5 – Crazy Wisdom Movie: Doing Nothing, Going Nowhere

The documentary movie "Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche", by Johanna Demetrakas, distributed by Kino Lorber.

This movie is streaming free on-line at this url: (4634) Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche | Full Documentary Movie - YouTube

Blog 5: Hopelessness: Doing nothing, going nowhere --
Sitting and waiting for long periods of time, apparently for no reason whatsoever

Hours late for talks, without explanation or apology, apparently without regard for our busy lives or our babysitters, paid by the hour -- playing awareness games, arts games, having conversation or nonconversation into the wee hours of the morning – taking three hours just to set the dinner table -- organizing and encouraging days and weeks of meditation practice, simply resting and being, precisely mindful, but without goal or even calling it “concentration” –

Nothing was more pervasive in Chögyam Trungpa’s Boulder and other Buddhist communities of the 1980s (and before) than students and nonstudents attempting to come to terms, publicly and privately, with this perpetual lateness, waiting, and lack of confirmation that our time mattered. There was all that meditation, all that waiting for talks that started hours after the scheduled time, all that reference-point-less activity. It was discipline and meditation without goal, without hope, without credential. It was practice without separation from life, that was not a rehearsal, and with no breaks. Even passionate, intimate relationship could be infused with open, quiet, wakeful, loneliness:

1:10:19 Valerie Lorig: “Sexual activity, what there was, it was about liberating sexual desire…”

TITLE CARD: Valerie Lorig/Psychologist

“…rather than creating more desire and so you take that place of desire where it’s the most which is in the sexual activity and you apply some kind of wakefulness, some kind of where you actually are present all the way through, so it’s very potent place to work from. You know, sometimes I would sit with him for hours, two, three, four hours in almost total silence. So sometimes it was really lonely.” [end 1:11:08]

As Valerie Lorig said in the film excerpt above, it was all about liberating desire, rather than creating more desire. In this context, desire – often referred to as the origin of suffering, the second noble truth of the Buddha – includes clinging to pleasurable and painful states of mind and body, clinging to ideologies and spiritual trips, clinging to the importance of oneself as a spiritual seeker or, for that matter, consort of the teacher, all categories and sub-categories of spiritual materialism when mixed with ego-clinging. It would seem that Chögyam Trungpa facilitated the creation of situations, in both his public and personal lives, which undermined any belief in the hypocrisy of conventional desire or naïve hope.

It is true, as the film demonstrates, that thousands of students were practicing and studying, making art, lots of arts, theatre, doing business, studying psychology, and meditation centers were popping up like weeds. However, this intense activity unfolded in an atmosphere of boredom, cool or hot, irritating or soothing (your choice!), appreciation or resentment (your choice!), nothing happening, and hours of sitting practice. That’s what students wrestled with the most. This was more of a puzzle, even, than Chögyam Trungpa’s consumption of alcohol and other unconventional behavior. Even if one avoided doing too much sitting practice -- still, showing up for a talk, there was this hopeless, vibrant space that seemed to show no respect for our appointment books.

In the following talk excerpt, Chögyam Trungpa guides students in a mirror visualization of their own humorless and hopeful earnestness on the occasion of a late-starting talk (The Lion’s Roar, Shambhala publications, pp. 19-20, in “Three Yanas Seminar,” Boulder, Colorado, December, 1973, Chapter 2, “Hopelessness”):

CTR: "Ladies and gentlemen, you are so faithful and so honest and so straight-faced. I appreciate your seriousness and your long faces, listening to me. That’s beautiful – in a way. On the other hand, it’s rather grotesque seeing you with your long faces trying to find out about enlightenment.

From this chair, I see lots of faces without bodies, serious faces. Some are wearing glasses, some are not wearing glasses. Some have long hair, some have short hair. These faces – if I had a big mirror behind me, you could see yourselves – are so honest, earnest. Every one of you is a true believer. Every bit of even the glasses you are wearing is a true believer. It is very cute and nice and lovable. It’s beautiful – I’m not mocking you at all.

