Continuing
Your Confusion
H
A V I N G L A I D T H E basic groundwork
regarding the practice of
meditation, we can now go further and
discuss the point that the
practice of meditation involves a basic
sense of continuity. The practice
of meditation does not involve
discontinuing one's relationship with
oneself and looking for a better person or
searching for possibilities of
reforming oneself and becoming a better
person. The practice of meditation
is a way of continuing one's confusion,
chaos, aggression, and passion—but working with it, seeing it from the
enlightened point of view.
That is the basic purpose of meditation
practice as far as this approach is
concerned.
There is a Sanskrit term for basic meditation
practice, shamatha,
which means "development of
peace." In this case, peace refers to the
harmony connected with accuracy rather than
to peace from the point of
view of pleasure rather than pain. We have
experienced pain, discomfort,
because we have failed to relate with the
harmony of things as they are.
We haven't seen things as they are
precisely, directly, properly, and because
of that we have experienced pain, chaotic
pain. But in this case
when we talk about peace we mean that for
the first time we are able to
see ourselves completely, perfectly,
beautifully as what we are, absolutely
as what we are.
This is more than raising the level of our
potentiality. If we talk in
those terms, it means we are thinking of an
embryonic situation that
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PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K . 1974
wil l develop: this child may be highly
disturbed, but he has enormous
potentiality of becoming a reasonable, less
disturbed personality. We
have a problem wit h language here, an
enormous problem. Our language
is highly involved wit h the realm o f
possessions and achievements.
Therefore, we have a problem in expressing
wit h this language
the notion of unconditional potentiality,
which is the notion that is applicable
here.
Shamatha meditation practice is the
vanguard practice for developing
our mindfulness. I woul d like to call your
attention to this term, mindfulness.
Generally, when we talk about mindfulness,
it has to do wit h a
warning sign, like the label on your
cigarette package where the surgeon
general tells you this is dangerous to your
health—beware of this, be
mindful of this. But here mindfulness is
not connected wit h a warning.
In fact, it is regarded as more o f a
welcoming gesture: you could be fully
minded, mindful. Mindfulness means that you
could be a wholesome
person, a completely wholesome person,
rather than that you should not
be doing this or that. Mindfulness here
does not mean that you should
look this way or that way so you can be
cured o f your infamous problems,
whatever they are, your problems of being
mindless. Maybe you
think like this: you are a highly
distracted person, you have problems
wit h your attention span. You can't sit
still for five minutes or even one
minute, and you should control yourself.
Everybody who practices meditation
begins as a naughty boy or naughty girl wh
o has to learn to control
himself or herself. They should learn to
pay attention to their desk,
their notebook, their teacher's blackboard.
That is the attitude that is usually
connected wit h the idea of mindfulness.
But the approach here has nothing to do wit
h going back to school,
and mindfulness has nothing to do wit h
your attention span as you experienced
it in school at all. This is an entirely
new angle, a new approach,
a development of peace, harmony, openness.
The practice of meditation, i n the for m
of shamatha at the beginner's
level, is simply being. It is bare
attention that has nothing to do wit h a
warning. It is just simply being and
keeping a watchful eye, completely
and properly. There are traditional
disciplines, techniques, for that,
mindfulness techniques. But it is very
difficult actually to explain the nature
of mindfulness. When you begin trying to
develop mindfulness i n
the ordinary sense, a novice sense, your
first flash o f thought is that you
are unable to do such a thing. You feel
that you may not be able to
17
T H E PAT H IS T H E G O A L
accomplish what you want to do. You feel
threatened. At the same time,
you feel very romantic: " I am getting
into this new discipline, which is
a unique and very powerful thing for me to
do. I feel joyous, contemplative,
monkish (or 'nunkish'). I feel a sense of
renunciation, which is very
romantic."
Then the actual practice begins. The
instructors tell you how to handle
your mind and your body and your awareness
and so on. In practicing
shamatha under those circumstances, you
feel like a heavily loaded
pack donkey trying to struggle across a
highly polished stream of ice.
