The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (86 page)

S3:
One of the difficulties here at Lama [Foundation], I think, is so many different approaches. Some people prefer much more emotional expression, like dancing, and getting very excited or feeling very good. Other people have different ideas.

R:
The bhakti approach is obviously almost tantric, very advanced. The Hindu approach is almost tantric, and Sufism, sort of tantric. It’s kind of returning again to the ape instinct, and using that as a transcendental one, which is very advanced. Buddhism warns that it becomes too easy, too much a sedative, so that you are not able to experience any real truth. The truth is purely associated with pleasure, like the mother is associated with milk.

S4:
Isn’t there in Buddhism, in the primary recognition of suffering in the world, almost a built-in bias which deflects you from the bhakti? The Sufi bhakti may have the same recognition, but the recognition would be that there is joy and celebration of that. I had a very difficult time dealing with those primary realizations of Buddhism, because I felt that they did bias the path that you would then travel. The recognition of suffering, and the recognition of the cause of suffering, and cessation of suffering. All of that seemed a focus which was conscious, deliberate, and intentional, and would take you somewhere. If it didn’t completely subdue it, it deflected the ecstatic devotional being which doesn’t seem to differentiate between suffering and joy. Is that clear? Do I misunderstand that primary recognition of the nature of the world?

Rinpoche:
When Buddhism talks about suffering, it’s a larger suffering, it’s talking about the area from which both pain and pleasure come. You have to maintain something. You have to maintain pleasure or try to get away from pain. So it refers to the speed rather than the pain.

S4:
To the speed?

R:
Yes, the speed or unnecessary longing, which brings, fundamentally, discomfort. You have to maintain the world, try to get away from the pain and maintain pleasure. So it’s not so much of allegiance toward anything, but acknowledging that there is a fundamental confusion.

Student 5:
It seems if you accept the idea of pain as existence, then it seems more possible to accept everything that comes up, depression or anxiety or fear.

S3:
The other way is to accept it as a gift from God or something like that. I think it’s a way to celebrate.

S5:
Even doubt?

S3:
I don’t know.

S5:
I’m not really trying to delineate. What I’m trying to interject is another possibility of accepting suffering, and that is that you’re never in the wrong place if you accept suffering as a truth.

S3:
I’ve read somewhere that
dukha
was wrongly translated as pain, and it actually means a split or a fracture or a separation.

R: Dukha
in ordinary usage means pain. In the Buddhist context it’s the fundamental confusion.

S3:
Confusion?

R:
Yes, it’s the duality. The split.

S3:
Refusal in some way.

R:
Yes, constantly trying to maintain individual existence. Holding on to that which is very hectic, and fundamentally it becomes cosmic worry. You have to keep up with it all the time. It’s a kind of awareness which keeps you from opening, because you have something to lose or become vulnerable.

S4:
It sounds very very different if you’re fundamentally a Christian. You have accepted Christ as having healed the division. The Christian doesn’t see the world as confused or divided, that’s his fundamental acceptance of Christ, Christ’s spirit. It allows him to see the world as healed. It seems very different; because if you see that way, then all of your experiencing of it is very different than if what you see is the fundamental confusion. It’s just like if I take my glasses off or put my glasses on. If I put them on, I deal with the world of very distinct entities, clearly defined edges that I walk through and make my way around. If I take my glasses off, I see colors and light continually merging, and I walk through that and I don’t have any sense of distinctions, except the memory of what it was like with my glasses on. To me that seems like what we’re talking about. You can wear glasses and have sharp, discriminating vision or take them off and because of some accident of physiology or whatever be able to see the fundamental flowing unity.

S3:
But what happens if a car comes down the highway?

S4:
It depends. I drive with my glasses on, but that’s because I accept the responsibility for maintaining that world. I could take my glasses off; I’ve done it with acid where I no longer accepted the responsibility of the car or killing someone. It just didn’t matter and it was fine. Maybe it was just an act of faith. Take your glasses off and do it. I’m not so sure it’s any different.

R:
Well, I think that there is still some acknowledgment in the Christian way that the fundamental split could possibly happen. You have the choice to have devotion. If you couldn’t do it and you’re still separated, it comes down to Christ. Then there’s you and Christ, which is the same as the original split in Buddhism. Also the sense of clarity and confusion seems to be interdependent. If you develop clarity, that means there is some reference point. You got glasses when you couldn’t see. That’s why glasses came about.

S4:
What couldn’t I see? I got glasses because there were certain things I wanted to see or expected to see, a way of seeing that I’d been conditioned to accept.

R:
That’s the whole point, that there is a kind of secondary truth. Even the discriminating perceptions may be false, fundamentally. Until you see the background where the split was nonexistent. There was a split because there wasn’t a split, until you go back and back. Then anything you try to do after the split will become artificial. The tantric term for nonduality is
advaya,
not-two. It’s the same as the idea of the third noble truth, the goal, the enlightened state, which is not-two.

When Buddhism talks about the fundamental world of split, that’s called the relative world, the world from our point of view. But then there is also the noblest point of view. So fundamentally it’s not a split, but a seeming split which is misunderstood; and we are constantly maintaining that misunderstanding as if it were a fact.

S4:
And Buddhism leaves open the conclusion. If it’s not two, then we know zero; and that’s just simply left open?

R:
Left open, that’s the noblest point of view. If you begin to make it into somebody’s point of view, then it becomes two again, and you’re not even two yourself.

S3:
You mentioned something about the figure/ground. We usually see the figure and not the ground? Before you said something about not seeing the ground?

