The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (21 page)

The absolute truth of egolessness does not need any of those comforts. But that is actually a very dangerous thing to mention at this point. I have my reservations as to whether I should talk about these things, and since I have lost my boss, I have no one to talk to. So I decided to go ahead and tell you. A sense of empty-heartedness takes place when we lose our reference point. If you do not have any reference point at all, you have nothing to work with, nothing to compare with, nothing to fight, nothing to try to subtract or add into your system at all. You find yourself absolutely nowhere, just empty heart, big hole in your brain. Your nervous system doesn’t connect with anything, and there’s no logic particularly, just empty heart. That empty-heartedness could be regarded in some circles as an attack of the evil ones and in other circles as an experience of satori, or sudden enlightenment.

People actually have no idea what non-reference-point experience is. When you begin to abandon all possibilities of any kind of reference point that would comfort you, tell you to do something, help you to see through everything, make you a better and greater person—when you lose all those reference points, including your ambition, the strangest thing takes place. Usually people think that if you lose everything—your ambition, your self-centeredness, your integrity and dignities—you will become a vegetable, a jellyfish. But it’s not so. You don’t become a jellyfish. Instead, you are suspended in space, in a big hole of some kind. It is quite titillating. Big hole of suspension! It’s as if you were suspended in outer space without a space suit or rocket ship. You are just floating and circulating around the planets forever and ever.

That sense of suspension is the ground, according to the non-reference-point view of how to perceive absolute symbolism. That experience of suspension is the canvas or the blackboard where you paint your pictures, your symbolism. It is the basic ground. You can only begin from there. It is the empty stage you can perform on. I’m not saying that you flip into that state of mind, and you are stuck with that particular experience for the rest of your life, necessarily. But we do have such a state of mind; such an experience occurs all the time. Throughout our life there are occasional experiences of this black hole, suspended space, where we have no reference point. No matter how much we kick, how hard we try to push, how hard we breathe, we don’t get anywhere. We’re just suspended in a vacuum. Such an experience takes place with everybody, all the time. But nobody has realized that from that experience you can cultivate your potential artistic talent, your dharma art visual appreciation, and begin to experience symbolism altogether. That idea has occurred to very few people. It has only occurred to our grandparents, the holders of the lineage, the people who made the symbols and experienced the symbols personally. They actually executed them, so this is not so much doctrine as the personal experience of our grandparents and great-great-grandparents, who experienced that black hole frequently. Out of that black hole of egolessness and no-discursive-thought, a color occurred, a symbol occurred, or a fraction of a symbol occurred.

Traditionally speaking, a symbol occurs because a symbol is unborn, unceasing, and its nature is like the sky, like space. Those are the three principles of absolute symbolism.
Unborn
means that symbolism cannot happen if there is no place to give birth to symbolism. Space can give birth to symbolism, because symbolism did not exist and does not exist. Because of its nonexistence, there is immense energy and power to create an image of nonexistence. So images of immense power and immense clarity, sharp-edged and crystal clear, take place.
Unceasing
means that symbolism cannot die once it has been given birth to within the level of nonexistence. Symbolism cannot die; it remains in the hearts of all human beings—all sentient beings, in fact. Symbolism is everlasting, but nobody has to nurture it, nurse it, or hold on to it. Third, since its nature is like the sky, like space, people can execute such symbolism from their own experience, their own perception. So giving birth to absolute symbolism requires no-mind, which is big mind, great mind. This may sound like complete gibberish, but it makes a lot of sense. The idea of nonexistence also being highly existent, eternally existing, is very tricky. It is a very powerful statement.

In that projection into space, there are no materials, no constituents out of which to make your symbols. For instance, you might be watching a dead dog, and that whole perception is an experience of nothing happening. We are not talking about the psychological functioning of a holy man, an enlightened person, or a buddha. We are talking about our own perceptions: we can experience this too, it’s right here, we could do it. When you experience a dead dog bleeding, its teeth showing and somewhat dirty, its fur covered with dust, and its innards slowly coming out, skin torn, and blood running onto the ground—if you look at it from a conceptual point of view, it’s a terrible idea. It’s not artistic to talk about such a terrible subject. I am certain we shouldn’t talk about such things; we are too genteel to talk about such dirty things. You mustn’t even mention death or blood; you only do that when you swear. However, it is blank mind that projects the vision of a dead dog lying on the ground. It may be revolting, and sometimes interestingly colorful, expecting possibilities of the future. Nevertheless, behind that whole thing there is a space of nothing actually happening, because you are so shocked.

We can look at a beautiful rose with its gentle petals, velvetlike, but not as rough as velvet. It is so delicate and beautiful, like an infant’s tongue. It is fantastically fresh and beautiful and sends out its fragrance. We could see little tears sitting all over it, the dew of the morning slowly melting and finally becoming an adornment of that particular rose flower. An occasional breeze sways it back and forth and gives it a sense of being alive. A beautiful rose flower. You are so fascinated, so appreciative of that particular image. In looking at that rose, there is exactly the same perspective of empty mind that takes place in watching the dead dog.

Although I’m sure you don’t really want to associate those two things—one is horrible and one is so beautiful—you are still doing the same thing all the time. If you watch a beautiful rose or if you watch a dead dog bleeding with its innards out, the same experience of blankness takes place. That is where symbolism actually begins to occur in your state of mind. When you first perceive something, there is a shock of no conceptual mind operating at all. Then something begins to occur. You begin to perceive: whether you like it or not, you begin to see colors and perceptions, to open your eyes. So that non-reference-point mind can become highly powerful and extraordinarily sensitive.