You can't grip it with your hooves, and you
have a heavy load on your
back. At the same time, people are hitting
you from behind, and you feel
so inadequate and so embarrassed. Every
beginning meditator feels like
an adolescent donkey, heavily loaded and
not knowing how to deal with
the slippery ice. Even when you are
introduced to various mindfulness
techniques that are supposed to help you,
you still feel the same thing—
that you are dealing with a foreign
element, which you are unable to
deal wit h properly. But you feel that you
should at least show your faith
and bravery, show that you are willing to
go through the ordeal of the
training, the challenge of the discipline.
The problem here is not so much that you
are uncertain how to practice
meditation, but that you haven't identified
the teachings as personal
experience. The teachings are still
regarded as a foreign element coming
into your system. You feel you have to do
your best with that sense of
foreignness, which makes you a clumsy young
donkey. The young donkey
is being hassled by his master a great
deal, and he is already used to
carrying a heavy load and to being hit
every time there is a hesitation.
In that picture the master becomes an
external entity rather than the
donkey's own conviction. A lot of the
problems that come up in the
practice of meditation have to do with a
fear of foreignness, a sense that
you are unable to relate with the teachings
as part of your basic being.
That becomes an enormous problem.
The practice of shamatha meditation is one
of the most basic practices
for becoming a good Buddhist, a
well-trained person. Without that,
you cannot take even a step toward a
personal understanding of the true
buddhadharma. And the buddhadharma, at this
point, is no myth. We
know that this practice and technique was
devised by the Buddha himself.
We know that he went through the same
experiential process.
Therefore, we can follow his example.
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PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K , 1974
The basic technique here is identification
with one's breath or, when
doing walking meditation, identification
with one's walking. There is a
traditional story that Buddha told an
accomplished musician that he
should relate to controlling his mind by
keeping it not too tight and not
too loose. He should keep his mind at the
right level of attention. So, as
we practice these techniques, we should put
25 percent of our attention
on the breathing or the walking. The rest
of our mental activities should
be let loose, left open. This has nothing
to do with the vajrayana or crazy
wisdom or anything like that at all. It is
just practical advice. When you
tell somebody to keep a high level of
concentration, to concentrate 100
percent and not make any mistakes, that
person becomes stupid and is
liable to make more mistakes because he's
so concentrated on what he's
doing. There's no gap. There's no room to
open himself, no room to
relate with the back-and-forth play between
the reference point of the
object and the reference point of the
subject. So the Buddha quite wisely
advised that you put only tentative
attention on your technique, not to
make a big deal out of concentrating on the
technique (this method is
mentioned in the Samadhiraja Sutra).
Concentrating too heavily on the
technique brings all kinds of mental
activities, frustrations, and sexual
and aggressive fantasies of all kinds. So
you keep just on the verge of
your technique, with just 25 percent of
your attention. Another 25 percent
is relaxing, a further 25 percent relates
to making friends with oneself,
and the last 25 percent connects wit h
expectation—your mind is
open to the possibility of something
happening during this practice session.
The whole thing is synchronized completely.
These four aspects of mindfulness have been
referred to in the Samadhiraja
Sutra as the four wheels of a chariot. I f
you have only three
wheels, there's going to be a strain on the
chariot as well as the horse. If
you have two, the chariot will be heavy to
the point of not being functional—the horse will have to hold up the whole
thing and pull as well.
If, on the other hand, you have five or six
wheels on your chariot, that
will create a bumpy ride and the passengers
will not feel all that comfortable.
So the ideal number of wheels we should
have on our chariot is
four, the four techniques of meditation:
concentration, openness, awareness,
expectation. That leaves a lot of room for
play. That is the approach
of the buddhadharma, and we know that a lot
of people in the
lineage have practiced that way and have
actually achieved a perfect
state of enlightenment in one lifetime.
19
T H E PAT H IS T H E G O A L
The reason why the technique is very simple
is that, that way, we
cannot elaborate on our
spiritual-materialism trip.
1
Everyone breathes,
unless they are dead. Everyone walks,
unless they are in a wheelchair.
And those techniques are the simplest and
the most powerful, the most
immediate, practical, and relevant to our
life. In the case of breathing,
there is a particular tradition that has
developed from a commentary on
the Samadhiraja Sutra written by Gampopa.
There we find the notion,
related to breathing, of mixing mind and
space, which is also used in
tantric meditative practices. But even at
the hinayana level, there is a
mixing of mind and space. This has become
one of the very important
techniques of meditation. Sometimes this
particular approach is also referred
to as shi-lhak sung juk, which is a Tibetan
expression meaning
"combining shamatha and vipashyana meditation
practices."
