Excerpt from The Collected Works of Chogyam
Trungpa
Chapter 12: Discovering
Magic
Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully.
What we see doesn’t have to be pretty, particularly; we can
appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic
in everything, some living quality. Something living, something
real, is taking place in everything.
In twentieth-century society, the appreciation of simplicity has
almost been lost. From London to Tokyo, there are problems with
trying to create pleasure and comfort out of speed. The world is
mechanized to such an extent that you don’t even have to think. You
just push a button and a computer gives you the answer. You don’t
have to learn to count. You press a button, and a machine counts
for you. Casualness has become increasingly popular, because people
think in terms of efficiency rather than appreciation. Why bother
to wear a tie, if the purpose of wearing clothes is just to cover
your body? If the reason for eating food is only to fill your
stomach and provide nutrition, why bother to look for the best
meat, the best butter, the best vegetables?
But the reality of the world is something more than the
lifestyle that the twentieth-century world has embraced. Pleasure
has been cheapened, joy has been reduced, happiness has been
computerized. The goal of warriorship is to reconnect to the
nowness of reality, so that you can go forward without destroying
simplicity, without destroying your connection to this earth. In
the last chapter, we discussed the importance of nowness as a way
of joining together the wisdom of the past with the challenge of
the present. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how to
discover the ground of nowness. In order to rediscover nowness, you
have to look back, back to where you came from, back to the
original state. In this case, looking back is not looking back in
time, going back several thousand years. It is looking back into
your own mind, to before history began, before thinking began,
before thought ever occurred. When you are in contact with this
original ground, then you are never confused by the illusions of
past and future. You are able to rest continuously in nowness.
This original state of being can be likened to a primordial, or
cosmic, mirror. By primordial we mean
unconditioned, not caused by any circumstances. Something
primordial is not a reaction for or against any situation. All
conditionality comes from unconditionality. Anything that is made
has to come from what was unmade, to begin with. If something is
conditioned, it has been created or formed. In the English
language, we speak of formulating ideas or plans, or we may say,
“How should we formour organization?” or we may talk
about the formation of a cloud.
In contrast to that, the unconditioned is free from being
formed, free from creation. This unconditioned state is likened to
a primordial mirrorbecause, like a mirror, it is
willing to reflect anything, from the gross level up to the refined
level, and it still remains as it is. The basic frame of reference
of the cosmic mirror is quite vast, and it is free from any bias:
kill or cure, hope or fear.
The way to look back and experience the state of being of the
cosmic mirror is simply to relax. In this case relaxation is quite
different from the setting-sun idea of flopping or taking time off,
entertaining yourself with a good vacation. Relaxation here refers
to relaxing the mind, letting go of the anxiety and concepts and
depression that normally bind you. The way to relax, or rest the
mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In Part
One, we discussed how the practice of meditation is connected to
renouncing small-mindedness and personal territory. In meditation
you are neither “for” nor “against” your experience. That is, you
don’t praise some thoughts and condemn others, but you take an
unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgment,
and in that way you yourself learn to be, to express your existence
directly, nonconceptually. That is the ideal state of relaxation,
which allows you to experience the nowness of the cosmic mirror. In
fact, it is already the experience of the cosmic
mirror.
If you are able to relax—relax to a cloud by looking at it,
relax to a drop of rain and experience its genuineness—you can see
the unconditionality of reality, which remains very simply in
things as they are, very simply. When you are able to look at
things without saying, “This is for me or against me,” “I can go
along with this,” or “I cannot go along with this,” then you are
experiencing the state of being of the cosmic mirror, the wisdom of
the cosmic mirror. You may see a fly buzzing; you may see a
snowflake; you may see ripples of waters; you may see a black widow
spider. You may see anything, but you can actually look at all of
those things with simple and ordinary, but appreciative,
perception.
