The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (79 page)

The sitting practice of meditation seems to be the only way we can actually bring together the notion of pain and the notion of inspiration simultaneously—sweet and sour at once. That’s been done in Chinese cooking, and people find it quite delicious, as a matter of fact. In this case, it is much more than sweet and sour, actually; it is hot and cold simultaneously, freezing and burning simultaneously. Particularly when students begin to get into the practice, they begin to get burnt—but simultaneously they are being frozen. You have the frigidity of being frozen, and you have at the same time the scorching qualities of being burnt. And that seems to be the general view or general experience.

I begin to feel that myself. And in my personal experience of watching our students, I begin to see that they have the facial expressions, physical behavior, and format of being burnt and frozen simultaneously. That brings some kind of massage system. They then begin to dance, to like it. However, they can’t like it too much, because once they do so, they begin to take sides, either to the cold or the hot areas. But when they feel some healthy awareness or wakefulness taking place, the hot and cold are balanced completely. So they are cooled and warmed simultaneously. All this is taking place at the hinayana level, of course.
E
and
VAM, E
being the cold and
VAM
being the hot, take place together at that point.

If you have any questions, you are welcome.

Student:
When we understand or accept these contradictions, is it a feeling of just accepting things the way they are, rather than coming to a greater logic?

Vidyadhara:
Accepting things as they are—what do you mean by that?

S:
Just opening up to the situation and not taking sides, not trying to maintain a hold on it.

V:
Sounds too naive for me. There’s more energy than that.

S:
Would you explain?

V:
Accepting things as they are could be just leaving it up to the situation to work itself out. But that’s not the case here. Accepting things as they are from one angle would be simply and directly experiencing without any fear. You see, you could be accepting things as they are with a sense of panic. You could say, “Now this is the folk wisdom. We should be accepting things as they are. Let’s cool it, cool off, just sit back and smoke our pipes in our rocking chairs.” That’s not quite the case here. There has to be some kind of continual wakefulness, rather than just sitting back and letting things happen on their own accord and everything is going to be hunky-dory, You see what I mean?

S:
Yes.

V:
It’s very taut—chippy is the only word I can think of. [
Laughter
]

S:
Thanks.

S:
What’s the relationship between
EVAM
and the feminine principle?

V:
E
is the feminine principle,
VAM
is the masculine principle.

S:
But it sounds like one could see
E
as the mother aspect of the feminine principle and
VAM
as the dakini aspect?

V:
Not necessarily.
E
is very tricky, it has everything. And
VAM
is just the mere occupants of the container, which is sometimes helpless. So the feminine principle has greater power, from that point of view. In other words, we can’t breathe without oxygen, and that oxygen is the feminine principle.

S:
But that can involve energy too, or manifestations of energy.

V:
Well, we have to use oxygen in order to function, so to speak. So the feminine principle is life strength, the strength of life. We can’t function without space. That’s it. And once we have space, once the feminine principle is graciously accepting the masculine principle, then you could do all kinds of things. In this case, we are not talking about a man and woman particularly at all; we are simply talking in terms of principles. And we are not saying that women are superior or men are superior. In this case we are just talking about how the cosmos works, the mechanics and chemistries. There are two elements—the container and the contained—that interact with each other. If there’s nothing to be contained, the container becomes irrelevant; and if there’s not enough container for what is being contained, then vice versa, so to speak. That’s the idea we are talking about here, although we have to rush a lot.

S:
I’m shocked at how familiar hinayana seems. That’s where I seem to be. In any case, I have been thinking about how it is not only difficult to transcend misery, but it is difficult even to acknowledge it. There is even a sense of embarrassment about it, a sense of shame. Is there a kind of subterranean sense of responsibility, that we choose this kind of existence?

V:
I think the notion is that you are still not willing to be public, so to speak. That’s one of the biggest obstacles. Even at the vajrayana level, the yeshe chölwa principle of crazy wisdom is that willingness to be public. At the hinayana level, there also should be some notion of being willing to be public. We would like to keep some little privacy, so there is still the faintest of the faintest of the faintest—or maybe even a much thicker level—of deceptions taking place all the time. We really don’t want to present ourselves as we are, but we would like to reinterpret ourselves in order to present ourselves to the public. Always there’s that kind of translation of what you like to see yourself as, rather than what you are.

S:
There’s a kind of pride involved in that.

V:
It is a neurotic pride of some kind, but I still think it is workable, actually. There’s no particular problem; it had to break through. Obviously, there’s always going to be some kind of stage fright taking place; nevertheless, you can overcome that. That’s what it is all about. And actually, that idea of performance is getting into the vajrayana level, that you are performing onstage, everything is a dance on a stage. In hinayana, the point is to acknowledge that stage fright much more. Then you could overcome it.

S:
Hopefully.

V:
I’m sure you can do it. See what happens.

S:
Rinpoche, you said
EVAM
is happening all the time throughout the three yanas, and then it becomes invisible. What do you mean by invisibility?

V:
In-di-visibility! They become one. At each level, it is the indivisibility of
E
and
VAM
together. That happens through all the yanas.

S:
And yet you can work with it, work with the
EVAM
principle?

V:
Work with the
EVAM
principle? Well, hopefully. I hope so, otherwise there’s nothing left. If you cannot work with your atmosphere and your body, there’s nothing left for you to do, is there? No house, no body, no practice—poof! [
Laughter
] What is there left? I hope so. It has been promised in the scriptures and texts that it is workable, that the journey is the indivisibility of the accommodation and what is being contained in it working together—which we are trying to correlate with the
E
and
VAM
principles at this point. Good luck, sir.

S:
I don’t know about that.

V:
I’m sure you can do it. . . . Shiny-headed guy over there.