Combining shamatha and vipashyana plays an
important part in the
meditator's development. Mindfulness
becomes awareness. Mindfulness
is taking an interest i n precision of all
kinds, in the simplicity of the
breath, of walking, of the sensations of
the body, of the experiences of
the mind—of the thought process and
memories of all kinds. Awareness
is acknowledging the totality of the whole
thing. In the Buddhist tradition,
awareness has been described as the first
experience of egolessness.
The term for awareness in Tibetan is
lhakthong,
2
and there is an expression
lhakthong dagme tokpe sherap, which means
"the knowledge that realizes
egolessness through awareness." This
is the first introduction to
the understanding of egolessness. Awareness
in this case is totality rather
than one-sidedness. A person who has
achieved awareness or who is
working on the discipline of awareness has
no direction, no bias in one
direction or another. He is just simply aware,
totally and completely.
This awareness also includes precision,
which is the main quality of
awareness in the early stage of the
practice of meditation.
Awareness brings egolessness because there
is no object of awareness.
You are aware of the whole thing
completely, of you and other and of
the activities of you and other at the same
time. So everything is open.
There is no particular object of the
awareness.
If you're smart enough, you might ask the
question, "W h o is being
aware of this whole thing?" That's a
very interesting question, the sixtyfour-dollar question. And the answer is,
nobody is being aware of anything
but itself. The razor blade cuts itself.
The sun shines by itself. Fire
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PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K , 1974
burns by itself. Water flows by itself.
Nobody watches—and that is the
very primitive logic of egolessness.
I'm sure the mahayanists would sneer and
think that this is terrible
logic, very crude. They probably would not
hold high opinions of it. But
from the point of view of hinayana, that's
extraordinarily fantastic logic.
Razor blade cuts itself; fire burns itself;
water quenches thirst by itself.
3
This is the egolessness of vipashyana
practice.
Traditionally, we have the term
smriti-upasthana in Sanskrit, or satipatthana
in Pali, which means resting in one's
intelligence. This is the
same as awareness. Awareness here does not
mean that the person practicing
vipashyana meditation gives up his or her
shamatha techniques of,
say, anapanasati—mindfulness of the coming
and going of the
breath—or of walking in walking meditation
practice. The meditator
simply relates with that discipline in a
more expansive way. He or she
begins to relate with the whole thing. This
is done in connection with
what is known as the four foundations of
mindfulness: mindfulness of
body, of mind, of livelihood, and of
effort.
4
If you relate with every move you make in
your sitting practice of
meditation, if you take note of every
detail, every aspect of the movement
of your mind, of the relationships i n
everything that you do,
there's no room for anything else at all.
Every area is taken over by meditation,
by vipashyana practice. So there is no one
to practice and nothing
to practice. No you actually exists. Even
if you think, " I am practicing
this particular technique," you really
have no one there to relate to, no
one to talk to. Even at the moment when you
say, " I am practicing,"
that too is an expression of awareness at
the same time, so you have
nothing left, nothing whatsoever, even no
" I am practicing." You can
still say the empty words, but they are
like a lion's corpse, as it has been
traditionally described. When the lion is
dead, the lion's corpse remains
lying in the jungle, and the other animals
continue to be frightened of
the lion. The only ones who can destroy the
lion's corpse are the worms
who crawl up from underneath and do not see
it from the outside. They
eat through it, so finally the lion's
corpse disintegrates on the ground. So
the worms are like the awareness, the
knowledge that realizes egolessness
through awareness—vipashyana.
Student: You characterized shamatha as
mindfulness and vipashyana
as awareness. Then you went on to speak of
the combination of shamatha
and vipashyana. Ho w would you characterize
that?
21
T H E P A T H IS T H E G O A L
Trungpa Rinpoche: It's a combination of the
two, of being precise and
at the same time being open. Precision is
shamatha and openness is vipashyana,
and it is possible to have both of those
happening together.
S: But don't they already happen together
in vipashyana? Isn't the
development of vipashyana based on the
precision of shamatha, which
vipashyana then goes on to include in its
openness or awareness?
