Glimpses of Abhidharma

Question: I didn’t really understand the difference between the Sutrapitaka and the Abhidharmapitaka.

Rinpoche: The Sutrapitaka gives the techniques of meditation, while the abhidharma describes the accomplished experience of meditation so that you can relate with other people about it, as well as yourself. Rather than being a cookbook, it presumes that you are familiar with certain ideas and experiences and proceeds to formulate them with great precision. That is why recent translators have run into difficulty with Buddhist texts—they have not had experience of what is being talked about. That is what is lacking in a lot of the translations.

Question: What does abhidharma mean?

Rinpoche: The Tibetan for abhidharma is chö ngönpa [chos mngon pa]. Chö means “dharma” in Sanskrit, the law or “isness” of things. Ngönpa refers to something visible or apparent, something available visually. It means, almost, something which is predictable, something you can interpret or see the pattern of. So you could say abhidharma means the “pattern of the dharma.” Here “dharma” could be the dharma of cooking, the dharma of driving a motorcar, any kind of dharma—not dharma with a capital D particularly. It is the intimate, homey quality of the dharma which is very vividly presented in the abhidharma.

Question: I heard that in certain Buddhist countries that stress the study of the abhidharma the practice of meditation fell away. Is there a kind of danger in the abhidharmapitaka teachings, that if one uses them in the wrong way to relate to kitchen-sink problems, it might lead one to think one could to without meditation?

Rinpoche: I think that is highly possible, definitely. That is a problem that has come up; and in fact it is a main cause of the degeneration of the buddhadharma in the whole Buddhist world. I have heard that an outstanding scholar from Ceylon has said that no one has attained enlightenment in the last five hundred years, but that nevertheless it is our duty to keep all the theories alive so that maybe one day somebody will click. Actually, it is a basic idea among Buddhist scholars who emphasize mainly the scholarly side of the teaching that it is dangerous to begin meditating before you have mastered the theory. Then, once you have discovered everything intellectually—how to do it, what the idea is behind it—once you have gone through all the psychological images intellectually, then you do not really have to meditate because you know it all already. That approach goes along with the idea of Buddha as superscholar. Since the idea of awakened mind or enlightenment exists in the tradition, these scholars must have some view of it. They have no way of interpreting it other than as knowing everything. They think that if someone has ten or twelve Ph.D.s, he will probably attain enlightenment because he has all the answers. Then someone with one Ph.D. should have attained partial enlightenment, but as we know this does not happen at all. So being a superscholar is not the answer.

The contemplative traditions of Buddhism, such as the Tibetan and Zen traditions, emphasize practice very strongly and see study as something that should go side by side with it. Here the idea of learning is that it is a process of new discovery, new scientific discovery, which is actual experience. There is a tremendous difference between putting something under a microscope, actually seeing it with your own eyes, and just purely analyzing the topic. Anything can be analyzed, but if you have no experience of it there is no basis for analysis. So the idea in the contemplative tradition is that one should have some basic training in meditation practice, however primitive it may be, and then begin to work on the intellectual aspect. This way the teaching is treated as a confirmation of experience rather than purely as a bank of information.

Question: Could you explain this tendency in us to be satisfied with theory instead of being freer and more open in terms of actual experience?

Rinpoche: I suppose the main tendency might be the tendency to make secure what we are doing. You see, on the whole, practice is a sloppy job. You have to accept that you have been a fool and start with being foolish. For instance, in the beginning, deciding to try the practice of meditation is just leaping to some conclusion about what to do. And even in doing the practice at the beginning, rather than really meditating, you just imagine you are meditating. So to begin with, the whole thing is based on confusion and confusion is accepted as part of the path. And since the situation is very loose and unorganized, it is as though you are leaping into unknown territory. A lot of people find that very frightening. You are not quite sure what you are involved with. But that is the only way to get into the practice. Being a fool then becomes a stepping-stone. The foolishness wears itself out and the thing behind the foolishness begins to peep through. It is like wearing out a shoe—your genuine feet begin to appear from behind your shoe.

You see there is a tremendous amount of fear involved and so a certain amount of security is needed. This particular answer does not answer all your questions of security. It does not really promise anything, it just pushes you overboard. It points out the situation of needing security and being frightened of that situation. Once we step out of that concern for security and are willing to be raw and rugged, personal, as we are, somehow a certain relaxation takes place. We discover that the more we let go the more comes back to us, rather than that we lose our grip on anything. Then a real relationship to our situation begins to develop.

The great problem is that spiritual teachings have been used as a way of securing ourselves, gaining a higher level of stability in terms of ego. This is our inevitable starting point. We cannot ignore this or push it away. We must start with the mistakes and that is always a problem. There is the fear and need for security that makes acceptance of spontaneity extremely difficult. As it says in the Dhammapada, “He who knows he’s a fool is a wise man indeed.”

Question: Can you say more about how the six senses connect up with meditation?

Rinpoche: The implication of the abhidharma teaching on the six senses for the practice of meditation is identifying yourself with sounds, touchable objects, feelings, breathing, and so on. The only way to develop sound meditative technique is to take something ordinary and use that. Unless you take something simple, the whole state of mind of your meditation will be based on the conflict of what is real and what is not and your relationship to that. This brings all kinds of complications and one begins to interpret these complications as psychological problems, neurotic problems, and to develop a sort of paranoid frame of mind in which what is going on represents to one much more than is actually there. So the whole idea is to start by relating to nonduality on a practical level, to step out of these paranoid conflicts of who in us is controlling whom. We should just get into actual things, sights and sounds as they are. A basic part of the tradition of meditation is using the sense perceptions as a way of relating with the earth. They are sort of middlemen for dealing with the earth. They contain neither good nor bad, are connected with neither spirituality nor samsara, nor anything at all. They are just neutral.

Question: Ignorance seems to take on different values at different times, if I understand you. Could you explain that further?

Rinpoche: Ignorance is an evolutionary process. It does not just happen as one bulk, so to speak, but develops and grows like a plant. You have a seed and then manure; then the plant grows and finally blossoms. As we have said, the beginning of that ignorance is bewilderment, panic. It is the ultimate panic, which does not even contain fear. Being just pure panic, it transcends fear. It is something very meditative in that sense, almost spiritual—a spiritual absorption. It is that profound; it comes right from the depths of your very being. That ignorance is the seed of what you are. It is fundamental, neutral, without any concepts or ideas of any kind. Just pure panic, 100 percent panic. From this, the cloudiness develops as an aftereffect. It is like when you get hit and then you get dizzy afterward.

Question: When you speak of “things as they are,” do you mean completely without projections? It is at least theoretically possible to experience things without projections, isn’t it? The reason I ask is because if there is an overwhelming quality to experiencing things as they are, then that sense of overwhelmingness would be a projection, wouldn’t it?

Rinpoche: It is definitely possible to experience things without projections. But just things as they are would not be overwhelming. That is dualistic. There would be no quality of overwhelming because overwhelming means “who has got control over whom.” So the question of overwhelmingness does not arise at all.

Seeing things as they are is very, very plain. Because it is so plain, it is colorful and precise. There is no game involved, therefore it is more precise, clearer. It does not need any relative supports; it does not call for any comparisons. That is why the individuality of things is then seen more precisely—because there is no need to compare anything to anything. You see the merit of each situation in its own right, as it is.

Question: Is not the student of abhidharma always playing a game then, intellectually assuming a nondualistic point of view and then using that to actually work through duality?

Rinpoche: That is not so much the case with the abhidharma. I would say that is more true of working with the shunyata principle according to the middle way or Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. This is a philosophy which developed after the abhidharma. Another example would be the koan practices in the Rinzai tradition of Zen where the meditation involves trying to use a certain kind of logic which is apparently illogical. But it is a logic of its kind because it is illogical. Using the koan again and again exhausts the mind’s habitual thinking and takes one off the road somehow. There is a sudden experience of the futility and childishness of trying to apply ordinary logic, and that is where the gap or satori comes. In that case it is using a kind of logic of nonduality dualistically in order to destroy dualism.

On the other hand, the abhidharma merely presents some first idea of the pattern of duality. It is like a philosophy of meditation. By explaining the psychological pattern, it tells why meditation is valid.

Question: With regard to the eight consciousnesses—does it make sense to try to have a direct experience of any one of them isolated from the rest, or is this too abstract a way of going about it?

Rinpoche: I think that is too abstract. You cannot deal with them purely individually. It is like looking at a person: if you look at a person from the point of view of how fat or how thin he or she is, you still cannot fail to see also that person’s head and toes and what clothes he or she is wearing. So in looking at experience from one perspective, you see the rest as well. Once we experience one sense consciousness, then what gives that particular sense consciousness the quality of consciousness relates it to the others. Each sense consciousness, to a certain extent, contains the overall picture. It must be what it is in relation to some background; it must breathe some air to survive. It is like seeing a flower growing—when you see the flower, you also see the ground it is growing out of.

Question: Is everything we experience within the basic ignorance, within the eighth consciousness, including wisdom or higher states of meditation?

Rinpoche: Yes. That is precisely why the whole thing is hopeful, precisely why it is worthwhile looking into our state of mind.

Question: So then higher states of meditation don’t blank out the six senses, for example?

Rinpoche: Not at all. Of course not. In fact, the six sense consciousnesses are heightened. If we regard meditation as just getting into a fog so that you do not see, you do not feel, something is terribly wrong. In that case meditation would reduce one to a zombie. The enlightened man would have to be rescued. Someone would have to feed him and take him to the bathroom. We would have to have an enlightenment ward.

Question: Rinpoche, you spoke of ignorance as not being willing to go back. What is the way back; is it meditation?

Rinpoche: One is not willing to trace back how one came to be ignorant. But actually one cannot go back literally. One does not really have to go back. Rather one discovers what one was by the process of going more deeply into the present situation. That is the difference between an intuitive approach and an intellectual one. You can go back intellectually, but that does not help; you remain stuck in the same point of view. The whole idea is that if you are able to realize what you are at the present moment, you do not need to try to go back. What you are at this moment contains the whole message of what you were. That is really the practice of nonduality in meditation—seeing your present situation and going with it, identifying with the particular sense experiences of sight, smell, and so on. Just experience the simplicity of them.

Question: I don’t understand the first skandha. It seems it would be more basic than experience itself if it is more basic than the second and third skandhas of feeling and perception and the rest of them.

Rinpoche: The first skandha of form is basic, yes. Feeling and perception and the rest of the skandhas are built out of that basic thing. They are different types of attributes of form, so to speak, that are around it.

Question: Is there any activity within that world of form? It seems to me that the most basic activities I ever experience begin with feeling.

Rinpoche: No, what you are talking about is what you might call “facade experience.” Fundamental experience begins with relativity, with the notion of comparison, which means ego and its projections. You cannot experience anything without a somebody to experience it and that is the starting point. That somebody is an unknown person, but experiencing it feels good. That is ignorance and the ego.

Question: So the first step is naming and labeling in order to begin experiencing yourself.

Rinpoche: Yes, yes—one’s own position. The starting point of comparison.

Question: What is a skandha?

Rinpoche: Skandha means “heap.” It is a collection, pile. That means it is not an independent definite object like a brick, but a collection of a lot of little details and aspects of psychological inclinations of different types. For instance, the second skandha, feeling, is not solid, not one feeling. It contains all sorts of feelings. The third skandha, perception, is the same—it is a collection. So ego is made out of a lot of particles rather than being one fixed thing that keeps going on.

Question: You say that the six sense consciousnesses are in the first skandha, the skandha of form. In the ordinary understanding, when one speaks of the senses one is already talking about perception; and yet perception is the third skandha.

Rinpoche: The senses are connected with perception; but there is more grasping and holding on involved in perception proper. Just the pure senses are very simple, mechanical almost.

Question: Could you give us a concrete example showing how the skandhas come into play—form, feeling, perception, and so on? Something simple—for example, if I see a car.

Rinpoche: The process that takes place here takes place in a fraction of a second of consciousness, that lasts something like a five-hundredth of a second. First you have an impression of something. It is blank, nothing definite. Then you try to relate to it as something and all the names that you have been taught come back to you and you put a label on that thing. You brand it with that label and then you know your relationship to it. You like it or you dislike it, depending on your association of it with the past.

