Warrior-King of Shambhala: Remembering Chogyam Trungpa [EXCERPT]by Jeremy Hayward
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This search for the truth of the universe, motivated by love, took me all the way to a doctorate. However, long before I had completed my degree, I found that few physicists were any longer interested in mind, and I myself had forgotten my original inspiration. To most modern physicists questions about the basic meaning of quantum theory were merely the speculations of metaphysics and therefore not important. What was real and interesting to them were the details of matter: how many different kinds of elementary particles there are, how many fundamental forces, and how they all fit together to make a "theory of everything." Matter was everything, and there was no longer room, or need, for mind as a fundamental aspect of the universe.
At the same time that I was becoming sadly disappointed in physics, a new research field was developing -- molecular biology, the study of DNA, which biologists were enthusiastically claiming to be the basis of life. I was seduced by the hope of finding this basis of life, and thereby its deeper meaning. After finishing my Ph.D. in physics and apprenticing in the famous Medical Research Laboratory in Cambridge, I crossed the Atlantic to do research in Molecular Biology at MIT. However, disappointed again, I quickly found that these biologists were not really looking at life. They were breaking up living cells and examining the small, lifeless parts, and no one really knew, or knows even to this day, how to put them back together again to make living cells.
While desultorily performing experiments on the bits and pieces of cells, I had begun to read about mind -- psychology, philosophy of mind, and Eastern ideas about consciousness.
Realizing that consciousness, or at least what we are conscious of, was deeply connected with language,I intensively studied linguistics and symbolic logic. Finally I understood that the truth of consciousness was to be found only at the point where language stops.
As Wittgenstein had written, "Whereof man cannot speak, thereon he must be silent."9 But how to see this point directly, personally, beyond the words?
With a thick, black marker, I placed a single black dot in the middle of a sheet of white paper. Underneath it I wrote the word WHAT, and tacked this paper on the wall by my bed; every morning when I awoke the first thing I saw was the piece of white paper with a dot and WHAT. This stopped my mind momentarily, but that was as far as I could get on my own. Later, under the guidance of Trungpa Rinpoche, I was to discover the nature of that moment, however brief, when thought is silent.
In the 1960s and early '70s, young people in America were beginning to become fascinated by the idea of "spirituality" but had little understanding of what it was really about. In addition, a lot of ideas were highly influenced by the drug culture. In the '70s in North America, there was a tremendous influx of spiritual teachers of all kinds: yogis, Indian gurus, Maharaji, Maharishi, Sufi Sam.
I began to visit the various teachers who came through Boston, and I also frequented a little bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called East-West Bookstore. I would glance through books there, buy a few, go away and read them, and come back. Some of my friends who were in the "spiritual supermarket," as Rinpoche called it, used to visit there, too. Sometimes we would meet and chat about the different paths that were being offered.IN THE GURDJIEFF WORKIn this way, I discovered the ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Russian teacher of spiritual ideas and methods of inner work .... Although Gurdjieff never disclosed the origins of his teaching,
it was clear that, during the twenty years that he disappeared as a young man, he had visited esoteric schools of Christianity and Sufism, as well as Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.
When he returned to Russia he began to teach all of these in a powerful synthesis, unique to himself, attempting to interpret the traditional teachings in the scientific concepts of the time. In this, though the scientific concepts of that time were particularly limiting,
he was remarkably successful, speaking and writing in a way that cut through much of the sentimentality of Western spiritual seekers.Studying and practicing these spiritual methods was known to his students as the Work, referring to inner work on oneself, and
I joined a group practicing these methods. This involvement in the Work meant a great deal to me and some of Gurdjieff's ideas, which I will describe briefly, carried through with me during my subsequent years of study with Rinpoche.First there is the utter and complete mechanicalness of the ordinary man and woman. Gurdjieff was completely uncompromising on this point: men and women are ordinarily machines, all asleep. Every one of us believes that "I am conscious and have free-will, and I determine the course of my own life." In fact none of this is true. From the moment we think we awaken in the morning to the moment we believe we have fallen asleep, we are simply driven mechanically by thoughts, emotions, or physical sensation that are not of our own making, but are purely the result of conditioning and physical make-up. Our normal waking lives are swept along unconsciously, just as in a dream. Later,
I found this to be in complete resonance with the Buddhist view that we will inevitably repeat habitual patterns of thought and behavior if we do not wake up to them through awareness.According to Gurdjieff, the only way to wake up to this mechanicalness, and to free ourselves from it, is by going against it. Every moment we make the choice to go against our mechanicalness, our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, or acting, is a moment of waking up -- or at least of stirring in our sleep. But such moments produce suffering in us, in this case "conscious suffering," brought about by the "voluntary labor" of going against habit. Thus "voluntary labor" and "conscious suffering" are important aspects of work on oneself.