TR: That is precisely why we talk about
shamatha-vipashyana. One
of the interesting points is that even at
the level of maha ati or the mahamudra
experience—on the tantric level of
awarenesss—shamatha and vipashyana
still function. They are still valid,
because you have developed
this basic way of taming your mind, and it
is still developing.
S: But i f vipashyana includes or is based
on shamatha, why do we
have to bother to speak of
shamatha-vipashyana?
TR: Further clarity and further precision
develop. Shamatha comes
back again at the level of the sixth bhumi
of the bodhisattva path, when
the bodhisattva has achieved the paramita
of prajna. He still comes back
to shamatha, and vipashyana comes back
again as well. There is a second
round.
S: Maybe it's that vipashyana is a stance
of openness, and as such,
maybe it's a little too loose.
TR: That's right. It loses its perspective,
so there is a constant renewal
of things happening. Then the same thing
happens again on the tantric
level of kriya yoga, which is the first of
the six yanas of tantra, involved
with purity. You begin your precision once
more. Then it happens again
at the level of the yanas of the higher
tantra, mahayoga yana, the first of
the ati yanas. There again, you bring back
your precision of relating with
certain mandalas and the experience of
phenomena. So there's a constant
recalling, again and again throughout the
nine yanas. The precision
of shamatha practice is always recalled,
again and again.
Student: Rinpoche, could you clarify
satipatthana a little bit?
Trungpa Rinpoche: Satipatthana, or
smriti-upasthana, as it is known in
Sanskrit, is the basic mindfulness practice
that goes on in both shamatha
and vipashyana. It is made up of the four
foundations of mindfulness,
drenpa nyewar shakpa shi in Tibetan, which
means resting your cognitive
mind, mindfulness. That is always a very
important point. Without that,
it is impossible to begin on the Buddhist
path at all. It is the foundation
of your building. Without going through
that process, you have misun-
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PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K , 1974
derstandings of vajrayana,
misunderstandings of mahayana, and of
course misunderstandings of hinayana. So
satipatthana is the only way
that is taught. It is a very important
basic beginning. A person cannot
begin any spiritual discipline without
that, because his mind will not be
tamed. Basic sanity will not be developed.
No reconciliation, or acceptance,
will have developed at the beginner's
level.
S: It's not easy.
TR: It's very hard, very difficult. That's
why we call the beginning
level hinayana, the narrow path, which is
very severe, extremely severe.
It's not a matter of being happy and having
fun, particularly. It's verrrry
difficult.
S: It has to be conquered.
TR: Has to be reconciled, or rather, you
have to become reconciled
to it. That's why there are going to be
very rare Buddhists who are actually
going to involve themselves with such a
process. They will be what
is known as golden Buddhists, who have been
burned and hammered
and have finally turned into pure gold,
beyond the twenty-four-carat
level, very fine gold. This is very
difficult, but it is better to have golden
Buddhists than copper Buddhists.
Student: Rinpoche, in meditation practice,
when you're beginning to
develop vipashyana and you become aware of
the space around the
breath, is there is no longer a watcher
involved?
Trungpa Rinpoche: There is still a watcher
involved, but the watcher is
no longer regarded as problematic. The
watcher is regarded as a vehicle.
S: So should one encourage the watcher
during meditation?
TR: One doesn't do anything with the
watcher. One just lives with
the watcher.
S: Ho w is the watcher a vehicle?
TR: Well, we don't have anything else but
the watcher for a vehicle.
At that point, the only intelligent voice
that you have is the watcher. For
lack of a better choice, that's it.
Sometimes the watcher is referred to as
self-consciousness. In the Christian
tradition, it might be referred to as a
guilt conflict—whatever.
Student: If you put 25 percent
concentration on the breath and 25 percent
on relaxation, and so on—the way you
described—does that create
a problem with identifying with the breath
as you have taught us to do?
23
T H E PAT H IS T H E G O A L
Trungpa Rinpoche: Absolutely not. It
provides more possibility of identifying.
Take a very simple example. People find it
very conducive when
they're watching movies to eat popcorn.
Twenty-five percent, maybe 50
percent of their attention is on the
screen, and another 25 percent is on
popcorn, and another 25 percent is on their
companion or their Coca-
Cola or whatever. Which makes the whole
experience of going to the
cinema very pleasurable. That's precisely
the whole point. You develop
enormous concentration. You follow the
dialogue in the movie and you
follow every detail of the story, and you
have a good time at the movies.
