All language subtitles for Ram Dass – Here and Now – Ep. 112 – The Notion of Ego with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

This is Ram Dass, Here and Now. I'm Raghu Marcus. Welcome.

Went deep into the archives again today to find something to share, a talk to share with you.

It's not a talk. It's actually a panel.

And it's from 1974, from when Naropa, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's university, opened up.

And Ram Dass was a featured teacher there.

And, in fact, I must mention to you, he was teaching on the yogas of the Bhagavad Gitas.

And we have an edited version of the complete talks called Love, Service, Devotion,

and the ultimate surrender.

It's a 10-CD set.

Go to ramdas.org,

to the shop,

and just put a search in

for love, service, devotion.

This is,

and not just me hyping,

there's a lot of people

who've listened to this

who would tell you

this is some of the best material

of Ramdas over all these decades.

I mean, it's all great,

but this one's particularly,

because of the subject matter

from the Gita,

So I can't more highly recommend it to everybody, from beginners to people who've known and heard Ram Dass for a long time.

And that's going to help the old foundation out, everybody.

So help support what we're doing at Ram Dass.org and the retreats, everything else that we're doing.

So as I said, this is a panel with Ram Dass and Trungpa Rinpoche and two other of his Naropa people, a man named John Baker and a man named Jim Green and hosted by Duncan Campbell.

And this is superb because it is absolutely unique in the way in which Ram Dass and Trungpa relate with each other.

another huge, huge thing for me.

I mean, I had not,

I don't think I ever actually watched,

I knew that we had it,

but I never watched it.

I just came upon it randomly today.

And you get the way in which

Trungpa Rinpoche,

his thinking,

his expression is so original.

It's so non-rational in a way.

I mean, everything that comes out of his mouth, you've got to do a double take.

And you could spend like 10, 15 minutes on each thing.

It's so radically unusual.

I don't even know how to describe it.

But you really, when you hear this, I think you'll get it.

By the way, this was a video, and we are putting the video up.

So when you go to this audio version, you know, either you're subscribing on iTunes or you're going through BeHereNowNetwork.com slash Ramdas, BeHereNow, it will have a link.

And I urge you, do watch at least some of this thing.

Just there's so much, you know, emotional display through gestures and facial expressions and so on.

It's really precious.

It really is.

But so what they're talking about is the notion of the ego.

And talking about it in terms of both Western psychology and psychiatric,

because one of these guys was a practicing psychiatrist,

and also through Eastern philosophy and psychology.

And so there is some really, really valuable information here,

aside from the incredible charm of this interplay.

Just a couple of things I'll just point out.

So Trungpa is talking about the development of the ego.

So the baby is there.

It comes from the one.

He doesn't say that.

But it comes from non-existence.

So it understands the possibility of non-existence, meaning non-ego.

And this is all my conjecture, by the way.

You all may get something else, you know, another message.

But here's what he says.

So it cries.

The baby cries because suddenly it's out of that incredible spaciousness, right,

as it has come through the birth canal and now is embodied.

And so what does it first do?

It sucks the mother's breast.

Why?

So it can have some connection, just some connection.

So it has a relative connection to know it does exist, right?

Because it's in a body, which is an expression of a kind of panic, Rinpoche says, which society

is built on from that point of view.

Pretty amazing thing when you start to really think about the reality of that.

I won't say any more about that.

And I'm sure everybody's going to come up with a little bit of a different thought pattern around what he says.

Oh, he also said at one point that the theory of relativity, that concept,

once that came into the West, there was more possibility of the Buddha mind emerging.

could emerge. Interesting.

What else?

There is another version of survival

other than trying to survive

with the basic necessity of the ego.

And he said, I would call that enlightenment.

That's another version of survival.

I mean, just radical kind of thought thing, thinking, thought pattern.

And then Ram Dass at some point says,

a lot of the boundaries are put up by the intellect

without recognizing intuitive possibilities in the universe.

And intellect is very finite in its possible abilities to conceive.

and the other note that I made to myself about this

is there is a just marvelous exchange

between Ram Dass and Trungpa

and it has to do with Ram Dass saying

when he was a therapist, you know, before he was Ram Dass

when he was a therapist at some point he started to realize

that he was so caught in the role

that there was no way that he could be of any use

to his students or clients or whatever.

And so that and the whole psychedelic thing,

that propelled him to get out to find,

he didn't say this exactly,

but find a roadmap of consciousness.

But he just said, so I got out to become a human being

that could be of some help to somebody.

So Trungpa took issue with that.

And he said, well, you left them hanging?

And so they went into a whole thing about that.

And Ram Dass said, well, you know, you went into a cave, right?

And just the nature of, it really, I guess the root of it is around the nature of service

and what you're doing.

And Ram Dass talked about, so there are times when you need to retreat

so that you can engender more of your true self

so that you can be of more use to people.

And so they went into a whole dialogue on that

that was really fascinating.

I'm just going to leave this to you guys to listen.

As you can tell, I'm very enthusiastic about this.

When I come upon something like this

and get so much out of it,

This is just the kind of thing I love to share.

And you know how much I love Trungpa,

even though I know there are people out there

who judge him for this, that, and the other.

He's just, to me, one of the most formidable teachers

of the last 50 years or more.

