Bird Neshama Trungma's Blog

If someone were to become angry and shout, “This woman is a mental case!” referring to me, I would not become angry at them for saying that. How could I, having arrived at that very same conclusion myself? It is no insult. That I understand my life and the world in which it has occurred to be entirely mental is my saving grace. For without that understanding, I would certainly have become a serial killer by now. Or a terrorist bomber. Or perhaps merely someone who climbs up to the roof of a tall building in some city’s downtown business district and begins sniping at the people on the sidewalk below, shooting them dead in no particular order, just as if I were at a carnival, shooting down clay pigeons. Whenever I read the news or watch it on television and learn that there has been another massacre committed by some insane gunman, I always feel amazed at how amazed everybody is. “Why oh why oh why oh why?” everybody always walks around, scratching their heads and asking. “Why oh why oh why oh why did he/she do it? He/she seemed to be such a nice person. The people who were killed were all so lovely too.” Nobody has any clue about it at all. That is because obviously, we are all strangers to anger. We are all strangers to hate, to fear, to loneliness. None of us has ever reached out to another human being in the hope of being loved and accepted, and instead been shunned, laughed at, ridiculed, told to go to hell, or been sent there via the express train labelled Ignorance, that one which runs on the Reliable Railroad whose services are advertised with the familiar slogan, “Just Ignore Her and She Will Go Away.” Ignorance, when doled out on a consistent basis, has the same practical effects as aggression and makes a reliable substitute for it. In fact, such ignorance is merely aggression under a different brand name.

However, as we all know, no one among us is ever ignored or ostracized in any way. We never allow our neighbors to become outcasts merely because they disagree with us, nor do we close our ears to divergent truths merely to save ourselves from the burdensome task of having to rethink our own positions. Cognitive dissonance is a terrible punishment! It forces us to really put our brains to work rather than recite paradigms and falsely claim them as our own unique thoughts. It causes us to carefully examine evidence and intelligently weigh facts. It may even force us, like Abraham in the Bible, to leave our parents’ intellectual and emotional homelands and set out to discover new worlds of the mind on our own. Why then should anyone ever feel so much shame or experience so much loneliness that they are brought to the point of committing suicide? Why would anyone be put to so much pain, they become enraged enough to want to kill?

There is no good reason for it at all. Nor is there a bad one. Such things never happen, and if I think they do, it is entirely in my mind. I am a mental case, but then again, so are we all. At least in that much, if in nothing else, I do not stand alone.
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We survive in a world constructed totally of mental bricks in which “everything is made from Mind alone” according to the Buddha’s teachings. So how does Mind know what kind of universe to build, what type of world or mental realm to create with her projections? The answer is that she takes orders from her boss, whose name is Karma. Karma is constantly shouting orders at her, reconstructing the universe over and over again each millisecond, in the blink of an eye. Mind works in the field of psychology; she is not a construction worker. Therefore, all the realms of existence which she creates are mental ones, and the bricks she uses to create them are mental ones as well. In any event, there are no physical bricks at all for Mind to use. Mind/Karma is never separate from the world which she creates, nor does she stand outside of it or above it; in that way, she is very different from the God of Western theology.

What that means for me on a personal level is that I may fume and boil as much as I wish, but there is nobody for me to burn. I may rant and rave and scream curses at everyone, but the truth is, there is no one to receive them. In fact, there is no one to deserve them either. Nobody has done anything to me, for how could they, since I am no more substantially real (and thus, available to be injured) than anyone else. Nevertheless, if I forget this wisdom taught by the Buddha and applied by me to my own life circumstances through the practices of meditation and contemplation, and I become all caught up in the desire to take vengeance upon my hallucinatory abusers in some aggressive or illegal manner, the consequences which I experience, such as sitting in a prison or a mental institution for the balance of my life, will certainly feel very real and awful. Whether or not I can manage to remember what I have learned, or even come across this truth at all over the course of my life, is purely a function of Karma.
But how do I know that any of this is true, and that I am not merely brain washing myself with some spiritual teaching which will get me through the toughest spots of a tough life? The answer is that there are two main ways of knowing: one is by logic; the other, by experience. I have confirmed the truth of these teachings, evaluating them by both measures.
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Logically, the course my life has taken has made no sense whatsoever. A therapist once pointed out to me that there seems to have been a dichotomy operating in my life that ran through everything, right from the beginning. Sometimes that dichotomy manifested as different tendencies within myself or my own behavior. At other times, my decisions and behaviors were entirely single minded and crystal clear, yet the consequences were exactly the opposite of what one would expect. In that case, the dichotomy existed between myself and my behavior on the one hand, and the consequences that behavior had upon my life on the other.

