening. Quite possibly, there may be a gap in their state of mind, their psychological state. Quite possibly they might hear the message if you are able to time it right. Otherwise, even your suggestion itself becomes reinforcement. So one has to be buddhalike, skillful—which is not impossible. It seems to be worth trying.

Student:
Rinpoche, it almost seems that the animal realm has a universal quality in the sense that you find an occupation in any one of the realms. The way you cope with being a hungry ghost or you habitually cope with being an asura sounds like the animal realm, because you just try to plow through everything with hungry ghost mentality or hell mentality. Do you call that the hungry ghost realm with an animal realm flavor—or what?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The animal realm is in a sense less self-conscious, doing things with false conviction. The other realms seem to have some kind of intelligence, except for the realm of the gods, which doesn’t have intelligence. The asura, human, hungry ghost, and hell realms seem to have some kind of self-consciousness as well. That seems to be the only difference. Apart from that, the stubbornness of all these realms could be said to have animal qualities.

Student:
With regard to the question that was asked earlier about the difference between stubbornness and confidence, would it be correct to say that if you are in fact working with yourself and working with the negative qualities that exist in any of these realms, such as the stubbornness of the animal realm—if you confronted it and transformed it and made it your friend, instead of a negative stubbornness, it could become a positive persistence which works for you?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. Yes, definitely.

SIX

The Hungry Ghost and Hell Realms

W
E SEEM TO HAVE
two realms left: the hungry ghost realm and the hell realm. First we could discuss the hungry ghost realm. Like the other realms, the hungry ghost realm is tremendously applicable apropos situations we deal with ourselves. It could be related with the idea of hunger. The Tibetan word for the emotional state of the hungry ghost,
serna
, could be said to mean “meanness” or “lack of generosity.” The literal meaning of
serna
is “yellow-nosed”:
ser
means “yellow,”
na
means “nose.” In other words, it is an extremely sensitive nose, an outstanding nose. It is like traffic patrols, dressed up in fluorescent orange shirts to raise people’s attention that there is something happening. It is that sniffy quality of a dog who is looking for something to eat. Even if he comes across a piece of shit, it is a delightful thing, because he has to come up with something.

In this realm it seems that the act of consuming is more important than what you are consuming; there is a disregard for what you consume. It is related with the ratna buddha family. There is a quality of trying to expand and develop. So the consumption is also based on a sense of expanding, becoming rich. In terms of the visual sense, hungry ghosts are presented as individuals having tiny mouths, thin necks and throats, gigantic stomachs, and skinny arms and legs. This image is usually connected with the struggle to get something through your mouth and swallow what you have consumed. It is extremely unsatisfying, dissatisfying. Given the size of your belly, you cannot possibly be satisfied at all in filling your stomach.

The hungry ghost realm could be related with food, as symbolism, but it also could be related with the concept of food as grasping: grasping human friendship, company, material wealth, food, clothes, shelter, or whatever. The whole thing is related with the hunger that we seem to have—there is tremendous hunger involved. That hunger is extremely accurate and penetrating. You would like to consume whatever is available around you, but there is a slight sense of deprivation, as though you are not allowed to do that. At a subconscious level, there is a sense that you are not allowed to consume what you would like. You are trying to consume much more than you are meant to in terms of the size of your mouth and the size of your neck. It becomes totally impractical: what you are able to consume cannot fill you up, given the size of your belly. The preta, or hungry ghost, mentality at the spiritual level is that you would like to be entertained, because there is constant hunger. Whatever you hear is entertaining at the time, but it tends to become too familiar. So you are constantly looking for new ways of entertaining yourself—spiritually, philosophically, what have you. There is constant searching, a constant grasping quality.

Fundamentally, there is a sense of poverty, disregarding what you have. You are still poor. You are not able to keep up with your pretense of what you would like to be. Again, there is a sense of one-upmanship, which happens all the time. Whatever you have is regarded as part of your pride, part of your collection—but you would like to have something more than that. So you are constantly collecting all the time, on and on and on and on. And when the time comes that you cannot consume anymore—when you cannot receive anymore because you are dwelling on what you have already so that what you are receiving becomes too overwhelming—you begin to become deaf and dumb.

In other words, you concentrate so much on what you want, what you would like to receive, what you would like to achieve. So much concentration is imposed on your being, your intelligence. Because you want to listen so hard, you cannot hear anymore for the very fact that you want to listen or you want to receive. You want to learn so much that you cannot hear anymore because your ambition becomes an obstacle. At that point, the deaf and dumb quality of the hungry ghost level becomes extremely powerful. You see that other people can relate: they can listen, they can understand, they can consume. Nostalgia becomes prominent: you wish that you were still hungry so that you could eat more. You wish that you felt poor, that you were deprived, so that you could take pleasure in consuming more and more, further and further. There is a sense of trying to return back to that original state of poverty, as much as you can. From that point of view, the mentality of poverty seems to be luxurious as far as the hungry ghosts are concerned. You would like to be able to consume as much as you can, in terms of knowledge, physical well-being, materialistic well-being, or what have you.