I appreciate your patience. You had to wait for a long time and it’s late, and now there are all kinds of other things. You’re hungry. Probably you had planned to eat after the talk. Probably you are not used to sitting on the floor and would like a nice comfortable chair. All kinds of things go into making up that earnestness. But there is one thing that we haven’t touched upon yet, which is that the whole thing is completely hopeless."

From the point of view of the Buddhist teachings, such hope – or desire, clinging, grasping, materialism, whatever one names it – is just part of a vicious cycle of suffering that feeds itself. It is why Buddhists study the five skandhas and the 12 nidanas – to see that cycle of suffering and the hopelessness of action based on such hope – and that it would be good to interrupt that vicious circle:

We have been conned by all kinds of trips, all kinds of spiritual suggestions. We have been conned by our own ignorance. We have been conned by the existence of our own egos. But nothing that has been promised is actually happening. The only thing that is going on is karmic volitional action, which perpetuates our desires and our confusion.... Once we realize that there’s no way of getting out of this misery, we begin to make a relationship with something.

.... Once we realize that we are trapped in our twelve nidanas, imprisoned, we begin to relate much more. We give birth to compassion in our prison cells. And our existence begins to make much more sense based on what we actually are.... You care about your environment, which is necessary, important, very basic, and also tremendously fun." (Lion’s Roar, “Hopelessness”, p. 23)

So much for the future being "open". Yeah, that's true, but that statement can be quite misleading.

The realization of imprisonment, based on giving in to hopelessness, gives birth to compassion and an appreciative environmental awareness that is not based on self-interest, self-confirmation. Relating to such hopelessness, therefore, is characterized by Chögyam Trungpa as a point where the student’s path begins to truly kick into gear, the “path of unification.” At that point, the dharma becomes real, not separate from one’s life. One is liberated from the peanut gallery of hope and is free to gain further appreciation of one’s actual life and world as an aware participant. The dharma is no longer just words, but part of a passionate relationship to reality that is not based on grasping or manipulation.

In the on-the-cushion mindfulness teachings, which will be addressed in the next blog, Chögyam Trungpa spoke of the experience of boredom, “cool boredom,” as a gateway experience to beginning to overcome the pretense of egotism. Off the cushion, as shown in this clip from the film featuring Carolyn Gimian and the famous / infamous “elocution exercises”, he was willing to train students in awareness practices, without embarrassment, in many challenging, inspiring, and hopelessly boring ways, sometimes for hours after long dharma talks:

start at 59:40, (Carolyn Gimian) “He really found the way Americans spoke English to be sloppy and he thought it reflected that if you didn’t work with how you spoke there was a way in which body and mind were not joined. So speech is the thing, one of the things, that can really join those, so that you have everything sort of line up. You have synchronized your body, speech, and mind. So, he took that to the next level, and he started out teaching people not only how to speak the English language, but he decided to teach them the Queen’s English."

Chogyam Trungpa: (continues 1:00:10) reading

“How to speak the English language and how not to speak Americanism.”

Back to Carolyn Gimian’s interview. Carolyn Gimian: "For a Tibetan to teach Americans how to speak the English language, how more outrageous could you get than that? Alright, I’ll give you an example of an elocution exercise. [Carolyn continues:]

"Spider is black, sky is blue,
How tantalizing this world.
Kathy’s hair is black,
Her complexion is white,
Her attention is like a bowstring
More than monumental,
More than tattered,
More than dying,
The liberty bell is more than antique."

Ultimately, he was trying to demonstrate how sound had a sacred element, so in spite of the appearance of torturing people, by making them repeat these words over and over again, I think it was much more about appreciation.” [end 1:01:27]

Link to blog 6: 6 - Crazy Wisdom Movie: Meditation, Boredom, Cutting Hypocrisy - Dharma Study Group Kazoo (dsgroupkazoo.com)