The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (33 page)

The third category of earth is
absence of laziness.
When you begin your work of art, a certain drive develops, and that drive should be absent of laziness. You might have a great theme that you want to execute, so you have to go on constantly in accord with your vision of what you want to do. If you cut down your full vision and create a work of art at a half-vision level, that is breaking the discipline or morality of artistic endeavor. So there has to be an absence of laziness. In other words, when we want to produce a work of art, we should do it all the way.

Then we have the principle of man, which falls into two categories. Number one is
freedom from subconscious gossip.
If subconscious gossip is going on in your state of mind, if there is that sense of wildness and your mind is constantly filled with thoughts, then it is very hard to execute anything. So that has to be controlled and overcome. The problem there is that you are not relating with either the heaven or the earth principle, so you can hardly create a man principle at all. But wandering mind can be cut through, either before or during your execution of the work of art. In fact, you can use the very process of executing the work of art as a way to cut subconscious gossip, through your commitment to the medium and to the vision that exists in you and in your work.

The second category of the man principle is
absence of regret.
Usually a sense of regret takes place all the time, which is known as artist’s fever. Such regret usually relates to the past. But in this case, we are talking about regrets of all kinds: regrets of the future and regrets of the present, as well as regrets of the past. There is a very slick but at the same time very deep-rooted depression taking place, which looks back and forth all the time. With that kind of regret, which is almost remorse, completely obscuring your vision of heaven and earth, you can’t produce a work of art at all.

All together, these three principles—heaven, earth, and man—deal with how we can integrate our state of mind into a work of art. A fourth principle, though not exactly the same kind of principle, is that of the universal monarch. It is what joins heaven and earth together. This principle is singlefold: that is, it says that body and mind are able to work together harmoniously. Therefore, the mind develops a sense of openness and peacefulness, and the body develops an absence of speed and aggression. In that way, a work of art becomes gentle rather than contrived or extraordinary. It becomes a good work of art, very genuine, and it becomes worthwhile, really good, to be an artist. You can take a lot of pride in being an artist, in the positive sense. You will be so happy and feel so good to be an artist. You can work according to the principles of heaven, earth, and man, and you can expose yourself by means of those principles. It could be extraordinary, quite fabulous.

Endless Richness

The whole philosophy of dharma art is that you don’t try to be artistic, but you just approach objects as they are and the message comes through automatically.

T
EACHING IS NOT MEANT
to be verbal alone. It is very visual. For instance, a medium such as film, rather than converting people to Tibetan Buddhism, can provide virgin territory unadulterated by conventional or institutionalized spirituality for anyone with curiosity or a question in mind. I hope that awake people who question their own basic sanity will find another way of looking into their neuroses without getting just another “answer to their problems.”

The whole philosophy of dharma art is that you don’t try to be artistic, but you just approach objects as they are and the message comes through automatically. It is like Japanese flower arranging. You don’t try to be artistic; you just chop off certain twigs and branches that seem to be out of line with the flow. Then you put the twigs in the container and the flowers underneath, and it automatically becomes a whole landscape. Likewise, when you see a painting by a great artist, it doesn’t look as though someone actually painted it. It just seems to happen by itself. There is no gap, no cracks at all—it’s one unit, complete.

Creating art is like meditating. You work with one technique for a long, long time, and finally the technique falls away. There’s ongoing discipline and continuity, stubbornness. You are willing to relate with it even if the object rejects you or the light isn’t right or something else goes wrong. You still go on and do it.

I would like to create a film in such a way that the audience has to take part in it. To do so, we would need to provide lots of space, speed, and richness. Those three principles, properly interrelated, seem to work together so that the audience begins to take part in the presentation. As they watch the screen, they feel they are giving birth to each vision rather than passively absorbing some ready-made creation. There should be room to question, not have the whole thing presented to you like machine-gun fire. The audience should take part in it. To do so, space is the most important thing—space and silence. Then you begin to value objects much more. It is quite possible we might allow too much space, which may not be particularly popular at first. Nobody is going to say, “Wow, how exciting!” It may seem alien at first. But then, when they change gears and see it a second time, next week, next month, it will be different.

When people go to a movie, they go because they want a change. They want something to see besides their usual scene of washing dishes, working in the office, or whatever. This automatically means that they need space. So if a movie presents space, no matter how irritating it may be, it will be worth it. The audience won’t come out tensed up; they’ll come out relaxed. They will have gone through the whole trip of waiting to see something and then actually seeing something. They will have gone through an eye-massage process. That is a challenge for both the audience and the filmmakers. It is like crossing the Himalayas to escape from the Chinese.

It has been said with relation to maha ati practice that the eyes are one of the most important exits. In fact, they have been called the door of jnana, the highest wisdom. So visual effects are the most important in their effect on the mind. Generally, an audience comes to see a film with certain expectations. When they begin to feel they are not going to see what they expected, it is somewhat strangling. But at the brink of nothing ever happening, something happens—something quite different from what you expected.

A film should make suggestions rather than feed information. In fact, not giving information is one of the best things we can do to help the audience take part in a film. Once they have been fed, they have nothing else to do but walk out. But if not enough information is given, although indications are there, they have to work on it and think about what has been presented. This whole approach to art is based on putting out just a corner of our knowledge, instead of saying a lot, even though that would make people feel more comfortable and secure.

