The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (31 page)

To put it slightly differently, suppose your name is Sandy. There is “Sandy,” and there is the “world.” You don’t need a verb between them as confirmation. Just be kind to others. Sandy should be genuine. When she is the real, genuine Sandy, she can help others a lot. She may not have any training in first aid, but Sandy can put a Band-Aid on someone’s finger. Sandy is no longer afraid to help, and she is very kind and on the spot. When you begin to help others, you have raised your head and shoulders, and you’re stepping out of your cocoon. The point of the Shambhala training is not to produce fake people. The point is to become a real person who can help others.

Being in the cocoon is almost like being a child in the womb, a child who doesn’t particularly want to come out. Even after you’re born, you aren’t happy about being toilet-trained. You would prefer to stay in your nappies, your diapers. You like to have something wrapped around your bottom all the time. But eventually, your diapers are taken away. You have no choice. You have been born, and you’ve been toilet-trained; you can’t stay forever in your diapers. In fact, you might feel quite free, no longer having a diaper wrapped around your bum. You can move around quite freely. You might eventually feel quite good about being free from the tyranny that parenthood and home life impose.

Still, we don’t
really
want to develop discipline. So we begin to create this little thingy, this little cocoon. We get wrapped up in all sorts of things. When we’re in the cocoon, we don’t want to sit upright and eat with good table manners. We don’t really want to dress elegantly, and we don’t want to conform to any discipline that requires even three minutes of silence. That’s partly because of being raised in North America, where everything is built for children to entertain themselves. Entertainment is even the basis for education. If you can raise your own children outside of the cocoon, you will raise lots of bodhisattva children, children who are real and face facts and are actually able to relate with reality properly. I have done that myself with my own children, and it seems to have worked out.

As decent human beings, we face the facts of reality. Whether we are in the middle of a snowstorm or a rainstorm, whether there is family chaos, whatever problems there may be, we are willing to work them out. Looking into those situations is no longer regarded as a hassle, but it is regarded as our duty. Although helping others has been preached quite a lot, we don’t really believe we can do it. The traditional American expression, as I’ve heard it, is that we don’t want to get our fingers dirty. That, in a nutshell, is why we want to stay in the cocoon: We don’t want to get our fingers dirty. But we must do something about this world, so that the world can develop into a nonaggressive society where people can wake themselves up. Helping others is one of the biggest challenges.

I appreciate your inquisitiveness, your sense of humor, and your relaxation. Please try to elegantize yourselves and step out of the cocoon. The basic point is to become very genuine within yourselves. This means being free from the plastic world, if such a thing is possible. Also, please don’t hurt others. If you can’t do that, at least treat yourself better and don’t punish yourself by sleeping in your cocoon. Finally, please try to work with people and be helpful to them. A fantastically large number of people need help.
Please
try to help them, for goodness’ sake, for heaven and earth. Don’t just collect Oriental wisdoms one after the other. Don’t just sit on an empty zafu, an empty meditation cushion. But go out and try to help others, if you can. That is the main point.

We have to do something. We’ve
got
to do something. As we read in the newspapers and see on television, the world is deteriorating, one thing after the other, every hour, every minute, and nobody is helping very much. Your help doesn’t have to be a big deal. To begin with, just work with your friends and work with yourself at the same time. It is about time that we became responsible for this world. It will pay for itself.

1
. Sutras are discourses by the Buddha; tantras are tantric Buddhist texts ascribed to the Buddha in his ultimate, or dharmakaya, form; and shastras are philosophical commentaries on the sutras.

2
. Published in 1976 by Shambhala Publications.

Part One

PROFOUND

Primordial Stroke

ONE

A Dot in the Open Sky

Our theme here is trust. To begin with, the notion of trust is being
without suspicion.
That is the idea of trust from the dictionary’s point of view. When you trust somebody, you’re not suspicious of them at all. Trust
without suspicion
strangely comes from nowhere, but we are not talking about a mystical experience. When you trust without suspicion, what are you left with? When there’s no suspicion, what is your trust in anyway? You are right on the dot. Trust without suspicion.

