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

However, venerating the past in itself will not solve the world’s problems. We need to find the link between our traditions and our present experience of life.
Nowness,
or the magic of the present moment, is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present. When you appreciate a painting or a piece of music or a work of literature, no matter when it was created, you appreciate it
now
. You experience the same nowness in which it was created. It is always
now
.

The way to experience nowness is to realize that this very moment, this very point in your life, is always
the
occasion. So the consideration of where you are and what you are, on the spot, is very important. That is one reason that your family situation, your domestic everyday life, is so important. You should regard your home as sacred, as a golden opportunity to experience nowness. Appreciating sacredness begins very simply by taking an interest in all the details of your life. Interest is simply applying awareness to what goes on in your everyday life—awareness while you’re cooking, awareness while you’re driving, awareness while you’re changing diapers, even awareness while you’re arguing. Such awareness can help to free you from speed, chaos, neurosis, and resentment of all kinds. It can free you from the obstacles to nowness, so that you can cheer up on the spot, all the time.

The principle of nowness is also very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society. You may wonder what the best approach is to helping society and how you can know that what you are doing is authentic or good. The only answer is nowness.
Now
is the important point. That
now
is a real
now
. If you are unable to experience
now,
then you are corrupted because you are looking for another
now,
which is impossible. If you do that, there can only be past or future.

When corruption enters a culture, it is because that culture ceases to be
now;
it becomes past and future. Periods in history when great art was created, when learning advanced, or peace spread, were all
now
. Those situations happened at the very moment of their
now
. But after
now
happened, then those cultures lost their
now
.

You have to maintain nowness, so that you don’t duplicate corruption, so that you don’t corrupt
now,
and so that you don’t have false synonyms for
now
at all. The vision of enlightened society is that tradition and culture and wisdom and dignity can be experienced
now
and kept
now
on everyone’s part. In that way there can never be corruption of any kind at all.

Enlightened society must rest on a good foundation. The nowness of your family situation is that foundation. From it, you can expand. By regarding your home as sacred, you can enter into domestic situations with awareness and with delight, rather than feeling that you are subjecting yourself to chaos. It may seem that washing dishes and cooking dinner are completely mundane activities, but if you apply awareness in any situation, then you are training your whole being so that you will be able to open yourself further, rather than narrowing your existence.

You may feel that you have a good vision for society but that your life is filled with hassles—money problems, problems relating to your spouse or caring for your children—and that those two things, vision and ordinary life, are opposing one another. But vision and practicality
can
be joined together in nowness.

Too often, people think that solving the world’s problems is based on conquering the earth, rather than on touching the earth, touching ground. That is one definition of the setting-sun mentality: trying to conquer the earth so that you can ward off reality. There are all kinds of deodorant sprays to keep you from smelling the real world, and all kinds of processed food to keep you from tasting raw ingredients. Shambhala vision is not trying to create a fantasy world where no one has to see blood or experience a nightmare. Shambhala vision is based on living on this earth, the real earth, the earth that grows crops, the earth that nurtures your existence. You can learn to live on this earth: how to camp, how to pitch a tent, how to ride a horse, milk a cow, build a fire. Even though you may be living in a city in the twentieth century, you can learn to experience the sacredness, the
nowness,
of reality. That is the basis for creating an enlightened society.

TWELVE

Discovering Magic

Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully. What we see doesn’t have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything.

I
N TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIETY,
the appreciation of simplicity has almost been lost. From London to Tokyo, there are problems with trying to create pleasure and comfort out of speed. The world is mechanized to such an extent that you don’t even have to think. You just push a button and a computer gives you the answer. You don’t have to learn to count. You press a button, and a machine counts for you. Casualness has become increasingly popular, because people think in terms of efficiency rather than appreciation. Why bother to wear a tie, if the purpose of wearing clothes is just to cover your body? If the reason for eating food is only to fill your stomach and provide nutrition, why bother to look for the best meat, the best butter, the best vegetables?

But the reality of the world is something more than the lifestyle that the twentieth-century world has embraced. Pleasure has been cheapened, joy has been reduced, happiness has been computerized. The goal of warriorship is to reconnect to the nowness of reality, so that you can go forward without destroying simplicity, without destroying your connection to this earth. In the last chapter, we discussed the importance of nowness as a way of joining together the wisdom of the past with the challenge of the present. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how to discover the ground of nowness. In order to rediscover nowness, you have to look back, back to where you came from, back to the original state. In this case, looking back is not looking back in time, going back several thousand years. It is looking back into your own mind, to before history began, before thinking began, before thought ever occurred. When you are in contact with this original ground, then you are never confused by the illusions of past and future. You are able to rest continuously in nowness.

This original state of being can be likened to a primordial, or cosmic, mirror. By
primordial
we mean unconditioned, not caused by any circumstances. Something primordial is not a reaction for or against any situation. All conditionality comes from unconditionality. Anything that is made has to come from what was unmade, to begin with. If something is conditioned, it has been created or formed. In the English language, we speak of formulating ideas or plans, or we may say, “How should we
form
our organization?” or we may talk about the formation of a cloud. In contrast to that, the unconditioned is free from being formed, free from creation. This unconditioned state is likened to a primordial
mirror
because, like a mirror, it is willing to reflect anything, from the gross level up to the refined level, and it still remains as it is. The basic frame of reference of the cosmic mirror is quite vast, and it is free from any bias: kill or cure, hope or fear.

