The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (56 page)

We could criticize the sunset, saying, “This looks like a postcard picture.” That is a perfect example of frivolous cynicism. We criticize people saying that so-and-so acts just like a typical grandfather or father or brother or mother-in-law. We tend to make certain assumptions and develop our cynical approach on the basis of them. It is as though the whole environment is totally poisoned. Whatever landmarks exist—telephone poles with wires running between them, neatly cut lawns, and so on—we use as targets.

What we seem to be discussing here is the frivolousness of the “avant-garde,” which everybody thinks they are somehow associated with. We think that we are progressive and transformed people. We have a different perspective on society, which
they
have fucked up for us. We are resentful about that, and that makes us the avant-garde. We are the messengers of a new age, the Aquarian age, or whatever you call it. It is antitradition, anti-establishment, obviously. In fact, we could say it is anti-earth, because the earth has had to be cultivated, and cities have had to be built on it, so now we are resentful about the earth.

I’m not particularly condemning being resentful of pollution. There is nothing cynical about that. That problem arises to begin with because we regard the whole world just as a gigantic world of opportunity for us in which we can build up our own kind of cynicism and unfriendliness. We can make the whole world into a gigantic satire. But by taking that satirical approach, we are pulling the rug out from under our own feet. The detrimental result of such an approach is that people end up by killing themselves, or for that matter, laughing their heads off. Those two extremes do arise.

The whole cynical approach is an extraordinarily aggressive one. The joke that develops out of it is a pointed joke, an aggressive joke. It is making fun of somebody’s thousand years of accomplishment, which is tradition. Tradition, whether developed in the East or the West, is not particularly a laughing matter, because people meant it. We could say that it is too heavy, not light enough, but so what? We do not have to reduce that ground to frivolousness, reduce it to our satirical or hysterical approach.

What I’m trying to say is that we have a very glib and easy way of pointing out the negative situations and the situations that are prone to cynicism, the humorous situations of spiritual and psychological materialism. We criticize how people run their businesses and how they drive themselves mad, and how they run their so-called enlightened society. In doing that, we do not leave any room—any freedom—to be inspired, which is something that does happen constantly at the same time as being critical. The fact that we do not leave that room does not mean that there isn’t any. There is tremendous room for psychological materialism and its businesslike, economic approach, and there is tremendous room at the same time for tradition that has nothing at all to do with psychological or spiritual materialism. And there is also room to appreciate the existing patterns that have already been created, which—of course—are a mishmash of spiritual materialism and genuine spirituality, both at the same time.

The point is that it is easy to criticize the materialistic approach, both psychological and spiritual, and to destroy it logically. But the real problem that we have to face is putting ourselves in the same boat as those we are criticizing, as if
we
had to take responsibility for running the whole world economically, spiritually, psychologically, and politically. How would we do it? That seems to be the real problem.

The frivolousness that goes on in ego’s mentality has intelligence in it as well, which communicates back and forth between aggression and passion and so on. But at the same time, it has an extraordinarily resentful quality. It blames. It says, “It’s somebody else’s fault, therefore I have nothing to do with it.
My
duty, my life’s occupation, is to make fun of other people constantly, to regard them as a big joke, to regard the whole world as a big joke.”

This is quite a different big joke from the one that developed in the tantric tradition. Maya, or illusion, the dance of the dakinis, is also a big joke.
¹
But it is not a cynical joke. It is a serious joke, if I may say so. The difference between a cynical joke and a serious joke is a very interesting one. The cynical joke is much more heavy-handed than the enlightened ones. The enlightened jokes are much lighter, because they leave room to accept wisdom, to accept the past.

Take Naropa, for example. He spent twelve years going through all kinds of painful tortures imposed by his guru Tilopa, and he attained the level of a lineage holder of the Kagyü tradition. And that is the path that we now have here. That is what we have to hold on to. It was not a joke; it was not a game. It was a matter of consequence. On the other hand, the kind of approach that regards everything as unreal because that provides a way to escape from it is the lubrication that has developed in the samsaric mandala. That disregarding of the effort and energy put in by people in the past goes on all the time.

Of course we might object, saying, “I don’t want to be dogmatic,” “I don’t want to be a convert,” “I don’t want to be a heavy person,” or “I don’t want to trip out about anything at all.” But all that “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to” is itself an extremely heavy trip. We are trying to put ourselves in an extremely safe situation in which there is no room for committing ourselves to a tradition, no room for relating to any solid ground at all. We might say that the ascetic trip of Milarepa was too pure, or Naropa’s approach of having visions and trying to follow them was very psychedelic and trippy. And, we might say, Tilopa was the greatest tripper of them all. There is no end to our cynicism. We do not allow any kind of space or room to move about with the dignity of basic tradition. We alienate ourselves from the inheritance that we have received and from the work that other people have put into society to produce this particular kind of solid situation. This is one of the plagues that could develop from taking a cynical attitude toward spirituality, even spiritual materialism. A very powerful, widespread disease of this type could develop.

That approach of trying to establish your ground somewhere but nowhere, which lubricates the situations of ego and its constituents of passion, pride, aggression, and so forth, goes on all the time. It is an approach of carelessness, of feeling that everything is going to be okay because we are allied with a super-satire person, a supercynic. “If there are any kind of trips going on with something wrong in them, my satirical authority figure is going to see it and transmit the message to me.” As a result of this kind of attitude, we end up having nothing—just an extremely frivolous situation.