Now the very, very first blank, which may last a millionth of a second, is the meditation experience of the primordial ground. Then the next instant there is a question—you do not know who and what and where you are. The next moment is a faint idea of finding some relationship. Then you immediately send your message back to memory, to the associations you have been taught. You find the particular category or the particular label you have been taught and you stamp it on. Then at once you have your strategy of how to relate with that in terms of liking it or disliking it. This whole process happens very quickly. It just flashes into place.

Question: Are all five skandhas in there?

Rinpoche: All five will be there, though I did not describe them all.

Question: Could you say more about the cloudy mind and the difference between the eighth consciousness, the seventh, and the six sense consciousnesses?

Rinpoche: We begin with the eighth consciousness, the background, and then the seventh is kind of a way of relating the eighth consciousness to the six sense consciousnesses. But it is a very random way of relating because you no longer have any sense of direction, you do not know how to proceed. If sight comes first or sound or smell—it just happens to you. You are just insensate, just crawling along. The seventh consciousness is more intelligent than the eighth, than the basic ignorance, but you are still only sleepwalking, almost awake but not quite.

Question: Is that at all like when you find yourself walking in the garden and you hadn’t realized you were there? You’ve done something without realizing it?

Rinpoche: Yes, it has actually been described that way. It is the subconscious feeling of a possible way of relating with the senses, but you have not quite worked it out properly yet. It happens in the midst of very precisely defined situations as well. It does not have to be a dreamy state at all. In those cases it is almost like the impact of the first bewilderment is coming to life again. But it still has a certain tinge of the dreamy quality and a potential of the six sense consciousnesses in it. It is a sort of no-man’s-land that you go through.

Question: Is this state characterized by a sense of tension between opposites, such as when for a minute you are confused between sweet and bitter? You are vacillating back and forth between the two and then you realize that the taste is just what it is?

Rinpoche: That sounds like when you have already gotten to the sense consciousnesses. But at the beginning you are not sure, you are just feeling around it. The seventh consciousness is like putting something in your mouth; chewing and tasting is on the level of the six senses.

Question: I really don’t understand. In the beginning you said that feeling could only function independently if it had concepts to work with, to relate itself to. Then right after that, when you mentioned mind and body, I thought right away that these are the concepts it’s relating itself to in order to be independent. Is that true?

Rinpoche: Well, the feeling happens with the concept, but as it happens that whole movement becomes bewildering and the concept does not apply any more. Actually pain and pleasure, apart from the second skandha, just happen. They have nothing to do with concepts or criteria at all. Pain or pleasure does not have to be a comparative thing. There could be independent pain, independent pleasure. We can afford to experience pain and pleasure without feeling. Many people might feel this is extremely demonic, that if there are no strings attached, if feeling does not have to be connected to concepts, you might be experiencing that through destroying or hurting people. But this fear on the part of people of the demonic aspect of themselves comes from being afraid of an unknown situation. They are afraid of that space because they have not seen the other aspect of it that is without hope or fear. Once they get a glimpse of the possibility of pain and pleasure without hope and fear, they see it as demonic. Of course there is nothing to latch on to there. If you take away the hope and fear, then pain and pleasure remains as it is. There is no way of relating with it except directly.

Question: So mind and body—one is not pain and the other pleasure, but both are sort of organs of pain and pleasure? Is that it?

Rinpoche: Well, yes. But at the same time mind is more closely connected with pleasure, because mind invites imagination. It invites imagination about what might be good, it is hopeful about possibilities of gaining something. But body is very much down-to-earth; it constantly brings us back to what we have to face. It’s like the difference between taking the whole family to the theater or movies, which is the mind situation, and when we come back home and have to clean up our old dishes and cook a meal, which is the body situation.

Question: Rinpoche, I don’t understand, because it seems that the imagination is just as inclined, in fact probably more inclined, toward the imagination of pain than the imagination of pleasure.

Rinpoche: Well, you see, the whole point is that imagining pain and pleasure as a solid thing is not very appealing. But on the other hand, imagining pain and pleasure as a floating situation is much more appealing, because you can turn pain into pleasure in your imagination. You see the difference? In other words, nobody likes to face reality. The reality is physical, the body, the form of the first skandha that we created at the beginning. We have a body, “I am what I am.” It’s like an individual God-consciousness. Once you have that thing, “I am what I am,” then it becomes very solid.

Question: So physical pain, then, could be translated into pleasure if it is seen as strengthening the “I am”?

Rinpoche: All pain for that matter. You see, all sorts of double-crosses can take place. You are sitting down to meditate and you say to yourself, “I’m going to do it for twenty hours starting right now; and whatever physical pain comes up is fine. It will be part of it. Okay, let it come through. Let it happen all along. That will be okay.” And each time when pain comes you feel that you are overcoming the possessiveness of ego by feeling that particular pain. But in actual fact, by the time you finish your twenty hours of meditation, your ego has been strengthened because you feel that you worked so hard and you faced so much. You have been double-crossed by ego.

Question: Is it possible to purify the feelings so that movement toward what is true feels good and movement toward what is not true does not feel good?

Rinpoche: The question is whether or not we see that there is no point in playing the game of feeling which is the second skandha. If we see that, we are not concerned by that or this anymore. We go along very boldly, in a very stubborn way—we just sail along. We have our own plow, our own tank, and we are going to drive right along. Whether we are confronted by a house, a shop, or a supermarket, we are going to drive right on through. The whole point seems to be whether or not we have that bold attitude of being what we are and are willing to disregard the duality of that and this. We accept our negative side and the fact we are a fool. Okay—that’s fine. We use it as part of the meditation process. Nevertheless we are going to go on and on and on being ashamed or being proud of it. But we are just going to go on and on and on.

Question: Rinpoche, I wonder if I’ve misunderstood. Are there basically four kinds of feeling, bodily pleasurable and painful and mind pleasurable and painful?

Rinpoche: There seem to be, on one hand, pleasurable and painful feelings and, on the other hand, bodily and mental-type feelings. The bodily feelings seem to be very complicated in a sense or very subtle, because it is very difficult to relate with a particular bodily pleasure or pain. This is because so much imagination is involved. To put it in terms of a very simple metaphor, the mind aspect of feeling is like being high on marijuana or LSD; and the body aspect is like being high on school. The first is highly imaginary, the second is rather earthy but at the same time emotional. So it’s like two kinds of intoxication—high on chemicals, high on yeast. Feeling has all kinds of variations—more than four. Pain, pleasure, or indifference could be friend or enemy, mental or physical.

You see, all human experience is high on something. Whether we regard ourselves as sober or not, we are constantly drunk, drunk on one thing or another, drunk on imagination or drunk on conflicts on the bodily level. Otherwise we could not survive. So we could say that this idea of feeling is different kinds of intoxication. You are intoxicated with good and bad: intoxicated with good, godliness, spirituality, pleasure; intoxicated with bad, evil, destruction, pain. You are intoxicated in imagination—all sorts of imaginations are going on. You are intoxicated in the body in that you are irritated by that and this and therefore you would like to get revenge by imposing yourself on something, laying your trip on something. The whole thing, all of experience, is being intoxicated on something. That is a very important and revealing aspect of this question of feeling, of this second stage in the development of the skandhas. The first skandha is ignorance, bewilderment, confusion, and vague name and form. In the second one, already having some vague concept of where you stand, you would like to lay trips on something. This is what the feeling that happens—good and bad, body and mind—is about.

Question: Is every feeling dualistic?

Rinpoche: If it’s based on something, some concept or wishful thinking. You see, every feeling of that sort must have a target in terms of this and that, of this in relation to that. This where I begin and that where I want to get to. As long as feelings are involved with this and that, that is duality. In other words, in relating to this and that, you have no way at all of relating with yourself. You have lost yourself altogether because you are so fascinated with this and that.

Question: You talked about the lonely journey and said that everything we do with other people is just projections, chasing our projections. So why do we need to relate with other people? It seems the obvious solution is just not to relate.

Rinpoche: “Why” and “why not” are saying the same thing. Do you see what I mean? “Why so” and “why not” are the same thing. So then, why don’t we just plunge in?

Question: I seemed to understand that earthly intoxication is better than heavenly? Is bodily feeling, then, somehow more helpful?

Rinpoche: I think so, yes. Like the situation of a fistfight or making love—that kind of boiling situation brings you very much into the present moment.

Question: Rinpoche, you speak of a heavenly trip which tries to elude pain, move away from the down-to-earth situation, and say that this is associated with pleasure. Is there a kind of intoxication which transcends the duality of pain and pleasure?

Rinpoche: I think so, but that is not associated with heaven; that transcends heaven in the sense of that which is above as opposed to you below experiencing it. As long as you relate to heaven above and you down below, you do not experience it properly, you do not transcend. But when you see that heaven is below or that it is nowhere, that is the point where you transcend the whole process. That becomes an open and ultimate state, because then you are relating with the primordial ground. The primordial ground contains everything without being based on the relative situations of good and bad, this and that.

Question: I only got four developments in perception. Manifestation, nonmanifestation.

Rinpoche: Big is the third one, and small is the fourth. The fifth is absolute nothingness.

Question: Could you go over nonmanifestation again?

Rinpoche: It has to do with fear. It is based on the fear of not having a solid situation anymore. Solidified space is hope. It is hopeful in that you manage to solidify the space as something to hang on to. In nonmanifestation, you have found nothing, and there is complete despair and giving up hope. But that is in itself a double-cross of ego, because giving up hope is in itself clinging to something.

Question: So in the case of manifestation I’m very taken up by the things I can see around me, whereas in nonmanifestation I’m more occupied by the things that I can’t see that I wish were there.

Rinpoche: By the frustration of it. In nonmanifestation you are occupied with the frustration of not having what you want.

Question: And those two, hope and fear, would continually re-create each other?

Rinpoche: Yes, definitely. Wherever there is hope there is also survival of hope, which is based on fear. Maintenance of the hope is based on the fear of its nonfulfillment.

Question: What’s the difference between big and small? Big and small what?

Rinpoche: The third and fourth ones are just two polarities. It is connected with outside and inside—expanding your vision outward and exploring, deepening your vision inward. Certain scholars in Tibet have spoken of perception as “hungry perception.” It is dying to look for new material to eat up. It is constantly looking for possibilities for hanging on to something. The development of big and small particularly corresponds to this hungry notion of perception. Perception is much hungrier than feeling, because feeling is already partly secured. In the case of feeling, we have a form, a solid thing, and then we radiate out from the form, we extend and stretch ourselves, exploring very gently, very gently. But when we reach the level of perception, this sort of forced gentility begins to wear out and we become a bit desperate.

Question: Would these five parts of perception ever be simultaneous or are they separate psychological stages?

Rinpoche: It seems that they are separate psychological stages because you can concentrate on only one at a time. You see, the five skandhas are a very evolutionary thing. Form and feeling can manifest by themselves quite spontaneously, but when we get to perception and samskara, there are more and more separate things involved.

Question: I don’t understand the evolutionary quality. I thought that all the skandhas had to work together, so that even though we speak of form first, it’s not possible without perception, for example.

Rinpoche: That is true also, yes.

Question: You said form and feeling can exist on their own, but in order for there to be form, don’t you have to perceive it?

Rinpoche: Yes, you definitely have to. What’s wrong?

Question: Well, you say, “that comes later on” or “when we get to such-and-such skandha” as if that was the order of being, that we form and then we feel and then we perceive. But aren’t they happening simultaneously?

Rinpoche: Well, it depends on our notion of time, of “simultaneously.” We described the other day how the first stage of ego and its extensions develop by thousandths of a second. In that way, the whole thing develops by stages. But on that time scale, you could also say they happen simultaneously. So that process happens simultaneously or progressively. There is a beginning and an end, but the application of notions of time becomes rugged and crude here. When we get to the level of consciousness, the last skandha, it becomes cruder still. That last skandha contains form and feeling and perception and samskara; but as far as the way of flashing is concerned, there is the evolutionary pattern. The first flash is the form and the next, feeling. As you flash further and further, the content becomes more and more involved. When you flash perception, that contains feeling and form; when you flash consciousness that contains all the other four.

