The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (26 page)

Aggression acts like a big veil preventing us from seeing the precision of the functioning of absolute symbolism, as well as relative symbolism. And the only possible remedy, according to the traditional approach, is surrendering. That seems to be the only way to overcome aggression. Surrendering does not mean reducing yourself to a child jumping into someone’s lap, looking for parents. Surrendering is simply wanting to give, to let go of all kinds of personal trips, economic trips, and spiritual trips involved in holding back. Holding back, or aggression, only makes us more blind. So giving up, opening, surrendering, is very important, because you finally begin to let go of your aggression. You begin to say, “Get the hell out!”

You feel you would like to give, to open, to take a leap. Depending on the level of your understanding, that might even mean giving in to your own aggression, letting that aggression take you over. You couldn’t care less. You have some faith and trust in the basic truth coming from the lineage that actually speaks the truth of nonaggression. It is such a relief when you begin to give and give and give. I don’t mean the conventional idea of giving, where if you have ten dollars in your bank account, you might give five and keep the other five for your upkeep. Giving away fifty percent of your aggression and reserving the other fifty percent for holding your trip together is not quite enough. You have to give up the whole thing. And each time you give, your vision begins to clear, and there’s less of a filter over your pupils; your hearing begins to clear, and there’s less wax on your eardrums. So you begin to hear and see much better as you give up more and more of this uptightness, this holding back, this resentment. You’re not doing anybody a favor particularly, and there is no one to say thank you, like a country parson thanking you for giving money to the church, which may seem fake. You don’t give it to anybody; you just give it away without expecting anything in return. You just give, give, give, let go. Each time you give, more clarity takes place, and you are better able to see the real meaning of symbolism. The twofold reality of relative and absolute symbolism can be seen very clearly.

Giving and opening oneself is not particularly painful, when you begin to do it. But the idea of giving and opening is very painful. When you are asked to give, to take a leap, it feels terrible. You don’t want to do it, although you are somewhat tickled by the idea. “Maybe I’ll make some kind of breakthrough or maybe I’ll lose everything.” Let’s go along with that inquisitive mind and give, open further, open completely! Sooner or later we’re going to do it, so the sooner the better. I hope this is not too complicated. Basically the only thing we are discussing is giving. It is quite simple: giving and the absence of aggression.

Once you give, once you open your eyes and ears and everything is completely cleaned up, when everything has been seen through completely, the end result is a sudden experience of precision. It is so precise and clear that it is like getting new spectacles or a new hearing aid. The whole thing becomes so precise and so direct that it’s painful. You want to go back to your old fucked-up system: “I’d rather be deaf than hear this. I’d rather be blind than see that.” In some sense, that is like what the entire older generation is saying, because they don’t want to see their children growing up in their own way. That is a problem for a lot of parents. So we end up in a very complicated situation. We are seeing so much that we can’t handle it—things are so precise, so direct, and so true. “How can we protect ourselves from the truth? Let’s run back and reject the whole thing, let’s lie a little bit. Let’s cover our heads with blankets and pretend nothing has happened and go back to the past, the fantastic, dirty, neurotic, juicy, good old days. We prefer that.” It is very possible that we would like to go back and degrade ourselves. If we are forced to see too much, we would like to reduce ourselves to infants, go back to our mother’s womb and become an embryo, or maybe a sperm, and then just disappear altogether. But we can do better than that.

Let’s face the facts of reality and its precision, which is so irritating and powerful. Once we begin to experience its workings and the texture, once we really perceive it, it is no longer problematic. The reason it could become problematic is because we are not inquisitive enough to perceive the symbolism or signs that come up or occur to us. But we now can experience the symbolism precisely and directly. Having taken the leap, having abandoned home ground, you are like a naked child without preconceptions. You can experience the symbolism on the spot. You can do that. You are clear, precise, and direct. And that precision becomes very powerful and important.

Let’s not complain about the past; it is such a waste of energy. You could do a lot of things for humankind if you could come out and be precise. Let us face the world without wearing sunglasses. Take off your glasses and perceive the light. That is very much needed. You can do so much, not only for yourself but for others. You could contribute so much help and service to people who are suffering, who are trapped in all kinds of problems. You are not dead yet, and you can’t pretend to be dead. Sometimes you might feel you would like to join the dead world so nobody would bother you, but it’s not as simple as that. There is life after death. Things are not as simple as you think. You can’t just act on impulse. You have to give more.

So please pay some consideration to this mutual world of ours. We create this world mutually. Maybe it’s not so good, not so beautiful, but it’s not so bad either—it’s a regular world. You can get along in this world, and once you begin to relate with the world, you can appreciate the idea of symbolism. Aggression and paranoia, being unable to leap, are obstacles to symbolism. But once we stop rejecting the world, the world begins to pounce on us. Symbolism is imposed on us. Realizations and perceptions of all kinds of realities begin to take shape. There is symbolism right and left and front and back.

Self-Existing Humor

The separation between “you” and “I,” you and your world, you and your God, is cut through by a sense of humor
.

I
T IS VERY IMPORTANT
to appreciate your world: the place you live, your lifestyle, your style of cooking, your style of viewing the visual world altogether. Basically, you’ve got to know who you are and what you are, to begin with; otherwise, you will just be another agent selling the dharma for your own benefit. If you appreciate your world, then you might pick something up that personally benefits your spiritual journey and increases your wisdom. You could see the world as it is, with its own perspective, and with a touch of insight. You could learn how to look at a needle on a pine tree, how to smell a raccoon, how to drink a cup of tea, how to feel your hair, your dress, your clothes, how to touch your feet on the ground, how to walk. At the perceptual level, everything is artistic in some sense, but there has to be communication and real perception. Without that we have a big barrier. I don’t feel like talking to anybody, if they have no actual interest in life. If you’re only interested in recapturing information about thangkas, you would be better off studying Mexican cooking or learning how to make horseshoes. Symbolism is not simply an art-school project—it’s much more serious than that. There is a lot of power behind the whole thing.