The whole point is that what lubricates the samsaric mandala is a frivolous approach to samsara—not taking samsara’s game seriously enough. We fail to regard samsara as something very powerful, very energetic. We tend to dismiss it as belonging to an area of mistake, not realizing that the mistake has been made seriously and meaningfully. Such mistakes bring about the sacrifice of many lives and a great deal of time. They are monuments. So samsara is a very monumental situation rather than something frivolous. Somebody decides to do it; it is not an accident. It is not something frivolous, it is a very serious game. We have to learn to respect the monumental creation called samsara. It is because of its monumental quality that it also breeds nirvana at the same time, as a by-the-way situation. So we cannot purely take a satirical approach toward samsara. We have to take it very seriously and the whole world very seriously. This seems to be a very important point.

Student:
Is this kind of lubrication found only in the West?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think it is found everywhere. It happens in the East as well, or anywhere where a highly traditional society decides to do something insane and is criticized and laughed at. It is found all over the globe and even among Martians!

S:
How do you deal with it if it’s so monumental? How do you get through it if you want to respect it and everything that went into it but still don’t want to go along with it?

TR:
It is such a monumental situation that you respect it for that. It is extraordinary, impressive; it is extraordinarily documentary. You respect it as a landmark. If you do that, what we talked about right at the beginning of the seminar can happen: you can begin to realize that space happens within those monumental things and becomes more significant than the monuments themselves. The monuments—the Statues of Liberty—are hollow monuments. But until you realize the monumental quality of the Statue of Liberty, you don’t see all that it is. You have to respect things; in other words, the whole thing is regarded as sacred.

Student:
I’m cynical.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Okay.

S:
But I also have a tendency to be too serious. I can’t seem to really understand what it is to have a sense of humor. So part of my being cynical is wanting to have a sense of humor. It comes out in cynicism.

TR:
How would you develop your sense of humor?

S:
Maybe you can’t develop it?

TR:
How do you develop your seriousness?

S:
By being too attached, too worried about myself.

TR:
How about the space between the two [between humor and seriousness]? What happens there, can you tell me?

S:
[
Student is unable to answer
.]

TR:
I think that is the interesting area. It is not so important what happens in terms of that and this, but what happens in between the two.

Student:
The tradition here seems to be a tradition of forced change, constant innovation. If we go along with that, we find ourselves with changes that are very unpleasant for the entire globe. Many of us are here at this seminar perhaps because of a recognition that we have to return to the sources of a genuine tradition that is monumental . . .

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We are talking about monumental in the sense of solid space or hollow space. We are not talking about
the
monument or
the
landmark that is connected with the dharmakaya or dharmadhatu realm.
²
That is very different—

S:
It’s very different from the mentality that has created the H-bomb and is destroying the globe ecologically. For me it’s not a matter of resenting tradition as much as of having to reject it out of the same source from which I recognize humanity in myself and my relation to the whole biosphere, all living things. I must reject a cultural tradition that tends to destroy that relatedness.

TR:
Well, that’s some kind of respect, isn’t it?

S:
Well, I don’t feel cynical, but I do have to reject what I see in the cultural tradition.

TR:
In other words, you have to reject not being a poet. Do you write poetry?

S:
Yes.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You do? How? What line do you take in relating to the world in the realm of poetry? How do you write poetry so that it doesn’t become solid?

S:
On the basis of what you’ve said about mandalas, I would say that my conception of a poem is a mandala. It’s a recognition of a bounded area, and one of the limitations of that is that it’s words. Is that what you mean?

TR:
Not exactly. The idea is that poetry could become hollow poetry, like a concretized sponge. It has the stoneness or rocklike quality of concrete, but at the same time it’s filled with all kinds of space. Consequently, if you threw it in the water, it would float, rather than sinking to the bottom of the pond.

S:
It seems to me that avant-garde cynicism gets to be a tradition in itself.

TR:
That’s true. For instance, the early poems of Allen Ginsberg and a lot of poets and playwrights of the American Beat Generation are very satirical about society. And in particular, a lot of inspiration sprung up after the Vietnam War, which provided something to work with in terms of basic material. There is nothing particularly wrong with the satirical remarks or satirical poems themselves at all. They’re beautiful. They see all kinds of areas, all kinds of corners. They speak beautifully. But what is the matter with that poetry is the punctuation, which speaks of mutual embarrassment. Nobody talks about freeing ourselves from the hysterical entrapment we have been discussing here. So something is unsaid, remains unsaid all the time, whenever we criticize. That unspeakable truth becomes haunting—like the ghost of George Washington! It’s all over.

S:
How does what you’re saying relate to exposing the hypocrisy of the samsaric mandala?

TR:
We have to acknowledge that to begin with. We are not advanced enough to expose it as a matter of public humiliation. At this point we’re merely concerned with acknowledging that such a thing is happening and with digging it out from the subconscious or unconscious embarrassment that keeps us wanting to keep silent about that whole area.

S:
Does the mandala have a historic aspect? Is there a forward and backward?

TR:
Mandala is time in its own way, so obviously future and past become the mandala.

S:
Can we see it going forward?

TR:
As well as coming backward.

S:
Where would the viewer be standing in relation to that?

TR:
Nowhere.

Student:
I don’t understand what you mean by lubricating the samsaric mandala. You said frivolousness lubricates it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I mean lubrication in a pejorative sense.

S:
It makes it more slippery?