Question: So the first flash of seeing something hasn’t reached the stage of perception yet because it’s without feeling?

Rinpoche: The first flash is just blank. Then a question, then an answer, then solidifying that and relating to it in terms of love and hate and so on. But very quickly, in a fraction of a second.

Question: Is it possible to continue to exist without this process? It seems if that would stop, I would be in great danger.

Rinpoche: That is what you think. There are people who have managed to do without it. After all, all this information about this pattern of the five skandhas comes from the point of view of those who have seen it from above, from an aerial view. It is not necessary to go through these complicated patterns of skandhas. It would be extremely simple not to go through them anymore. You do not have to keep giving birth to the whole process. You can just perceive and go along with that perception, whatever arises.

Question: Is that kind of perception you were just talking about outside the ego’s confine?

Rinpoche: Well, that becomes inspiration. Outside the ego, perception becomes inspiration. But that is getting onto the tantric level, which may be too difficult to understand.

Question: Inspiration for what?

Rinpoche: For that. Itself.

Question: It seems that there are hints of tantric teachings in all of this.

Rinpoche: Of course, yes; if it were without connection to the earlier teachings, tantra would be a solitary planet. Actually some of the details of tantric iconography are developed from abhidharma. Different colors and feelings of this particular consciousness, that particular emotion, are manifested in a particular deity wearing such-and-such a costume, of certain particular colors, holding certain particular scepters in his hand. Those details are very closely connected with the individualities of particular psychological processes.

Question: If you understand the abhidharma really clearly you can get into tantra, then?

Rinpoche: Yes, that is what happens. Actually a great deal of the tantric symbolism, the mandala, for example, is based on the terminology of the abhidharma. It runs right through. The abhidharma is a way of seeing; the psychology that it describes is not just a lump sum, a theoretical generality. There is individuality in every aspect of human emotion, human psychology. It is very rich. Each aspect of mind has its own individuality, and as you go along further and further, deeper and deeper, you begin to see these individual aspects as really living forces. At that point you also lose ego, because you no longer have to label experiencing as one big lump sum of “me” and “mine” and “I” anymore. That has become useless, absurd.

Question: Does one identify with these details? Is there a technique of identification happening?

Rinpoche: Well, if you identify with all these details going on in personal experience, that is very much a shortcut. You don’t have to look for outside answers, because answers are there already. It happens on a personal level.

Question: What is the process when you say “identify with something”? Say I’m sawing a piece of wood, and I remember to identify with that, is it somehow like putting my mind on my hand? How does this fit in with the skandhas? Is it like connecting the sixth or the seventh or the eighth type of consciousness with the visual consciousness?

Rinpoche: You are quite right to raise that question. It is quite dangerous actually when we talk about identifying. You could identify outwardly with things as they are, so there is no center, but just fringe everywhere, expansion everywhere. Or you could identify inwardly, that is, you could identify with things that are happening with yourself as a solid entity.

Identification should be open identification, centerless identification, in other words, without a watcher. That is the whole point. If there is no watcher, then identification becomes real identification, really making a connection with things as they are. Whereas if you identify inwardly then you are identifying in accordance with some concept, in accordance with your own categories.

Question: Identifying inwardly would be connecting your mind with the thing?

Rinpoche: With the thing, a solidified notion, yes. That is what we call materialism, spiritual or psychological materialism.

Question: What is the other kind? Identifying outwardly is just being aware of what’s happening, without any—

Rinpoche: Well, you are not watching your body and your physical motion of sawing wood, but you just become one with wood itself. You do not watch yourself being identified, but you become completely one with the action or object of what you are doing.

Question: What about when Buddha taught the woman at the well how to feel the rope and attend to the motion of drawing water? What about the practice of mindfulness?

Rinpoche: That is like using the breathing in meditation, it is the motion of the two arms—as outsiders. It has nothing to do with me and my arms, but it is just two arms doing a regular functional thing—drawing up water.

Question: So there is nothing built up that way? No territory or sense of ownership?

Rinpoche: Nothing is built up that way. Breathing is just breathing happening there. It has nothing to do with my breathing, so that I should have to breathe specially.

Question: Becoming one with the wood, is that becoming intoxicated?

Rinpoche: We could say that, yes. Once you are in the experience there is some logical pattern to follow, which becomes a sort of perpetually creative process; you begin to see the colorfulness, the vividness of things.

Question: Could you explain the relationship between fear and identification?

Rinpoche: Well, identification is surrendering and not referring back; not checking back with central headquarters but just going on with what is there. Fear is referring back to yourself and making sure that your relationship with what is happening is quite secure. If you don’t check up on yourself, you might have to panic. Suddenly you stop identifying because you fear something is wrong—you begin to lose your grip. This is because in identifying, the carpet of security is pulled out from under your feet.

Question: Rinpoche, you said that nonmanifestation is based on fear, whereas it seems to me that the quality of fear is a more solid thing than hope. I see something more spacious about hope than fear. I don’t understand how nonmanifestation is based on fear.

Rinpoche: Well, nonmanifestation is based on fear in the sense that it becomes despair. Fear projects a situation in which there is nothing to hang on to and you have lost every contact, every connection; so you are dwelling on that—which is despair. It is creating another type of ground to hang on to, dwelling on fear, enjoying fear or sadness as an occupation.

Question: Why is there a problem about this fifth state of perception, absolute nothingness, that some schools of Buddhism would consider this to be a cloudy mind or a clinging mind?

Rinpoche: I think there was tremendous distrust in the definition of the absolute, of absolute mind, buddha nature, and its intelligence. That connects with our previous discussion about viewing Buddha as a great scholar. From the point of view where being enlightened is being a great scholar, any kind of feeble intelligence or feeble inspiration is regarded as a manifestation of samsara. The people holding this view thought that in order to have a really good glimpse of the absolute you had to have fantastic dramatic flashes. They themselves had not had these experiences, but they imagined that should be the case. The other school, our school, says that awakened mind has to be something that is part of our everyday experience of ego. The experience of awakened mind is extremely simple; it does not have to be dramatic. The faintest expression of intelligence is part of the awakened state of mind. So you do not have to build up a mythical notion of enlightened experience. It is something realistic, and flashes of it happen constantly. That viewpoint also coincides with the tantric teachings.

Question: So all through these skandhas, the awakened state of mind is the thread that everything goes on, and somehow the complications built up by each skandha live on this thread which they obscure.

Rinpoche: That’s right, that happens all the way along.

Question: So that the awakened state of mind is actually doing all the work that everything else is living on?

Rinpoche: Exactly, I mean even uprisings, agitation, aspects of living in the samsaric world like guerrilla warfare and political intrigues and everything—all are based on a fundamental sense that something is not right, and seeing that something is not right is based on intelligence.

Question: So doubt is intelligence.

Rinpoche: Doubt is intelligence, yes. That is really very powerful thinking actually. The chaos is intelligence and it is teaching. So you do not have to ward off anything at all.

Question: Could you say something about pure pleasure and pure pain isolated unto themselves? How could they exist outside the body or mind?

Rinpoche: They cannot exist outside the actual body and the actual mind, but they can exist outside our version of the body and our version of the mind. That is the most difficult thing of all—we say “body” and we say “mind,” but we have our own interpretation of them, our own concept of them, which constantly separates us from the reality of the body and mind, the bodyness, the mindness, the thingness of things as they are. This thingness of things as they are is what is called emptiness, shunyata, the actual isness quality of things. Things could be without us; they could remain pure and perfect as they are. But we put our own version over them, and we then amalgamate them all together. It is like dressing up dolls. We have the naked bodies and then we put on military costumes or monks’ robes or an ordinary tie and suit. We dress them up. Then suddenly we find that they are alive. And we try to run away from them because they begin to chase us. We end up being haunted by our own desire and perceptions, because we put so much onto them. Finally our own creation becomes destructive to us.

Question: I really didn’t understand what you said about freezing space.

Rinpoche: The basic ground is open ground, but you do not want to accept that. You want to solidify it to make it tangible, safe ground to walk on. So by freezing space, I mean solidifying that open space. There could be the experience of pain and pleasure as naked pain and naked pleasure without any problem of fixing them in relation to anything. We do not have to conquer our projections and our mind at all. We do not have to control anything. Things as they are can remain independent. Once situations are left open and fresh and naked, experience can become very flowing, real, living.

Question: Where do pure pain and pleasure come from in this pure, open situation?

Rinpoche: Well, they manifest by themselves. They are not dependent on anything. That is the whole point. We do not have to have a chain-reaction process. Each pain and pleasure can come as an independent package deal. The whole problem arises from relating with experience as something other than just what it is. Then it has to be maintained or controlled. If you have extreme spiritual pleasure, there is the possibility of losing it or its dying because you are trying to maintain it. But really you do not have to maintain it; it is an independent, self-sufficient experience. Therefore, in the tantric iconography, pain and pleasure and all these experiences have been described as divinities, independent persons dancing on lotus seats. They are independent beings. They are not being manipulated by remote control.

Question: When you talk about pain and pleasure in their pure state, I think that if I tried to relate to that I would end up on a trippy imagination jag, leaving out the earth of the situation. I would just go off on a mind trip.

Rinpoche: I think that you might well as long as you have the aim and object of trying to get pure pain and pleasure. When you have that idea in mind and try to go out and do it, then you have to do something extraordinary, either take an acid trip or freak out. And you never make it because you have the idea in mind already prepared. That means that ego planned it for you and sent you out with its consent.

Question: Suppose you had a little flash of intelligence and then saw the whole process of ego starting all over again, the ego panicking and falling into a hungry-ghost mentality, cutting yourself off from the very thing that you want. What do you do with that process?

Rinpoche: If you see it happening, that is the key point, and you find some spontaneous way of dealing with it. It is like learning to swim. If you are suddenly pushed into the water, you automatically swim; whereas, after a certain time being educated in how to swim by teachers, watching becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Once you see the key point of the situation, then you can relate to it properly, actually do it.

You see the teachings are not really like do-it-yourself books. They do not go through every point down to the last detail. They just indicate, give hints. The teachings are an awakening process to rouse you to the situation, rather than a compendium of step-by-step, specific guidance. The teaching gives hints, and you are inspired to go out and develop them. Then you find that you can do it. That is the whole process. Spontaneity and basic intelligence become extremely important. They begin to function independently when the confusions begin to arise. That is what is meant by the notion of the universal guru.

Perhaps we should have some discussion.

Question: Did you say that samskara is associated with neither nirvana nor samsara, or does that apply to all the skandhas?

Rinpoche: To all the skandhas.

Question: I am puzzled. You said that the good thoughts were somehow related to buddha nature.

Rinpoche: Well, that is easily possible if there is underlying non-ego intonation. That is why they are called “good,” because they are not acts of egomania in the literal, ordinary sense.

Question: Is there more possibility of buddha nature in the states of mind classified as good?

Rinpoche: Yes, there is a tendency to be closer to the awakened state; but at the same time, if this good is being used by the ego, then it is not necessarily absolute good, but just sort of pseudo.

Question: Then does it make any difference? That is, is it worthwhile trying to be a good boy?

Rinpoche: I don’t think so, necessarily. Although these are said to be the good or virtuous ones, at the same time such thoughts—patience or nonviolence or whatever—cannot happen by themselves. They have to have the tinges of passion or aggression, as I said, or also ignorance. They cannot constitute the basic energy that has to go along with them for them to occur. So there is no such thing as 100 percent good in any case. The tendencies are sort of lighter and heavier rather than good and bad.

Question: So they all come from ignorance, hatred, and passion.

Rinpoche: They do, yes.

Question: Is the thread that connects them perception, feeling, or both?

Rinpoche: Quite likely it is form, the basic continuity, ignorance which makes it all possible for the others to continue.

Question: I am confused about speed. There is a speed of the ego being driven, going faster and faster, and there is also a speed of universal energy, or something like that. There is an evil speed, but is there also another speed?