For example, as a child, I always loved school and was an excellent student. In middle school and high school, my favorite subjects were French, English, and Social Studies, so I decided that I would become either a French teacher or an English teacher when I grew up. However, my family was very poor and my parents uneducated, so I was raised in a city housing project in Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York, which was a terrible slum back then. That situation became a big problem for me in high school, because Abraham Lincoln served a number of different communities, ranging from poverty-ridden Coney Island to wealthy Manhattan Beach, and since I was excellent at school, I was placed in all of the best classes, which were otherwise filled with middle class kids. Intellectually, I went right to the head of every class, but I felt inferior socially. My sense of social inferiority was exacerbated by having a father who walked around our apartment in filthy skivvies, cursing and farting whenever I brought any potential friend home from school, so that the girl left quickly, (and I certainly couldn’t blame her), which caused me to stop bringing nice girls to the apartment and to give up trying to make nice friends. Instead, I eventually made friends with a girl from a different class who was a prostitute, and one day she took me to work with her to “show me the ropes.” This was the manner in which I lost my virginity, when I was fourteen years old. Afterward, I took the twenty dollar bill which was my pay and tore it up and threw the pieces into a trash can, because I was afraid my mother would find the money and ask me how I came by it.

My concern about my mother’s disapproval was needless, however. During that same period, she was always complaining angrily about how short on cash we were, so in order to help out, I applied for a waitress job at a new diner that had just opened up across the street from our apartment building. The owner told me that I would be required to wear low cut blouses and bend down low when serving male customers. That would cause them to give me bigger tips, he said, and return more frequently to the diner. I ran out of the interview sobbing, and back to the apartment, where my mother was sitting in the kitchen. Shaking, I told her what had transpired at the interview. I was expecting her to become indignant on my behalf, and to march across the street to the diner together with me to give that owner a piece of her mind. Instead she just looked at me with eyes full of hate, and hissed from between clenched teeth, “You should have taken the job!” Right then, I lost all trust in her and all hope of getting any support from her as a mother. I knew that I did not have a mother who loved me, or who had my best interests at heart. I was entirely alone in the world. Although my mind held the image of a mother and the image of a father walking around in the apartment, what I was seeing in them were not real parents, but facades. In fact, that is precisely what they were. “Insubstantiality” or “egolessness” is one of the “three marks of existence” in the Buddhist teachings. I learned about this “egolessness” from the reality of my life long before I ever learned about it in any Buddhist classroom. Although I always worked hard in school and definitely planned to go to college, I was never quite certain whether I would wind up working as a French teacher or as a prostitute.

That was an example of the dichotomy which haunted me for my entire life manifesting as different tendencies within myself, and within myself and my nuclear family. Now here is an example from my experience as a Buddhist practitioner in which my behavior was as straightforward and guileless as imaginable, yet it yielded a result which was entirely different from that which anyone might expect in such a situation. Thus a dichotomous relationship ensued between my behavior and its consequences in the world.

When I was in my thirties, I met with one of the high lamas at Woodstock Monastery in New York to request ordination as a nun. He responded by telling me that he would be unable to ordain me; however, he requested that I remain at the monastery for some time as his guest. I was happy to comply.

Soon after, one of the monks asked me whether I would be willing to care for His Holiness Karmapa’s birds as my work assignment, since everyone staying at the monastery was assigned some chore. His Holiness Karmapa is the head of the Karma Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, which is the lineage whose teachings have been passed down to me, and it was well known that he had a strong fondness for birds. I was very happily surprised to be offered this assignment, since I considered it a great honor, and I agreed to it right away. . As I was heading upstairs to my space in the dormitory, bringing the cage of birds along with me, the monk called after me, as if it were an afterthought, “Don’t forget to supplement their bird food with salad. They like to eat a lot of salad and it is good for them.”

Bright and early the following morning, I headed down to the kitchen before breakfast to collect some lettuce for His Holiness’ birds. As I was removing the lettuce from the refrigerator, the head of the kitchen, a young lay woman, entered and saw me taking the lettuce leaves, and she began to scream that I was stealing from the monastery and was a thief. Without giving me any chance to explain, she grabbed me and began shaking me violently by the shoulders; since she was much larger than I was, this quickly became very frightening and painful to me. Though I tried to explain several times that I was not taking the lettuce for myself, but for His Holiness birds, she was unwilling to listen. Since she would not put me down or let me go free, I ended up throwing a punch at her. (Since I had never punched anyone before, I shocked myself by carrying out this spontaneous act of self-defense). As a result, the police were called and I was handcuffed and taken off to jail. A very low bail was set, but since the entire situation was so outrageous, I felt certain that my arrest could only be a spiritual trial arranged for me by the Lineage. Therefore, I did not pay the bail but chose to remain in jail in order to carry out what I believed was the Lineage’s will for me. I ended up sitting in jail for around six weeks until the court date, when I was sentenced to time already served.