So here it is.

The notion of ego, Ram Dass, Trungpa Rinpoche,

in a panel at Naropa in 1974 on Ram Dass, Here and Now.

Welcome to Open Secret, a series of radio and television discussions

that are being filmed and recorded this summer in Boulder, Colorado at Naropa Institute.

Naropa Institute was founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

to create a ground in which the Western academic and artistic and religious traditions

could interact with those of the East.

This evening, we are discussing the general topic of psychology East and West.

We have with us an audience of over a thousand people

who have been drawn primarily from the courses at Naropa Institute

which have been taught by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Ram Dass.

and before proceeding into the discussion itself

I would like to introduce the people with us

we have Jim Green

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert

and John Baker

It is open secret, that's true.

All of these people are faculty members at Naropa Institute during this first summer session.

Jim Green has taught philosophy at Columbia and Antioch

and for the last five years has been doing psychotherapy in Berkeley.

And he's teaching courses at Naropa on philosophy and psychology.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the president of Naropa Institute,

is teaching a course on basic Buddhist meditation and on the Tibetan Buddhist path.

Ram Dass is teaching a course on the yogas of the Bhagavad Gita.

John Baker, the vice president of Naropa Institute,

is teaching courses with Reginald Ray on the tantric Mahasiddhas and saints

and on Buddhism in India,

and is in the process of writing a book on Buddhist psychology.

Now it seems to me that perhaps one way to start this

would be in terms of the notion of ego,

that if we talk about the Western philosophical or psychological approach...

Who are you?

My name is Duncan Campbell, I forgot that.

I'm the moderator.

We're talking about ego.

Thank you.

to the different ways in which the Western psychiatric tradition

and the religious and psychological traditions of the East

approach this notion of ego or personal identification,

and what the differences might be

and what each of the two traditions might have to learn from each other.

It would seem that on the members of the panel,

perhaps Ram Dass would be the best qualified to speak to that.

Especially since I have two names.

Well, it's been interesting to me over the past 12 years to remember that as a psychologist,

a child development, a developmental psychologist.

One of my major concerns was with theories of the developing ego of the individual

and the development of an ego that has integrity and that is effective in coping with the environment.

working with people at Harvard such as Eric Erickson,

and with behaviorists concerned with converting Freud's ideas

of the development of identification,

the development of personality and personality structure,

it seemed at that time as if the ego was a very real, solid,

and necessary part of the healthy functioning of an organism.

And when I started to work with psychedelics,

it became, I started to experience something

that didn't fit into my theoretical structure of ego.

And I began to think maybe we were going to go the other way now.

that we're now going to unwind the ego or get out from under it.

In Hinduism, there is a thing called the Ahamkara,

which is a structure like the ego.

And the game of awakening is to transcend that structure,

not to get rid of it because the ego is very functional,

but to at least not be attached to it.

Seems like a statement for openers.

well in the buddhist tradition i think the interesting thing is that they start

from a concept of no self that somehow the whole project of involving oneself with the buddhist

meditation practice and with the buddhist system of thought is to work from a premise that in fact

the ego doesn't exist that it's not even there there's some concept of emptiness that is the

ultimate reality if we can speak in those terms. And I wonder what the implications of that point

of view are for dealing with personality or neurosis in the life of various individuals.

Well, as a practical matter, in my experience as a therapist, what seemed to happen is that I was

involved with people whose life dramas seemed to be more or less unsuccessful. And as a therapist,

my task was to help them rewrite the script so that there was a better drama.

And to some extent we were successful and the drama was better,

but it was never quite satisfactory.

There always seemed to be something quite wrong,

i'd infinitum, about those dramas.

And it seems in some way that the problem was,

not that the drama was quite wrong, but that there was a drama.

In some way it was the energy in the drama which produced the difficulty.

And when we worked somehow to make the drama less dramatic,

It seemed that a great many problems simply dissolved.

In doing therapy now over the past ten years,

it's interesting that as the role of the therapist,

the concept of what you do in relation to another person

has changed a great deal because before it seemed very horizontal.

You were substituting one ego structure for another, a more effective one.

Now it seems to me you're still doing that,

but you're doing it from a place in yourself

of not being attached to ego structures,

so that at the same moment you're putting one in place of another,

you're not investing it with an emotional attachment

that you would be if you thought you were a therapist.

In other words, when people say to me,

is therapy still okay within, you know, I say,

if Buddha were your therapist, you get enlightened.

But if your therapist thinks he's a therapist, watch out.

It's that place.

We do seem to be engaged, though, in some process of slowing down the substitution of structures.

That is, a great deal of interest in the drama is in the

kaleidoscopic

variety of the structures,

both for the therapist and for the therapy.

And it seems that we want to try to slow down that process of production of structures a little bit.

But Rinpoche said or wrote that you had to become somebody before you could become nobody.

And I think you did. I don't want to put words into your mouth.

you can handle yourself.

And it seems to me that's what we end up doing

in the psychotherapy domain is at this moment.

I'm not sure that I agree entirely.

It seems that one needs not to have the sense of being nobody,

but I'm not sure that one needs to have the sense

of being somebody necessarily.