Rinpoche: Well, I’m trying to use the word speed as a sort of driving aggression. But that is not purely pejorative. This has a positive aspect as well, because any kind of aggression, any kind of movement that there is, always has neutral energy that goes along with it. So speed is pure force, neutral force, which could be used for different purposes. The buddha wisdom of the accomplishment of all actions could also be called speed. But somehow that speed is not based on a target. Once you have a target, or criteria in terms of reaching somewhere from somewhere else, that makes the whole pattern of speed destructive. In the case of the energy without a target, without a relativity notion, that speed just happens and returns just by its own nature. It fulfills actions completely and comes back. Because fulfilling action in this case follows no criterion or model at all. The speed or energy just goes out and gets into the natural situation spontaneously, tries to bring the natural situation to its fullest state, and then comes back. This kind of speed does not behave in a dictatorial way. In the case of ego speed, you have a blueprint of what should be happening and you put out speed accordingly. You try to control situations or remold them. That leads to disappointment and confusion.

Question: Wouldn’t these dogmatic beliefs that you talked about be beliefs on the part of the “watcher”?

Rinpoche: If there is any tendency to get yourself to believe in certain ideas, particularly philosophical views such as the nihilistic and eternalistic ones, automatically you are aware of the learning process as being separate. You watch yourself in the process of learning and you use particular tools of different intensity, either gentle or aggressive ones, to bring about a certain result. So all these beliefs are, in a sense, very deliberate. It is a natural mind process, but that mind process involves deliberate effort—deliberately trying to be good or deliberately trying to grasp something and so on. Except for those four types of neutral patterns, sleep and the others: they are not deliberate, which is why they are called neutral. They can be influenced by either kind of deliberate thought pattern. They do not contain a watcher, actually. That is why they can be used by either kind of deliberate pattern or by ego or non-ego. But the rest of them are fixed and definite.

Question: That watcher is the one that puts everything that happens into one of those categories, these samskaric types of good and bad?

Rinpoche: Yes. That is actually a certain kind of common sense developed by the establishment of ego. By this time ego is so well established, it has developed its own regulations and rules. This becomes a kind of common sense. You see, as long as you are involved with the ego game, all these flashes of different types of thoughts and concepts are not independent ones at all. They are purely dependent on central headquarters. You always have to report back to yourself in order to define the ground. That is the watcher. And the watcher has a watcher as well.

Question: Would you say a little more about doubt? You have just spoken of doubt as one of the negative factors. Previously you spoke about it in a positive sense.

Rinpoche: We have been speaking about two quite different kinds of doubt. One kind is one of the six types of egocentric thoughts. This is ego’s tendency to have doubt in terms of the motivation of passion and anger and ignorance. It is a fear of losing ground, bewilderment rather than doubt in the intelligent sense. We fear we may not be able to survive to implement our ambition properly in the perspective of our egohood. It is more a fear of losing ground than doubt.

The intelligent doubt we were talking of earlier on is a general sense that there is something wrong all the way through, a sort of seed of doubt which runs right through the whole five-skandha process. It is the quality of inquisitiveness, questioning mind, which is the seed of the awakened state of mind. This is doubt or intelligence which is not protecting anything. It is purely questioning rather than trying to serve either the ego or non-ego state. It is purely a process of critical view which goes on all the time.

Question: I’m trying to relate this to inner experience. Associations present themselves and many other things, you know, when one is sitting quietly. And then a thought happens and there is belief in it, and then remembrances, and then an impulse arises that this that I am believing is not necessarily so. It may or may not be. I think what I’m trying to ask is—is this still within the pattern of attachment, or is this in the direction of something a little bit more free?

Rinpoche: You see, it is very difficult to make a generalization. What you described in itself could have different implications. The implication could be based solely on a survival notion; it could be based on a sense of “maybe that one, maybe this one”—ego jockeying for better position. Or there is the possibility of something else—that it could be based on a kind of open mind. It depends on your own relation to that.

Question: You mentioned slothfulness as one of the neutral states. But I’m wondering in what way slothfulness can be converted. Can it be channeled in the same way that intellectual speculation could be clarified?

Rinpoche: Slothfulness could be sort of infiltrated rather than changed or channeled into something else. This is because slothfulness does not contain any definite thing. It is a process, a mind process of not having made up your mind quite. You are just trundling along. So it has the possibility of being infiltrated from any side.

Question: Is slothfulness synonymous with laziness?

Rinpoche: Well, the words are complicated in this case. Somehow, laziness could have the connotation of being a naughty boy. You know, you should be doing thus and such, but you do not want to do it. Sort of stubbornness. But sloth is a general heaviness or being sleepy rather than game playing. It is just quite honest and ordinary.

Question: So in that sense slothfulness may be more receptive, more passive?

Rinpoche: Precisely, yes. It could be infiltrated.

Question: Insofar as you try to be something, wouldn’t it be better to try to be honest instead of trying to be good? I mean honest in the sense of trying to abandon one’s own pretensions. Isn’t that the basic effort?

Rinpoche: I think so, yes. The reason why all these different types of thoughts and ideas are being introduced, in fact, is so you can see your psychological picture in its fullest perspective; so that you do not try to regard one kind of thought pattern as good or another as bad; so that instead you regard everything directly and simply.

Question: I have an image going in my mind that the skandhas represent energy which has gone astray from the awakened state of mind and has taken on various forms. Lost from its origin, it has taken on various forms. And it seems that spiritual understanding would return this lost energy to its origin in some way. But also I have another image from when you pointed out that ignorance or form has the thread that holds all the skandhas together. Then I had the thought that it is simply a question of not operating ignorance—if you’re just completely still and unconcerned, it will all just blow away. And the two images give me two different attitudes. Do you know what I mean?

Rinpoche: Well, I don’t see any difficulties there. Ignorance is the binding factor for all the skandhas in their minute detail, but ignorance cannot exist by itself without relative situations, and the relative situation of ignorance is the awakened state of mind, intelligence, which makes ignorance survive or die. In other words, we could say that the awakened state of mind is the thread also, in the same way as ignorance. It runs right through the skandhas.

Question: But it wouldn’t be awakened if it were doing that.

Rinpoche: It would. Ignorance feels the other, the awakened, aspect of the polarity; therefore it does what it does. There is some subtle relationship ignorance is making with the basic intelligence of buddha nature. So ignorance in this case is not stupid, it is intelligent. The term for ignorance in Tibetan, marikpa, means “not seeing, not perceiving.” That means deciding to not perceive, deciding to not see, deciding to not look. Ignorance makes certain decisions and, having already made a certain decision, it tries to maintain it no matter what. Often it faces a hard time keeping to that decision constantly, because one act of ignorance cannot persist indefinitely, once and for all. Ignorance also is based on sparks or flashes of ignorance operating on some ground, and the space between two sparks of ignoring is the intelligence that this process of ignorance is operating on. It also happens occasionally that ignorance forgets to maintain its own quality, so that the awakened state comes through. So a meditative state of mind occurs spontaneously when, occasionally, the efficiency of ego’s administration breaks down.

Question: Would you explain what you mean by “ego game”?

Rinpoche: I think that is what we have been discussing all along in this seminar. The basic notion of ego is the notion of survival, trying to maintain oneself as “I am,” as an individual. Now, as we just said, there is a tendency for the coherency of that occasionally to break down. Therefore one needs to find all sorts of means of confirmation, of confirming a coherent, consistent me, a solid me. Sometimes, quite knowingly, ego has to play a game as though nothing had gone wrong with it. It pretends seeing through ego never happened, even though secretly it knows better. So ego trying to maintain itself leaves one in the strange position of trying to indoctrinate oneself oneself. This is a false pursuit, of course. But even knowing it is false does not particularly help, because ego says, “That’s not the point. We have to go on trying to learn to survive, playing this survival game of grasping, using any situation available in the present moment as part of the survival technique.” This involves a power game as well, because at a certain stage the defense mechanisms you have set up become more powerful than you are. They become overwhelming. Then, when you become used to the overwhelming quality of the defense mechanisms, when, for a moment, they are absent, you feel very insecure. That game of polarities goes on and on. On the whole, ego’s game is played in terms of ignoring what is really happening in a situation. You constantly, quite stubbornly want to see it from your point of view rather than seeing what really is happening there.

Question: You spoke of an aerial view of the five skandhas. Do you mean that with the development of meditative awareness one can actually experience the development of the skandhas in oneself?

Rinpoche: Yes. In a sudden glimpse of awareness, or in the meditation state, one sees the ups and downs of the five skandhas taking place and dissolving and beginning to develop again. The whole idea of meditation is to develop what is called the “wisdom eye,” prajnaparamita, transcendental knowledge. It is knowledge, information, at the beginning, when you are watching yourself and beginning to discover yourself, your psychological pattern. And suddenly, strangely, that watching process begins to become an experiencing process, and it is, in a sense, already under control. That does not mean to say that the development of the five skandhas would stop taking place. The skandhas happen continuously until they are transmuted into what are called the “five tathagathas,” the five types of awakened being.

You see, at the beginning, we have to develop a very sharp, precise mind to see what we are. There is no other way of sharpening our intelligence. Pure intellectual speculation would not sharpen it at all, because there you have to introduce so much stuff that blunts, that overclouds. The only way to do it is just to leave intelligence as it is with the help of some technique. Then the intelligence begins to learn how to relax and wait and allow what takes place to reflect in it. The learning process becomes a reflection rather than creating things. So waiting and letting what arises reflect on the intelligence is the meditation practice. It is like letting a pond settle down so the true reflection can be seen. There are already so many mental activities going on constantly. Adding further mental activities does not sharpen the intelligence. The only way is just to let it develop, grow.

Question: One of the six virtues of a bodhisattva is energy, exertion, virya. It is hard to relate this virtue to the idea of a waiting intelligence.

Rinpoche: Well, I don’t see any problem, particularly. You see, hardworkingness or exertion does not necessarily mean doing a lot of things. Waiting in itself could be very hard work, being is very hard work, and there are so many temptations not to do it.

Question: Is there some kind of recognizable psychological event which particularly reinstigates the process of the five skandhas and of karma?

Rinpoche: Yes, that is what is called “immediate cause.” It is the immediate occasion of getting into a further series of events, a sort of stepping-stone. Each transition has to have that intermediary moment. Even in sleep, things function that way. It allows you to fall asleep from being awake and in dreams pushes you from one moment to the next and then makes it possible to wake up again. Karma is dependent on that state, that immediate cause. It cannot function without it. The whole idea of the practice of meditation is that in the meditative state you do not have that impulse. That suddenness or the restlessness is automatically freed; that sudden impulse has been transmuted into a flowing process through the use of a meditation technique. That is how the process of meditation can be a way of preventing planting the seed of karma.

Question: It seems from what you’ve been saying that meditation in action has something to do with going very much into detail. You know something and then something else comes along. And if you could just go along with the new detail—

Rinpoche: Well, you see, awareness meditation, meditation in action, is a process of providing fundamental space. If you are talking or you are doing things, you are acting within that open space, so that no sudden jolt can happen, no sudden confusion or slothfulness. That abrupt clicking-in of confusion can only take place if the ground, the basic space, has been solidified or frozen. The karmic process operates against that kind of solidified background. Whereas once that solidity has been transformed by acknowledging there is another aspect to it, which is open space, openness, then any kind of sudden, impulsive movement is accommodated. Still the same rhythm goes on, but that rhythm now becomes a creative movement. The rhythm of events goes on, but you appreciate that that rhythm can happen on space, on open ground, and this brings back the message of meditation happening.

So you do not have to force yourself to remember; you do not have to try to maintain your awareness all the time. Once you are open to the challenges of the moment, somehow, as you go along, the situation flashes back the awareness to you. So a perpetually creative process develops and a highly precise one as well.

Question: If the situation doesn’t flash back that awareness, then you forget it?

Rinpoche: Well, you disown whatever comes up. If you try to keep up and maintain something, then it does not work. It becomes your product. You are solidifying space again.

Question: Getting back to that transitional moment in karma where it picks up impetus. Do I understand that as you advance in your meditation you notice this happening, and by noticing it you can prevent it from happening and control the situation? Once you notice what leads to the karma, do the steps become much easier to deal with?