Gurdjieff taught that, while we all believe we are a single, unitary "me," we are not. When we look more closely, we see that we do not have just one idea of "me," but many. We have different "me's" for different occasions. The different "me's" are like roles that we play -- a different one for each situation -- or like masks we put on to cover how we are really feeling. We slip into our roles automatically, without even realizing it. Each role has different thoughts, different feelings, different moods, and even different muscular tensions and bodily postures. The change of role is so smooth, and the roles themselves so familiar, that we don't really even notice the changes happening. We think each role is the same "me" feeling a different way. We don't notice the automatic nature of the whole process. And if we were asked to describe ourselves we would probably describe only one or another of our various roles, depending on who was asking us.
HARRY: Who are you?
GOETHE: I'm not anybody.
I'm a chess player. Do you want instruction in building up your personality?
HARRY: Yes, please.
GOETHE: May I see your pieces, please?
HARRY: Pieces?
GOETHE: Of your personality. I can't play without the pieces.
Which one is you?
Wrong.
You are the whole game.
HARRY: But all these personalities in one man, that's schizophrenia.
GOETHE: It don't matter, honey. Watch.
HARRY: What is it called, this game?
GOETHE: Life. Your life. Complicate it or enrich it as you please.
Your soul has fallen to bits and pieces. Good. Rearrange them to suit yourself.
[Goethe laughing]
-- Steppenwolf, Written and Directed by Fred Haines, featuring Max Von Sydow, Dominique Sanda, and Pierre Clementi
This understanding of the multiplicity of our "I's" is very helpful in understanding the Buddhist view of egolessness, which means similarly that although we believe and act in ordinary life as if we were a unified, independent, permanent "I," such an " I" does not in fact exist. Seeing the multiplicity and impermanence of our moment-by-moment "I's" can be a valuable step on the road to discovering true egolessness.To help us wake up, Gurdjieff taught the dual practices of "self-observation" and "self-remembering."
Self-observation is the continual effort to see ourselves just as we are -- good, bad, or indifferent -- without judgment, self-praise, or self-blame; it is to see ourselves, in a sense, as others see us. Self-remembering does not mean excessive focusing on the momentary "me," or anxious self-consciousness in the conventional sense, but is a moment of being fully present, to the moment and to one's own being in the moment, free from daydreaming, discursive thought, or fuzziness of perception. It is a direct knowing of a larger sense of self beyond the "me." During this period, as I read around in other spiritual traditions, these practices of self-observation and self-remembering seemed to me to have much in common with Buddhist mindfulness and awareness practices.In Gurdjieff's view, our mechanicalness is driven by
three main centers of energy: the intellectual or thinking center, the feeling or emotional center, and the moving or instinctive center. These three centers, in every ordinary, asleep human are completely unsynchronized with each other, even working in opposition to each other -- our thoughts do not correspond to what we feel, our body resists what we desire or what we think we should do, and so on. Thus, the first stage of awakening, absolutely necessary for everyone, is to
harmonize these three energy centers. Many of the practical exercises Gurdjieff gave were directed toward this aim. The purpose of self-observation, for example, was mainly to see, at any moment in active daily life, how disharmonious our three centers are.
Regarding the joining of mind and body, Gurdjieff was very clear: "Magic lies in awareness of the body," he would say. While we were never given long practices to do, such as the sitting practice of mindfulness/awareness, we did have a morning exercise known as
the "collection exercise." This consisted basically in what has come to be known more widely as a "body scan," in which one brings awareness successively to the different parts of one's body, beginning with the feet and arms, moving up the torso and head, and coming to rest in the heart. This was, for me, a powerful and important daily practice.
Another potent instruction was that whenever I come to a moment of remembering myself, remembering my aim to wake up, whatever activity I am involved in at that moment, to immediately bring my attention to the inner sensation of a particular, already-decided-upon part of my body, such as the sensation of my left forearm. This has the magical effect of bringing me right into the present moment. It is especially powerful if, for example, I remember myself in the middle of a heated discussion.
