CTSM Chapters 4-5: Hard Intelligence · 13 August 2010

Initiation

This chapter extends the method of cutting-through to any efforts to find a teacher, guru or “spiritual friend.” The first few pages could be nailed to trees outside ashtanga shalas. But maybe all seeking looks pretty much the same: a search for the perfect teacher. Someone wiser, better, more right about everything, more insightful, more popular.

Trungpa discusses the cynicism of some searching, insofar as it’s not attentive to teachers so much as their popularity. One wants to join their club, to get something extraordinary. One searches for a teacher out of a sense of starvation or worthlessness, or maybe to try to buy or steal wisdom. Choosing a teacher out of these motives is not intelligent: “we must approach spirutality with a hard kind of intelligence.”

Said intelligence comes out of one’s own experience; and without it, working with a teacher is pretty lame. If a teacher is to be useful for CTSM, there needs to be a relationship of “mutual opening,” predicated on effort “to expose ourselves” and our self-deceptions. 

Pages 64-66 are specific about how listening to one’s inner wisdom actually works. The "meeting of minds" is described as open and ordinary. 

In contrast, the ego is described as very professional and overwhelmingly efficient. “When we think that we are working on the forward-moving process of attempting to empty ourselves out, we find ourselves going backward, trying to secure ourselves, filling ourselves up. And this confusion continues and intensifies until we finally discover that we are totally lost… because our mind has been so overwhelmed by our own defense mechanisms. So the only alternative seems to be to just give in and let be. Our… smart solutions do us no good, because we have been overwhelmeb with too many ideas; we do not know which to choose, which ideas will provide us with the best way to work on ourselves.” (65)

Mutuality with a teacher is not sacred. It is ordinary. It is nothing. “It is the most insignificant thing of all, complete openness, the absence of any kind of collection or evaluation. We could say that such insignificance is very significant.” (68)

Self- Deception

Combining the discussions of ordinariness, openness, surrender and self-confidence, this chapter begins with an exhortation to drop wishful thinking about onself. Accept yourself as you really are.

Pages 74-79 address students who have had some kind of transcendent experience with a teacher, and the problem of grasping to that experience and identifying with it. This echoes (quite painfully, I'd say) of how charisma tends to be “nostalgized” in many practices, as CT illustrates. One tries to write down everything about the experience to capture and anchor it. One tells guru stories and compulsively clings to tales of “the good old days,” denying the ordinariness of both the past and the present.

Anyone who has experienced past moments of flashing insight is automatically set up for depression. Usually, we deny this when it arises. But depression is bound up with any kind of seeking (80). The force of despair can be very great. Those who only allow themselves to express whatever bliss they contain are enacting a stark dualism, denying the background against which that bliss is felt. (81)

The end of this chapter, like the Q&A section of the previous chapter, gets in to the problem of constantly, compulsively evaluating one’s own experience. This problem is described as “the watcher.” Page 82 describes how the watcher works, and the discussion on pp. 85-86 ultimately reduces it to a form of paranoia.

It’s unclear to me the degree to which the terminology and discussion about the watcher simply refer to compulsive spiritual self-control and self-critique, in contrast to the ways in which this might specifically refer to problems in the early expression of the Kornfield-Goldstein-Salzburg Vipassana paradigm. The latter teachings would have been popping up in Boulder around that time, and their initial problems would later be resolved somewhat. In short, the early Burmese-Thai Theravada tradition ran in to trouble as the teachers started to realize that cultivating witness consciousness was inherently dualistic and that this concsiousness eventually needed to be dismantled in meditation practice. At the time CTSM was articulated, the contradictions that eventually arise from cultivating a witness consciousness may have been a source of anxiety and confusion in this circle--and something Trungpa was using to highlight the importance of "ordinary," non-"evaluative" mind. Basically, I don't know if he was taking a swipe at a rival strain of Buddhism. If not, it's possible this discussion of the watcher applies more generally to any self-evaluation, showing it to generate a kind of infinite hall-of-mirrors regress.

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1. Three more chapters to come tonight, but I separated them out because the post would be too long.

   For this section, I’m pretty interested in the dismissive attitude toward “the watcher.”

   And I keep thinking about Christine’s initial comment, that this book is a how-to for tapping in to one’s deeper wisdom. Certain passages are still doing that, but other times he’s just going to town on specific mindsets he disagrees with.