Rinpoche: Well, that is rather tricky. Theoretically you might know the whole thing, but once you have the idea in mind that what you are doing is trying to escape from karma, to step out of it, then you are already double-crossed. The probability then is that you are automatically not in the right state of mind. That is why is it important in meditation practice that at the time of practice everything is just based on a simple technique, but with no aim or object at all, none whatsoever. You give up everything and go along with the practice entirely and fully.

Question: Yes, but in daily situations I think it’s helpful to deliberately notice things happening.

Rinpoche: You see, in daily situations if you have a certain understanding of the continuous quality of the meditation experience happening all the time, then, without trying to meditate deliberately, you automatically know the daily situation, because the daily situation comes to you as a reminder, rather than your trying to go to it. It becomes a personal creative process.

Question: You have talked about creation at times as though it were an ego process and now as though it is more egoless. Could you clarify?

Rinpoche: I suppose you could say there is ego creation and true creation. I think here again it is a question of whether or not the notion of competitive achievement, of an ideal or a goal, is present. With ego’s notion of creation you have a concept that you want to achieve something, and you try to match your situation with your idea of the actual achievement. You compare the dream and the actual reality. That is not the ultimate creative process but a one-way creation which can wear out. You build a thing and it is finished; you have no further place to go. It is a very limited inspiration.

Whereas in the other approach without aim and object, without a goal in mind, each situation acts as an end in itself. You go along with that situation and that situation brings another, it opens another possibility. So you go along and along. That is like the experience of the bodhisattva developing through the bhumis, or stages of development. When one bhumi is accomplished, he goes on to the next. Without ambition, he goes on and on. He had no desire for enlightenment, but one situation leads to another until he finds himself enlightened one day. This is because he relates to things on their own merits rather than in terms of a goal of his own.

So the ambition type of a creation is that of ego. The alternative is to have natural appreciation of creation itself rather than being fascinated by what you are doing. If you tune in to the actual creativity itself, the delight of it, it becomes an inexhaustible source of creativity.

Question: It seems to me you are saying that meditation for us at this stage of the game should be basic, at the kitchen-sink level, which would mean more bodily. I wonder if more subtle activities like talking or reading can be seen as basic bodily practices too.

Rinpoche: I think so, because you have to use your body. You have to read with your eyes, you have to hold your book in your hands; talking, you have to use your mouth.

Question: But then isn’t awareness of the hands holding the book or the mouth making the words being unfair to the author or the person you are talking with? Isn’t that overly self-centered?

Rinpoche: Well it depends on whether you are completely one with what you are doing or whether you are playing games. It is quite simple.

Question: You mention meditation as being a way of making friends with oneself; it seems to me more like making enemies with oneself, in that it seems to be a more painful process than the usual process of making friends. I wonder if you could clarify that a little bit.

Rinpoche: That painful experience is very good because that is the beginning of making friends with yourself. If you are really going to make a long-term friendship with somebody, probably the first thing that hits you about that person are the things that you do not like. That is the starting point that provides a foundation for your friendship. It is a really solid foundation, because having included those things, you will not be perturbed later by whatever may happen with that friend. Since you know all the negative aspects and do not have to hide from that side of the relationship, you are now completely open to find the other side, the positive side, as well. That is a very good way to start making friends with oneself or anybody else for that matter. Otherwise you feel cheated when you discover the faults later on.

Question: How do the five skandhas tie in with meditation?

Rinpoche: That’s a big question. The five skandhas are a process of five stages of psychological development, and meditation does not contain that development. Meditation is just dealing with the situation that exists before the development took place or just continuing to deal with that basic situation while this development is taking place. In other words, meditation means getting simple rather than getting involved with the five stages. These five stages become insignificant or just purely external. That means that you are getting to the basic quality of the five skandhas rather than trying to follow their implications as we ordinarily do in a sort of hunting process, as though we are going to reach some valuable conclusion. It is getting to the basic point of the process without getting involved in the sidetracks.

Still, of course, the discovery of five types of processes there already is kind of very amusing. Although you are concerned with the basic point, the presence of the five processes helps keep you smiling.

Question: In the play between ignorance and intelligence that runs through the whole development of the skandhas, there seem to be moments where the skandhas are not occurring. There seems to be a very rapid buildup and then, poof, the process goes away. And then it starts again.

Rinpoche: That is the whole point, there is a buildup and then this whole building-up process turns to dust. There is a gap, a space. And then either you build up again or you do not. But that kind of moment does happen. Automatically the process builds up; but before and after that, there is some space. It is like moving fast in one direction and having to turn and come back—you have to stop at the peak point. There is a moment of stillness; in the process of regenerating the speed, you have to stop at one point. That happens.

Question: Does one pass backward through the skandhas? I mean if you were to sit down and meditate, first of all your mind would be full of thoughts. Then you meditate for a while longer and maybe your thoughts are not so discursively connected anymore so that then you relate directly to your perceptions. And then you reach a point where you are not so much relating to your perceptions anymore; they are not that important to you anymore. So then you feel just a vague sense of contact with your stream of associations. And then you have just a vague sense of sitting there. And then maybe you’re in a nondualistic state. Could something like that happen?

Rinpoche: It sounds a bit fishy. You see, what you are talking about is going deeper and deeper, slower and slower. Somehow meditation does not happen that way. Once you go into the profundity, deeper and deeper and slower and slower, there is a possibility of being hypnotized by it so that you lose all contact with anything. You lose the dynamic quality of samskara, the dynamic quality of perception, the dynamic quality of feeling. And these are the only guidelines for buddha activity in a state of enlightenment. You do not want to push those out at all. You do not have to go into a process of going deeper. Rather, at the beginning when you are dealing with form, a certain funny thing goes on between awakeness and confusion. There is a certain funny moment. That is where you strike first, whether you are using the breathing or the walking. Whatever your technique may be, that is your starting point. And meditation happens right there. You do not have to go through a process at all. The process just happens by itself. But the important point is the precision and sudden quality of that flash, a kind of first questioning created between sanity and insanity. That first moment of black and white, dullness and sharpness, is the starting point from where you relate with your breathing and your walking. You do not have to slow down at all. Meditation has nothing to do with working with the metabolism of the ego in that sense.

Question: In the Heart Sutra it says that Avalokiteshvara saw that the five skandhas were empty. Is that emptiness the same as the space you have just been talking about?

Rinpoche: Yes. The idea is—just flash. That is why it is important for a person to be free from his meditation as a concept, free from the idea “I am going to meditate,” the sense of a ritual of any kind. You see if a person is able to relate with his practice of meditation directly and simply on an everyday level, a sane level, then there is a possibility of perceiving the five skandhas as empty. Otherwise once you take the wrong starting point of working on the skandhas one by one systematically, then the five skandhas develop a system as well.

Question: Would the experience of emptiness be no less an aerial view than to see the minute workings of a situation, than seeing what is arising from moment to moment?

Rinpoche: Once you have a good aerial photograph of the whole area, that means that you have all the details in it as well. It is the same thing. Otherwise it cannot be called an aerial view. It is just a blurry picture.

Question: Where does memory come in? Is it inherent in all the skandhas?

Rinpoche: Memory is connected with putting things into the cloudy mind. It is an active process in which consciousness picks certain themes and classifies them into particular connections and then sends that over to the cloudy mind, puts it in the bank of cloudy mind along with the collection of wanted and unwanted thoughts that already exists there. What is in the cloudy mind is not only thoughts you dislike and have suppressed, but also content that you would like to play back again in the future for whatever purposes. It could be technical information, experiential material, pain and pleasure, hysterical things. Whatever it is, it is picked up by consciousness and put into that bank of cloudy mind.

Question: Why does it have to be “cloudy” mind? Why can’t it just be mind?

Rinpoche: It is just mind, but mind cannot survive without relating to something, without relating that to this. Mind does not mean anything if there is no context of relativity. So that context of relativity which must be maintained in order to survive, that process of maintaining its consistent pattern is uncertainty, is confusion. The process of maintaining a sense of relativity is what confusion is. Because in order to keep something for future purposes or in order to hide from seeing it, we have to put it into a no-man’s-land, an unresolved space. We have to put it away from the current focus of clarity. That is the cloudy mind, which does not have particularly sharp delineations of this in relation to that, but is just generally confusion.

Question: What is it that does the sorting, that suppresses things so that they get into the suppressed collection?

Rinpoche: It seems that consciousness picks out something and then hands it over to samskara and then that sends it to perceptions and feelings and then it is processed through and finally sent back to the bank. Consciousness sort of works like chopsticks. It picks an impression up and passes it to where it can begin to be chewed. It is not quite enough just to pick it up, it has to be refined in a sense, it has to pass through the process of all the skandhas.

Question: In meditating you pick up a thought, a disturbing thought, out of this cloudy bank. What happens then to the thought? Does it go back to the bank? Does it burn out? Does it ever disappear? Does it ever resolve itself?

Rinpoche: In many cases thoughts do not become resolved because the impression of a thought that you picked out still remains in the cloudy mind, a sort of reproduction of it remains there. In some cases, for instance during meditation, if we relate to thoughts as insignificant, that is, if we do not put them into categories of any kind, then they are not transferred back through the skandhas anymore. They are not put back through the process, so they are suspended on the level of consciousness and are finally resolved. That is the way of resolving thoughts—through complete nonevaluation. As long as there is nonevaluation, the skandhas have no function. They do not know what to do with a nonevaluated thought because their language is the language of duality and evaluation. That is why they keep thoughts in a bank.

Question: So the job at hand would be to wipe out the cloudy mind through a kind of objectivity?

Rinpoche: Well, that is an extremely long process. Eventually the bank will wear itself out; but in the meantime we must keep on collecting as well.

Question: It sounds like duality has its own built-in pattern that ego is only part of. In other words, from what you’re saying, it is not that the ego is selecting and fortifying only on its own behalf, but it seems that that kind of selection and fortification is inherent in the nature of duality itself. It is as though the skandhas just automatically select and sort like that without any particular interest.

Rinpoche: Yes, they are sort of slaves rather than intelligent. They have been given their job in accordance with their nature and they just react accordingly.

Question: Is there any way of working with the cloudy mind other than meditation?

Rinpoche: There does not seem to be any other way at all. In order to get free of the pattern of cloudy mind we have to create chaos in the efficient mechanism of consciousness, and nothing can do that except absolute nothing—which is meditation. That seems to be the only way.

Question: Is it good to try to take some kind of positive step in working with your state of mind during meditation?

Rinpoche: You see, meditation should not be regarded as a learning process. It should be regarded as an experiencing process. You should not try to learn from meditation, but try to feel it. Any tendency to categorize what goes on during meditation as learning is an obstacle to meditation. This also applies to exotic techniques. They are also an obstacle because, when you use a technique which has an exotic flavor, you are more conscious of the technique than its application. So any technique used in the practice of meditation should be a purely functional one with no implication of any kind to it at all.

Question: How about reflection upon the nature of one’s mind, or rather just sort of recognition of it?

Rinpoche: That is rather like contemplation in the sense of dwelling on something and going over it again and again. That means you have the subject you are working on and yourself separate. It becomes a sort of private show. You end up relating this to that, yourself to the subject matter. But meditation is an act of nonduality. The technique you are using should not be separate from you; it is you, you are the technique. Meditator and meditation are one. There is no relationship involved.

The trouble with contemplative practice is that there is always a relationship involved, some kind of criterion. Somehow this does not really cut the basic root of neurosis. The root of neurosis is conflict; neurosis requires the conflict of not knowing who you are, of not knowing what you are doing or how you relate with things. Neurosis needs to play this game of conflict. Therefore as long as some kind of resource for playing the game is provided, such as some subject matter, as long as some pretext is provided, you will go on and on with the game. Whether you do it in a genteel spiritual fashion or an ordinary fashion really does not matter. It is still a game.

Question: In the arts, there are techniques that one learns for the purpose of overcoming techniques, in order to be able to get to the direct experience part of it. I was wondering if, besides meditation, there are any other techniques that you could speak of that could help one in this way, some means to open oneself or to get closer to being.