Student: It seems to me that once you gave
some instruction before
we were going to meditate like, "Don't
be the watcher."
Trungpa Rinpoche: You can't be the watcher
anyway, but i f you try to
be the watcher, that just creates further
problems. It's like leprosy: once
you have one sore, that expands and
develops another, and another sore
is constantly developing. So the less
watcher, the more clean-cut. But
rather than trying to abandon the watcher,
you just don't take part in
the watcher's trip.
S: Is the watcher your reference point?
TR: Reference point is the watcher. The
reference point referring to
itself is the watcher. There is no other
watcher other than the reference
point. That's the whole point—that all
kinds of reference points become
the watcher.
Student: When I'm meditating I see words,
and some of them seem
to be other people's thoughts and some of
them seem to be communications
from somewhere else, and some of them seem
to be directions.
And it's very hard to really distinguish
what's what.
Trungpa Rinpoche: W h y bother?
S: Just to clarify.
TR: W h y bother?
S: I suppose I can just try to ride through
the confusion, but —
TR: There's no point trying to sort out
whose confusion is whose.
That would be like trying to sort out whose
dollar is whose, and every
nickel and every cent. The whole thing
becomes very complicated.
Maybe some analytical disciplines might
encourage you to sort out the
problem of the universe bit by bit, but we
Buddhists are very sloppy, I'm
afraid. We don't bother to count our
pennies. We just deal with dollars,
24
PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K , 1974
or twenty-dollar checks, or
seven-hundred-dollar checks. It's just simply
money. It doesn't matter who each cent came
from. That doesn't seem
to present any problems.
S: I'm a writer. I try to record it.
TR: Well, you have to write very simply.
The possibilities are you
might become a more successful writer i f
you simplify the plot. Make it
very clean-cut, which is very intriguing at
the same time, maybe very
mysterious. That makes a best-seller.
S: I don't know. I wouldn't really know how
to simplify.
TR: Don't try to. That's the starting
point.
Student: Making friends with yourself.
Trungpa Rinpoche: Well said.
Student: Can you make a distinction between
hope and expectation,
which is one of the things that you listed
for 25 percent attention? You
once said it was necessary to give up hope,
and I really don't see too
much distinction there.
Trungpa Rinpoche: Hope is future-oriented.
Expectation is much closer
to reality, but still not quite getting to
the reality. It's on the verge of
reality. Hope is like saying, " I hope
I could be the mother of a child."
Expectation means you are already pregnant,
that it is already happening
in real life, that you are going to bear a
child. Which is much more immediate.
Student: What is perfect enlightenment,
which you mentioned in
your talk?
Trungpa Rinpoche: The Sanskrit term is
samyaksambuddha, which traditionally
means enlightenment without any reference
point. So there is
no certainty whether you have actually
attained enlightenment or not.
You are. If you look at it from our angle,
it might be very dull, disappointing.
But once you are there, you find it is
completely spacious. The
whole thing doesn't sound that glamorous,
eh?
Student: Ho w do you avoid creating a
better speedy, confused situation
by doling out your awareness into
concentration and expectation,
et cetera? It seems to me that in
meditation practice, just as in the rest
25
T H E PAT H IS T H E G O A L
of your life, you try to keep on top of
what you're doing and create
space at the same time. And it only creates
more confusion.
Trungpa Rinpoche: I think the only thing to
do is try not to sort out
what is better and what is not better.
Sorting out produces further problems.
Gesundheit.
Student: Is there a point in meditation
practice where you practice
letting go of the watcher or reference
point, or is it something that just
falls away by itself?
Trungpa Rinpoche: There's no telling. No
promise.
S: Is letting go of the reference point
something you consciously practice?
TR: No promise. Duhkha, suffering, is
regarded as the first noble
truth. Discovering duhkha is also regarded
as one of the noble truths.
And the path is regarded as a noble truth
and the goal is regarded as a
noble truth. Al l the four noble truths are
equally valid in themselves.
One can't say which one is the best truth.
All four are noble truths. Good
luck!
S: I don't understand at all.
TR: Well, think about it. You can't sort
out which is the best one.
