The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (13 page)

In that way, synchronizing mind and body is also connected with developing fearlessness. By fearlessness, we do not mean that you are willing to jump off a cliff or to put your naked finger on a hot stove. Rather, here fearlessness means being able to respond accurately to the phenomenal world altogether. It simply means being accurate and absolutely direct in relating with the phenomenal world by means of your sense perceptions, your mind, and your sense of vision. That fearless vision reflects on you as well: It affects how you see yourself. If you look at yourself in the mirror—at your hair, your teeth, your mustache, your coat, your shirt, your tie, your dress, your pearls, your earrings—you see that they all belong there and that you belong there, as you are. You begin to realize that you have a perfect right to be in this universe, to be this way, and you see that there is a basic hospitality that this world provides to you. You have looked and you have seen, and you don’t have to apologize for being born on this earth.

This discovery is the first glimpse of what is called the Great Eastern Sun. When we say sun here, we mean the sun of human dignity, the sun of human power. The Great Eastern Sun is a rising sun rather than a setting sun, so it represents the dawning, or awakening, of human dignity—the rising of human warriorship. Synchronizing mind and body brings the dawn of the Great Eastern Sun.

SIX

The Dawn of the Great Eastern Sun

The way of the Great Eastern Sun is based on seeing that there is a natural source of radiance and brilliance in this world—which is the innate wakefulness of human beings.

T
HE
D
AWN
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Great Eastern Sun is based on actual experience. It is not a concept. You realize that you can uplift yourself, that you can appreciate your existence as a human being. Whether you are a gas station attendant or the president of your country doesn’t really matter. When you experience the goodness of being alive, you can respect who and what you are. You need not be intimidated by lots of bills to pay, diapers to change, food to cook, or papers to be filed. Fundamentally, in spite of all those responsibilities, you begin to feel that it is a worthwhile situation to be a human being, to be alive, not afraid of death.

Death comes, obviously. You can never avoid death. Whatever you do, death occurs. But if you have lived with a sense of reality and with gratitude toward life, then you leave the dignity of your life behind you, so that your relatives, your friends, and your children can appreciate who you were. The vision of the Great Eastern Sun is based on celebrating life. It is contrasted to the setting sun, the sun that is going down and dissolving into darkness. The setting-sun vision is based on trying to ward off the concept of death, trying to save ourselves from dying. The setting-sun point of view is based on fear. We are constantly afraid of ourselves. We feel that we can’t actually hold ourselves upright. We are so ashamed of ourselves, who we are, what we are. We are ashamed of our jobs, our finances, our parental upbringing, our education, and our psychological shortcomings.

DESIGN BY CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA. EXECUTED BY GINA JANOWITZ.

Great Eastern Sun vision, on the other hand, is based on appreciating ourselves and appreciating our world, so it is a very gentle approach. Because we appreciate the world, we don’t make a mess in it. We take care of our bodies, we take care of our minds, and we take care of our world. The world around us is regarded as very sacred, so we have to constantly serve our world and clean it up. The setting-sun vision is that washing things and cleaning up should be the domain of hired help. Or if you can’t afford a housekeeper, you clean up yourself, but you regard it as dirty work. Having a nice meal is fine, but who is going to wash the dishes? We would prefer to leave that to someone else.

Thousands of tons of leftovers are discarded every year. When people go to restaurants, often they are served giant platefuls of food, more than they can eat, to satisfy the giant desire of their minds. Their minds are stuffed just by the visual appearance of their giant steaks, their full plates. Then the leftovers are thrown into the garbage. All that food is wasted, absolutely wasted.

That is indeed a setting-sun approach. You have a giant vision, which you can’t consume, and you end up throwing most of it away. There is not even a program to recycle the leftovers. Everything goes to the dump. It is no wonder we have such big problems disposing of our garbage. Some people have even thought of sending our garbage into outer space: We can let the rest of the universe take care of our leftovers, instead of cleaning up our earth. The setting-sun approach is to shield ourselves from dirt as much as we can, so that we don’t have to look at it—we just get rid of anything unpleasant. As long as we have a pleasurable situation, we forget about the leftovers or the greasy spoons and plates. We leave the job of cleaning up to somebody else.

That approach produces an oppressive social hierarchy in the setting-sun world; there are those who get rid of other people’s dirt and those who take pleasure in producing the dirt. Those people who have money can continue to enjoy their food and ignore the leftovers. They can pay for luxury and ignore reality. In that way of doing things, you never see the dirt properly, and you may never see the food properly, either. Everything is compartmentalized, so you can never experience things completely. We are not talking purely about food; we are talking about everything that goes on in the setting-sun world: packaged food, packaged vacations, package deals of all kinds. There is no room to experience doubtlessness in that world; there is no room to be gentle; there is no room to experience reality fully and properly.