S:
Rinpoche, at the end of your talk, you began to describe the experience in sitting practice of burning and freezing. I think I didn’t quite get it. You said that after a while the student begins to like it?

V:
Well, I don’t mean “like it,” in the sense of indulgence, but the student begins to feel familiar with it, that hot and cold are one.

S:
Is that what produces the sensation, if I understood you correctly, of transmutation from burning and freezing to warming and cooling?

V:
No, no! It is having two experiences at once, which makes the whole thing indivisible. You get completely exasperated: your dualistic mind can’t jump back and forth anymore, so you begin to accept the whole thing. You begin to give in. Then hot and cold are, “So what?” One thing, one taste. That’s it.

S:
And that presents the possibility of moving into—

V:
It doesn’t present even the impossibility of actually experiencing hot and cold at once.

S:
Well, the balance sounds like something—

V:
There’s not even a notion of balance anymore.

S:
Okay.

V:
That’s that! [
Laughter
] You see what I mean? If you begin to talk about balance, then you have presented that as like tuning your record player—which is bass and which is treble. But in this case, it is the whole thing. It’s like a broken bottle, and the juice inside is running out completely, with both hot and cold at once. That’s what we call a potential vajrayana mess. [
Laughter
]

S:
Thank you.

V:
It’s quite delightful, actually. It happens at the hinayana level as well. When we begin to give in, not choosing the hot or the cold, both become one completely. That’s possible. It’s been done.

S:
What is the relationship between hot and uncertain? You talked about
VAM
in terms of uncertainty and in terms of heat.

V:
Inquisitiveness. Uncertainty. Not knowing exactly what’s happening. For instance, if you moved into a house that was not particularly familiar to you, and you had not been there before, you would like to look into every closet, what it’s all about. Uncertainty. Occupation. Problem. So?

S:
So . . . you also talked about
VAM
in terms of being hot, and the
E
cold.

V:
Yeah. Hot, of course, yes. Hot cannot happen if there’s no cold to begin with—but you can’t work the other way around. In other words, without a mother, there cannot be a son. In this case, we are saying the chicken is first and the egg is last. Finally, Buddhist tantrikas worked out which comes first! [
Laughter
] That’s what we are talking about: the chicken comes first, the egg comes after.

S:
Rinpoche, in breaking through stage fright, it seems that even in that commitment there is still a sense of deception, of being onstage but still playacting. How do you get to that point where you are even beyond playacting on the stage?

V:
If you regard that as life. If you regard it as a performance, that’s a problem. That’s a problem with a lot of performing people in the theater, as well. If they don’t regard that as purely demonstrating their life, they make a terribly bad performance. They begin to act. You see what I mean? It is the same thing. You are not performing for anybody’s entertainment, you are performing as you are—including wiping your bottom on the toilet seat and everything. Whether you are performing in public or private, you are there. Jolly good job. [
Laughter
]

S:
Rinpoche, would you say that our first glimpse of space is usually perceived as fright or boredom or depression because we tend to compare it with what we experienced before?

V:
Absolutely. We don’t take it seriously enough; but on the other hand, we take it too seriously—which are the
E
and
VAM
principles, hot and cold. The problem is that we don’t relate with hot as actually hot, we think it might be cold. If we run our hot-water tap long enough, it might come out cold water afterward; and if we run enough hot, the cold tap might run hot. That is a kind of distrust in the chemistry that exists, simultaneously. You know, you expect the moon is going to turn into the sun, and the sun might turn into the moon if you sit long enough.

S:
So it’s kind of a baby’s view of space?

V:
Infantile, that’s it, absolutely.

Well, friends, that seems to be a good way to end. I understand that tomorrow I will be here earlier, according to my friends in the administration. Good night. Thank you.

TALK 5

Small People with Vast Vision

I
AM BEGINNING TO FEEL
that we don’t have enough time to discuss the whole thing properly; however, we could do our best at this point. Today, I was hoping that we could go through the mahayana concepts connected with the
EVAM
principle. One of the interesting points there is that there is some notion of problem, we could say. At the level of vajrayana, it is very clear and precise. At the level of hinayana, it is equally precise and clear because of its simplicity, its connection with reality. But at the mahayana level, there seems to be some kind of obstacle or problem, which comes from the possibility of religiosity and benevolence. The popular mahayanist view of how to conduct one’s life and to organize the whole thing is based on the idea of goodness of some kind. That sometimes becomes problematic. It has become a big problem. However, we could work on that, so it is no longer regarded as an obstacle at all, by any means. The idea of goodness becomes an obstacle in certain situations. If the practitioner begins to become too involved with religion or do-goodism, that could lead into a notion of love-and-light. That seems to be the epitome of the problems of mahayana buddhism. On the other hand, it is impossible just purely to put hinayana and vajrayana together without the transition of mahayana. It would make no sense, there would be no virtue of any kind at all.

The basic point of mahayana’s view and concept of the
E
principle is the notion of commitment, extensive commitment, and vision. Commitment means taking the vow of doing a bodhisattva’s work, and vision means that there is nothing in the way between you and practice anymore. Commitment means that you are willing to work with the rest of sentient beings, not only sentient beings who crawl and walk on this planet, particularly—your commitment is to work with the complete universe, including the billions of solar systems that exist. There is such vast vision of your being willing to work with anything there is: you are willing to work with the sun and the moon, the rest of the stars, and all the other planets that exist in the universe, beyond your imagination of vast. Those vast outer-space worlds, any kind, all kinds—you are willing to work with the whole thing completely. That particular vow and commitment tends to become very warm and very personal at some point; nevertheless, that personality is not in the way. It becomes real experience. It is complete experience when there are no limitations put on your vision, your expansion, anymore. It is large mind, gigantic, great, vast mind.