S: The question I think I was asking was
related to the practice itself:
whether letting go is something active or
something that just happens
through the practice of watching the
breath.
TR: Both are saying the same thing. Letting
go is watching the breath,
watching the breath is letting go. Saying
the same thing.
Student: Could meditation and these
techniques you've been talking
about be regarded as a form of
psychotherapy?
Trungpa Rinpoche: Psychotherapy is
analyzing oneself and providing
medication—being therapeutic. But
meditation is not regarded as medicine
or even as therapeutic. It is just an
unconditional way of being in
life.
S: Well, is it parallel at all to
existential therapy in philosophy and
practice?
TR: Somewhat, but the Buddhist approach is
more boring. There's
no glamour involved.
Student: I've been wondering what dangers
one can encounter in
meditation, i f there are dangers that
exist.
2.6
PAR T O N E : N E W Y O R K , 1974
Trungpa Rinpoche: If one becomes involved
in contemplative practices
which entail contemplating all kinds of
visual objects without first having
developed basic shamatha and vipashyana, it
could be quite dangerous.
The scriptures say that i f you become
involved in visualizing without
basic training of the mind, you could become
Rudra, an egomaniac.
Apart from that, if a person is following a
very simple technique of meditation
practice and has a background in the basic
training, there's no
problem at all. That is why shamatha, for
example, is called development
of peace. It is harmless, very kind. That's
why vipashyana is called development
of insight or awareness—because it sharpens
your basic being.
It is designed for those people who are
following the first stages of the
path.
According to the Buddhist tradition, there
are five paths that make
up the path: the path of accumulation, the
path of unification, the path
of seeing, the path of meditation, and the
path of no more learning. So in
this case, being a beginner, you are
starting on the path of accumulation.
Traditionally, a person on the path of
accumulation should begin with
shamatha practice, which is a harmless
practice, but at the same time
very fruitful. That's how the Buddha
designed the path. And it seems it
has been working for twenty-five hundred
years. Nobody has gone utterly
crazy except those people who didn't follow
his path.
Student: Ho w do you reconcile what you
said in your first talk about
being willing to waste time and what you
talked about tonight about 25
percent expectation? I mean, a rock doesn't
expect anything. It's just sitting
there. That's what you said in your first
talk. Then tonight, we're
expecting something.
Trungpa Rinpoche: That's also wasting time.
Expecting something is
wasting your time as well, because you are
not going to get anything.
S: So wasting time is not part of your
feeling, then. You don't feel like
you're wasting time.
TR: It doesn't really matter what you do,
you're still wasting time.
You don't have to make a martyr of
yourself, saying, " I feel great because
I'm wasting my time. I'm being a perfectly
good Buddhist and a
good meditator, because I'm wasting my
time."
S: So wasting time with that attitude . . .
that really isn't an attitude
that you want to cultivate.
TR: Wasting time's not an attitude. It's
just a fact.
27
T H R E E
The Star of
Bethlehem
T
o U N D E R S T A N D T H E relationship of
awareness and being, we
have to look into the notion of being at
this point. There are all
kinds of approaches toward being. Being
good, being bad, being sensible,
being crazy. Beatitude [be-attitude]. All
kinds of notions of being. But
when we talk about being in relation to
awareness, we are talking about
unconditional being. You just be. Without
any questions about what you
are being. It is an unconditional way of
being.
Unconditional being is a state of mind that
is involved with a certain
attitude. You might say, "Could that
be unconditional mind i f it is involved
with an attitude? I f it is also an
attitude, we couldn't define it as
unconditional being." True. But oddly
enough, even unconditional being
requires an attitude in order to develop to
the unconditional level. We
have to make some condition in order to
develop unconditionality. We
cannot begin perfectly. Otherwise it would
cease being the beginning
and become the end, an achievement.
The reason we refer to this whole process
as the beginner's level is
that it is the level of clumsiness, the
level of messiness. It is unstructured,
confused, and so forth. There is confusion,
messiness, untidiness—and
constant dichotomy, constant reference
point. But at least we are moving
in the direction of unconditional being.
We are gazing at the star of Bethlehem on
the horizon. It is far, far
away, but still there is hope. A spark of
luminosity is there. The land
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may be dark, the sky may be gray and black.