It seems there ought to be a way to avoid that particular

route.

there ought to be a possibility of moving from feeling like a nobody, which is very...

I didn't mean

that they would experience being a nobody, they'd just be nobody.

Oh, I see, okay.

Well, one of the things that's always interested me is that it seems that

a lot of people in America are familiar in some general sense with the notion of ego

and certain psychological terminology that we get from Freud or Adler or Jung or whatever,

as vehicles to try to deal with our own personality.

And the interesting thing about the Eastern traditions is the discovery

that in the Eastern religious traditions, they are talking about very much the same thing.

In fact, in some of those traditions, they even talk in terms of ego.

And so the bridge is actually quite an easy one to make.

It's not the matter of trying to absorb something so foreign and exotic that you can't relate with it at all.

But in fact, in most cases, the attraction seems to be that they are speaking directly to your own struggle

to kind of understand your own personal drama and how you can work with it.

And in that light, it would seem that there might be some real differences between a Western psychology,

which seems to be premised on the notion of building up a strong ego capable of playing the game successfully.

And Eastern psychology premised on the notion that there is no ego,

which has the concomitant danger that you could just lapse into some sort of passivity or a state where, you know, your energy was completely inactive.

And both of those seem to be cliches.

And I thought maybe perhaps

in the course

of this conversation we could try to clarify some of those popular notions as to what the interplay really was between these Western and Eastern approaches.

I mean, for instance, Jim, do you actually think that the Eastern psychological approach has a danger of lapsing into passivity?

I mean, that is the popular notion.

And in your experience, have you found that in your own experience with Buddhism, for instance?

Well, no, I know there

is the sense that somehow one's ego is going to be ripped off if one becomes involved with meditation practice or anything of that sort.

And one is going to lapse into a sort of helplessness.

And that doesn't seem to be entirely a theoretical issue.

It seems to be a practical issue that in the situation of meditation practice or in the situation in a therapeutic context in which some space is allowed to emerge within the conflict, within the drama,

that typically some energy appears which before wasn't available.

So that in fact life begins to enter where before rigid structures,

the rigid structures of the drama and the roles prevented it from

entering it all.

And in some way the problem seems to arise out of creating theoretical polarities

like the ones you described,

which have the function very well of staving off the actual experience.

It seems to reduce the anxiety about having one's ego ripped off

and being a helpless body or something like that.

What do you mean having one's ego ripped off?

Well, there's the sense that somehow Eastern religions or meditation practice are after one.

They're after what one considers most valuable

and that one has to sacrifice immediately everything one is.

It's as if somehow everything one is were the enemy initially,

so some sense of opposition.

between what one is and what one is required to be

according to these religious teachings.

And that doesn't seem to be quite a sound understanding of what we're doing.

I think one of the problems that we have to...

the misunderstandings that come up

is I think that

speaking from a traditional point of view of Buddhism

that there is big misunderstanding universally,

and both Easterners and Westerners believe in ego.

And ego is the subject of discussion,

and ego subject of development and hope, the only hope, and those things be presented.

But on the other hand, Buddhist point of view is not particularly that of the Eastern point of view

or the Western point of view particularly, but somehow peculiarly Buddhistic,

which doesn't belong to particular category,

that Buddha, for instance, refused to identify himself

with the national ego of India at the time.

And he broke through systems, caste systems,

all kinds of other systems,

and he even broke through his own meditation master,

that he found that there's something wrong there at the time.

And the only conclusion that he came up is that maybe there's wrongness,

which is a traditional knowledge of dukkha, suffering,

and maybe such suffering does not belong to anybody at all.

That maybe there is another possibility is that even this doesn't exist, that you don't exist.

and maybe that's the message of transcending from samsara to lirvana.

It's an entirely different category.

So I think if you stick too much in terms of debating between the East and the West theory,

somehow we don't get the message across.

I'm not saying particularly Buddha was a smart person,

and I'm all for it particularly,

but it's a different prospect that Buddha has presented.

has a different dimension altogether.

Kind of a humanistic person 2,500 years ago,

who disbelieve in humanism,

or ego, whatever, which is, I think,

subject that we are discussing in terms of psychology.

and therefore teaching of Buddha had become highly psychological oriented from that point onward

rather than behavior oriented as such or culture oriented as such that it's non-cultural thing.

It's a sort of revolutionary idea which still could be more revolutionary as time goes on in my way of thinking anyway.

So I think there is a point there that all kinds of behavior patterns that we could present to make ego less or ego good, but at the same time we are doing something with it.

The real idea seems to be that to find out, discover, is there anything at all?

That's the question that nobody has really looked at.

And you presume that there is something happening,

and it's as if that you have bought the cart, and you never discussed by the horses.

And that's what Buddha's getting at,

is let us discuss what kind of horse we're gonna have.

Is the horse at all or not?

Is it worth buying the cart?

And that's kind of fundamental thing

that we might inject in this particular situation,

so which makes things more lively.

- In the developmental part of

an individual's growth from infancy onward.

In the West, it's assumed that a certain structure

will develop just for functioning.

That is, the sucking behavior will start,

and these sort of basic needs systems

will build a structure around them

which will become psychological in nature.

And that that will be a necessity for survival.

And only after that can some other conditions occur.