That is an interesting point of view, and it can be conducted in ordinary human situations. For instance, my own students like to find out where things are going wrong. They have lots of complaints—very intelligent complaints, not just ordinary complaints. Because of that, their intelligence begins to heighten, so that their complaints do not become real complaints but an expression of clarity, or clear-mindedness. So we are not talking about the perceptions of the Buddha, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, or the great tantric masters. We are talking about the principles of perception. In order to realize unconditional symbolism, we have to appreciate the empty gap of our state of mind and how we begin to project ourselves into that non–reference point.

Coloring Our World

If we are to be able to perceive symbolism, we have to abandon
this
so that we become completely with
that
—the events of life, the expressions of life, the colorful play of life. That seems to be the basic point
.

I
N OUR LIVES
, there is a lot of symbolism, or reminders, so to speak. Sometimes we miss them, and sometimes we experience them. And when we experience them, sometimes we experience them incorrectly and sometimes correctly. It seems to depend on the dogma of the situation, which leads us to the topic of obstacles to realizing symbolism.

An important obstacle to experiencing symbolism is expectations. We have been brought up with all kinds of reference points and frameworks of ideas, which we use to try to recapture the crucial experiences that highlight our lives. For instance, we would like to recapture our lover by identifying our lover with some symbol, concept, or connotation. And we would like to relate with our parents, our sisters and brothers, and our friends in this same way. In a constant attempt to make our lives worthwhile, we try to make each thing that comes up into a highlight, the best possible situation. It could be the time we spent in the hospital, the time somebody told us about some person, the time we had with our teacher in school, whatever. We make these things into very interesting highlights—but in doing so we are missing the point of symbolism.

We experience some shift or breakthrough in our minds in
every
situation, whether it is an experience induced by psychedelic drugs or a natural experience such as a personal dilemma, personal revelation, or personal tragedy. Then we turn
some
of these experiences into highlights. And often, one particular highlight becomes a crucial password in our lives, a turning point. “The first time I had that experience I felt fantastic! It struck me like a bolt from the blue!” But whether an experience is ordinary or extraordinary,
every
experience is regarded as a message. It is not like a telegram from Western Union, announcing that somebody died or got married; it is a message of the natural situation. Since it is a natural message, therefore we decided to call it symbolism.

In relating to natural symbolism, the fault arises from your sense of personal expectations. You would like to see yourself playing a certain role in society—or within yourself, for that matter. You would like to be such-and-such a person, playing such-and-such a role. Of course, you could easily say that you do not have any expectations. But the desire not to have expectations only becomes another form of expectation. In fact, that is a great expectation, because you begin to feel that not having expectations is the best way to attain your expectations. So expectations are a stumbling block. We color and reedit our experiences drastically. How do we do that? We do it with our passion, aggression, and ignorance.

Passion colors our expectations with desire. We see whatever is connected to us in terms of warmth, friendliness, and congeniality. We are constantly trying to mold our expectations in terms of what we want. The rest of what we hear is completely inaudible; the rest of what we see is completely invisible. We only take in what we want to see and hear. Expectations also take the form of aggression, or rejecting. Whatever we see or hear is constantly subject to our rejection. We would like to push away anything presented to us as either logically or personally inapplicable. We reject all those facts and figures, so we can’t hear and we can’t see. Another form of expectation is known as ignorance, according to traditional Buddhist language. Here this is a sense of basic panic, basic bewilderment, basic pain. We are completely numbed by the situation, so we can’t hear or see. We can’t even reject or accept. Instead, whenever a situation does not suit our requirements, we automatically create a mental block to shut it off. We are confused and terrified by all those uncertainties.

These three types of experience—passion, aggression, and ignorance—occur in our minds because behind all that there is a governing factor, which is our belief in “I,” “me.” “Me” or “I” is not very visionary: it’s very personal, very domestic, and very petty. “I” would like to do certain things. “I” would like to experience certain things. Whenever that word
I
flashes in our mind, our experience is that we are willing to employ any one of those three convenient tactics: passion, aggression, or ignorance. We are willing to employ any of those possible tactics so that “I” can be preserved. In that way, “I” cannot be challenged; “I” cannot be manipulated by such undesirable situations as the nonexistence of “I” or the possibility of giving up territory altogether. That is the general problem that takes place. Whenever there is the word “I,” “me,” or “I am,” there is a sense of thisness, which is extremely strong. Therefore, our sense of thatness has to be conditioned by whatever is experienced by
this
. So we begin to have problems with
that
. We try to reject it, which is an expression of aggression; we try to magnetize it or suck it in, which is an expression of passion; or we ignore the whole thing, which is an expression of ignorance. Since expectations relate with passion, aggression, and ignorance, if you could see through their particular games, then the expectations themselves would be transparent. It’s a question of clarity, as well as self-confidence.

The experience of I, me, a personal existence, ego, self, whatever you want to call it, has a sense of immense fundamental pain. You don’t want to exist, you don’t want to be, but you can’t help it. Children often complain to their parents: “Why did you bring me into this world! What am I doing here! Who am I?” There is a lot of resentment toward existence; self-existence is a painful point. Sometimes mystical traditions talk about a fantastic rediscovery of self, rediscovering who I am. But if you look at that as purely rediscovering your identity, that mystical experience becomes another push to play spiritual games, I’m afraid.

The fundamental effect of ego and its tricks is becoming hardened. It actually prevents the sensitivity of experiencing the total, complete reality of symbolism. Of course, from the realm of ego, you can manufacture your own little symbolism, your own little messages. But that’s just adding to your confusion, rather than seeing absolute symbolism. If we are to be able to perceive symbolism, we have to abandon
this
so that we become completely with
that
—the events of life, the expressions of life, the colorful play of life. That seems to be the basic point.