The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (47 page)

But at some point this kind of relationship becomes stagnant; it is too indulgent and must be cut through. Your spiritual friend will sit in your chair and serve you beer instead of tea. You are confused, you feel as if the carpet had been pulled from under your feet. The regularity and predictableness of your relationship has been challenged. That is how the spiritual friend turns into a crazy-wisdom guru. He acts unexpectedly and the atmosphere of tranquillity is disturbed, which is very painful. The physician becomes wild, which is terrifying. We do not want to trust a wild doctor or surgeon. But we must. We have been nursed by our parents and treated by our physician and now we must become an adult, a real grown-up person ready to face the world. We have to become an apprentice warrior. Devotion, at this point, involves being extraordinarily accommodating to the darts that the spiritual friend throws at you.

You have to learn to believe in the mysteries or mystical aspect of the art of war. In the vajrayana, war is not regarded as a struggle to gain victory. War is regarded as an occupation. The guru is the archetypical warrior who has knowledge of war and peace. He is a great warrior who is familiar with the mysteries of the world, with the mystical aspect of the world. He knows how the world functions, how situations occur, and how situations can fool you. Devotion to the guru develops with the realization of the tremendous difficulty of finding your way in the midst of this warfare. You need to learn from a master warrior. Warfare demands fundamental bravery in handling situations, a willingness to fight with situations and a willingness to believe in the mysteriousness of life.

The guru has fantastic skill in developing you and destroying you at the same time, because the guru can communicate with the real world, which in turn can communicate to you either positively or negatively. That is one of the mysteries. People refer to it as magic or miracle, but I do not think we have a true understanding of it. The popular idea of magic is the dream of the comic books—Clark Kent transforming himself into Superman. But a guru will not turn you upside down or suspend you in the air. Nor does he have a mystical power to watch you being old and infantile at the same time. Nor does he have the power to turn you into a reptile to confess your sins to him and then, having confessed, turn you back into a human. People would like to have such power, of course. It would be a tremendous thrill. “I wish I had the power to turn this person into a bug so that I could step on him.” We have been reading too many comic books. Mystical power can only be expressed through an extraordinarily direct relationship with what is happening, with reality. Without a sense of compassion nothing can take place. We cannot conquer the world if we desire victory over something. We must have the sense of our relatedness with the world. Otherwise, our relationship with the world is imaginary, based upon false devotion to the guru.

One must make a very direct and personal relationship with the guru. You might give twenty million dollars to your spiritual friend whom you love dearly, but that is not enough. You must give your ego to him. The guru must receive your juice, your vital fluid. It is not enough to give him your feathers or hair or nails. You have to surrender the real core of you, the juicy part. Even if you give everything you have—your car, your clothes, your property, your money, your contact lenses, your false teeth—it is not enough. How about giving yourself, you who possess all these things? You still hang out. It is very clumsy. Particularly in the vajrayana, teachers expect you to give yourself—it is not enough to strip off your skin and flesh and pull your bones apart and your heart out. What do you have left to give then? That is the best gift of all.

We might feel proud that we gave one of our fingers to our guru: “I cut off my ear as a gift to him,” or “I cut my nose as an expression of devotion to him. I hope he will take it and regard it as a sign of how serious I am about the whole thing. And I hope he will value it because it means so much to me.” To the crazy wisdom guru such sacrifice is insignificant. Vajrayana surrender is much more painful and powerful and intimate. It is a problem of total communication; if you hold anything back, your relationship will be false, incomplete, and both you and your guru will know it.

C
OMMITMENT

The crazy wisdom guru has tremendous power—the power of transformation, the power of development, and also the power of deadly rejection which could destroy you. It is said that the guru should be regarded as being like fire: if you get too close to him you get burned; if you stay too distant you receive no warmth. You have to keep a reasonable distance. Getting too close means that you would like to obtain some kind of acknowledgment that your neuroses are a valid and serious matter, that they should be included as part of the bargain of the spiritual unification of guru and student. But such a bargain cannot be made because your guru will not sign his name on the dotted line.

Unfortunately, we usually think that devotion is very safe, pleasant, and a harmonious relationship to enter into, almost like getting married. But in the devotional relationship there is more doubt as to whether it will continue. You wish you could keep it a secret in case it does not work out. There is still a great deal of mystery concerning the teachings and the teacher. In relating with your wife or husband there is less mysteriousness. You know each other’s backgrounds and have learned each other’s habits and you begin to suspect possible boredom. But in the case of the teachings you do not suspect boredom but you do suspect tremendous possibilities of failure and danger. Whenever this distrust arises, you surrender more, you trust more blindly, and you commit your energy more to the unknown. In spite of being unknown it is secure, absolutely safe, since you are on the side of goodness or God. You are willing to fight his enemies—vice, the devil, whatever. You are linked with goodness. “If I devote myself enough, my teacher will accept me and then he will free me.” That is a big problem.

We do not realize that the wrath of the goodness is tremendously powerful. It could strike us at any time. We could be hit by any little deception, which to you is only a way of speaking, but in actual fact it seems to be much more than that. You might bend the income tax laws or plead your way out of a fine for a traffic violation, but it is not so easy with spirituality. It is a much more subtle, very acute, very immediate, very sensitive situation. When minds tune into subtle situations, then the consequences become subtle as well. The usual expectation is that when we tune our minds into a subtle situation, we get subtle pleasure out of it and can ignore the subtle pain. But both pleasurable and painful messages are equally potent.

