The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two by Chogyam Trungpa, Chögyam Trungpa Page B
Authors: Chogyam Trungpa, Chögyam Trungpa
Tags: Tibetan Buddhism
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struggle, at some point the all-pervasiveness is all over the place, and a sense of suffocation begins to develop. And that subtle suffocation turns into boredom. That is the point when you are actually getting into the all-pervasiveness of the vipashyana experience.
This is just the beginning stage of vipashyana that we have been describing. And I would like to emphasize once more that we are not talking about hypothetical possibilities. You can actually experience this in your life, in your being. And in fact, potentialities of vipashyana are already prominent in our experience; they take place all the time. But we have not actually acknowledged them or perhaps even seen them.
Student: There are experiences in meditation where a certain openness takes place. But this openness seems to be different from boredom. It seems to punctuate the boredom. It is more exciting. It seems to be the opposite of boredom.
Trungpa Rinpoche: At the introductory level, when you first have such experiences, obviously you feel excited. You feel that this is something new you’ve gotten. But as you use such experiences as part of your practice, you wear out the novelty of them very quickly—particularly in this case—and it all turns into a very powerful boredom.
When you are in a sauna, you like it at the beginning, and you like the idea, the implication, of being in a sauna. You like the sense of cleaning up and loosening up your muscles, and so on. But if you are stuck there, if somebody put a lock on your sauna-bath door, then you would begin to feel the heavy-handedness of it. You would get bored and frightened at the same time.
Student: You spoke of suffocation turning into boredom, and boredom then moving into some kind of openness. It sounds to me as though boredom is in fact a gut response to the fear of losing oneself, or losing selfhood. Is that the correct way of seeing it?
Trungpa Rinpoche: I see it that way too, yes. The boredom is the atmosphere. While you are bored, you are not aware of this , but you’re aware of the atmosphere, which creates boredom. That is a very interesting twist that takes place there, which doesn’t usually happen in your ordinary life.
S: Instead of being afraid that the self is disappearing directly, you turn that outward, toward the situation.
TR: That’s right, yes. That’s the awareness experience that happens. Well said, sir.
Student: When you’re meditating and all of a sudden there’s a sound in the room, like somebody coughs, sometimes you feel so susceptible to it that you feel very shattered. It’s very magnified, very physical, electric. Is that an example of openness?
Trungpa Rinpoche: There’s something faintly suspicious there. It is possible that you become open and susceptible. But if you don’t have a sense of the atmosphere as filled with body, with texture, then you are spacing out rather than connecting with shamatha or vipashyana. There is a definite need for you to deal with the, so to speak, dense, humid atmosphere.
Student: How does being aware of the body and texture of the atmosphere, as you just said we should be, differ from being aware of the theater backdrop?
Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s the same thing, actually. In the theater you see not only the stage alone, but you have already created your own texture around the theater hall, and that thing, the stage, is more or less a highlight. If it weren’t for that atmosphere, you wouldn’t bother going to the theater. You’d watch television instead, or a movie. There’s a difference between watching a movie and going to the theater. The movie has been produced already, and you are seeing the result. The play in the theater is being performed on the spot. Maybe the actors have their own stories, but still you are taking part in the performance somehow. Something might go wrong. Somebody might fall off the stage and break his neck. Whereas you can’t expect that in the movies. All that is part of the
This is just the beginning stage of vipashyana that we have been describing. And I would like to emphasize once more that we are not talking about hypothetical possibilities. You can actually experience this in your life, in your being. And in fact, potentialities of vipashyana are already prominent in our experience; they take place all the time. But we have not actually acknowledged them or perhaps even seen them.
Student: There are experiences in meditation where a certain openness takes place. But this openness seems to be different from boredom. It seems to punctuate the boredom. It is more exciting. It seems to be the opposite of boredom.
Trungpa Rinpoche: At the introductory level, when you first have such experiences, obviously you feel excited. You feel that this is something new you’ve gotten. But as you use such experiences as part of your practice, you wear out the novelty of them very quickly—particularly in this case—and it all turns into a very powerful boredom.
When you are in a sauna, you like it at the beginning, and you like the idea, the implication, of being in a sauna. You like the sense of cleaning up and loosening up your muscles, and so on. But if you are stuck there, if somebody put a lock on your sauna-bath door, then you would begin to feel the heavy-handedness of it. You would get bored and frightened at the same time.
Student: You spoke of suffocation turning into boredom, and boredom then moving into some kind of openness. It sounds to me as though boredom is in fact a gut response to the fear of losing oneself, or losing selfhood. Is that the correct way of seeing it?
Trungpa Rinpoche: I see it that way too, yes. The boredom is the atmosphere. While you are bored, you are not aware of this , but you’re aware of the atmosphere, which creates boredom. That is a very interesting twist that takes place there, which doesn’t usually happen in your ordinary life.
S: Instead of being afraid that the self is disappearing directly, you turn that outward, toward the situation.
TR: That’s right, yes. That’s the awareness experience that happens. Well said, sir.
Student: When you’re meditating and all of a sudden there’s a sound in the room, like somebody coughs, sometimes you feel so susceptible to it that you feel very shattered. It’s very magnified, very physical, electric. Is that an example of openness?
Trungpa Rinpoche: There’s something faintly suspicious there. It is possible that you become open and susceptible. But if you don’t have a sense of the atmosphere as filled with body, with texture, then you are spacing out rather than connecting with shamatha or vipashyana. There is a definite need for you to deal with the, so to speak, dense, humid atmosphere.
Student: How does being aware of the body and texture of the atmosphere, as you just said we should be, differ from being aware of the theater backdrop?
Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s the same thing, actually. In the theater you see not only the stage alone, but you have already created your own texture around the theater hall, and that thing, the stage, is more or less a highlight. If it weren’t for that atmosphere, you wouldn’t bother going to the theater. You’d watch television instead, or a movie. There’s a difference between watching a movie and going to the theater. The movie has been produced already, and you are seeing the result. The play in the theater is being performed on the spot. Maybe the actors have their own stories, but still you are taking part in the performance somehow. Something might go wrong. Somebody might fall off the stage and break his neck. Whereas you can’t expect that in the movies. All that is part of the
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