Rinpoche: In addition to the sitting form of meditation, there is the meditation practice in everyday life of panoramic awareness. This particular kind of practice is connected with identifying with the activities one is involved in. This awareness practice could apply to artwork or any other activity. It requires confidence. Any kind of activity that requires discipline also requires confidence. You cannot have discipline without confidence, otherwise it becomes a sort of torturing process. If you have confidence in what you are doing, then you have real communication with the things you are using, with the material you are using. Working that way, a person is not concerned with producing masterpieces. He is just involved with the things that he is doing. Somehow the idea of a masterpiece is irrelevant. The masterpiece, the perfect work of art, comes as a by-product of this process of identifying with what you are doing. You should not be too much concerned with producing a masterpiece.

Question: I’m confused about mindfulness and awareness. Is it that in doing everyday things, simple things, you practice mindfulness? And at the point where you forget what you are doing and go off into daydreaming, is that the point where you should start practicing awareness?

Rinpoche: In mindfulness practice there is very definite precision; every move, every minute detail is noticed. In the case of awareness practice you have the general outline of what you are doing, which covers the details as well, naturally. In practicing awareness in everyday life, at a certain point the wandering mind itself, the daydreaming mind itself, turns itself into awareness and reminds you. If you are completely one with the idea of awareness as being intimate, it is a true practice. That is, as long as your relationship to the idea of awareness is a very simple one and as long as your awareness practice is connected with sitting practice. In a proper practice of awareness, the complete proper relationship is that awareness comes toward you rather than you going toward it. In other words, if awareness is not possessed or owned, then it happens. Whereas if you try to possess and own awareness, if you relate to it as “my awareness,” then it runs away from you. In order to understand this, you need to have the actual experience of it, rather than just reading the menu.

Question: I am very involved with music and for me art can only have a sense if it makes a complete statement of a certain very clear quality. In this connection I have been very much struck by the quality that emanates from certain ceramic lohans that can be seen in Western museums. I would like to find a way to begin to approach a statement of that sort in my own life. Everything else seems so trivial.

Rinpoche: Generally, the whole idea of appreciation is based, of course, on true understanding of things as they are. This means that you have to develop true understanding, which means understanding without other ideas put on it. If it is overlaid with other ideas, it becomes commentary or interpretation, rather than true understanding. True understanding is direct and simple appreciation, simple understanding without any criteria attached to it. I think this idea is expressed very clearly in a lot of Japanese art—flower arrangement, for example. Just a simple twig is chosen and just a couple of flowers are arranged in a certain way and the two elements are put together. Maybe there is a small rock beside them and a very simple plain background without any fancy designs behind, against which you can see the actual arrangement of flowers properly. The lohan that you mentioned also has that same simple quality. He just does not have any pretense of any kind. He just sits there. It reminds one of the Zen saying, “When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep.” It is the same sort of thing. When you sit, you sit properly. Just sit ordinarily. In fact the special quality of the lohan comes from the fact that he is so insignificant, absolutely insignificant; so ordinary that he is superordinary. It is because of that total ordinariness that he becomes special and radiates.

Question: Rinpoche, how does insanity fit in with the five skandhas? How would you explain insanity in terms of that system?

Rinpoche: Well, there seem to be two types of insanity—Idonot know if insanity is the right word or not—two types of unbalanced states of mind. One of them is what we call “flipped,” really mad. Because the world has come to appear totally and powerfully uncompassionate to the mad person, he sees every new event in terms of this total distortion and he loses his natural logic. This is connected with the distortion of consciousness, the fifth skandha. It is complete distortion on this level; on this level all criteria are lost. He is completely mad. His language is incoherent and he does all sorts of things that do not have any coherent significance. The other type is not mad at all in this sense. This type of person functions naturally, normally, looks after himself or herself, but distance is always being distorted. This sense of distance is the basic requirement for skillful communication. To communicate skillfully a person must be aware of interpersonal distance—a sense of whether he should reach out or whether he should wait. That kind of distance becomes very distorted so that communication is handled unskillfully; and there is frustration about that blindness. This brings on aggression and the demand for pain. This type is the egocentric, the egomaniac. Its main characteristic is the basic confusion of losing the sense of distance and this is connected with cloudy mind on the primeval level, as the background of all the skandhas. The confusion here is at the level where the original criteria separating this from that developed, at the level of the first development of duality. That is where distance first develops, the distance between me and that, that and me. Because one becomes completely overwhelmed, involved, self-centered into so much here, one loses the distance. That is the extreme of egocentricity.

Question: Is that accessible to cure?

Rinpoche: I think both types can definitely be cured. But you see it is really tricky to cure problems like that. It depends very much on what sort of method you use. There are a number of methods which are seemingly good, but it turns out that the method itself can be turned into fuel. The process of cure itself becomes fuel for the disorder to live on. Somehow, the analysis method and the encounter-group-type method do not seem to be particularly the way. If you put a person in an encounter group, at the beginning the person might see things and do things completely honestly, in an open way; but then at a certain point the person begins to pick up the style of the other people taking part in the group and it becomes another kind of language. Quite probably, the person picks up a whole new style just for his participation in encounter groups. Very frighteningly, it becomes the ultimate kind of deception: the person is expressing everything, saying everything out, but at the same time there is a basic deception which is never expressed at all.

There is a certain danger in any purely analytic method. Somehow the word does not help very much at all. The word is actually the source of the confusion anyway. People who are “flipped” have a very skillful way of using words in accordance with their mad perspective; so the survival of their madness could be endless.

It seems that setting up a certain kind of general situation for the person is more effective. One starts with the basic physical situation of food and living environment. The whole idea of using the situation is to communicate with the unbalanced person so as to awaken him, so you start on the basic level of survival, the instinctive level, the level of the animal realm. The person should have some feeling of instinctive simple communication. Start that way. Then having established that kind of simple communication on the level of survival, the rest becomes much easier and quite obvious.

Question: When these five skandhas are going along mechanically, just doing what they do, what happens when the individual who is part of these five skandhas becomes compassionate? What happens to the skandhas? Can you describe the process of compassion in terms of the skandhas?

Rinpoche: The basic idea of compassion is communication, skillful communication. That kind of skillful communication develops through relationships. This begins on the consciousness level. But in fact compassion is the source of transmutation of all the skandhas into the five tathagathas, or five aspects of enlightenment, that we discussed earlier. Compassion makes the skandhas function independently rather than as part of a chain. Ordinarily, feeling is dependent on form, form is dependent on feeling, feeling is dependent on perception and samskara, and so on. They are all interdependent. They cannot be separate things. Whereas when the skandhas are transmuted into tathagatha principles, they become independent. In other words, all the skandhas have their independent mind and intelligence. This process of the skandhas becoming independent of each other begins from compassion. Communication based on this state of mind is the ultimate communication.

Question: I keep seeing the skandhas as part of the psychology of an individual. I see the process of compassion as someone behaving mechanically and then suddenly becoming sensitive. I’m still forced to see it somehow as a dualistic relationship, even when the five skandhas become five tathagathas. I mean the relationship of, say, a compassionate individual to those with whom he is relating.

Rinpoche: It has to remain a dualistic relationship still. Nothing is wrong with that at all. But in the case of compassion the process does not become centralized. You see, duality in the ultimate sense consists of wisdom and compassion; the two poles are necessary. If your five skandhas develop into the five tathagatha principles, you still have duality, but you are not baffled by it at all. It is a natural function. When we talk about nonduality, we mean it in contrast to the bewilderment by duality that is the ordinary case.

Question: So the process of meditation is trying to cut the link between the skandhas? And a man who has done enough meditation, let us say, would have all the skandhas but they just would not be connected?

Rinpoche: Would not be connected, that is right. That is what is meant by cutting the karmic chain. The chain of karma is the five skandhas. And even after the links have been cut, the skandhas continue running, the process keeps running through. Actually the skandhas are not really linked; it is more that they are pushed one against the other. By meditating, you are slowing down the process. When it has slowed down, the skandhas are no longer pushed against one another. There is space there, already there.

Question: When the five skandhas are functioning independently, what happens to memory?

Rinpoche: Memory becomes a sort of inspiration to each of them in their skillful activity. There is skillful activity because you do not have to refer back to memory anymore. You see, memory is a very cowardly way of dealing with a situation. Since you are not in direct contact with the present situation, you have to refer back to what used to be. And you work that way. Whereas if you are relating directly to the present situation, as is the case with inspiration, then you do not require memory to work your way through the situation. You can tell everything from the present situation. Still you have the information of the past because of the present situation, in terms of the present situation rather than purely in the form of what was.

Question: In working on separating the skandhas, are they pushed apart one at a time, slowly, or does it happen suddenly all at once?

Rinpoche: It is an extremely gradual process, like a wound healing. On the whole, there does not seem to be such a thing as sudden enlightenment as it is ordinarily understood. Of course there is sudden discovery of the different stages. This is like your discovering that your hair has gone gray or that you have become fat.

Question: You have said that we begin to meditate with ambition. The consciousness is still in control of everything. And at some point, you said the bank of subconscious thoughts comes up and consciousness is no longer in control. This seems to me to be on the way toward enlightenment. What I wonder is, until we are enlightened, do we always meditate with ambition?

Rinpoche: You begin with ambition of some kind. Then at a certain stage meditation becomes instinctive. Then you cannot not meditate—it happens to you.

Question: But when the process of the skandhas starts reversing itself and consciousness is losing control, you have lost your original incentive. What you are doing no longer makes sense from the point of view you started from.

Rinpoche: Exactly, yes. That is the point at which the techniques begin to drop away, as well as the games that are involved in pretending to yourself that you are meditating.

Question: Well, during the gradual process that still goes on, what is it that becomes attractive about meditation, that replaces the ambition? People still want to sit down and meditate even if they are almost enlightened.

Rinpoche: You start with ambition and then meditation begins to seep into your system, so to speak. Gradually your system begins to require meditation. It is sort of an addiction, sort of an infiltration of your system begins to happen. That is what happens with bodhisattvas. They take a vow not to attain enlightenment, but they find one day that they have attained enlightenment anyhow because the practice has thoroughly infiltrated their system. Their behavior has become the complete embodiment of the dharma.

Question: In getting beyond duality, beyond criteria, there is still relativity and still form. There is still some kind of distinction between this and that. Wouldn’t there then still be preference, say, for bliss, understanding, clarity? Or does it get to the point where it no longer makes any difference whether the forms are heavenly or demonic?

Rinpoche: There is a stage at which all of these sort of heavy-handed dualities dissolve. There is a very, very heavy-handed and solid duality in which without that, this cannot survive; because of this, that happens to be. You reach the stage of losing this sort of concept. And then you are conscious that you have lost that, got beyond it: you feel freer, but at the same time you feel that you have gained something. But this is not quite final. You still have the memory that you have relinquished that heavy duality, that you used to have such ideas but you have lost them now. But a person gets beyond even that. One reaches a point where even the sense of the absence of duality no longer applies. The whole thing becomes very natural and obvious. On that level, a person really begins to perceive things as they are. A sort of transparent experience of duality begins to develop in which things are really precise without depending on each other. There is no sense of comparison, just precision. Black is black and white is white.

Question: I’m a little confused about the distinction between panoramic awareness, which does not have the definite quality of mindfulness, and a kind of blurry state which comes up. I’m talking about the kind of blurry state in which one leaves tools all around, leaves one thing half finished to start another, etc. That seems to be the kind of dreamy state that frequently comes up just after one has finished meditation. It just does not seem to matter where you put your tools. Is panoramic awareness that kind of a blurry thing?

Rinpoche: The panoramic awareness of meditation in action contains textures. Texture are part of its scope. You see things in the right shape, in their own right shape, their own right situation—which is a kind of precision, sharpness. That sharpness and precision comes from experiencing the distance, proper distance, that we were talking about earlier on. You feel immediately the right skillful and active relationship with things or people. You experience them as they are, completely—so the tools belong to the toolshed. They are not knives and forks or anything else. You would not use the toilet to bathe and the basin to defecate. A sense of the proper relationship of things is included in your panoramic vision. You just would not do things the wrong way around. In the case of the blurry state, this is cloudy mind on the instinctive level. One is so much wrapped up in oneself that there is no chance for panoramic vision at all. There is nothing to be panoramic about. One is totally wrapped up in one’s own little world. Others see you moving very slowly, very gently, saying very little, doing very mysterious things—but still that could hardly be described as a contemplative state of mind. It is more what has been described in the scriptures as a drunken elephant.

