T h e d r a l a p r i n c i p l e (2):
l u x u r y i s e x p e r i e n c i n g r e a l i t y
Bill Scheffel
Photo: Bill Scheffel
Read the first part of this text at http://blog.dharma.art.br/2009/11/o-principio-do-drala-1_english/.
A course of study
(continuation)
Discover that, “Luxury is experiencing reality”
The intriguing quote, “Luxury is experiencing reality” is another phrase Chögyam Trungpa used which goes to the heart of the drala principle. In our modern world of technology and consumerism we live tremendously and unnecessarily shielded from the elements; as Trungpa taught, “so many devices are presented to us [...] ten thousand types of gloves and a hundred thousand types of shoes and millions of masks to ward off animals in the real world [...] Just in case you smell a cow, you have an aerosol.”
Chögyam Trungpa counseled his students that the life envisioned in Nova Scotia must be highly connected to the earth.
We are talking about a farming situation in some sense: how we are going to experience the land properly, the real land, the land that grows crops and the land on which animals are raised. It is very, very important for us as students of Shambhala that when we first wake up in our bedrooms, the first incense we smell is either cow manure or horse manure or the smell of plants… We have to back and experience how the earth words rather than purely smelling our neighbor’s bacon cooking as soon as we wake up… We all have to work on the earth, literally and properly.
Chögyam Trungpa’s vision was of course not the forced “reeducation” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but a call for devotion and sacrifice in the spirit of sanity and as an alternative to the dark future facing humanity if the excesses of our age continue unchecked. Quite simply, when we live with awareness of the elements, we live in luxury. Conversely, nearly everything we have come to call luxury is an excess, a distraction, a prison. The experience of rain is one of life’s great luxuries, the source of life falling from the sky! To experience the reality of rain does not mean to go out without an umbrella or a jacket if it is cold, to give up common sense comforts. But the luxuries of the “setting sun” world of modern mass culture is mere endless consumerism based on hungering for ever greater and mindless comforts and entertainments.
In the following Taoist passage, one doesn’t need to understand its esoteric implications to be moved by its dramatically devastating conclusion:
. . .
The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.
Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness.
When openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, energy turns into form, and form turns into vitality, then vitality turns into attention. Attention turns into social gesturing, social gesturing turns into elevation and humbling. Elevation and humbling turn into high and low positioning, high and low positioning turns into discrimination.
Discrimination turns into official status, status turns into cars. Cars turn into mansions, mansions turn into palaces. Palaces turn into banquet halls, banquet halls turn into extravagance. Extravagance turns into acquisitiveness, acquisitiveness turns into fraud. Fraud turns into punishment, punishment turns into rebellion. Rebellion turns into armament, armament turns into strife and plunder, strife and plunder turn into defeat and destruction. — From The Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women, translated and edited by Thomas Cleary. This section was written in the 10th century by Tan Jingsheng. It’s called Transformational Writings, and it sums up the Taoist view of the evolution and involution of both individuals and collective processes.
Invoke astonishment
The following is from the text of a “Shambhala Day” (Tibetan new year) address I once gave at Naropa University.
The word I have chosen is: ASTONISH. It is a very beautiful word. It comes from the Latin extonare which means “to thunder.” It means to strike with sudden wonder, or even sudden fear. John Lennon said, “Because the world is round it turns me on.” That’s the idea. Since I thought of this word a week ago – almost immediately after I was asked to give this address — I really have been noticing how astonishing the world is. Every perception that comes to us. A person’s face is astonishing. The way my dog tries to smile at me in the morning by baring his fangs is astonishing. The dentist’s drill is astonishing.
A term in the Shambhala Tradition called The Great Eastern Sun means the world is always presenting itself to us for the first time. Chögyam Trungpa used to begin his talks by saying “Good Morning” because the sun rises in the east. The east is where things are always new. I think he saw his students this way, because when he looked at you he always seemed astonished (even appalled!). Some things are so astonishing they seem uncalled for, gratuitous or almost absurd. A flower!
Moments of perceived astonishment can transform depression and give us real vision. There is a poem by the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis in which smelling the branch of a bush transforms his mind.
. . .
One day when I was feeling abandoned by everything and a great sorrow fell slowly on my soul, walking across fields without salvation, I pulled a branch of some unknown bush. I broke it and brought it to my upper lip. I understood immediately that man is innocent. I read it in the truth-acerbic scent so vividly, I took its road with light step and a missionary heart. Until my deepest conscience was that all religions lie.
Yes, Paradise isn’t nostalgia. Nor, much less, a reward. It is a right.
Photo: Bill Scheffel
Take one’s seat
The ultimate purpose or expression of the drala principle is to take genuine responsibility for one’s life. Although this requires sacrifice, it is not a burden but a joy. Becoming responsible means taking one’s seat, but this seat — or throne — is found in the chamber of one’s own heart. Quite the contrary to what we’re taught in school, where we are often “slowly reduced to disbelieving in ourselves” (Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros, p. 105), responsibility is the fulfillment of our true or fundamental desire, what we irreducibly believe in (even if long forgotten).
Two Shambhala terms are helpful in understanding this responsibility. The first is the sakyong principle. When my son was seven years old, I showed him a photograph of a clear-cut forest and he burst into tears. He cried immediately, inconsolably and seemingly out of any proportion. The sakyong principle entered him, or emerged from him. From his heart. Sakyong means “earth protector,” a term for the highest seat we could claim, one that is devoted to protecting the earth itself, and, or course, all he beings that live here. The sight of the destroyed forest — a sight of grotesque un-sustainability — evoked from my son an archetypal response of the deepest kind.
