Transcending Madness by Chogyam Trungpa

Author:Chogyam Trungpa [Chögyam Trungpa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780834821583
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

NINE

The Lonely Journey

SINCE THIS PARTICULAR SESSION is going to be the last one, I think we should try to develop further perspective, or view, as to what we have discussed and its application to everyday life. Of course, everyone must go through different phases of so-called normality and so-called abnormality, such as tension, depression, happiness, and spirituality. All these phases that we go through constantly seem to be what we have been talking about in this seminar. Unless we are able to apply this to everyday life, there is no point to it. Often, before we begin to apply it to anything, certain reminders come up to show us whether we are going too fast or going too slow. I’m not talking in terms of divine power or psychic phenomena of any kind, but the kitchen-sink level—conflicts of the bedroom and conflicts of the sink. Such situations are always present, but on the other hand we are left completely alone—without help, without a sympathizer, without a comforter.

It is important to see that this journey is a lonely journey. We are alone, completely alone, by ourselves. Nobody is really, fundamentally, going to comfort us at all. For that matter, nobody is really going to show us the path. There are a lot of big deals. People make a big deal about transmission or sudden enlightenment—but even that is interdependent. Transmission is a meeting of two minds: you come halfway, the teacher comes halfway, and you meet. It is very much dependent on personal effort. So any kind of savior notion is not going to function one hundred percent at all. Transmission has to be interdependent because we are trying to relate with something. As soon as we decide to relate with anything, there has to be judgment, relative criteria: how we are going to relate, how open we are, how much ground we are allowing to relate to the space. That is always apparent, it always happens that way.

In the same way, as we relate more, external situations come to us. We begin to learn; we begin to receive the instructions of the situation as it is. But we can’t re-create such situations at all. Situations come up and vanish of their own accord, and we have to work along with them by not grasping, by not being fascinated by them. That doesn’t mean that we have to be frigid, or rigid for that matter, and fail to communicate with situations. It seems that the whole thing is extremely simple. Therefore, it is too complicated to get into it by using the language of the mind of complications, the logic of that and this, this and that, “On the other hand, let’s look at it that way,” and so on. The reason we are suffering is that we are so involved with strategy or planning rather than actually putting this into practice as it is.

This whole series of situations, the six types of bardo experience, is present all the time. There is the domestic problem of the hungry ghosts, in terms of comfort, luxury, hunger, and thirst.

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