Question: As regards that open future you were talking about, I find that certain thoughts are constantly recurring in individuals. Everybody has their own style, their own thoughts, but it is as though a script for their whole life has been written. When they try to be completely blank with no conceptualization at all, certain thoughts in their own style keep flashing into their minds. Is this underlying gossip the fifth skandha? Is the continuity of this little gossip narrator going on all the time, the person who is sort of writing the script of our lives? Whatever the case, that omnipresent script seems to keep the future closed rather than permitting it to be open.

Rinpoche: Strangely enough, actually, nobody writes the script at all. It just mysteriously happens. That is sort of a Zen answer rather than one in the style of methodical Indian philosophy. The abhidharma would say it differently. But I think it is a much clearer way of looking at this particular situation to say that nobody writes the script—it just happens. It is because there is nobody writing the script that so many varieties of things keep popping up. It is not that the thoughts happen particularly according to some logical pattern. Logically they might be quite dissociated, but things just pop up. They just happen out of nowhere.

Question: Is the fifth skandha the person who thinks he is writing the script? Making choices, giving coherence to your life?

Rinpoche: Once a thought pops up, he has to acknowledge it. But he does not really dare to, really care to go back to the root of the thought. If he goes back to the root, he does not find any. He does not find anything at all.

Question: I still do not understand why certain kinds of thoughts keep recurring to certain people, no matter what they try to do. Even when they try to change, they look back and their pattern is still there. Where does everybody get their own style of thought pattern?

Rinpoche: Each person has his own style according to his type. There are different types of mentality—the mentality of aggression, the mentality of passion, and all sorts of others. Different types of individuality originate from different types of basic energy. These are basic energies that misunderstood themselves, right at the beginning, and differentiated themselves from the basic ground. That basic ground is an open one, but the energies it contains are colorful. There will be red with a tinge of yellow, yellow with a tinge of green, white with a tinge of pink. The certain basic energies which also carry the tinge of a certain style of emphasis. For instance, there could be hatred, which finds emphasis through passion; the basic quality is hatred but it develops in terms of passion. There could also be other combinations, such as a basic quality of pride with emphasis through ignorance. All sorts of combinations of sparks of light develop. Then they become individuals, detached from the main ground, like satellites. In this way, we each develop our particular version of ignorance, because of those particular colors, so to speak, that we had right from the beginning. Our particular individual style with its particular energies runs through all the processes of psychological evolution—the five skandhas, the twelve nidanas, and so on. But this is not a hang-up at all. It is our wealth. We each are a particular type of person with a particular type of mania; and that is good.

Question: Could you speak a little more about the commitment to the present situation you were talking about, and particularly how to distinguish that from the ego’s commitment to extend itself?

Rinpoche: Somehow the ego’s commitment to extend itself has no direction. The ego’s movement is not a flowing one. It is simply trying to maintain its own house. Since ego’s commitment involves purely this maintenance sort of mentality, there is really no sense of journey involved at all. In the case of the commitment to the present situation, there is a movement or journey. The sense of journey consists in the fact that, from the point of view of this commitment, every situation contains a unique drama.

Question: Are you saying that one no longer finds everything familiar?

Rinpoche: Situations need not be familiar. Ego’s commitment tends to rely on a sense of familiarity or feeling that nothing is happening. A person might sit down to meditate and feel that nothing is happening even though he is extremely agitated. He has pain in his back, pain in his neck, and flies are buzzing all around. He is extremely agitated and yet he feels that nothing is happening. But it is possible to experience every moment as having individuality in it. Once you are in a situation, you go along with the unique patterns of it, its particular textures and so on. This is quite different from ego’s commitment to maintaining itself as a solid thing. Ego would find acknowledging the unique individuality of every situation extremely threatening. But relating that way to each situation as it is is a path. There is a great deal of movement in it. You are constantly facing a drama of some kind.

Question: But then there is no other direction than that of each situation?

Rinpoche: That is a much more definite kind of direction than having a map or blueprint to follow. It is a real direction. Pain will be real pain and pleasure will be real pleasure. Confusion will be real confusion. Every situation will be a true situation, a precise one—and that is the guidance, that is the pattern that you go along with. Looking back we find that all the situations in which we have had a sense of making a journey were situations of living constantly in the present moment. There was no sense of predestination involved at all. The present situation is the destination as well as the path.

Many people wish to secure their destination in the future now. But the future is not here yet, that is why it is the future. It is amazing the extent to which we deceive ourselves, stretching ourselves to all sorts of territories and situations that are purely imaginary. It is as though the whole future is planned and a planned time has been stretched all the way back from the present moment and all the way forward from the present moment. Then everything is overcrowded. Looking at things this way we manage to set ourselves into a great deal of paranoia and panic. But if one really sees the present situation as it is, it is always a quite simple one.

Question: Can you speak about when one is sitting in meditation and bodily discomforts arise and one is taken up by the feeling of discomfort and boredom? But then one oscillates from this to the commentary that the discomfort and so on is just something for one to cling to as an entertainment. But then one clings to the commentary. And somehow there is nothing there in any of these moments which is free. There is only oscillation back and forth between these various clingings.

Rinpoche: It seems that the idea of the commentary and trying to make something out of it becomes self-destructive or confusing. There is an analogy used in the scriptures of discursive mind being like a silkworm. A silkworm has a web of its own substance around it. It survives by churning out more silk. You see, the situation is very simple. When bodily pain or pleasure arise, it is very simple. You just perceive it and just leave it. You do not have to put it through any process of any kind. Each situation is unique. Therefore you just go along with it, let it happen according to its nature.

Question: I guess what I can’t quite understand is what you mean by “go along with.”

Rinpoche: It is a matter of acceptance. Even though the acceptance of what is happening may be confusing, just accept the given situation and do not try to make it something else; do not try to make it into an educational process at all. Just see it, perceive it, and then abandon it. If you experience something and then disown that experience, you provide a space between that knowledge and yourself which permits it simply to take its course. Disowning is like the yeast in the fermentation process. That process brews a state of mind in which you begin to learn and feel properly.

Question: Does it matter if the disowning is only another form of commentary in the beginning? Or is that inevitable?

Rinpoche: You cannot start from absolute, complete perfection. Being perfect does not matter. Just perceive and experience and disown. It does not matter how and what. The problem is that we always want to start something and at the same time make sure that what we are doing is right. But somehow we just cannot have that kind of insurance. One really has to take a chance and accept the raw and rugged quality of the situation. You could have a commentary-type situation where there is constant analysis involved. But that analysis is just part of the process. Just leave it that way. It does not have to become final. There is nothing the matter with your commentary as long as you do not try to take it as a final conclusion. You should not try to make it into a definite, recorded message with the idea of playing it back when you need it. Because when you play it back, you will be in a different situation so that it will automatically be out-of-date.

Question: In the moment when that commentary exists, there is so much clinging to that commentary.

Rinpoche: The commentary, without being given special value, is okay. It is just chatter. That is okay. Let it be that way. You should not interfere with that energy that is going through.

Question: When a conflict arises, I usually feel that I have control of the situation. I feel that I can make a choice. But now I am wondering whether I actually make a choice or not.

Rinpoche: There is nothing the matter with the idea of choice. In dealing with a situation, the choice is there already. The choice consists of two aspects of the situation that are happening at the same time; those two aspects provide a basis for your making a relationship with either of the alternatives. The way to work with that is, in making that choice, not to go according to your sense of comfort but to go according to straightforwardness. If there are two choices, one is ahead of you, right in front of you, and the other choice is slightly off-center. There may be ten or twelve hundred choices, but there is one choice waiting for you on the road. The rest of them are waiting on the side, as sidetracks. Therefore the other choices waiting on the side become more attractive, like restaurants and drive-in movies on the side of the road. The choice has to be straightforward, based on common sense, basic sanity. Actually, it is transcendental common sense.

One could misunderstand what I have been saying. If I say that by going along with the present situation the future becomes quite clear, that could be misunderstood in the sense that everything is marked out for you. It could be misunderstood in the sense of there being divine guidance. You could think that everything has been prepared for you so you can immediately find your place, as in the saying, “The swan is in the lake and the vulture is in the graveyard.” This is not quite the case. Relating with the present moment is quite difficult and painful in many cases. Although it is straightforward, a straight road, it is quite a painful one. It is like the bardo experience mentioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. You have a brilliant light coming at you with the image of a certain tathagatha peering at you from within it. And on the side there is a less brilliant, less irritating light. The light from the side is much more beautiful because it is less glaring, only a reflection of the tathagatha. So there are two choices. Should we go into the irritating one or should we just turn off on one of the sidetracks.

This symbolism from the Tibetan Book of the Dead is very profound for our actual, everyday life situation. It does not have to refer only to after-death experience. Perhaps the after-death experience just typifies the kind of situation in which choices are most enlightening or stimulating and most immediate. In our ordinary life situation we have to open ourselves and investigate and see and then make a commitment. Without choice, there would be no leap and no moment of letting go at all. Because of choice, therefore, there is a moment of leap, and letting go happens. So it seems that it is not particularly comforting and blissful and easy. On the other hand, it could be inspiring. That much at least could be said.

Question: You seem to be talking about the discovery of wisdom. Could you say more about that?

Rinpoche: The discovery of wisdom has nothing to do with the centralized quality of ego. It is not actually a discovery at all because you cannot see that you are discovering. You become part of wisdom. You transcend the transcendental knowledge of prajna and you reach to the level of the jnana, real wisdom. This is actually very disappointing because we would like to watch ourselves being enlightened. But that is impossible. That rewarding experience of confirmation, that finally you have made it, here you are, is impossible. That would never happen.

Question: When you make choices you don’t seem to have to think about it, but something spontaneous leaps up and makes the choice before you think about it. Before you can choose, something else makes the choice for you.

Rinpoche: It all depends on how much of a big deal you make out of the choice itself. If you do not make a big deal about the choice, you cannot be conned or seduced by anything on the sidetrack. By the time those seductions arise, you are going on anyway. So you go ahead, you go straight.

Question: Is this straightforward choice the same as intuition?

Rinpoche: It is spacious intuition, intuition which is not based on the animal level of instinct. It is the kind of true intuition that is not connected with the survival of ego.

Question: In this context of making choices, where does “crazy wisdom” come in?

Rinpoche: Crazy wisdom is the sort of basic impetus behind the whole process of working with the situation. In order to make a decision that is straightforward but not particularly pleasurable, one has to have some power behind one. That is the element of crazy wisdom, that basic power behind the situation. But this does not mean that you should just find the most painful alternative and make your decisions according to that. The tendency here does not have to be suicidal, masochistic. You would not get into that either.

Question: Again in relation to choice, I was thinking about the forms of divination that you mention in Born in Tibet. Is a technique of divination used in a situation where there is a vagueness about going straight ahead?

Rinpoche: Divination is generally used when you are somewhat trapped by the situation. You really have no alternative, but you are too cowardly to commit yourself to your actual intuition of the straightforwardness. So you turn to the pretense of divination. And what happens in divination is that, even though you may be highly biased in your view of the situation, you pretend not to be. You step out of the situation altogether and then you open your mind and allow yourself to make a decision in accordance with the divination practice. Or, more precisely, once you are there in no-man’s-land, the answer is there already. Then you come back to your own territory and make a decision.

Question: So it is not that divination has the answer, but rather that it is a vehicle for stepping out?

Rinpoche: Yes. Divination is like a sword. So you take the step and you use it. You cut the doubt.

Question: I find a certain seductive and fascinating quality in getting into and submitting to the teaching. There is a feeling of something very strange and novel and open, and one is pulled along quite willingly. But at the same time I am suspicious of the fascination aspect of it.