   I am wondering. Would you agree with me that CTSM is an emptiness teaching? If so, is it practical? Honestly, I can’t really think of any other method for getting in touch with emptiness… this one seems pretty committed to using everything spiritual people hold dear to point directly to the nothing.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 13, 01:17 PM · #

2. My first thought to your question was yes, it is an emptiness training. He has not given many examples of our styles of attachment (to help our egos alleviate its suffering through more ego strategies it can put in its wisdom room!). My second thought was to compare it to Big Mind/Non-Dual, but then I thought again and realised that was MY WATCHER attempting to deconstruct and find a way to conceptualize the model. Or as the Jungians would say ‘for the ego to claim what is Self’. Suffice to say the message that ‘when we are not open we do not feel ok’ kicked me into see that I am then dualistically interminably playing ping-pong with pain or pleasure as my only options. And that, is a bit of a nugget to chew on for me.

   Posted by: Gregor · Aug 13, 02:49 PM · #

3. On the very questionable assumption that the experience of my last two years is something of “surrender” as CT puts it,

   then I would say actually no, I don’t see this as emptiness training. The sheer pain of that surrender (again, assuming it’s what CT means by surrender) is very much not empty. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so the plenitude that then fills in the pain—even if that plenitude is housework—is then multicolored and interesting (let’s assume this is “the present”).

   I guess that I assume that “emptiness” is silent (not sure why). The sheer noise of my experience makes me think that surrender isn’t emptying, although CT’s language is certainly that of reduction.

   Posted by: patrick · Aug 13, 04:35 PM · #

4. The Heart Sutra points out that form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The absolute and the relative, rising up and falling back, endlessly. From thie perspective, the idea that there is noise and that it is in opposition to silence doesn’t really compute. Trying to sort the opposites out is fine but it’s also squarely situated in the relative.

   I’ve never really gotten the watcher thing. It doesn’t resonate for me.

   Posted by: karen · Aug 13, 05:03 PM · #

5. My limited experiences of emptiness could be called chaotic.

   Karen, have you always meditated in the Zen tradition, with ordinary mind as the way? Vipassana is very much about watching thought, learning to note kinds of thought and even label them. After a while, what happens is that the labeling consciousness gets selfy, taking on a sub-concsciousness of its own. And then sometimes one creates a labeler to label the labeler, and so on. I’ve actually had a bit of this dynamic really collapse in my sitting practice the past three months or so, and things have been much, much more chaotic. But for a few years before that, a lot of my sitting practice was watching, and sometimes, given the way that my ego has of getting in to everything, the watching had a tendency to create a watcher.

   Given its temporary usefulness, I am dubious “the watcher” is inherently self-deceptive, if what he’s talking about is a Vipassana consciousness. Too, watching and even scientifically describing one’s own mind is a significant part of Vajrayana training among Trungpa’s students. This is why I wonder if there’s something going on here historically that I’m not understanding… that Trungpa has some interesting reason to depict the watcher as a hindrance even though it’s a pretty usual part of many beginning meditators’ experiences. The exception is some forms of Zen, which stay in “everyday mind,” and thus avoid this dualism of cultivating a witness consciousness.

   As I mentioned, the strategy here seems to be to show the self-deceptive nature of everything one holds dear and objectifies as “spirituality.” The dude is relentless!

   I was re-reading my summary just now, realizing that if I had commented with the openness that Wombat and Sara brought out in the last thread, I would not have taken an interest in this matter of the watcher. Rather, I could have gone to the thing that triggered me enough that I almost passed it over as “irrelevant” in my reading notes and didn’t add it to the summary. This is the commentary on bliss and its denial of depression and separation. The allegation that, in my own words, joy is only experienced against the background of suffering. Meh. Pissing on my bliss.

   Ok. Now, because I’m making an effort to read this work experientially rather than to increase my (materialist) knowledge, I’m go back to that passage and read it without my defenses up, without my (happily SM) identification with bliss....

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 13, 05:17 PM · #

6. Yes, always zen.

   Just an FYI, ‘cause I keep thinking about it: the word around zen town (ha!) is that the Tibetans use lots of “stuff” (words, images, stories, etc.) to essentially overwhelm the mind with so much info that it short circuits the way it can when confronting a koan. This has been pointed out to me by Japanese and by Tibetan monks, so I’ve always kind of taken it as a truth.

   I’m growing a little weary of this, truth be told. It sounds more like a harangue than I remembered. I read a little Huang Po this evening to see if I was just out of sorts in general, but the HP seems clear and resonant as usual, and the CT rather busy.

   Posted by: karen · Aug 13, 05:52 PM · #

7. Yes, I’ve heard the description of overwhelm too.

   Chapter 6 strikes me as masochistic. Mostly a repetition of the theme so far, with the addition of “excruciating pain,” and almost Puritan themes of facing facts and forswearing luxury (huh?). Maybe he’s trying to get rid of us? Probably, I'm being really insensitive here to how central pain is for some people, especially in the experience of growth. From what I can tell, both in body and everything else, experience of pain is something varies sigficantly; and for some I'm guessing it's way more valuable than I understand....