In contrast to that, Great Eastern Sun vision is a very ecological approach. The way of the Great Eastern Sun is based on seeing what is needed and how things happen organically. So the sense of hierarchy, or order, in the Great Eastern Sun world is not connected with imposing arbitrary boundaries or divisions. Great Eastern Sun hierarchy comes from seeing life as a natural process and tuning in to the uncontrived order that exists in the world. Great Eastern Sun hierarchy is based on seeing that there is a natural source of radiance and brilliance in this world—which is the innate wakefulness of human beings. The sun of human dignity can be likened to the physical sun spanning the darkness. When you have a brilliant sun, which is a source of vision, the light from the sun shines through every window of the house, and the brightness of its light inspires you to open all the curtains. The analogy for hierarchy in the Great Eastern Sun world is a flowering plant that grows upward toward the sun. The analogy for setting-sun hierarchy is a lid that flattens you and keeps you in your place. In the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, even criminals can be cultivated, encouraged to grow up. In the setting-sun vision, criminals are hopeless, so they are shut off; they don’t have a chance. They are part of the dirt that we would rather not see. But in the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, no human being is a lost cause. We don’t feel that we have to put a lid on anyone or anything. We are always willing to give things a chance to flower.

The basis of Great Eastern Sun vision is realizing that the world is clean and pure to begin with. There is no problem with cleaning things up, if we realize that we are just returning them to their natural, original state. It is like having your teeth cleaned. When you leave the dentist’s office, your teeth feel so good. You feel as though you had a new set of teeth, but in actual fact, it is just that your teeth are clean. You realize that they are basically good teeth.

In working with ourselves, cleaning up begins by telling the truth. We have to shed any hesitation about being honest with ourselves because it might be unpleasant. If you feel bad when you come home because you had a hard day at the office, you can tell the truth about that: You feel bad. Then you don’t have to try to shake off your pain by throwing it around your living room. Instead, you can start to relax; you can be genuine at home. You can take a shower and put on fresh clothes and take some refreshment. You can change your shoes, go outside, and walk in your garden. Then, you might feel better. In fact, when you get close to the truth, you can tell the truth and feel great.

In this world, there are always possibilities of original purity, because the world is clean to begin with. Dirt never comes first, at all. For example, when you buy new towels, they don’t have any dirt on them. Then, as you use them, they become dirty. But you can always wash them and return them to their original state. In the same way, our entire physical and psychological existence and the world that we know—our sky, our earth, our houses, everything we have—was and is originally clean. But then, we begin to smear the situation with our conflicting emotions. Still, fundamentally speaking, our existence is all good, and it is all launderable. That is what we mean by basic goodness: the pure ground that is always there, waiting to be cleaned by us. We can always return to that primordial ground. That is the logic of the Great Eastern Sun.

SEVEN

The Cocoon

The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.

I
N THE LAST CHAPTER
we talked about the dawn of the Great Eastern Sun. However, in general, we are much more accustomed to the darkness of the setting-sun world than we are to the light of the Great Eastern Sun. Therefore, our next topic is dealing with darkness. By darkness, we mean enclosing ourselves in a familiar world in which we can hide or go to sleep. It is as though we would like to reenter our mother’s womb and hide there forever, so that we could avoid being born. When we are afraid of waking up and afraid of experiencing our own fear, we create a cocoon to shield ourselves from the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. We prefer to hide in our personal jungles and caves. When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think that we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. We are so afraid of our own fear that we deaden our hearts.

The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in this cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. We regard this dank cocoon as a family heirloom or inheritance, and we don’t want to give that bad-good, good-bad memory away. In the cocoon there is no dance: no walking, or breathing, not even a wink of the eyes. It is comfortable and sleepy: an intense and very familiar home. In the world of the cocoon, such things as spring cleaning have never been known. We feel that it is too much work, too much trouble, to clean it up. We would prefer to go back to sleep.

In the cocoon there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we begin to examine that comfortable darkness—look at it, smell it, feel it—we find it is claustrophobic. So the first impulse that draws us away from the darkness of the cocoon toward the light of the Great Eastern Sun is a longing for ventilation. As soon as we begin to sense the possibility of fresh air, we realize that our arms and legs are being restricted. We want to stretch out and walk, dance, even jump. We realize that there is an alternative to our cocoon: We discover that we could be free from that trap. With that longing for fresh air, for a breeze of delight, we open our eyes, and we begin to look for an alternative environment to our cocoon. And to our surprise, we begin to see light, even though it may be hazy at first. The tearing of the cocoon takes place at that point.

Then we realize that the degraded cocoon we have been hiding in is revolting, and we want to turn up the lights as far as we can. In fact, we are not turning up the lights, but we are simply opening our eyes wider: constantly looking for the brightest light. So we catch a certain kind of fever: the fever of the Great Eastern Sun. But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves to move forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from.

If we don’t look back, then we will have difficulty relating to the reality of the setting sun. You see, we cannot just reject the world of the cocoon, even though it is quite horrific and unnecessary. We have to develop genuine sympathy for our own experiences of darkness as well as those of others. Otherwise, our journey out of the cocoon simply becomes a setting-sun holiday. Without the reference point of looking back, we have a tendency to create a new cocoon in the Great Eastern Sun. Now that we have left the darkness behind, we feel that we can just bathe in the sun, lying in the sand and stupefying ourselves.