Certain energies take place in you when you begin to view visual dharma. Having understood symbolism in general and your perceptual world—the world of phenomena that is colorful, nasty, exciting, helpful, and all the rest—something actually takes place in your visual perception. You can’t avoid it. We are trying to take that particular essence and work with it. The essence of that perception is not a work of art but a lifestyle that can be shared throughout your life. Walking on the sidewalk, crossing at the red light, watching your eggs in the frying pan, listening to the tea kettle whistling—the little things in life are the most important.

Ultimately, there are three levels to viewing symbolism or visual dharma. These levels apply to dharma painting as well as the dharma pictures that exist spontaneously in your life. First you need a
sense of humor
, which is based on an understanding as to how things work. Ordinarily, people have the idea that humor means you must be laughing at somebody behind their back, or that you think everything is corny and funny and doesn’t make any sense. There is immense aggression in that; such humor is crude and resentful. But in this case, humor is some kind of delight. We begin to learn something about how reality works, not by studying scholastically but by perceiving how humor exists within the cosmic world. With that kind of humor, we begin to see through the separateness of me and others, others and me. The separation between “you” and “I,” you and your world, you and your God, is cut through by a sense of humor. That is the basic point.

After that we come up with the second level:
basic space
, in which humor is self-existent. We begin to see the manifestation of a cosmic structure. It is very personal, very ordinary, and very matter-of-fact—nothing divine or blissed out, particularly. There is some kind of complete, open space, ground that has never been messed up by plowing or by sowing seeds—complete virgin territory.

At the third level, experience becomes much more realistic, much more grounded and personal. The perceiver, or person with a sense of humor, is beginning to be able to relate with things as they are very closely and precisely. That
precision
has all kinds of sharp edges. The idea of peace, the idea of harmony, the idea of aggression or negativity—all things are included. So visual dharma is based on having these three foundations: a nonindividualistic sense of humor, a sense of all-pervasive space, and an appreciation of the play of phenomena.

At the beginning, there is a person with a sense of humor. Then there is a perception—which is a big, wide-open, empty sky, bright blue in color. Finally, there is a little comet coming out of the blue sky—or maybe a little cloud, or maybe a little bird begins to fly, or a bigger bird, or an airplane. Something takes place in your openness that begins to change the mood. The openness is acknowledged by the different tones of energy that take place. Peaceful energy is benevolent, pacifying, harmless. There is a sense of warmth and encouragement. Wrathful energy is mocking, exposing. Our caricature is exposed and starts to churn up. Sometimes it’s savage and deadly; sometimes it’s dignified and powerful. That all takes place quite simply.

Then, having already developed those experiences, we have some sense of understanding the teachings of enlightenment. We begin to appreciate reality in its fullest sense. All the experiences we are going through are somewhat workable. And it is not just your lonely trip, but somebody has done it already. Somebody has the idea and the information and the lineage behind it. So there is a sense of the warmth of the guru, helper, spiritual friend, elder, master, medicine man, or whatever you’d like to call it. Finally, you come down to earth, where those experiences are not all that outrageous or fantastic, but
real
.

Outrageousness

I don’t think you learn dharma art, you discover it; and you do not teach dharma art, but you set up an environment so it can be discovered
.

D
HARMA ART IS BASED
on energy and conviction. In this regard, the perceptions of everyday life are seen as a resource, or working basis, for both the work of art and the practice of meditation. But there seems to be a need for two further types of energy—the energy of nonaggression and the energy of outrageousness.

Generally, outrageousness is a product of extending oneself: you can’t contain yourself, therefore you become outrageous. You tend to spill over what you can’t contain in your container. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Outrageousness here is a sense of direct conviction, in which you feel intense humor, or intense energy and power, penetrating inside. Such outrageousness seems to be necessary, but it has to be accompanied by nonaggression. The question of nonaggression is based on whether you perceive your particular world in connection with glorifying your existence and your ego in the neurotic sense, or whether it is free from that.

That’s very definite. But there seem to be mixed feelings in people’s minds—inspiration is mixed with ego-centeredness. Somehow, that mixture tends to produce a sense of blindness in which you are unable to see the panoramic vision of a given situation, and consequently you are unable to act accordingly. So there’s a problem with being self-centered, if there is aggression as well as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness alone doesn’t seem to be a particularly big problem. In fact, sometimes there’s room for being self-conscious: the constant checking, constant reviewing, might be a source of further cynicism toward one’s ego, which could be desirable. But definitely aggression is a big problem.

Aggression is based on wanting to demonstrate something that you know, wanting to tell somebody the truth you have discovered. Although your demonstration might be okay, even fantastic, and the truth you have discovered may be relevant, the means and way the whole thing is presented seems to be a problem. From that point of view, we can’t have rules and regulations as to what to say and what not to say, how to act and how not to act, particularly. The whole thing has to be genuinely intuitive. The medium, or the style that we use in presenting the truth, seems to be the crux of the matter. In other words, an artist may be able to present his or her work of art precisely and thoroughly. But a work of art doesn’t come out purely transparent, without personality. A work of art always has the smell, so to speak, or the feelings of whoever produced that particular work of art. For instance, the smell and feeling of that person could be extraordinarily aggressive. In that case, no matter what the actual representations may be, the person behind it has a lot of aggression, so more garbage is involved. The question of nonaggression is extremely important. Nonaggression makes art the art of dharma, or truth—real art. Such art has a sense of real simplicity, without any handles attached. We only want to exhibit our work of art, perform our work of art, or live with our work of art.