W
E ARE WORTHY TO LIVE
in this world. The Shambhala journey is a process of learning to appreciate and understand this worthiness. The training is based on the discipline of uplifting and civilizing ourselves, which is partly a reflection of the buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhism provides an idea of how to handle ourselves: body, mind, speech, and livelihood all together. The Shambhala training is also a response to suffering and pain, the misery, terror, and horror that have developed throughout what is known as the setting-sun world: a world based on the fear of death, fear of oneself, and fear of others—a world that comes with lots of warnings.

We have no idea how to actually live and lead our lives in today’s society. How can we be decent human beings, dignified human beings, awake human beings? How can we conduct ourselves properly in this society, without laying trips on others or ourselves? How can we treat our children better, our husbands better, our wives better? How can we relate with our business partners better, our bosses better, our employees better? In response to those questions, the Shambhala idea of warriorship is quite practical. It is learning how to conduct our lives according to what is known as the Great Eastern Sun vision. The vision of the Great Eastern Sun is perpetually looking ahead, looking forward. Basically speaking, it is impossible not to go forward. You are always getting older—or younger. You can’t hold off your death. Beyond that, every day you learn something new. You can’t deny that. You may not have a particularly extraordinary vision every day. You may not make a billion dollars in a day—although sometimes such things come up as well! Nevertheless, there is always some kind of forward motion. There is no problem with going forward, but there is a difference between going forward and speeding recklessly. When you go forward, you go step-by-step. Recklessness is pushing yourself to do more than you can, or it is the result of impatience and being fearful. Rather than taking the time to prepare a nice meal, you eat bad fast food and get sick from it. Just go ahead. Just do it. Rebel—against something or other. There is no dignity.

Dignity is having consideration for others and being gentle to yourself and others. With gentleness, you go forward without recklessness, and the result is that you avoid any accidents. One analogy for that is riding a horse. If you have a good seat on the horse, good posture, and proper control of the reins, then as the horse moves forward, you and the horse are synchronized, so that the horse never bucks and throws you off. Your gait is fantastic. Walk, and everything is controlled. You sit in the saddle as if you were on a throne. You have a good relationship with the horse, and your riding is good. In the Shambhala world, when mind and body are synchronized, you never mess up anybody else’s situation. Recklessness is destroying other people’s state of mind as well as your own. With Great Eastern Sun vision, that is out of the question. So the Shambhala training is learning how to be gentle to ourselves and others and learning why that
works
better. This particular training process educates us to become very decent human beings so that we can work with domestic situations and with our emotional life properly. We can synchronize our mind and body together, and without resentment or aggression, with enormous gentleness, we treat ourselves so well. In that way, we celebrate life properly.

The Shambhala path involves individual training. You might say that there is no new message here and that you’ve heard these things before, which may be true. There is no new message, particularly, or new trick. But the point here is to
actualize
. That in itself is a new message—which might be a new trick as well. People may give you lots of advice, trying to help you be good. They keep saying, “How’re you doing? Take it easy. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK.” But nobody knows
how
to make that so. Can you really take it easy? Are you really going to be OK? This training presents how to do it. It presents the real heart of the matter. By joining the basic Buddhist-oriented practice of sitting meditation with the appreciation of our lives, there is no discrepancy between dealing with ourselves and dealing with others at all.

Our theme here is trust. To begin with, the notion of trust is being
without suspicion
. That is the idea of trust from the dictionary’s point of view. When you trust somebody, you’re not suspicious of them at all. Trust
without suspicion
strangely comes from nowhere, but we are not talking about a mystical experience. When you trust without suspicion, what are you left with? When there’s no suspicion, what is your trust
in
anyway? You are right on the dot. Trust without suspicion.