How could such a thing happen? How could I go to a Buddhist monastery asking to be ordained as a nun, and end up doing time, sitting in jail as a thief instead? The entire incident was plainly ridiculous. The only answer is that it simply could not have happened if the world were real. Such outlandishness could only take place in an imaginary universe, a world of the Mind in which Karma is the sole reality. The consequences I experience in this life are for Karma accumulated in the past. Karma is not necessarily immediate; it can take several lifetimes for its full effects to manifest. This is the only answer to the old Job Paradox of why bad things happen to apparently good people which makes any sense.

My guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, often talked about the importance of having a sense of humor when practicing on the spiritual path. In the spirit of humor, I often joke to myself about what happened at Woodstock by referring to myself as “the notorious criminal who did time for felonious bird feeding and unarmed lettuce larceny.”

Felonious bird feeding!
Unarmed lettuce larceny!
I’m tougher than Al Capone!
More notorious than Barney and Clyde!
I should be Number one on the FBI's Dangerous Criminal-at-Large List.
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Here is another story having to do with a non-Buddhist friend:
I moved from New York City to Boulder, Colorado, where the cost of living was much lower and the lifestyle very different. Because of the difference in cost of living, I was able to afford a car and to rent an apartment in a community which provided a swimming pool and Jacuzzi, among other amenities, all of which I could never have afforded back East. When my closest friend of many years, Megan, said that she was coming to nearby Denver for a conference, I was very happy to invite her to stay with me rather than spend money on a hotel room. Since I had a one bedroom apartment, I gave the bedroom over to her, and I slept in a very comfortable chair in my living room. I cooked for her, chauffeured her around town, did everything I could think of to make her feel comfortable and happy. When her conference ended, she returned to New York City and has never spoken to me since. It has now been around four years. “What did I do?” I have asked myself in utter frustration so many times. “Perhaps I should have had her sleep on the floor. Then we would be best friends still!”

There is no logic to these things which happened to me. I do not mean to brag, but in fact, I am an extremely bright person, with intelligence well above average, who has not been lazy by any means, but who has worked very hard on my life. In spite of a million obstacles being thrown in my path, I managed to put myself through college and graduate school. As a college instructor, I always worked very hard to put together excellent lesson plans that would open students’ minds and really get them thinking. However, when I presented a lesson about the teachings of Carl Jung which was observed by my supervisor, she became very upset that I had obviously not prepared for the class at all.

“How so?” I asked her.

“Well,” she answered, “You didn’t even spell Carl Jung’s name properly. As everyone knows, his name is Yung, yet you spelled it with a J!”

What can I say? She is still teaching there. I was not rehired again after that semester. It is hysterical, yet it is not a joke. My entire life has gone exactly that way!
Logically, because none of it makes any sense whatsoever, this proves that none of it is real. How could it be? Further, it proves the Law of Karma as answer to the Job Paradox. Since this sort of situation has occurred time and again throughout history and throughout my life, I do not refer to it as a hypothesis, but a law.

My experiential proofs consist of the same material. The only difference is that many decades of meditation practice and a recent decade of intensive contemplation get added into the formula. That moves my understanding from the realm of mere knowledge to direct experience (in ever-broadening flashes) of non-existence.
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When I was 12 years old and my beloved grandma lay dying in the hospital, I began having panic attacks in school and got sent to the guidance counselor, a man by the name of Seymour Freedgood, for help. Mr. Freedgood helped me by unzipping his fly and teaching me to jerk him off underneath the desk. After he came, he provided me with a note permitting me to re-enter my classroom.

Since that time, there has hardly been a single person who has not treated me in a similar fashion, not betrayed me when I turned to them for help. I have been misdiagnosed, misanalysed, “mistherapised,” mistreated, and abused not only by psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers and other so-called “professionals” of that ilk, but also utterly disappointed, emotionally injured, scorned, rejected and turned into an outcast by the spiritual teachers I loved and offered my life in service to, so that I have now had to seek refuge from the spiritual community that I took refuge with.

The search for an external protector has met with no success. The idea of a deity as an external being has deceived us, led us astray. Counting on friends has brought nothing but sorrow and insecurity. - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

If I really believed that my life and the idiots in it actually existed, I would without any doubt have by now become either a serial killer, a terrorist bomber, or a rooftop sniper.
Instead of becoming any of those things, I have recognized my own Buddhahood as the result of everybody’s actions toward me. Their actions have led me to realize the ultimate unreality of the world, and at the same time, have caused me to have no option but to fall back upon my own mind and my own wisdom rather than depend upon others for any kind of help. Thus, although none of the people who disappointed and hurt me were real, I am nevertheless indebted to every one of them.