You experience a vast realm of perceptions unfolding. There is
unlimited sound, unlimited sight, unlimited taste, unlimited
feeling and so on. The realm of perception is limitless, so
limitless that perception itself is primordial, unthinkable, beyond
thought. There are so many perceptions that they are beyond
imagination. There are a vast number of sounds. There are sounds
that you have never heard. There are sights and colors that you
have never seen. There are feelings that you have never experienced
before. There are endless fields of perception.
Perception here is not just what you perceive but the whole act
of perceiving—the interaction between consciousness, the sense
organs, and the sense fields, or the objects of perception. In some
religious traditions, sense perceptions are regarded as
problematic, because they arouse worldly desires. However, in the
Shambhala tradition, which is a secular tradition rather than a
religious one, sense perceptions are regarded as sacred. They are
regarded as basically good. They are a natural gift, a natural
ability that human beings have. They are a source of wisdom. If you
don’t see sights, if you don’t hear sounds, if you don’t taste
food, you have no way to communicate with the phenomenal world at
all. But because of the extraordinary vastness of perception, you
have possibilities of communicating with the depth of the world—the
world of sight, the world of sound—the greater world.
In other words, your sense faculties give you access to
possibilities of deeper perception. Beyond ordinary perception,
there is super-sound, super-smell, and super-feeling existing in
your state of being. These can be experienced only by training
yourself in the depth of meditation practice, which clarifies any
confusion or cloudiness and brings out the precision, sharpness,
and wisdom of perception—the nowness of your world. In meditation,
you experience the precision of breath going in and out. You feel
your breath: It is so good. You breathe out,
breath dissolves: It is so sharp and good, it is so extraordinary
that ordinary preoccupations become superfluous. So meditation
practice brings out the supernatural, if I may use that word.
You do not see ghosts or become telepathic, but your perceptions
become supernatural, simply super-natural.
Normally, we limit the meaning of perceptions. Food reminds us
of eating; dirt reminds us to clean the house; snow reminds us that
we have to clean off the car to get to work; a face reminds us of
our love or hate. In other words, we fit what we see into a
comfortable or familiar scheme. We shut any vastness or
possibilities of deeper perception out of our hearts by fixating on
our own interpretation of phenomena. But it is possible to go
beyond personal interpretation, to let vastness into our hearts
through the medium of perception. We always have a choice: We can
limit our perception so that we close off vastness, or we can allow
vastness to touch us.
When we draw down the power and depth of vastness into a single
perception, then we are discovering and invoking magic. By magic we
do not mean unnatural power over the phenomenal world, but rather
the discovery of innate or primordial wisdom in the world as it is.
The wisdom we are discovering is wisdom without beginning,
something naturally wise, the wisdom of the Cosmic mirror. In
Tibetan, this magical quality of existence, or natural wisdom, is
called drala. Dra means “enemy” or “opponent”
and la means “above.”
So drala literally means “above the enemy,”
“beyond the enemy.” Drala is the unconditioned wisdom and power of
the world that are beyond any dualism; therefore drala is above any
enemy or conflict. It is wisdom beyond aggression. It is the
self-existing wisdom and power of the Cosmic mirror that are
reflected both in us and in our world of perception.
One of the key points in discovering drala principle is
realizing that your own wisdom as a human being is not separate
from the power of things as they are. They are both reflections of
the unconditioned wisdom of the cosmic mirror. Therefore there is
no fundamental separation or duality between you and your world.
When you can experience those two things together, as one, so to
speak, then you have access to tremendous vision and power in the
world–you find that they are inherently connected to your own
vision, your own being. That is discovering magic. We are not
talking here about an intellectual revelation; we are speaking of
actual experience. We are talking about how we actually perceive
reality. The discovery of drala may come as an extraordinary smell,
a fantastic sound, a vivid color, an unnatural taste. Any
perception can connect us to reality properly and fully. What we
see doesn’t have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate
anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in
everything, some living quality. Something living, something real
is taking place in everything.