For instance, if you study with a teacher who acquired his understanding by information alone, that person may tell you very wise things, beautiful things, but he won’t know how to handle the gaps. He blushes or he gets embarrassed or he fidgets around between stories, between the wisdoms that he utters. But if you are dealing with somebody who is completely competent, who is actually
living
the information, the teaching has become part of his whole being, so there is no embarrassment. It goes on and on and on, like the waves of an ocean. There is endless richness. You receive a lot, but at the same time you don’t feel that he emptied out all his information to you. You feel there’s much more to be said.

If you are completely confident in yourself, you don’t have to think about the audience at all. You just do your thing and do it properly. You become the audience, and what you make is the entertainment. But that needs a certain amount of wisdom. When an artist does a painting for a commission, there is a good likelihood that his painting will be one-sided because he is aware of the audience, and he has to relate to the educational standards of that audience. But if he presents his own style without reference to an audience, the audience will automatically react, and their sophistication will develop, eventually reaching the level of the artist’s.

Any entertainment that aspires to art should not work with the audience like an advertisement. Trying to please the audience lowers the level of sophistication constantly. That’s what’s wrong with the American marketing system. When you try always to please the audience, you have to produce more and more automatic gimmicks, more and more plastic. Finally, people don’t even have to walk out of their rooms to make things work; they just press a button and get entertained.

As artists, we have the responsibility of raising the mentality of the audience. People might have to reach out with a certain amount of strain, but it’s worth it. The whole civilization then begins to raise its level of sophistication. It is possible that the first attempt will be a failure. You might not get enough people in the audience to work that way. But gradually they will pick up on it. That has actually been happening. If you relate to yourself properly, then, since there are a lot of people like you, you become a catalyst for the rest of the world. The audience comes to you as to a queen bee. There is less sense of salesmanship or the feeling that you have to con people, so people come to you.

The beautiful thing about Buddhism, if I may say so, is that Buddhists don’t try to con you. They just present what they have, say it as it is, take it or leave it. If you try to con people, to make money immediately, it becomes prostitution. When we try to meet the immediate demands of the public in their present state of sophistication, we have to lower our standards constantly, whereas if we allow for some kind of resistance to our work, the audience has to jump up higher and higher. They have to work with their patience and they have to work with their sophistication, so the public automatically gets educated. It’s a plot, but a compassionate plot.

People in this country are very awake; they are looking for something—and usually they get the something they expect. But next time, they will be able to get something beyond what they are used to.

Back to Square One

At this point, we are in a very powerful spot: being in the present, we can reshape the whole future. Therefore, shouldn’t we be more careful, shouldn’t we be more awake in what we are doing this very moment?

A
RT IN EVERYDAY LIFE
seems to be our destination. The question is, how do we begin? Our main purpose is to develop an understanding of life and art. If we don’t have a life of our own, we don’t have art of our own, so we end up discussing the question of what is life—which is art, naturally. Life is based on various concepts and ideas, such as life being a big drama, a fantastic showpiece, an absolute torture chamber, or just gray. We have all kinds of ideas about it. But there seems to be a problem when we try to reshape the world. We don’t reshape the world haphazardly, of course; we reshape it in accord with our beliefs and our dreams. So the world is reshaped according to our own ideas and the way we want it to be.

The problem with that is that, in the end, the world begins to haunt us back. Because we have reshaped the world, the world begins to demand more and more attention. Since it is our world, what we make of this world, it acts as a mirror. When that happens, a lot of people panic—enormously, to say the least. They begin to feel trapped in their own creation and see it as unjustified, something they didn’t deserve. People go so far as to discuss the question of spirituality, the ultimate level of judgment, and the question of being fair to everybody. Everything seems to come back to the psychological, rather than the physical situation that we could do something about at the beginning.

Obviously, we must think first before we do. But the question is more complex: how to think, what to think, why to think, what is “to think” No one can stop or control your thought process or your thinking. You can think anything you want. But that doesn’t seem to be the point. The thinking process has to be directed into a certain approach. That does not mean that your thinking process should be in accord with certain dogma, philosophy, or concepts. Instead, one has to know the thinker itself. So we are back to square one, the thinker itself: who or what thinks, and what is the thought process?

The thinking process, to begin with, is a confused one. If you really look into the depths of its existence, the whole thing is extraordinarily confused. It is jumbled up with a lot of stuff we have collected throughout our life of birth and death, our existence in our world. The question is, if we work with that, could we produce a work of art? Is there any hope that finally the world will be what is desired or dreamed of as a perfect world, the world that manifests itself as the re-creation of the Golden Age? It’s doubtful. At the same time, nobody knows. Nobody experienced an absolute golden age—and even if somebody had created a golden age, it is doubtful whether that would satisfy us. Maybe we would begin to feel that there was a problem with it.

On that basis, how do we begin our world? Up to this point, we have not yet begun our world. However, we are still subjects of the world; we can’t avoid that. But from this point onward, since we have not yet begun our world, we are the masters of the world, the creators of the world. We can do whatever we want, whatever we like. Since we can do anything we want, we seem to have a lot of power. So at this point, we are in a very powerful spot: being in the present, we can reshape the whole future. Therefore, shouldn’t we be more careful, shouldn’t we be more awake in what we are doing this very moment? I think the suggestion would be quite strong that, “Sure, we should.” We should do something positive and intelligent or, for that matter, negative and intelligent. As long as there’s intelligence involved, there seems to be no problem finding our way through.