The way to look back and experience the state of being of the cosmic mirror is simply to relax. In this case relaxation is quite different from the setting-sun idea of flopping or taking time off, entertaining yourself with a good vacation. Relaxation here refers to relaxing the mind, letting go of the anxiety and concepts and depression that normally bind you. The way to relax, or rest the mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In Part One, we discussed how the practice of meditation is connected to renouncing small-mindedness and personal territory. In meditation you are neither “for” nor “against” your experience. That is, you don’t praise some thoughts and condemn others, but you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgment, and in that way you yourself learn to be, to express your existence directly, nonconceptually. That is the ideal state of relaxation, which allows you to experience the nowness of the cosmic mirror. In fact, it is
already
the experience of the cosmic mirror.

If you are able to relax—relax to a cloud by looking at it, relax to a drop of rain and experience its genuineness—you can see the unconditionality of reality, which remains very simply in things as they are, very simply. When you are able to look at things without saying, “This is for me or against me,” “I can go along with this,” or “I cannot go along with this,” then you are experiencing the state of being of the cosmic mirror, the wisdom of the cosmic mirror. You may see a fly buzzing; you may see a snowflake; you may see ripples of water; you may see a black widow spider. You may see anything, but you can actually look at all of those things with simple and ordinary, but appreciative, perception.

You experience a vast realm of perceptions unfolding. There is unlimited sound, unlimited sight, unlimited taste, unlimited feeling and so on. The realm of perception is limitless, so limitless that perception itself is primordial, unthinkable, beyond thought. There are so many perceptions that they are beyond imagination. There are a vast number of sounds. There are sounds that you have never heard. There are sights and colors that you have never seen. There are feelings that you have never experienced before. There are endless fields of perception.

Perception here is not just what you perceive but the whole act of perceiving—the interaction between consciousness, the sense organs, and the sense fields, or the objects of perception. In some religious traditions, sense perceptions are regarded as problematic, because they arouse worldly desires. However, in the Shambhala tradition, which is a secular tradition rather than a religious one, sense perceptions are regarded as sacred. They are regarded as basically good. They are a natural gift, a natural ability that human beings have. They are a source of wisdom. If you don’t see sights, if you don’t hear sounds, if you don’t taste food, you have no way to communicate with the phenomenal world at all. But because of the extraordinary vastness of perception, you have possibilities of communicating with the depth of the world—the world of sight, the world of sound—the greater world.

In other words, your sense faculties give you access to possibilities of deeper perception. Beyond ordinary perception, there is super-sound, super-smell, and super-feeling existing in your state of being. These can be experienced only by training yourself in the depth of meditation practice, which clarifies any confusion or cloudiness and brings out the precision, sharpness, and wisdom of perception—the nowness of your world. In meditation, you experience the precision of breath going in and out. You feel your breath: It is
so
good. You breathe out, breath dissolves: It is so sharp and good, it is so extraordinary that ordinary preoccupations become superfluous. So meditation practice brings out the supernatural, if I may use that word. You do not see ghosts or become telepathic, but your perceptions become supernatural, simply super-natural.

Normally, we limit the meaning of perceptions. Food reminds us of eating; dirt reminds us to clean the house; snow reminds us that we have to clean off the car to get to work; a face reminds us of our love or hate. In other words, we fit what we see into a comfortable or familiar scheme. We shut any vastness or possibilities of deeper perception out of our hearts by fixating on our own interpretation of phenomena. But it is possible to go beyond personal interpretation, to let vastness into our hearts through the medium of perception. We always have a choice: We can limit our perception so that we close off vastness, or we can allow vastness to touch us.

When we draw down the power and depth of vastness into a single perception, then we are discovering and invoking magic. By magic we do not mean unnatural power over the phenomenal world, but rather the discovery of innate or primordial wisdom in the world as it is. The wisdom we are discovering is wisdom without beginning, something naturally wise, the wisdom of the cosmic mirror. In Tibetan, this magical quality of existence, or natural wisdom, is called
drala. Dra
means “enemy” or “opponent” and
la
means “above.” So
drala
literally means “above the enemy,” “beyond the enemy.” Drala is the unconditioned wisdom and power of the world that are beyond any dualism; therefore drala is above any enemy or conflict. It is wisdom beyond aggression. It is the self-existing wisdom and power of the cosmic mirror that are reflected both in us and in our world of perception.

One of the key points in discovering drala principle is realizing that your own wisdom as a human being is not separate from the power of things as they are. They are both reflections of the unconditioned wisdom of the cosmic mirror. Therefore there is no fundamental separation or duality between you and your world. When you can experience those two things together, as one, so to speak, then you have access to tremendous vision and power in the world—you find that they are inherently connected to your own vision, your own being. That is discovering magic. We are not talking here about an intellectual revelation; we are speaking of actual experience. We are talking about how we actually perceive reality. The discovery of drala may come as an extraordinary smell, a fantastic sound, a vivid color, an unnatural taste. Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully. What we see doesn’t have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real is taking place in everything.