Now, how does that fit in with what you've just said?

- Well, I think it fits perfectly well.

That there is,

there is a big misunderstanding out of nothingness.

So we're dwelling on the misunderstanding

as if anchor.

And we built up the misunderstanding,

whatever it is, you know, built life out of it,

and it seems okay, functional.

We might build a house on ice block,

or, you know, let's decorate nicely.

And let's disregard the ice block,

but we still got to do that.

But then, some point, you begin to find in spring,

or in the summer,

that the spiritualities begin to question

your foundation altogether.

But

I think that's the point is that

misunderstanding in this case is the pain

and uncertainty, possibilities of non-existence,

but still existing when child cry,

cry for non-existence.

There is this message, that message happens constantly.

and the child sucks nipple because the child wants to have some connection,

make sure that there is a relative reference that the child could exist, it does exist,

which are the expressions of all kinds of panic,

which builds society from that point of view.

But on the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should abandon everything,

and we should abandon as soon as the child is born and throw it out.

but we should build those misunderstandings

to the level that misunderstandings

becomes a source of understanding of some kind.

Well, it sounds like, in a way,

that the process that Buddha went through

was starting out as a prince

and someone who became disillusioned with,

we want to cast this in psychological terminology,

the desire structure of being a prince

or that kind of material existence,

he then rebounded or reacted to the other pole

of searching for some sort of meaning

in a kind of ascetic structure,

being for several years with the yogis.

And then that itself proved dissatisfactory,

and it seemed like what he then discovered

was that somehow the whole psychological pattern

of what was carrying him from one pole to the other

was really what was interesting to look at.

And the only way he could look at that

was by studying his own mind.

Well, obviously, you know, I mean, you can't call somebody a liar.

Unless there is something to prove that there is a truth exist.

You know, it's as simple as that.

The polarity is always there.

There is the materialism that's taking place in the domestic level of Buddha's kingdom, palace, his parents and everything.

And then he abandoned that and he latch onto something else,

which is still a path to Gloria, glorifying ego, something,

that he still went on.

But then when he realized the, what's the word, polarity,

that he should look closely,

he's doing is actually what he's actually doing it or not.

But then he began to realize he wasn't doing anything at all, but he was just purely playing

a game.

You know, pretend to be a saint, but actually that he find himself trapped up in a sainthood,

whatever.

That's the crux of the matter seemed to be.

I think one of the greatest developments that the Westerners,

Western world has discovered is the law of relativity.

And I would say as soon as the law of relativity

has given birth in this country or in the West world,

that it was Buddha mind is beginning to work.

And before that, people have never thought of comparing.

And people just presumed, you know,

like we presumed ego.

And you know, the question doesn't rise

that everything seemed to be okay,

but let's check the details.

You know, that's become the problematic question.

Do you have anything to say about that?

- Oh, I think that,

I wanted to ask you what one says to, what you say to someone who feels that the game or the series of games are what there is.

And that if one gives up the games or even the sequence of games, one is left with nothing which is worth surviving for.

Which is what?

Which is worth surviving for.

I see.

Well, I mean, that's precisely the point, you see.

We haven't explored another kind of life at all.

We thought this is there, this is it.

We haven't even stepped out of our front door.

So there is something else, there may be something else,

but let us experience it.

- Right.

- Intellectually

very difficult to prove,

because that we are inbuilt,

we are inbuilt all kinds of concepts and ideas,

the whole thing becomes very solid already, but there is another version of survival

other than trying to survive with the basic necessity of the ego.

I mean, that's, to my mind, that is enlightenment.

There's another version of survival without trying to survive.

I mean, that's the big question, actually. That is it.

And in some

way it seems not at all to be a theoretical question.

It seems that so long as we rest in

theory,

we rest in

a state of hopeless internal conflict and contradiction.

And as soon as we take a first step outside that particular circle of conflict and contradiction,

well, something happens or it doesn't, perhaps.

But it seems as if the step needs to be taken in some way.

Some exploration needs to take place if the issue is to be resolved.

each person.

But what is the motivation for taking this kind of a step?

We're having a panel discussion.

Well then I'll answer. Despair. Despair. That's the model

that Buddha demonstrates, despair of the finiteness of whatever structures he found himself in

over and over again. They weren't paying off.

But then how can you create a system which

goes beyond the very notion of systems? That seems to be the problem. The problem of ego

is that it

continues to be... You can't create it, but you can be it. You don't create it.

Right, but it also, because people seem to be somewhat imperfect, it may be that we for

sometime hold the carrot in front of ourselves. That may be necessary, particularly if we're aware

that the carrot doesn't quite exist.

That's the desire for enlightenment.

Yeah, the desire for

enlightenment, right, or for any one of a number of things connected with a mind. Yeah.

Well, the

desire for enlightenment itself seems to be somewhat a contradiction in terms, that the more

you desire enlightenment, the less you can be

enlightened, because you think there's something

to get. But you find that out in the course of pursuing the desire for enlightenment. Right,

It seems to be an imperfect world.

Well, it is an imperfect world in some ways,

and it seems that at times, actions are paradoxical.

You couldn't have it more perfect than that.

The thing

destroys itself.

I tried to remember

that.

The thing that destroys itself.