Rinpoche: We have to allow ourselves some stepping-stones. It is not necessary to be so severe. You see, that is the wonderful thing about the four noble truths—they begin from duhkha, pain. They start from the bottom where the most important things are, rather than from the top where the most refined things are—the cream and all. It starts from the spices and minerals and everything that floats down to the bottom. You begin with the dirty work, but that in itself becomes a stepping-stone. And then gradually, more and more, you discover the top layer. And since you discover it gradually, it comes as no surprise. Whereas if one starts with the beautiful and rich things in the top layer, then one does not want to come down because there is the possibility of finding other things underneath. One does not want to associate with that. One begins to discover that there is something fishy. You do not want to go down to the bottom because you fear you will discover something unpleasant. So we begin from underneath, with the most gross part. That is our starting point. One does not have to start perfect or beautiful. Starting from the bottom, the whole structure is fundamentally sound. Since you have already dealt with the worst things, what worse could happen?

In our style of teaching, we could start from the cream. But then a person would not be satisfied with the cream because he has not been given any impression of the value of it. Therefore we have to go through the whole evaluation process. We have to start from the bottom and then come up. That could be called a useless game from the point of view of enlightenment itself, but from the point of view of the unpeeling, the unmasking process, it is necessary. It is a game, the practice is a game, but one has to go through it.

There is a story of a mother and child living together. And the child asks the mother, “Where is my father?” And the mother says, “He is a wonderful person, but you cannot find him.” The child gets very curious about his father and the mother keeps telling him stories about how wonderful his father is. The child’s expectations get more and more built up until finally the situation reaches a point where the mother actually has to take him to see the father. So the mother takes her son out the front door of the house, and the two go up into the mountains. They climb steep slopes and cross streams and labor over all kinds of obstacles. Finally they reach a ridge from where they can look down. They look down and see a valley with a house in it. The mother says, “That house down there is where your father lives.” Then they climb down to the house and enter at the back door. In the room, they find a man, and the mother tells her son, “This is your father.” After the tremendous effort of the journey, climbing and walking a long way, the child is tremendously excited and very pleased to find his wonderful father. Then the child discovers a door on the other side of the room that leads into the very same house where he had always lived with his mother. The mother could have taken her son directly through the door to see the father, but the child would not have appreciated him unless they had made this journey. If the mother just took the child from one room to the other, it would not have been anything.

Question: I am still not sure about the relation between practice and the intellect. Do we have to keep them separate, or is there some way that we can use intellect in our practice?

Rinpoche: Let me tell you something about my own training. In Tibet we not only attended talks but also memorized the texts; every day we had to memorize about six pages. The following day someone would be chosen by lottery to present what he had heard the day before, with the commentary and everything. And he would be asked questions about what he had heard the day before. There was no way of getting out of it. At the beginning it was quite a good discipline. But at a certain stage the whole thing became very monotonous. It felt like we were being programmed into this structure of scholarly learning. We couldn’t hear things anymore; we just memorized the words. We could even discuss the subject from an intellectual point of view, but we didn’t really understand it. We couldn’t properly hear ourselves, let alone what other people were saying. Usually such a course would take about six months. We would learn the abhidharma text itself and the Indian commentary, and then the Tibetan commentary on that commentary. There were also various theses written on particular abhidharma subjects from the point of view of the Gelukpas, the Kagyüpas, the Sakyapas, the Nyingmapas, and so on. So we would try to bring everything together. But it was just too much material. Somehow it had the hypnotic effect of hearing something over and over and over. The teachings echoed in our heads continuously; we even dreamt about them. When we would get up in the morning, certain quotations would pop into our heads. Finally the six-month course of study was finished. We were told that we had learned abhidharma, but we thought we really had not heard anything. We were just happy to get rid of the whole thing so we could relax, go off for a summer holiday or something. But somehow we couldn’t really take a complete vacation; the discipline kept coming back to us constantly. We realized afterward that we were really involved with the teaching. Whatever we were doing, talking to people, walking in the mountains, riding a horse, or camping on the mountainside, abhidharma would come back constantly to haunt us like a ghost. Then we would begin to understand a few things, maybe just one or two ideas at the beginning, but as we got into it more and more, we began to get curious about the whole thing. Just out of curiosity, we would open the book and read a few little passages. And they began to mean something.

The point is that certain things may be out of your reach. But if you have the discipline to listen to them, at a certain moment they become appropriate to you. They come back to you automatically, by themselves, rather than by your attempt to really tune in to them and work on them.

Question: What you just touched on is something I have not been clear about for a long time, namely, using a form of conditioning in the service of becoming free of conditioning. My thinking has been that all it does is just stuff one up with more material, whereas I am really interested in being free of conditioning.

Rinpoche: I suppose that’s largely dependent on the type of conditioning involved. For instance, the intense indoctrination taking place in China is very impressive at the moment because you can see what they have achieved by it. But as soon as you step out of China, the whole thing becomes irrelevant; the conditioning doesn’t apply once you step out of that environment. Whereas certain ideas that do apply to you personally may be particularly obvious at the time. But even if you step out of the learning situation, they are still applicable, even more so. In meditation practice you start by putting yourself into a conditioning process. But by doing that, the conditioning itself wears out. The process of conditioning begins to develop seeds, but the conditioning itself goes away. Then the seeds begin to ferment.

Question: Don’t you get a little high on this fermentation?

Rinpoche: You always get high.

Question: What’s the difference between having these ideas coming back to you in daily life and the kind of extraneous commentary you have characterized as the “spiritual adviser”?

Rinpoche: The idea of a spiritual adviser is more the pious attitude of trying to be good and spiritual all the time. Whereas in this case you have no idea of what you should be doing, you just go along doing your ordinary things. The ideas just pop up. Of course if you begin to hold on to them, it could turn into a spiritual adviser. We are talking about ideas breaking through spontaneously, which is quite different from the deliberate spiritual adviser of ego.

Question: Then should one’s approach to the abhidharma scriptures be more like reading a novel than studying something so that you can use it in a particular way later? Should we approach it in a way which is more free of purpose, something like a chess game or a puzzle, and forget about trying to apply it to our meditation?

Rinpoche: Yes and no. You can go too far. Finally you may find that you are not reading at all, because not reading is more appealing or you are sick of the whole boring subject. You have to have some discipline of applying your mind to it. You should think in terms of how you could apply it to yourself. But if you become too ambitious, trying to digest every little detail, you can’t do it.

The idea is to try to feel the general outline of the whole thing rather than being too faithful to every sentence, every word. That kind of attitude has become a big problem in the study of Buddhism. If you are too involved with details, you might lose the perspective as a whole. But if you are able to feel the whole pattern, the outline of the whole thing, you will find it much more applicable to your life. And once that has happened, the details begin to come up by themselves—spontaneously. For instance, if you have a basic understanding of the development of the five skandhas, you have a feeling for the whole process, so the details cease to become isolated, disconnected facts. Instead they are just part of that map.

Question: Is there a point, if you learn these things more or less by rote, where they become a part of your feelings and your conceptions?

Rinpoche: There seem to be two ways to approach it: the highly disciplined way of taking in everything without choice, or trying to work along with your interest. But if you take the second approach, that inter est should bear on the overall context so that you don’t get carried away by fascination for one particular aspect of the subject.

Question: Supposing that one is quite willing to give up any idea of choice and to take in anything that might eventually become a part of oneself.

Rinpoche: Well, that suits one type of personality. It’s the kind of conditioning process that we have been talking about, like meditation. Whether you like it or not, you go on meditating. It may not be particularly pleasurable, in fact it could be extremely boring. Memorizing or reading doesn’t have to be directed only toward apparently profound or highfalutin subjects. It could be very ordinary and simple. From that simplicity you can learn a great deal. There was a tradition in Tibet that certain teachers were expert on particular short writings of various great teachers. Every year a camp was set up and these teachings were presented very simply. Hundreds of people attended these summer study groups, although the same thing was said every year in exactly the same way. But each year they went a little bit further in their understanding. Not only the students but the teachers themselves found that each year it was as though they had never read those particular sentences before.

Question: When you said that the reading is to be applied to our meditation, you didn’t mean thinking about it during meditation, did you?

Rinpoche: No, but by providing some sense of space and openness, meditation is good preparation for reading. If you allow yourself some gap or space to rest by sitting down and doing absolutely nothing, you recover from your speed. Then you are in the right state of being to read and absorb more.

Question: When we first start noticing some of the things we have learned about in abhidharma in our own psychological processes, how can we see the interconnectedness of these processes and not just get hung up on identifying them: “Aha, I see this! It talks about it in the abhidharma.”

Rinpoche: If you recognize something on the spot that way, it is automatically interconnected. That inspiration is based on the cause-and-effect pattern that is part of the whole. But I think the main point is that one shouldn’t get carried away with pride about finding something in your being that matches the abhidharma. The point is not to fit things into some system or to prove anything to yourself, but to see the pattern as it is. You just recognize it and go on. It is not a big deal.

Question: I don’t understand the time scale that the twelve nidanas happen on. Do they happen in each moment, or does it take a whole lifetime or many lives?

Rinpoche: They take place every moment. The twelve types of chain reaction have to take place in order to bring daily experience into action. They form a pattern. They are not independent; each of them depends on the previous one as well as the next one. But that whole development could happen in one fraction of a second. The abhidharma compares the twelve nidanas to a stack of paper. You could put a needle through it in one second. If that process were divided so that you could consider the point at which the needle penetrated the first piece of paper, then the next, then the next, there would be twelve of them. And those twelve could be divided into three parts each—touching, penetrating, coming through and touching the next one. This process, which constitutes ego mind, can be divided endlessly, which is why ego as a solid thing does not exist. It cannot be found in any part of this process. Things happen very momentarily, and there is no solid independent thing such as me and mine.

Question: Does that mean that each moment is one of these cycles of twelve?

Rinpoche: Yes.

Question: Let’s say I was able to see each step in the process—

Rinpoche: You wouldn’t be able to see each step in the process. It would be impossible.

Question: What could you see?

Rinpoche: You could perceive the whole pattern, perceive it rather than see it. Regardless how sharp your mind was, you couldn’t see them as long as you regarded each of the twelve as separate.

Question: You mean you could perceive it by being part of it?

Rinpoche: Yes, you could be part of it, and you could feel it that way.

Question: What is the thread of continuity between those twelve steps?

Rinpoche: The process begins with ignorance and ends with death and then death produces ignorance again. It goes on and on.

Question: But there must be a thread of connection, otherwise there would be absolutely no continuity. I would see you one moment and the next moment I would be sitting in England seeing my mother.

Rinpoche: The body is the connection. The mind/body, rather than the physical body, that is, the central headquarters of ego. You report back to your mind/body, your nest. If you ask a person, “How do you know that you are what you are?” the only simple way of explaining it is by saying “I see myself in the mirror. I am what I am. I have a body.” But if you try to go beyond that and find some further principle to base it on, you would not find anything. That’s why the Heart Sutra says, “There is no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body. . . .” Your eye is just an eye, it’s not your eye; your nose is a nose, but it’s not your nose. Nobody is you. Through the whole system of your body, every part has its own name, its own place. It is made out of a lot of things, but there is no such thing as you.

So one begins to transcend the mind/body, one’s version of the body as a solid thing, by seeing the individuality of each particle in the body. But you do not have to destroy the body. You learn through the body.

Question: So your teaching is to try to show us how to transcend our attachments, which constitute the mind/body.

Rinpoche: We are not exactly transcending the notion of a body altogether, but we are trying to step out of the tendency toward nesting in the body, that tremendous security notion we have that the body is a fortified place and that we can go back to our fort. Even if we get beyond that, continuity does not seem to be a big problem. We still have to have some basis for dealing with other people because, having got beyond ego, we develop compassion and a sense of compassionate communication. In order to communicate with other people, there has to be somebody who is communicating, and that kind of continuity goes on. That has nothing to do with ego at all. Ego is imagination of a centralized nest that gives secure protection. You are frightened of the world outside of your projections, so you just go back into your sitting room and make yourself comfortable.

There is a general misconception about Buddhism in relation to this point. People wonder who, if there is no ego, is attaining enlightenment, who is performing all one’s actions. If you have no ego, how can you eat, how can you sleep? In that case, ego is misunderstood to be the physical body rather than what it is—a paranoid insurance policy, the fortified nest of ego. Your being can continue without your being defensive about yourself. In fact you become more invincible if you are not defending yourself.

Well, this seems to be the end of the beginning of our learning process. So we will end our seminar and our seminar will continue.