R:
Yes, on the level of the split. There seem to be several types of grounds, like the ground of the planet Earth and the ground of outer space, which are relative things. There is a seemingly relative ground which generally functions, but there is still a basic split. We have a point of reference which is also based on another point of reference as ground. The fundamental ground seems to be where reference doesn’t apply anymore, where all the other points of reference come from, that functions simultaneously with secondary ground. It becomes a way to maintain secondary ground. The secondary ground has to have an atmosphere to function within, to survive, which comes from non-ground, the basic ground. At that point the realization of confusion doesn’t apply anymore.

S3:
Is that shunyata?

R:
Even shunyata is a slightly directed idea; it’s emptiness of something.
Dharmakaya
is also a conditioned word because we have to have a form of dharma. In tantric terms it’s vajradhatu, indestructible space, or dharmadhatu; all the names and laws can function within it and not be conditioned by it. It seems that the ground cannot be experienced.

S3:
Can it only experience itself?

R:
In order to experience that ground, you have to undo old experience. When the old experiences cease to function, are nonexistent, that’s the kind of thing it is, because the ground has no allegiance to anything.

S3:
There was a Hasidic rabbi here who spoke about the seventh level of God, that God doesn’t even know Himself.

R:
Because there’s no point of reference.

S3:
So He manifests to know Himself.

R:
Then God and the Devil and others could exist.

S1:
Is there a function in meditation of conceptualizing, theorizing, bringing together logical concepts, and seeing how things would be in a place you’re not yet perceiving? I might talk about the seventh level and relate it to the sixth, whereas I’m not perceiving it; it’s something I’m theorizing. Is there a place in meditation for theory, is there a value in it?

R:
There is koan practice in Rinzai Zen, and things like that, where intellect is used in subtly trying to understand something; then finally the intellect short-circuits itself. We could almost say that the function of intellect, in understanding the dharma, is to liberate itself. Finally you begin to realize that speculation does not apply, so you give up hope.

S1:
You mean, by practicing speculation you become familiar with it. You go into its nature. You understand its nature and then you can go beyond it?

R:
The intellect plays an important part. If you don’t use it then, you are missing out on a big area. So use every faculty that there is. Emotion can be used as well; you begin to realize that the goal of emotion becomes itself, which short-circuits emotions.

S1:
It seems that sometimes the intellect is used to gather, to collect the information. After a point it starts to become useless because that’s all you’re doing, just gaining more and more facts. You become an expert in this and that. It seems there’s a place where the intellect wants to be used in another way. It wants to be used to perceive right now in a very instantaneous way that hasn’t much to do with the future and the past.

R:
In the end, when you’ve made all the discoveries, you begin to realize that there’s still a split between you and knowledge, and you look at that. At that point the intellect ceases to function as analytical mind and attains a more intuitive level.

S1:
But it is necessary for the intellectual mind to naturally clear itself out and see its own uselessness through practice?

R:
Yes, I think so. Otherwise, if you stop doing it, then you have some unfinished business.

II

Rinpoche:
The latest development that happened in the Christian Church, particularly among the Catholics, was Teilhard de Chardin, who became an extremely exciting figure in Christendom because he spoke scientific language and at the same time he could conduct prayer. There was a historical moment when Teilhard de Chardin conducted services on the beach with several thousand people taking part in it. He was a scientific person and at the same time he was a Jesuit priest, which seems to be extremely valuable for Christians. Also, the Bishop of Woolwich, Bishop Robinson, wrote a book called
Honest to God
which was tremendously revolutionary. He could still be a bishop in the Anglican Church in England, which was very extraordinary. It seems to make for a very strange kind of reaction, that the church has so much concern for public relations with the scientific world, whereas Buddhists wouldn’t pay attention. Bishop Robinson’s book from a Buddhist point of view wouldn’t be particularly surprising. It would be regarded as just one revolutionary thing—which shows somewhat that Christianity is too self-consciously trying to be accepted in the modern world.

Student 4:
What I hear you saying really is that there is something that is knowable. When you talk about using the scientific approach, the underlying assumption is the Buddha as a model for a kind of self-examination process. There is an assumption that there is something knowable; and that in each experiment we move closer to it. In a sense there’s a denial of mystery, is that right?

R:
Yes, I think so. That’s the thing about the mystical approach—the very fact of its being mysterious is because it’s knowable, otherwise we couldn’t even comprehend such unknowable things at all. If the unknowable is within the realm of knowable, the possibilities have to be proved, examined, worked on, like the scriptures talk about. It should be good gold, beaten, hammered, burned, and then finally it becomes pure gold. That seems to be the ultimate protection from charlatanism. Nobody can con anybody. It has to become real, thorough, and workable. You can save yourself from expending too much energy on purely blind faith. Nothing is a mystery from that point of view. But its knowableness might become a mystery—how much can you know, how much can you understand—and you should give yourself time rather than immediately just being zapped by some understanding, some wisdom. It takes a sequential process. That’s why the approach of Buddhism does not begin with tantric practice of visualization or a magical approach, but starts from a lower level, and gradually builds up. Just purely meditating, you simply have to be able to manufacture, create your own herukas. Buddhism is not speaking for itself alone, but is minding the business of other spiritual practices. Spirituality has to be a gradual process; experience of pain to begin with, then experience of the openness and finally realizing the mystical approach to reality in a general sense.

S4:
Could we talk without any names, Rinpoche? I mean, not “Buddhism,” not “Christianity,” or “meditation,” but let’s go over it a little bit and try to run through what has been said. What’s been said is we’re here because what else is there to do . . .