But the relativistic thing,

The way psychological theory is built is built out of the range of the person's experiences,

the theoretical psychologist's experiences,

in terms of getting deductive theories from which to deduce.

And until we put into, infuse into Western psychology,

people who are living by an alternative,

in an alternative domain, if you will,

or however we want to say,

a space which doesn't work from within ego structure.

There's no possibility that we can apply

that relativity to psychological theory

because we can't speculate about the possibility

of the Buddha mind, if you will, from outside of it

and have the theory worth a damn, as far as I can figure.

So it seems to me that many psychologists,

I mean, I feel part of a large group of psychologists

who are driven inside

because of the dissatisfaction with behaviorism,

because you can't study it as object.

Ultimately, you've got to be it.

And until you be it, you can feel that gap.

You just can't jump that relative system.

You can't jump out of your absolutistic prison, if you will.

In fact, I think that's the way you first got into Eastern religions,

as I remember the story you used to tell about being on the other side of the desk

where the student would come in and you were the therapist and he was the problem

and his game wasn't as successful and your game was more successful

and your whole role as psychologist seemed to be simply to tell him how to play the game better.

And then you began to think that there was maybe something about this game itself

that was to be questioned.

And so off you went.

Here we are.

Because then I had to hide my neurosis.

Now I

can just exhibit

them.

Well, I think we might discuss about the question of the notion of alternatives.

That might be an important point to discuss at this point.

should a person be trained, disciplined in a certain way that there is no alternatives left,

or should a person be inspired, there is lots of alternatives and you are free.

I think that is the cracks of the matter that psychology is the West or whatever you like to call it.

The alternative has a positive aspect and also has this negative aspect as well sometimes.

And which is largely the Western therapy work is based on is an alternative.

The therapy work is about as an alternative thing.

Better than something else.

and also various practice with spiritual discipline

that all the Muslim therapists would get into,

the discovery of a better world,

which in itself is a binding

factor.

It is good at the same time because it gives you a new insight,

but on the other hand, that will be misunderstandable.

There is that problem.

Anybody has anything to say about that?

Well, there are a couple of levels at which that...

First of all, the individual psychologist's fear of his own death

puts a boundary on the game anyway and starts to make a finiteness to the possibilities that they're willing to consider.

That's the first part of it.

then the kind of lack of humility that often exists in social science

makes one conclude that one already knows all the possibilities

or that one could know them intellectually.

It seems to me that a lot of the boundaries are put on by the intellect

without recognizing intuitive possibilities in the universe.

And the intellect feels very finite to me in terms of what its possible ability to conceive of, if you will.

That's your domain, not mine.

I couldn't agree more.

On the other hand, though, on the other hand, there is a certain, how to say it, legitimacy and integrity to that life which is a life of drama.

and gain, which makes it very difficult to step outside it even momentarily.

And that seems all right.

I mean, in some sense, it seems a mistake to attack that head-on in some way

because that attacking head-on seems only to intensify, in any case, the struggle.

As you know, if you talk with

therapists who

are very intellectual,

It's as if some softening of a situation has to take

place.

I don't think you do anything to anybody else anyway.

You don't attack me.

You just do it to yourself.

You do it, yeah.

Like undercutting your own structures,

your intellectual understanding of psychodynamics.

Excuse me.

I think there might be some problems with that.

that you are not helping somebody at all, anybody at all,

but you are trying to learn very, very much

by using somebody else's examples,

that there is a kind of very exclusive,

kind of confused arahat kind of problem that,

that you know you are,

like the example that Duncan was talking about

that you felt in the early days

that the students on the other side of the desk,

you were on this side,

and you found that was very ironically

strange.

But then you didn't

dealt with it, but you took off.

To fight another day, you will.

Yeah, well, I mean,

let

us discuss about that as well.

There is a problem of becoming too self-centered, you know, that…

Or too compassionate to proceed with a game which is perpetuating illusion.

Yeah, but then in the main time the other person is suspended, you know,

Until you did your research work, the other person is suspended and going through the same problem, maybe behind another desk.

Look, you go into a cave for a period of time, and yet you already knew about the need to alleviate suffering.

And you're not going to say you can't justify spending times in retreats in caves.

You were in the same predicament.

That's what I mean. That's what I mean.

Let us discuss

about that.

I think it's a very narrow concept to think that you relieve suffering by staying on the firing line all the time.

When I was in India and sitting in the temple, I used to think, well, maybe I'm copping out

because all these guys like Allen Ginsberg and all these boys are out fighting the fight, the good fight.

Here I am sitting in a temple.

You know, what am I doing?

Why aren't I out there in Chicago at the riots and so on?

And I began to think that the inner battle was really where the battle line was for all of us.

It wasn't necessarily out there sitting in the desk in the therapy office.

Do you mean that didn't cost a lot of lives?

Hmm?

Yeah.

Cost a lot of lives.

At least one, hopefully.

In the meantime, it would cost a lot

of lives, yes.

Sure, of course.

Rinpoche, what would your particular advice to Ram Dass have been?

What would your particular advice to Ram Dass have been?

You know, a minute ago you said that the reason for giving up this world and entering a world

which possibly beyond our imagination might not have anything worth living for in it is despair.