When you are suspicious of someone or something, then you study that person or situation, and you say to yourself, “Suppose this happens. Then that might happen. If that happens, then this might happen.” You imagine possible scenarios, you build up your logical conclusions, and you create a plan to rid yourself of any potential danger—which prevents any form of trust. In our case, the idea of trust without suspicion involves giving up any possibilities of a warning system for danger at all. In the Shambhala context, we are talking about unconditional trust. Unconditional trust means, first of all, that your own situation is trustworthy. You are as you are. Karen Doe is a good Karen Doe. Joe Schmidt is a good Joe Schmidt, a trustworthy Joe Schmidt. You trust in your existence and in your training. You
are
trustworthy; therefore, you can work with others. You don’t have to pollute the world or give in to any indulgence at all.

Unconditional trust: We are capable of being good, kind, gentle, and loving, either to ourselves or to others. Why so? Because we have a gap somewhere in our state of mind. You might be the most cruel and mean person in history—a terrible person—but you are capable of falling in love. There is that possibility—not even possibility, but there
is
that actuality already. We are capable of being kind, loving, and gentle. In the English language, usually those words—
kind, loving, gentle
—refer purely to ethics or to our actions alone. But here those terms refer to our fundamental state of mind. With the state of mind of kindness and gentleness, we are capable of falling in love; we are capable of being gentle; we are capable of shaking hands with someone and saying, “Hello. How are you today?” That little capability—how little it may be! But we
have
something there. We are not complete monsters. We
do
occasionally smile. We look at someone, and we feel good. It may be only for a short period, but we have something in ourselves, and if we cultivate that experience, that dot of goodness, that spot, then we find that we have a dot in the open sky.

That dot was not produced by anybody. It wasn’t part of our education or our upbringing or our relationship with our family or our love affairs. It’s not part of our love of good food or good clothing. But that very soft spot, that tinge of something, is a dot in the sky. The dot is always there; it’s primordial. We didn’t even inherit it.
Inherited
means that something is handed down by generations. But in this case, we simply
have
it. Therefore, it is called the primordial, unconditional dot. That dot exists in a
big
sky. Often, we think it is a small sky, and we think the dot is just a mishap of some kind. We think it’s an accident that we have that soft spot.
It
didn’t mean it. We can just cover it up and forget it altogether. But there is a good dot in the sky, and that very dot is primordial, unconditioned basic goodness.

The dot is also the
source
of basic goodness, its fuse or starting point. Out of that primordial experience, we begin to realize basic goodness. To begin with, whenever there is a dot, it is unconditional. You can’t say whether it is bad or good, but it is so. Then out of that dot of unconditional goodness comes the second level of basic goodness, which is the state of mind that is
willing,
always willing, to do things. To begin with, you are willing to acknowledge basic goodness. The obstacles to willingness are laziness and selfishness, which are a temporary patchwork that covers up the dot. But fundamentally, underneath that, there is always willingness. You are willing to sacrifice yourself for somebody else. On a certain day, you might feel terribly uptight. Then you feel your dot. After that, you might end up saying to somebody, “Hello. How are you?”

That willingness is almost an automatic thing, not something that you have to crank up, but a basic human instinct that happens all the time. Habitual patterns of neurosis don’t provide any real obstacles to it. The pattern of habitual neurosis is to hold back, be uptight, and maintain your “thingy.” But such neurosis doesn’t reach very far fundamentally at all, because willingness is a natural reflex. You’re driving with a friend in the middle of the night, and you look out the window of the car and see a shooting star. You think that your friend hasn’t seen it, so without thinking, without hesitation, you say, “Did you see
that
?” Willingness and the dot take place at virtually the same time. The dot is the inspiration. It provides a connection, an inspiration, to being fundamentally good. Boing! You feel that you are you. Therefore, you can treat other people as you treat yourself. The dot is first thought. There’s always the number zero. That’s the dot. Otherwise, the rest of the numbers can’t happen. That’s it: the beginning of the beginning.