What I am trying to say is that devotion to a teacher involves tremendous consequences. Reading this in itself can be dangerous. You are surrendering yourself, acknowledging that you have some kind of commitment. And if you go so far as to regard yourself as a student of spirituality, then you are not only siding with the goodness of the teaching but you are also embedding yourself into the soil of the teaching. Each time you fold your hands and bow, each time the teacher acknowledges your commitment, each time you light candles or incense at a shrine or sit in a meditation hall, you are rooting yourself more deeply. It is like planting a tree. Each time you water the plant, the roots grow further into the ground. Devotion is usually regarded as inconsequential. You bow and you get what you want. If you do not get it, you can walk away without any difficulty. Not so. Each bow creates a stronger umbilical cord. You become more deeply rooted in the teaching and more deeply rooted in the debt you have to repay to all sentient beings. It is extraordinarily demanding. Not realizing this is comparable to saying, “I’m doing the landlord a favor by moving into his property and signing a lease. I am doing him a favor so that he can make money from me.” But you do not realize the consequence, that you are committed to pay rent as long as the lease is in effect. It is ordinary common logic.

Even if you try to pull yourself out of the relationship, some link will remain; you cannot completely undo your past. You cannot really leave without being touched. It is a terrible trap in that sense, an extraordinarily haunting thing. So realize what you are doing.

T
HE
U
NIVERSALITY OF
G
URU

Discipline goes hand in hand with devotion. They are both important to each other. We could say that discipline and devotion are like the two wings of a bird. Without both of them together there is no way to relate to the spiritual friend, teacher, or warrior. And without a spiritual friend there is no way to realize the teachings. And without the teachings there is no way of developing basic sanity. And without basic sanity there is no journey, no movement, there is no creative energy.

One of the problems of spiritual searching is that we tend to feel that we can help ourselves purely by reading a lot and practicing by ourselves, not associating ourselves with a particular lineage. Without a teacher to surrender to, without an object of devotion, we cannot free ourselves from spiritual materialism.

It is important first to develop a sense of devotion that allows us to be disowned by our ego. Devotion is a process of unlearning. If there is no devotion, no surrendering, we cannot unlearn. Of course we could say that sometimes even having a spiritual friend might generate further spiritual materialism as well. But it depends on the qualities of the friend and the communication of the student, whether a link is properly made or not. It is possible that a spiritual friend who is highly evolved could meet an embryonically highly evolved person and not form a proper link. Their chemistry together must produce a spark.

Each of the approaches to devotion that we have talked about has its place. We cannot begin immediately with the vajrayana devotional approach. It would be suicidal. It would be like an infant trying to imitate a grown-up. The various styles of devotion are not just progressive stages of development. They are also different aspects of each stage of development. One minute you might need a parental figure, another minute you feel sick and need a physician, another minute you might need warriorlike encouragement.

Nevertheless, we must start with the hinayana version of devotion which contains elements of the sympathy of the mahayana approach and the bravery of the vajrayana approach. But the external acts are predominantly hinayanist. Each stage along the path has its dominant themes. The hinayana approach to devotion is predominantly a simple relationship with your spiritual friend, a human relationship. The spiritual friend is not regarded as a god, saint, or angel, but he is regarded as a human being who has gone through tremendous discipline and learning. We can identify with this person because we can communicate with him. He is not a Martian who is pretending to be an earthman, but he is a son of man who grew up in this world and experienced all kinds of difficulties and was able to relate with the teaching and accomplish tremendous things. We can relate with this person without fantasizing all kinds of mysteries.

The hinayanist approach is very matter of fact: you are relating to another human being who happens to be accomplished. And the mahayanist approach is that this person is so highly accomplished that he is extraordinarily in tune with the events of everyday life. He has a perfectly constant awareness so that he does not miss a point. And he has developed exceedingly powerful compassion to live through your negativities. Your trying to walk on the spiritual path may be a big joke to your spiritual friend. You may act as an absolutely confused and absurd person. Nevertheless this person never gives up hope for you. He accepts you and goes through the irritations that you create. He is tremendously patient with you. You do something wrong and he instructs you how to correct it. But then you slip up or distort the instruction; you create further mistakes. You back to your spiritual friend and he says, “Fine, we can still work together, but now try this project,” and you try again. You start with tremendous energy and confidence that you can do it. Several days later you get tired of the whole thing. You find something else with which to entertain yourself. The spiritual friend might ask you to do an intensive meditation practice without reading books, but you find that a book jumps into your lap and you cannot help reading it. It seems to be a part of the teaching as well. And you go back to the spiritual friend and say, “I followed your instructions but this book jumped into my lap and I could not help reading it.” The spiritual friend then says, “That’s fine. Did you learn anything from it? If you did, take the book and keep reading, find out what the book has to say in depth.” And you go back and try to read the book, but you tire of reading. It’s springtime. The flowers and trees and nature are so glamorous that you cannot help putting the book aside and taking a nice walk, enjoying the beauty of nature and the “meditative” state of being in nature. Following discipline is very difficult and you constantly create sidetracks by not realizing that you are sidetracking. The problem is not that you disobey your spiritual friend. In fact, the problem is that you are too serious; you find your sidetracks by being very serious. So it requires tremendous patience for your spiritual friend to work with you despite your slipping in and out of disciplines, despite your frivolousness.

A bodhisattva is like a crocodile: once you land in its mouth it never lets you go. If you were to want to leave your spiritual friend in order to live a free life away from such involvement, he would say, “That’s great, do as you wish, go ahead and leave.” By approving your leaving he removes the object of your rebellion, so instead of going away you come closer. It is a reciprocal situation: the guru’s devotion to the student is intense and therefore the student’s devotion begins to awaken, even if he is stupid and thick and burdened with all kinds of problems. The teacher’s devotion to the student is compassion and the devotion of the student to the teacher is discipline. So compassion and discipline begin to meet together at some point.