And I've heard you Rinpoche speak about reaching the depths of despair.

I have to become completely hopeless, which is even beyond despair.

But it seems that what you're talking about is the question of how one generates that kind of despair

that makes one willing to step out of ego into a world in which, I mean, no one wants to die.

Everyone's afraid of that. It must be a tremendous impetus that propels us out of a world where,

albeit we're suffering, but at least it's familiar and it has its petty pleasures and

not so petty pleasures, rather intense ecstasies and so forth. So, you know, how does one go about

generating that kind of impetus to make a person want to or able to step out of the world of ego.

Well, we haven't come to the conclusion yet at this point, actually, that should we examine that

possibility or should we just try to develop and grow our ego, materialistically or spiritually?

We haven't discussed the first point, so the second point seems to be obsolete in some sense.

That's what I'm trying to get at, is that there are a lot of people listening to us here,

as well as there will be viewers in the rest of the country, and people are concerned about that.

I

think we should make very clear to them that maybe...

That

you don't walk away from your desk.

Is

that what you're

saying, that you don't walk away from your desk?

Well, whatever.

That wasn't a particular thing.

I don't think it would be bad if a lot of

therapists walked away from their desks.

I mean, statistically, the recidivism rate is just about the same whether people go to therapists or not.

So, Western therapy isn't really doing that well.

Yeah, but the issue seems to be a more general one of walking out of one life into another.

Walking out of one life which one has behind the desk immediately into another which one has

has when one leaves the desk, which I'm sure wasn't to a sense. And it doesn't seem to

be that way.

There's no real dropout.

There's no real dropout.

It seems that that's one of the meanings of a path, that really

when one leaves the desk one is in the same place.

In

some sense that we have a microphone, which is another form of a desk.

Absolutely, the game doesn't change. You can't get out of it no

matter how hard

you try.

It's just the illusion of change that just...

So, is there any point at all?

Not at that level.

It's just spinning wheels

at that level, those

dances.

What level are we talking about?

Oh, no.

Other than that level.

In the process of changing from the desk to the microphone, to the pen, to whatever the same vehicle is over and over again,

the motivations, this is the same thing about working within desire structures, desire hierarchies.

there is a process going on through that whole thing

that is working on you in quite a different way

than is represented by the phenotypic behavior.

By whether, I mean, you can stand in front,

you are in front of a microphone

at a very different motivational level

than I am in front of this microphone.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

We're sitting on the same room.

I know.

It looks the same, doesn't it?

The microphones look the same.

Sounds come out.

But I suspect it's different. I don't

know.

How am I going to get in there and find out?

Well, your microphone is different than me.

Yes, my friend.

I noticed that.

It's different than everybody's here.

Well...

Mega square one.

You didn't answer Jim's question.

Jim asked you, what would you have done sitting behind that desk?

Well, not quite. I asked what

advice he would give.

Excuse me for putting him up.

Yeah,

well, I do that every day.

I have a desk and

telephone and

a couch.

Yeah.

The meaning of them all changed.

Yeah.

You arrived at that from a different space.

I came to England by boat.

Right.

What the other person meets in the office with you, in the office,

is perhaps a different space

than what they met with me

12 years ago.

I do feel sometimes my desk shrinks and

when we have a

conversation taking place,

if not an optical illusion, which I think it is, but still, desk does shrink.

and it becomes just a very thin little desk,

but still telephone rings,

and other things

happens anyway.

So I wonder.

- They all seem, the desk and the telephone

and the microphone all seem much less intrusive

than they did within that other space.

system that I was working in.

That's possible, I think, yeah. And

in fact my own identity as a therapist or whatever seems less intrusive.

And the idea

that the person is a patient seems less intrusive. Or the idea there's anything to do seems less intrusive.

Right, it isn't really clear what the particular problem is actually.

There's a time

gap.

There is a time gap, perhaps, but perhaps not after

all.

We need to go up as young therapist up to old therapist.

It's good if that happens in times.

It's timely.

Otherwise you die sooner.

Yeah.

Things should be seasonable, but it doesn't seem so urgent either, perhaps.

That's a philosophical remark.

Yes.

Well, maybe what we're talking about on a very simple level

is that when you've got the psychiatrist behind the desk

and you're on the other side of the desk

and you're the one that's neurotic

and he's the one that's sane,

that already provides a certain polarity

which is very difficult to get beyond.

If you're the one that's neurotic,

if you can't talk on an eye-level, friendly, communicative level with a therapist,

it's only going to further reinforce your own feeling of being

you're the one that's screwed up and you're the one that's neurotic.

And that's what we're really talking about

is how can we create a space or a model which allows that kind of communication back and forth to take place?

But I think that this

conversation

is precisely

the question of model.

I mean, when a psychiatrist sits behind his desk, he's got a particular model.

And if you talk about enlightenment or being a guru, that likewise is a particular model.

And the question is, do you reject one model in favor of a better one?

That's still horizontal.

It's still horizontal.

Now, I think

that's

what's being discussed here.

The question of, is a spiritual model necessarily better than a secular one?

That of a guru better than the psychiatrist?

And it seems like it's

a tricky point.

I don't think the word is spiritual

and

secular.