The tears of my son demonstrated not only sadness but a kind of tremendous potential energy — so much energy that I’ve never forgotten that moment! We must use the energy-awakeness of the unbidden heart to have the courage to journey toward taking our most deeply human seat as earth protector, Sakyong. It is seemingly only this kind of collective awakening that will save our planet from continued degradations and possible catastrophic collapse.
The unbidden energy we sometimes feel (perhaps only once in a lifetime) in or from our heart is something more than the constituents of our personality or the type of person we are trying to be. This energy is connected to the second pertinent Shambhala term, the ridgen principle. You could say that, although this primordial energy is not “elsewhere,” it nevertheless originates from a kind of ultimate or unconditioned space (which all spiritual traditions attempt to evoke, understand or at least speak of). In the Shambhala tradition, it is not spoken of, or conceived of, as God, but as “The Rigdens,” the highest from of non-dual intelligence or being. The Rigdens are not exactly separate from us, yet we can say – and experience! – that they want to help us.
Rigden means “possessing family heritage.” Our heritage goes back through our mothers and fathers and every ancestral predecessor to the dawn of humanity. But even that is an arbitrary designator, because our genetic heritage not only continues back through apes, but to the original creatures of our earth’s oceans, back to single cells, to carbon, to stardust. It is impossible not to possess this heritage, but our minds have acquired endless ideas and conditioning that ultimately makes us feel alone and alienated from any heritage at all. Existence, in the form of The Rigdens, and in every cell of life, does have an allegiance to helping us reunite with our true family heritage. The ultimate and highest dralas are the Rigdens themselves.
How exactly will the Rigdens help us? There is a simple process we must undertake and in the undertaking help arrives inseparable from the process and perhaps, for a long time, unnoticed. There are steps to the process, though not necessarily in this order:
1. We must recognize our response-ability (to separate the word into its obvious halves). Each of us has a unique ability to respond to our life experience and thus effect the world around us. Not everyone is equal, precisely because there is not a single “ability” to measure us all by. In hitting a tennis ball, some have more ability than others, but this is only one of infinite abilities to possess. Just as we are not all equal, none of us are particularly special, only unique. If each snowflake that has fallen since the beginning of snow is unique, how could each human (dog, cat, tree) not be?
The great Zen teacher Dōgen said, “Everyone has all the provisions they need for their lifetime.” Amidst injustice, deformity, starvation, war and poverty it hardly seems believable that we each have the provisions we need. The provisions Dōgen spoke where the ones needed to wake up and waking up can never occur from material other than what we have, however awful. To recognize the material of our response-ability is a life-time process that is too infrequently tried.
As we do try to recognize and commit to our response-ability, the world offers a response — you could say the rigdens respond. Small forms of acknowledgment occur; accidents, synchronicities, threads of new possibility. The sense of “moving in the right direction” is palpable though not always tangible; it is a kind of real support that comes to our aid.
2. We must realize our privilege. Most of us living in the so-called first-world have tremendous privileges over the greater majority of human beings who live in the so-called third world. A hundred dollars does not necessarily mean a great deal in, say, middle-class United States, but in terms of the overall world economy where the majority of human beings make only a dollar or two a day — one-hundred dollars is a tremendous amount of money.
Strangely, we in the first-world often live far more in the grip of economic fear than our brothers and sisters making two-dollars a day. The mortgages, credit-card debt, home and automobile insurance policies (not to mention the homes and automobiles), the warranties, deeds of trust, legal contracts, iPod rebates, parking tickets, security clearances, credit ratings, golf course memberships and orange juice coupons become a heaping pile of overhead we feel duty-bound and scared to death to do anything other than support. And thus our life force goes into supporting primarily these things, making us quite irresponsibly responsible.
That we could leverage our life in an entirely different way — and for very different purposes – is the point of realizing our privilege. Recognizing and acknowledging our privilege take courage because it begins to dissolve that sense that we are “special,” that we are entitled to what we have and that it will always be there.
Quite simply put, the dralas do not prefer cowards, whereas any expression of the courage to become more vulnerable will potentially attract the dralas. Acknowledging our privilege means to become more vulnerable. The rigden principle – as the ultimate drala principle — is the self-existing sense of fearlessness we find in ourselves. As we become courageous we become anointed — or self-anointed — with courage — and the process of courage grows on itself.
3. We must begin to simplify and to risk. When we realize “luxury is experiencing reality,” simplifying is not a hardship but something natural — and natural things tend to do very well if they are allowed to. Simplifying provides the ground to risk. Most of us in the first world have far more resources available to us than the vast majority of humanity. We not only have the possibility but the responsibility to risk some of our so-called security for benefit of finding and taking our seat and in turn, helping others.
4. Supplicate for vision and support. If we are unwilling to simply risk, renounce our privileges and assume responsibility it is unlikely it would occur to us to supplicate for a vision, much less receive one. Conversely, if we do have this willingness, we already have a vision; vision is surrender to what our heart desires. This is not the vision of ego, which are always “wants” that will make us comfortable. A vision will have its way with us, but it will also come with a curious way of providing the necessary provisions. Simply to supplicate into the unknown is a act of courage and a link with vision.
What is vision? It is the truth of the human heart, which exists in nowness outside of time and can never be discovered through hope and fear.
Photo: Bill Scheffel
© 2009 Bill Scheffel. All rights reserved. http://westernmountain.org/
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