These ideas and practices were later to have strong parallels in Rinpoche's teaching, especially in the Shambhala teachings in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on "joining mind and body."Gurdjieff was very far from being merely an intellectual purveyor of ideas.
He had a mischievous and at times brutally sharp sense of humor with which he would cut through his students' pretentiousness and self-importance. And he would often push his students to extreme physical, emotional, and mental hardships to help them break through their mechanicalness.
His emphasis was on the development of attention in ordinary life -- what Buddhists would perhaps call meditation in action. One of his main methods for arousing attention was a series of highly complex exercises,
the "Movements," and "Sacred Dances," both of which demanded increase of attention far above the usual. These, too, he had brought back and synthesized from his journeys East, and
I was fortunate enough to have a skilled teacher of the Movements for the Work group which I joined in Boston.
The Work with the Gurdjieff group had a powerful, life-changing effect on me. I can still recall, almost forty years later, a period of a few days when the world seemed to become alive. The space around me seemed to be bright, vivid, almost luminous and filled with life. Suddenly, for those few days, I was lifted out of my habitual depression into a quiet joy and appreciation of the world around me. This was the moment when I began to realize that a different dimension to life -- the inner, spiritual dimension that I had been reading about all these years -- was real, actually attainable.
I am forever grateful to the Gurdjieff work and to Gurdjieff himself, for giving me some little hint, as well as direct experience, of this greater perspective.
A teacher is necessary at the beginning of the path, according to Gurdjieff, although no amount of following great men would ultimately free me; in the end, only I can do it through my own efforts. Yet at this point Gurdjieff had been dead for over twenty years. He had no definite lineage to carry on his work, and his teachings had no clear history.
People who had known him were leading our groups, and when they spoke they seemed to almost always refer to Gurdjieff: "Mr. Gurdjieff said this; Mr. Gurdjieff said that." I began to feel his absence: "Where is Mr. Gurdjieff?" So my search for a living teaching and teacher continued, even while I took part in the Gurdjieff group.
Knowing that the Gurdjieff work had its origins in some combination of Christianity, Sufism, and Tibetan Buddhism, many of us read a great deal about these other spiritual methods.
I found myself most drawn to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation and the Buddhist teachings on egolessness, and recognized these in some of the central ideas of Gurdjieff as I have described.FINDING RINPOCHEOne day, I bought a book called Meditation in Action. It was a beautiful early September afternoon, warm, fresh, and sunny. I went to sit by the banks of the Charles River and started to read this book. It was quite short and very simple, and I read it all the way through, sitting there on the banks of the river that afternoon. At the end of it I had a strange feeling, something between disheartenment -- a flat, washed-out feeling -- and a kind of joy, a kind of excitement. I wanted to find out more about Chogyam Trungpa, the man who had written this book. I wanted to meet him.
At the back of the book it said, "If you would like to correspond with the author, his address is Samye Ling, Eskdalemuir, Scotland." Here I was, an Englishman now living across the Atlantic Ocean in Boston, and to meet this person I had to go back to Scotland! So, disappointed, I returned to the bookstore that very afternoon to look for something else. There I told a friend, "I just read this really good book by a Tibetan, but he lives in Scotland." "You mean Trungpa Rinpoche?" my friend replied, "He's giving a seminar in Boston this weekend!"
The seminar was to be held at the East-West Center on Marlborough Street in Boston and, on the Thursday before the program, Rinpoche was giving a public talk there.And so it was that my heart and mind were opened that Thursday evening in September 1970. The kind smile that accompanied Rinpoche's answer -- "There's something left, don't worry" -- in response to my desperate personal question, went straight to my heart.
I knew then that I had found what I had been searching for all my life....TO TAIL OF THE TIGERIn early December I was overjoyed to receive a flyer from TOTT advertising a seminar to be held over the Christmas period with Trungpa Rinpoche, called "The Battle of Ego." Thus it was with excited anticipation that, on Christmas Eve, I drove up along the lanes of Vermont to TOTT [3 hrs drive]. It was already dark as I approached it on the long, winding country road, but at the end of the road I could see a rather small looking farmhouse. I parked the car and entered the house, coming directly into a small, funky old farmhouse dining room. There were several wooden tables in the room, with wooden benches alongside them.