It just seems to me that the training I received as a Western psychologist

left me in a position where I was not open as a student, really,

to keep doing the work on myself.

It got me, I mean, there was a whole idea.

Once I had been given the PhD and had the credentials,

I knew something, and I was a knowledgeable person

who then should function a certain way.

And there was a certain fixity about the whole structure.

and breaking out of that back into the student role of surrendering that,

that's what seems to me the healthy quality of the growth of psychology in the West at this moment.

So what you just said then is you think that the student role is better than that of the teacher?

I think the student role is better than that of the teacher, yeah.

But then you have a kind of...

The issue came up the other day as well, the same thing,

is that should you have a constant cultural revolution

of some kind or rather that when you become

an advanced, knowledgeable student and you know, push back,

and how far you can do that.

It seems in the past, in quality of tradition,

that a lot of the great teachers didn't have to go through

self-criticism having become great teachers.

They stayed where they are.

And somehow there is some gap in logic,

and we have to solve that problem.

Did you say they didn't have to or they didn't have to?

They didn't.

When they

become guru

and when there was inheritance

of spiritual

initiation,

Abhishekha,

and they stood.

And their grandfathers honored that as well,

or great-great-grandfathers as well.

And did that maintain the living spirit of the constitution?

Something is living

rather than revolutionary

or democracy of some kind.

There's

a problem with that.

Maybe it's cultural, but the tradition,

all traditions came from theocracy of some kind.

And our new tradition is democracy.

Yeah.

I don't know.

There is a gap

there.

We should

look into that.

That you can't constantly recommend people to be a student constantly.

Well, it doesn't...

It's the ability to be, in a way, in both roles simultaneously,

in the sense of staying...

You once said to me, it's okay.

I said to you, is it all right to keep going out and lecturing

when I know how much uncooked, you know,

with my model about who I thought I wasn't?

And you said, as long as you remain a student.

Yeah.

But I am in the role of a teacher,

but it's very much the role of a student.

And to me, these come together very beautifully.

I don't find that as a contradiction that much.

Well, um...

Something was slippery there.

Slippery?

You wanted to protect tradition and lineage and I just...

You just did say though,

you know, that the student role was better than the teacher role

and there was something strange about that because it would seem that

the obvious statement would be that the student role and the teacher role are somehow the same.

And I really wonder what you meant by that

when you said the student role is better than the teacher role.

You may end up being a teacher, but I think when you think you are a teacher, you aren't.

I mean, that's what it really... I'm trying at a lower level... I can't use the word 'level'

anymore.

I suppose... I suppose the problem that comes up is,

when you become a guru who is also a student,

and working with the people as a student,

And then, where does it go?

What happened to the hierarchy?

Should the guru be also made into a student?

You could teach him or her that lesson.

So you see there's

a hierarchical

problem.

The hierarchical problem only exists in the early stages of the process.

After a while, the guru is everywhere.

It's all the teaching.

and the guru is giving you the teaching wherever you look.

Well, who is the spokesman for that?

Your heart.

Which is one person's heart or...?

Each person's heart.

Well, so then everybody...

We have no right to be here.

That's true.

That's equally true.

Sure.

So how we could hold the foot?

What happens in the lineage?

Well, I think we do this till everybody realizes this.

I mean, the game isn't to end up having everybody need somebody out there.

Or on or out there or then. You...

It's a self-destruct system, really.

Mr. Moderator, I think you have to intervene.

Well, I

think we ought to get down to brass tacks then as to

what kind of system would, in fact, do just what you're saying.

You know, what kind of system is the best design to kind of short-circuit that process

while honoring all of the, you know, neurotic elements in all of us.

How do you create a series of practices, for instance, meditation practices or mantra practices

or devotional practices of any kind that free a person to get beyond, you know,

like his own trip about substituting one system for another?

Maybe we ought to talk about it in those terms, you know, like just in terms of a system.

What kind of practices seems to be the most conducive to that?

Well, you have a problem there, if I may begin.

Is that introducing a technique or particular practice,

it's not group effort.

According to the spiritual hierarchy that we know of all the traditions,

great traditions and religions, Hindus and Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism,

and things be handed down.

There's an immediate problem.

That a student might say that

what right you have to give us this thing

that we have to sit on the ass for 10 hours.

What kind of authorities?

Who gave you that authority?

The student gives you that authority.

The student

gives you that authority

No, but when students

begin to revolt and begin to ask you a question,

then

he takes away

the authority.

So you can't wave the Koran or the Bible and this is my authority.

There is a very awkward moment there.

There's a what?

An awkward moment.

An awkward moment, hopefully, yes.

Well, why hopefully?

That's

the spark you talk about. That's the spark because it's your being that is the teacher.

I mean, in the ultimate analysis, to you, your lineage is important.

To me, the part of the teaching is the spark or is the process of the being or the connection to the being.

Do you have anything to say about that?

Nothing.

Just like the other day we talked about eclecticism versus a single tradition.

And I think we dealt with the issue of stages of sadhana or stages of development.

and that there were stages when a person had enough Gyaan or enough Vidya,

enough that kind of knowledge,

to be able to honor a tradition as a functional entity

to take you from here to here or here to there or whatever,

however you want to say it.

