On becoming transparent

Q The hell I often visit is anxiety – what actually is that Rinpoche?

R It is what keeps you safe. It is a bargain. If you are anxious, you will be alright – you will not be a risk. Not being anxious means putting yourself at risk, so one needs to hold onto anxiety in order to feel safe. Anxiety does not make you feel safe, but it makes you feel safer than not being anxious. It’s circular.

Q2 And breaking the circle is allowing the space for the opposite to actually be acceptable?

R Yes.

Q2 I can remember being terrified the first time I got really angry at my family. They wanted me to do something, and I said no. I thought the roof was going to fall in. It took me forty-five minutes of sitting, waiting, and nothing happened. Then I realised, ‘You know, it’s alright.’ I had to be willing to let that space be there, and not run from it, before I could say, ‘This is a possibility. I can do this and make this choice from which I’ve always turned away.’

R Yes.

Q It seems like the intensity of the habit is amazing.

R You have to make friends with the habit.

Q That’s what I’ve discovered. That’s the only way; because otherwise you’re in endless struggle. So it’s learning to... It’s like yes, this is what you do; but maybe there’s some other way to relate.

R That is why you cannot attack it. You cannot attack yourself. It is quite interesting, the number of people who talk about ‘destroying their egos’. If ‘I’ destroy ‘my ego’; then I just gain an even bigger ‘ego’ – the ‘ego that is the destroyer of ego’. Who then destroys that ‘ego’? We cannot win that way at all.

Q3 How does that relate to karma, because we know karma relates to patterning? So how does one break . . .

R By observing. That pattern has to become transparent. I enact the pattern, in the knowledge that I am enacting the pattern.

Q3 That’s what you mean by making friends with the pattern?

R Yes.

Q So, I repeat the pattern?

R That is almost inevitable.

Q But there is part of me that does not want to do that again; but I will do that. And then: ‘Oh, oh. There it goes. I thought it would do that. It did that last time, too.’ I guess one day it will occur to me that this is not going to work. Yet there is still a trace of the idea that, ‘Yes, let’s try one last time; I might get away with it’. And then it goes that way again.

R Quite. As long as there is that trace, you have to be relaxed enough to give it another try.

Q Is that the only way we actually learn that this really always happens. If I have to try to give up the desire to do it, then that is false; because the desire to do it is based on something real – an idea that something is going to come out of it.

R Yes For example, it is not hard for me to resist hitting my head savagely against the wall. It requires no discipline at all. There is nothing to give up. But if I feel that I would like to hit my head savagely against the wall, then the conventional approach is that I either have to do it – or I have to resist it. Then I have to say, ‘This is a bad thing; it is bad to do that. I don’t want to be a bad person; I want to be a good person.’ I have to deny the badness. I have to cut that off. Then I never acknowledge the payoff. There is no way out that way. One has to discover the nature of the payoff. One can only discover that by acting out the desire – but acting it out with sufficient space to see the mechanism of the habitually patterning. When I realise ‘Oh, this is what I get out of it.’ It is usually a horrible surprise, because what I get out of it is so miserable so utterly puerile. But the only way I can keep doing it is by telling myself that I get nothing out of it – by hiding from the payoff. Once I open up to the nature of the payoff, I see that it is too ridiculous to take seriously. A schlimazel would be ashamed to take such a payoff.

Q3 I had always thought that if I looked at what I got out of it, it would be a positive thing. I worked so hard to try to see the positive. I’ve had this on-going experience; and I realised that what I got out of it was a sense of ‘victim’...

R Yes. As I said, a schlimazel would be ashamed to take such a payoff.

Q3 Right! And something kind of evaporated. When I was going through this I’d thought there must be really something wonderful that I get out of this; and it’s not. It’s a stupid thing . . .

R But a stupid thing is a wonderful thing, if it seen in a spatial context in which it evaporates as a habit...

Q3 Yes – this victimisation I was feeling was kind of lousy, and not really a very accurate picture.

Q4 But there is something you get out of that too.

R Yes – so it would appear.

Q3 Yes, and there was this insight: Wow. This victimisation has really been alright for a long time (laughter).

R Yes – and what maintains the pattern is that we avoid seeing the payoff.

Q So victimisation is an identification. ‘I am a victim. I know that now.’ That is security.

R Yes, certainly – and it feeds into all its connective areas.

Q Like, I’m down-trodden – negative self-esteem – no-one understands me, no-one wants to know me.

R Yes. I can revel in grovelling misery. Teenagers tend to be prone to this. Encountering what appears to be ‘deep misery’ for the first time. My girlfriend or boyfriend has left me; so there I am, looking in the mirror and crying. People have told me this – how they have caught themselves enjoying how their tearfulness disfigured their faces. The eyes being bloodshot and puffy; and they recognised their enjoyment of the grossness of the situation. That of course was the opening to transparence.

Q So you realise ‘There’s something weird about this’. You start getting suspicious of what you are doing: ‘I’m revelling in this; there’s something I’m enjoying. This is feeding me in some way.’

R Quite so.

Q As soon as I get this idea – when I am looking in the mirror, crying and enjoying ‘What a pitiful spectacle I am’ – if I get suspicious of that I can no longer really indulge it as wholeheartedly. I think, ‘just wait a moment – this is not quite real, is it? I don’t actually have to be doing this.’

R And that is a disappointment; because I was enjoying it, and now I cannot enjoy it quite as fully because I know I am fabricating it. It is not a real state; therefore it does not identify me totally. Therefore I am actually insecure again – and have to find security some other way. We are always hunting for security wherever we imagine it can be found – and it continually dissolves.

Q You use the energy to sort of fan it; you see how you like to fan whatever it is – grief, anger . . .

R Because that grief is an identification, I have to make it as substantial as I can. Then—of course—I cannot help but over inflate it, and then suspicion can arise – because I catch a glimpse of that fact that I am controlling it. If I am controlling it however, there is a problem. If it is really my identity, how can I both be in control of it and have it function as a solid identity?

Q Yes, I see – so, that is very much like something which occurs in parent-child relationship – where a child wants to get its own way, because that is fun. The child wants to dominate the parent in a sense. But if the child succeeds, then the child becomes very insecure.

R Yes. The parent is supposed to defend and nurture the child – but if a child can dominate its parents, if a child experiences itself as being more powerful than its parents – the child will not feel safe. The child will then behave in an increasingly appalling manner in order to be controlled again by its parents.

Q So I get what I want; then I lose something important.

R Yes. There is this kind of push-and-pull all the time. It manifests with our own relationship with what ‘we’ take to be ‘ourselves’. What I want to get I also do not want to get – because if I get it, it means something unpleasant.

Q So in Vajrayana terms, if I think I can manipulate the Lama in order to be safe from change – I will not be able to trust the guidance of the Lama.

R And that gives no sense of safety either. Fundamentally, safety is an illusion. It does not exist. It never has existed. The only safety is complete vulnerability.