The first thing I noticed was a lady who looked to be in her late thirties, wearing a short red dress and red tights, dancing to music on top of one of the tables. People were laughing and clapping and there was a feeling of celebration.As I walked in the door, I had a feeling I can only describe as "coming home." As I came in to this farmhouse dining room on Christmas Eve, I felt as if I had at last come back to my family, my first family. It wasn't the family I had known in England; it was a true family.The farmhouse was full to bursting. The small dining room couldn't even begin to accommodate all of us, so we had our meals all over the place -- the dining room, the living room, the library, the stairs, the sewing room, everywhere. There was little real furniture in the living room, so we sat on some wooden blocks. We crowded into the small attic shrine room of the farmhouse for Rinpoche's talks. The general atmosphere of the seminar was joyful and celebratory.
THE BATTLE OF EGORinpoche gave a talk every afternoon based on
the image of ego as a castle. The first few days were spent talking about
how we build this castle of ego and the second half of the seminar was on
how to attack it. His description began on virgin territory, or
no man's land. This basic ground is not owned by anyone and is an analogy for the primordial intelligence that is free from all concepts of good and bad, this and that, I and other, inside and outside. At a certain point the all-pervading intelligence of this basic ground panics and realizes that it has no place to settle, no reference point, no nest. It runs around and tries to find something to hold on to.
Discovering its first rock -- an analogy for the first discrimination between this and that -- it begins to build a castle.
The castle has walls, representing the ignorance of separation from the basic ground; guards, who judge the outside in terms of friend or foe; a central security officer, who determines what defensive or aggressive action should be taken at each moment; ministers, who label everything with concepts; and a king, consciousness imprisoned by ego. Later I was to discover that these five aspects of the castle of ego represent a traditional teaching of the five skandhas, or "heaps" -- components of our body and mind which we lump together into one thing and identify with as a real "self," or ego.
The second part of the seminar addressed the question: How are we going to dismantle this castle? How are we going to deal with the foot soldiers, and so on all the way up to the king? In this second part, Rinpoche worked very much with questions and answers, asking the students questions like, "How would you get through the protective circle of the guards?" "How would you deal with the ministers?" People made suggestions, and he always responded very directly and in a way that personally related to the student who asked the question. He was warm and personal, humorous and slightly cutting sometimes, and always delightful.
Lord Pentland, the head of the Gurdjieff movement in America, was attending this seminar along with several other senior Gurdjieffians. I sat down next to him one evening in front of the fire, and said, "If it's all really so simple as Trungpa Rinpoche is presenting, why is the Gurdjieff work so complicated?" Lord Pentland replied, in his very upper class, Scottish accent. "I think it is because we are so complicated." This was helpful. He went on to say that it is ego that is complicated, and therefore the teachings have to be complicated even though, ultimately, it may be simple. Later on, I was to find out that Buddhist doctrine can also be highly complicated, for the same reason -- there are said to be as many different teachings as there are beings.IS IT REALLY SO SIMPLE?During this program, Rinpoche had private interviews with everyone. He was staying in one of the two rooms at the front of the farmhouse, and met with people in the room across the corridor from his bedroom. He sat in a wicker chair that was very similar to the one at the seminar in Boston, and the person meeting with him would sit on a cushion on the floor.
When it was my turn, I sat on the cushion and just looked up at him, feeling quietly joyful, and he looked down at me with his sweet smile. I said, "Rinpoche, is it really this simple?" He smiled and nodded, saying, "Yes," and added, "It's said that a cow cannot taste its own tongue. It is that close." In my memory of that exchange, which was
my first personal meeting with Rinpoche, it is as if the air were filled with golden light. It isn't something that I saw at the time as a visual illusion or something tangible, but I always remember him in that room as if it were that way.
As I returned to Boston, I was very happy. I felt that I had found what I was looking for. I don't remember how I actually put it to myself at the time, but the feeling was that I had finally found my home and a genuine living teacher who could show me the way to discover what was truly real. And, after years with the rather solemn Gurdjieffians, I had discovered that it could be a joyful search, full of humor! What faced me in Boston, however, was an extremely bleak situation.
The previous year, utterly disheartened, I had quit research altogether and taken a position teaching physics in a public high school, thinking that perhaps I could reconnect with the physics that I had loved as a teenager and pass that on to others. As I had had no teacher training at all, this was turning out to be a rather disastrous experiment. I had been demoted and so, in my second year, I was teaching general science to ninth grade students who mostly seemed to think the whole thing was at best a joke! I had no idea where my life was heading, but it was clear that it couldn't continue in the same way.