But the problem seems to be that the spokesman's role,

that if there is a sacred and very sane and very solid message comes down,

why do you have to play the role of a student teacher flipping back and forth?

You don't have to play any role.

Well, at the point where there is no role that you're particularly connected with,

the whole issue is irrelevant at that point. Then you merely are the lineage.

You are the statement

of it, the living statement of it.

Until then,

the optimum

strategy is that of a student.

I think there's a big gap somewhere. There's a gap somewhere.

Well, it sounds to me like what you're saying is that, you know, if

you're in

a certain role,

like if you're behind the desk as the therapist,

or if you're up in front of the microphone as the teacher,

that there's something about that that you have to take responsibility for.

You have to actually do that with a certain kind of confidence

without providing that little escape hatch of,

well, I'm just as neurotic as you are,

and somehow that weakens the whole situation.

Does it?

It feels that way to me, and I throw that out.

Do you have anything to say, John?

Well, it's like, Rinpoche, you were talking, well, I shouldn't refer back.

Let's see, try a sort of a pat statement.

If you take it as it's done in the Buddhist tradition,

that sort of the definition of ego is that it constantly wants to secure itself,

then a spiritual path becomes somewhat tricky, a process.

Because we're talking about motivation.

And motivation, in this sense, could be the tool of ego.

I want to get enlightened. I want to stop suffering.

I want to be wise.

Then the problem comes that if the teachings, the essence of the teachings,

are in fact the spark that cuts through ego, that steps out of ego's manipulation,

that goes beyond the students or the practitioners' desire to see something,

to experience something, to get someplace.

That that spark has to be completely spontaneous.

If you then co-opt it into the teaching and say,

well, we're looking for this spark and we're going to try and create it,

then you've put it into ego's employ.

once again

and I think it's something of the same situation

with

the role you take

in other words, sure

where

the final position

may be that

I'm neither a teacher nor a student

but if you don't commit yourself

to one stance or another

until before you've reached that point

then you're trying to kind of

you keep trying to co-opt

you see, you're trying to be the goal

before you get to it

and you can't have that spontaneity because you keep co-opting it into you.

Yes, it's as if there's an apparent progression.

You start off as the therapist expert with a client,

and then you realize you're neurotic too.

So you remain the therapist, but you acknowledge that you're neurotic.

Nevertheless, you remain in the role.

And you may even seek as a student some solution.

Recognize that you're neurotic and find someone who will cure you.

Nevertheless, you go on functioning as a therapist,

who, however, is decent because he/I acknowledge that I'm neurotic.

And that seems to be somehow an unsatisfactory situation,

although it can go on for a very long time.

At some point, probably, one has to see that the play of neuroses,

which constitutes a therapeutic situation, is unsound in itself.

And it may be a therapeutic situation or any sort of teaching situation.

And at that point, one might see the possibility

that the teaching situation is not a situation.

situation. That is, there's no particular situation one needs or institution or role in order for

teaching or learning to take place and even that there isn't a difference between teaching and

learning. It seems that that one can imagine that sort of progression taking place now.

I mean it always seems, you know, there's this statement by Shanti Raksha, where he says

something about the spark of wisdom strikes like lightning and illumines the world. And

I think what he's talking about is the complete, you know, spontaneity with which that has

to strike, that it can't be something that we create by trying to be enlightened. I mean,

it's that constant, you know, like the story of Naropa that we put in the front of the catalog.

Yeah, well, in that case, you can be the lineage, but you can't think you are teaching a

because that stifles the spark.

Well, I think you as long as you think that you

are you've got to. I mean you've got to play the game according to the rules that

you've got because you can't keep trying to change the rules to make them

according to what the books say they're supposed to be. In other words it's like

accepting where you are at whatever level that's the place you got to accept and

start with when you say. I mean I'm sure you would.

Yeah that part I would say the first part.

I didn't accept the whole statement.

That's sneaky.

It's like it's the lineage that Doug's here.

He's

very shifty.

I agree. Mother

and the flag and apple pie are goodness.

I think there's a...

It was interesting that when I first went to the convocation exercises of the new Naropa Institute

and listened to you gentlemen talking about lineage and tradition,

I was somewhat taken aback because to me, I guess as a Westerner,

lineage and tradition has always been connected with deadness and the lack of spark, really.

Now, to me, it is only conceivable that a lineage or a tradition can be transmitted through a living entity who is the spark itself.

In other words, I think that Naropa requires Trungpa Rinpoche.

I don't think it would spark without that.

It's like, well, you need the flint to get the game going.

And the flint is not that he thinks he is a teacher.

I'm not describing it, but that he is a teacher.

that he is the lineage, not that he thinks he's the lineage.

And until one is that thing,

it is most functional, it seems to me,

to remain wide open all the time to all possibility,

which to me is what I've called a student role,

even though I have to get up and teach every day.

But you've got to take a chance.

I mean, being wide open can't mean sort of taking the safest position,

like I'm a nobody.

It's as long as you think you're somebody,

you've got to try and be somebody

and see what that brings

that's the really gutsy

courageous thing to do

it's sticking your neck out

and then you can get it chopped off

which would be

we are certainly doing that now

here it comes

speaking of that

I think this is an ideal time for a break

I think so yes

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