The Precious Words of My Teacher
Friday, August 24th, 2007Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in his book, Dharma Art,
I had some experience of this as a child. On certain days the colors, textures, sounds, and movements of the world seemed so intense, I felt like hiding.
As people practice, relaxing and opening to more of Reality, colors become more luminous, and all of the senses begin to sharpen. This can be disturbing if you are used to living in a fog. Far from withdrawing from the world by entering benumbed states, Tantra leads to increased aliveness of all of the senses and alertness to the precise communications of the world.
Accomplished teachers are precise in their words and actions. Students will often say about a teacher that the right teaching comes at the right time. It seems very mysterious, but it is just the student noticing the precision of the world. This is how Guru teaches us about Reality.
Many of my teachers have been exceptionally precise with words. But students generally do not have the capacity to be precise listeners.
Here’s an analogy that describes this common situation. Have you ever noticed the incredible range of art that people enjoy? One person might really enjoy a painting of a little puppy playing with a ball. To another person, this same painting is crude and of little interest. When a person who enjoys puppy paintings encounters a painting of greater complexity, their first impulse might be to look for something familiar in that unfamiliar canvas. Maybe this person will even manage to find a puppy among the brush strokes. Now there is something to grab onto and rescue oneself from the feeling of being set adrift!
When we are relatively ignorant, i.e., stuck in duality, we tend to paint the world with the broad strokes of our concepts and fears. We want a manageable world, a familiar world that we can grasp as easily as possible. We grasp at the world instead of letting it communicate to us.
We cannot yet tolerate the world’s precision, its infinite complexity. We also don’t as of yet have access to the plane of equality. So we are stuck, fending off both diversity and the one taste of all existence. We are overwhelmed by complexity and nondual experience alike.
In this situation, listening to the precise words of the teacher, we have a tendency to turn those words into a puppy painting, something familiar.
We may feel happy, thinking we hear the teacher affirming our pet fixations. Or we may become upset, believing that the teacher has made some terrible mistake, or has attacked us. In many cases, our fears and insecurities have caused us to imprecisely listen to the teacher’s words.
We miss many of the nuances, and we very often miss the key transmissions that undermine our self-concept. At the same time, because we have agreed to be in a teaching situation, we slowly begin to experience more of the picture. After hearing the same thing repeatedly, the real import of the words begins to sink in. Other times, of course, words are heard immediately, and the opening is immediate also.
Really hearing Reality is relaxing. Holding onto our fixations and ideas about the world is a lot of work. When we let our ideas and fixations go, it is as if a heavy knapsack has dropped from our shoulders.
Another analogy is that of listening to a conversation in a foreign language. Listening only to familiar words, we can make up an entire story about the conversation based on those few words we understand. We could assume that people are talking about what to have for breakfast when they are actually talking about politicians who get large sums of money for pet projects in their home states (pork barrel projects).
But if we stop trying so hard to figure things out and find familiar meanings, if we just relax, we can be more open the totality of a communicative situation. We can notice and absorb more.
This is how we begin to receive the transmission of the precise words of a teacher. We relax and open all of our senses. We don’t just use our legal mind, or our emotional drama mind. We let go and relax. Emotions and thoughts are free to play, but we don’t grab onto them. We just relax and notice our condition if disturbances arise.
Arguing with the teacher is, of course, the path that some people take, especially in the West. And arguing is sometimes, but not always, an aspect of listening closely. Any path is ok, as long as there is also a conscious kernel of willingness to let go and surrender to one’s desire for realization. In order to realize the fruits of a student-teacher situation and receive the teacher’s precious, precise words, any fixation has to be tempered by a certain level of aware responsiveness to this simple, heartfelt desire.
In Matriseva,
Shambhavi
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