When we see things as they are, they make sense to us: the way
leaves move when they are blown by the wind, the way rocks get wet
when there are snowflakes sitting on them. We see how things
display their harmony and their chaos at the same time. So we are
never limited by beauty alone, but we appreciate all sides of
reality properly.
Many stories and poems written for children describe the
experience of invoking the magic of a simple perception. One
example is “Waiting at the Window” from Now We
Are Six, by A. A. Milne. It is a poem about
spending several hours on a rainy day looking out the window,
watching drops of water come down and make patterns on the glass.
Reading this poem, you see the window, the rainy day, and the child
with his face pressed to the glass watching the raindrops, and you
feel the child’s sense of delight and wonder. The poems of Robert
Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden
of Verses have a similar quality of using
very ordinary experiences to communicate the depth of perception.
The poems “My Shadow,” “My Kingdom,” and “Armies in the Fire”
exemplify this. The fundamental vastness of the world cannot be
expressed directly in words, but in children’s literature, very
often it is possible to express that vastness in simplicity.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is
another wonderful example of literature that evokes the sense of
ordinary, or elemental, magic. At one point in this story, the
little prince meets a fox. The prince is very lonely and wants the
fox to play with him, but the fox says that he cannot play unless
he is tamed. The little prince asks the meaning of the word “tame.”
The fox explains that it means “to establish ties” in such a way
that the fox will become unique to the little prince, and the
prince unique to the fox. Later, after the fox has been tamed and
the little prince must leave him, the fox also tells the prince
what he calls “my secret, a very simple secret,” which is, “it is
only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is
invisible to the eye.”
Saint-Exupéry has a different vocabulary here for describing the
discovery of magic, or drala, but the experience is basically the
same. Discovering drala is indeed to establish ties to your world,
so that each perception becomes unique. It is to see with the
heart, so that what is invisible to the eye becomes visible as the
living magic of reality. There may be thousands or billions of
perceptions, but they are still one. If you see one candle, you
know exactly what all the candles in the whole world look like.
They are all made out of fire, flame. Seeing one drop of water can
be seeing all water.
Drala could almost be called an entity. It is not quite on the
level of a god or gods, but it is an individual strength that does
exist. Therefore, we not only speak of drala principle, but we
speak of meeting the “dralas.” The dralas are the elements of
reality—water of water, fire of fire, earth of earth—anything that
connects you with the elemental quality of reality, anything that
reminds you of the depth of perception. There are dralas in the
rocks or the trees or the mountains or a snowflake or a clod of
dirt. Whatever is there, whatever you come across in your life,
those are the dralas of reality. When you make that connection with
the elemental quality of the world, you are meeting dralas on the
spot; at that point, you are meeting them. That is the basic
existence of which all human beings are capable. We always have
possibilities of discovering magic. Whether it is medieval times or
the twentieth century, the possibility of magic is always
there.
A particular example of meeting drala, in my personal
experience, is flower arranging. Whatever branches you find, none
of them is rejected as ugly. They can always be included. You have
to learn to see their place in the situation; that is the key
point. So you never reject anything. That is how to make a
connection with the dralas of reality.
Drala energy is like the sun. If you look in the sky, the sun is
there. By looking at it, you don’t produce a new sun. You may feel
that you created or made today’s sun by looking at it, but the sun
is eternally there. When you discover the sun in the sky, you begin
to communicate with it. Your eyes begin to relate with the light of
the sun. In the same way, drala principle is always there. Whether
you care to communicate with it or not, the magical strength and
wisdom of reality are always there. That wisdom abides in the
cosmic mirror. By relaxing the mind, you can reconnect with that
primordial, original ground, which is completely pure and simple.
Out of that, through the medium of your perceptions, you can
discover magic, or drala. You actually can connect your own
intrinsic wisdom with a sense of greater wisdom or vision beyond
you.
You might think that something extraordinary will happen to you
when you discover magic. Something extra-ordinary does happen. You
simply find yourself in the realm of utter reality, complete and
thorough reality.