   Chapter 7 is a new topic entirely, so lovey-dovey that I almost can’t trust it after being beat over the head with Chapter 6. But more on that in the next thread.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 13, 07:01 PM · #

8. “Pages 74-79 address students who have had some kind of transcendent experience with a teacher, and the problem of grasping to that experience and identifying with it. This echoes (quite painfully, I’d say) of how charisma tends to be “nostalgized” in many practices.”

   Bingo! There I am. At least I’m still practicing. I haven’t given up.

   Posted by: boodiba · Aug 14, 03:25 AM · #

9. I guess this is pretty normal, Boo. (Like idealization of a perfect, past lover.) Later, the descriptions of nostalgia for the good old days, or by contrast, spiritual heroism, also feel just normal.

   Let’s see how others read this, but my reading is that the point of this discussion is to urge students to be open, honest about and present with the depression transcendent teacher experiences necessarily leave in their wake. I think this is why this discussion is immediately followed by the crazy chapter on The Hard Way. Sometimes working with pain is what there is to do. Otherwise, staying with the nostalgia is SM.

   The book seems intensely practical when it’s not alienating me. Oh wait….

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 14, 04:00 AM · #

10. The emphasis that I kept returning to in these 2 chapters was the focus on ordinariness.

    Patrick, I was thinking along the same lines. I was reading the description of surrender and openness as embracing a very full ordinariness rather than emptiness.

    He seems to be sort of standing with us on the path and gesturing to each side noting the pitfalls…our tendencies to attach to transcendent moments or to get frustrated and try to remove ourselves from life completely…impossible and leading to more frustration and suffering.

    I was reading his description of the “watcher” as our tendency to try to step out of the flow of life when we get uncomfortable or bored. While it seemed like CT’s “watcher” was maybe different than the practice of stepping back from thoughts as we notice attachment to them during a sitting practice, it seems that the difference is subtle. I can easily see myself moving quickly from disentangling myself from thoughts to avoiding whatever they represent and then to resisting openning to whatever is going on in that moment.

    In these chapters, I picture CT standing with me on the path emphasizing openning to ordinariness “tapping into one’s deeper wisdom” as Owl said, while gesturing to all that repeatedly trips me up…as if I was Dorothy and CT is trying to get me to open to the possibility that I’ve been in Kansas all along!

    Posted by: Christine · Aug 14, 04:06 AM · #

11. does fascinating-to-watch trip-fall-dance over Karen’s “form/emptiness/emptiness/form”

    It’s like Purusha/Prakriti “seen exists for the sake of the seer” but, with our pre-enlightenment confusion (assuming time exists), both are one, then it’s wait, both? one? multiplicity? unity? KAPOW!!!!

    I think watcher/watched has a like tendency to explode, and perhaps CT pushes us toward the explosion rather than what he calls the paranoid bureaucracy (watchers watching watchers watch the watched).

    Posted by: patrick · Aug 14, 10:01 AM · #

12. I love the idea of the paranoid bureaucracy – the watcher holed up in their fortress, surrounded by ever-growing banks of monitors and cameras…

    But isn’t this ‘paranoid watching’ (watching precisely as a way to stay safe, and ‘above it all’) different from the watching which leads us out of ourselves and into the ‘watched’, the idea that you watch and watch until you become the watched, until there’s almost a transfusion of consciousness between watcher and watched, so that the watched almost seems to start watching itself?

    I’m thinking of the way mindfulness of breathing brings consciousness into breathing, so that breathing becomes transfused with consciousness, not separate from it. In other words the breath starts to watch itself. So it’s not about separation but transfusion..

    An image which leads straight on to operations and pain…Is pain necessary? When the defensive layer grows on, it grows on hard…it’s not just a mask but another layer of skin, as in CT’s delightful in-growing toe-nail which gets buried under layer after layer of rock-hard excrescence. And as the defence grows on hard, won’t it hurt to cut it off again? I’d like to think there could be some moment of grace, some miracle where all that extra growth can just fall away, but after reading CT my wishful thinking alarm goes off at that idea…

    I did find the pain stuff compelling, but wonder if, at the same time, that isn’t just a need for those high levels of stimulation that CT is otherwise warning against – the feeling that ‘something is happening’, the search for extremes…

    Meanwhile, the section on initiation gave me some more understanding of the guru-student relationship…it seems that CT is talking about the opening of a kind of channel between two minds – and it’s that pure possibility of communication that’s really important here. Openness meeting openness – whatever moves through that space is maybe less important than the fact that something can move – that suddenly there’s the possibility of abhisheka.

    Posted by: Louise · Aug 14, 12:02 PM · #

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