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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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.

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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?

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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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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?

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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,

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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

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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.

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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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PAR T O N E : NE W Y O R K , 1974

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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