It might be chilly, and we
might be cold, uncomfortable, tired, and
restless. But nevertheless, the
star of Bethlehem is over there. Human
beings hope. The final hope
that human beings could ever be hopeful of
is enlightenment, the star of
Bethlehem on the horizon.
The buddhas, tathagatas, and great teachers
have developed skillful
means throughout the ages. Their approach
is to hold up enlightenment
like a carrot in front of a donkey. There
is a carrot thousands of miles
away shining, and you have to walk and walk
and walk and go get it.
The donkey doesn't have the carrot at this
point, at the beginner's level,
but he has to be inspired. So a faraway inspiration
is provided. Something
is taking place way off there on the
horizon. There is a big space,
a huge desert landscape.
The point (apart from all this poetic
imagery) is that we need hope,
the powerful hope of attaining
enlightenment in this lifetime. We need
that hope because of having to relate with
the constant chatter that goes
on in our mind, the emotional ups and downs
of all kinds that go on,
the disturbances that we experience, the
constant, ongoing process taking
place in our state of being. We need a
reference point connected with
that.
Hope can be categorized into two types.
Spiritual aspiration is one,
and the hope of gaining power is another.
As far as aspiration is concerned,
the students need to relate with a
spiritual friend, a kalyanamitra
in Sanskrit, gewe she-nyen in Tibetan. A
spiritual friend is very important.
You cannot start even at the beginning of
the beginning without relating
with a person who has gone through this
particular journey and
achieved results, enlightenment. It is
necessary to have that kind of reference
point, a lineage holder, a craftsman. You
have to have information.
You have to gather information about the
handicraft—how the knowledge
is passed down. You have to relate with
somebody who knows how
to make the dharma part of a visible world
rather than letting it remain
a myth. The spiritual friend, kalyanamitra,
is a person who avoids a speculative
attitude toward the teaching. He keeps it
from being mythical.
He brings it about in reality. He has done
it, you can do it. It is possible
and visible. It is obvious.
Such a relationship could begin purely
through the fame of a certain
spiritual friend, or guru for that matter,
a person who is reputed to have
power over other people's confusion.
Confusion doesn't exist when you
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meet a certain guru. You could follow such
a person by faith, or else you
could have a personal experience. You could
experience that meeting
such a person is very powerful. You could
actually experience that in the
presence of such a person, you experience
your own basic sanity, a sense
of solidness. A sense of reality actually
takes place.
So there are two choices. Either you could
be the blind-faith type,
who just believes and worships without
logic. Or else you could be the
type of person who doesn't believe, who is
extremely skeptical, highly
opinionated, full of his own philosophies
of all kinds. A person like that
could still meet a spiritual friend on an
eye-level basis and could explore
how he is, why he is, and what level of
spiritual operation he is performing.
That doesn't mean to suggest that to pass
your examination the spiritual
friend has to be levitating three inches
above you or constantly
emanating sparks of enlightenment in the
form of fireworks. It is the
personal relationship that is very
important.
Traditionally the guru is described as like
the sun shining on the
earth. Every aspect of this earth—every
flower petal, every leaf, every
blade of grass that grows—is related to the
sun in accordance with the
four seasons. Each flower on this earth has
a personal relationship with
the sun, although the sun does not
particularly personally direct its attention
with any bias, does not actually shine more
on the rosebush than
on the poppy or anything like that. The
whole process depends on how
much receptivity there is, how much
openness.
So personal openness is the important
thing, rather than purely living
on faith. Faith can be blind or
intelligent. Open faith is intelligent, being
willing to include one's confusion and
one's understanding at the same
time. Blind faith is purely going by facts
and figures; thinking in terms of
quick results; depending on fame,
reputation, and so forth. It is like saying
you should read this book because this book
is a best-seller. Five
million copies have been sold, therefore it
must be good. It is possible
that five million stupid people bought it
and read it. But that's the kind
of reference point followed by blind faith.
So in following the spiritual path it is
very much necessary to have a
personal relationship with a teacher, a
kalyanamitra, a gewe she-nyen. The
spiritual teacher presents you with the
star of Bethlehem. He takes you
out of your cozy home. Maybe outside, it is
brisk or even biting cold.
He says, "Shall we put our coat on?
Let's just step out and take a look at
what's happening in the universe."
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