Finally, anything that happens in your life is regarded as something that you should consume, something that you should possess. If you begin to see beautiful autumn leaves falling down, they are regarded as your prey. You should captivate that: take photographs of it, paint a picture of it, write about it in your memoirs, how beautiful it was. Everything is regarded as something you should consume: if you hear somebody say a clever thing in one sentence in the course of your conversation, you should write it down, try to captivate that subtlety, that cleverness, that person’s genius that they had such a beautiful thing to say. All the time, we are looking for something to catch in order to enrich ourselves. There is that mentality of complete poverty. No doubt, at the same time, if any delicious international meals are being cooked in certain restaurants, we would like to take part in them, eat them, taste them, have a new adventure. The flavor is more important than the value or the heaviness of the food, or that it could fill your belly.

Preta mentality is not so much a question of filling your belly. It is based on sensuality: taking the trouble of going out and buying something, walking into a store, picking out your particular brand of chocolate or wine, and bringing it back home. You are looking forward to doing that, to taking part in that. Your purchase could be consumed purely by you. If you share it with friends, you also could watch your friends enjoying your purchase. As you open the case or the bottle or the package, even the rattling of the paper unwrapping is extremely seductive. It is a luscious feeling, opening packages; the sound of Coke coming out of a bottle gives a sense of delightful hunger. It is something very beautiful. Self-consciously, we taste it, feel it, chew it, swallow it, and then finally, we actually manage to consume it—after that whole elaborate trip that we have gone through. Phew! Such an achievement! It is fantastic. We are able to bring a dream to life, it is a dream come true.

That applies to every living situation, not necessarily food alone. Constant hunger of all kinds happens. Intellectually, you feel your lack of some kind of encouragement. In all kinds of experiences, you feel a lack of something. You are deprived of something and you decide to pull up your socks and go and pursue it, to learn and study and hear those juicy intellectual answers or profound, spiritual, mystical words. You can hear and consume one idea after another idea. You try to recall them, try to make them solid and real. In case you want to or need to, you can recall them again and again in your life. Whenever you feel hunger, you can open your notebook with your notes, or you can open a particular book written by a great person who said very satisfying things in his books. You could satisfy and resatisfy constantly, again and again. In the course of your life, when you start to feel boredom or experience insomnia, you can always open your book, wherever you are. You can read your notebooks and ponder them constantly, or re-create a playback of the videotape of your mind as much as possible. That satisfies, seemingly.

But somehow, constantly playing back situations seems to become rather repetitive at a certain stage. We would like to re-create the situation again and again, possibly making the same journey. We may search for a new situation, or try to re-create meeting that particular friend or teacher. Another introduction is an exciting thing to do. And another journey to the restaurant or the supermarket or the delicatessen is not a bad idea. So we are constantly re-creating situations again and again, as much as possible. But sometimes the situation prevents us, we are running too fast. We may be able to re-create the journey for a certain amount of time, but at a certain stage, something prevents us. Either we do not have enough money or, when we try to plan something, something else happens: our child gets sick or our parents are dying or we have to attend some other situation. We have been holding back constantly. We realize that continual obstacles are coming at us; and that much more hunger begins to arise in us. We are still suspended in the realm of the hungry ghosts. The more we want something, the more we realize that we cannot get it. Constant holding back is involved.

In terms of the hungry ghost realm, there seem to be two types of hunger. The first is basic poverty, the feeling of the lack of fulfilling your desire. The second is that when you cannot fulfill your desire because you cannot consume any more, you wish that you could be somebody else who could, somebody who
is
hungry and who could still consume. You are trying to become like one of those. You would like to take pleasure in hunger, like those other people. There is that competitiveness. That seems to be the basic quality of the hungry ghost realm.

As that builds up to an extreme, or bardo experience, you are not quite certain whether you are really hungry or whether you simply enjoy being hungry. If you are hungry, you can satisfy it. But at the same time, if you satisfy your hunger, you realize that you will not be able to enjoy your hunger anymore. You don’t know whether you should suspend yourself in hunger or whether you should overdo it so that you could enjoy watching other people be hungry. That kind of extreme case begins to build up. There is uncertainty, actually, as to who is consuming and who is getting sick of consuming. The notion of poverty seems to be prominent.