As the Mahayana Buddhist slogan states, “Be grateful to everyone.”

My guru, Chogyam Trungpa, used to talk about how important it is to have a sense of humor when practicing on the spiritual path. The spiritual path, incidentally, includes all of life. To practice spirituality, a person is required to breath. Besides that, spiritual practice includes eating. It includes brushing teeth. It includes using the toilet. Getting dressed. Reading. Writing. Having sex. Going for a swim. You name it. I am sitting in front of my computer, typing this blog. I am doing my spiritual practice.

If one is unable to laugh at the craziness which comes up all of the time, one will surely be dead in the water. By dead in the water, I mean hopelessly miserable. Sunk in despair, so that one is unable to ever emerge.

The opposite of laughing is crying. If you cry all of the time, someone may decide you are very depressed, and they may telephone 911 on your behalf. On the other hand, though, if you laugh all of the time, somebody else may decide you are totally manic. You are "off your rocker." They may also telephone 911 on your behalf. Karma is karma, as the saying goes. In that sense, it matters not whether you laugh or cry. If someone is going to call 911 "in order to help you," they will do it whether you laugh or you cry. Therefore - and here is my main point or my thesis statement, as we used to call it in undergraduate composition classes - you might as well live in such a way that will garner you the most happiness. You might as well be as free and authentic and as joyful and spontaneous as you can. Playing it safe does nothing to protect you at all. There is no way to be safe from the insanity, which is all around us (in case you haven't noticed it). That insanity includes a whole bunch of people who quickly notice that other people are out of their minds, but never notice their own craziness or think they are "one of those insane others." They are the ones who click their tongues at non-conformity and define any vision of the world which differs from their own as psychopathology, and they in the majority. As we say in democratic America, "majority rules."

I heard a story about something that took place shortly after the Chinese Communists annexed Tibet by force, in total contempt of the world's rules about playing fair, knowing full well that the world would do nothing to enforce those rules of fairness, which are meaningless words that have nothing whatsoever to do with behavior. We all know how to talk a good talk, right? At that time, there was an old lama who used to come to a certain lake where many dakinis (female goddesses) lived, and he sat down on the same rock every morning and conversed with them. He had been visiting the dakinis there every morning for many years, enjoying the chat and learning from whatever the dakinis shared with him. Some Communist officials saw him chatting with the dakinis, and they explained to him very patiently and kindly that there was really no such being. "They are only in your mind," they told him, and they warned him to not return there any more or they would stop him by force. Of course, foolish man that he was (the same type of idiot that I am), he kept returning there every day in spite of their warnings. Finally, they took him away, not in a police car, of course (he had committed no crime), but in an ambulance. After all, they had his best interests in mind. They only wanted to help him.

He never returned. What a big surprise!

Since karma is karma, you might as well follow your heart. In my e-book, Four Ghosts in a Mad House, there is a true story about a not very attractive woman who is getting sent to the State Hospital. She doesn't want to go, so she demands a court hearing. The night before her hearing, she paces up and down the corridor of Bellevue's Women's Psych Ward wearing a bikini. She has decided to wear this to court the next day, because she looks so gorgeous in it, she thinks. She tells everyone who is looking at her, "I'll knock the judge's eyes out wearing this!"

I had to include that story in the book because it was sitting in my heart. I was on that ward more than forty years ago, and it was all horrible, but it would have been much worse were it not for the flip side of everything, which was the aspect of it all which was hysterically funny. The ability to laugh was and still is my good friend. It comforts me in situations where I might otherwise be frozen with terror or overwhelmed with grief or consumed by rage. It shows me the emptiness in situations. What I mean by that is that humor pokes holes in everything. It takes what seems like thick, solid, impenetrable prison walls of misery - or impossible hopelessness - and drills little holes in those walls. It drills the holes with laughter.

Maybe laughter was the weapon used by Joshua at the Battle of Jericho, when the walls came tumbling down. Joshua looked at the wall that everybody else was so freaked out about, and it was such a nothing to him that he just started to laugh. He laughed so much that he drilled millions of little holes in that wall with his laughter. Those millions of holes entirely destroyed the structure of the wall, causing it to tumble.

My father-guru, Chogyam Trungpa, was referred to as the Dorje Dradul, the great, invincible general. He's been teaching me his battle strategies. When all seems lost, there is always the weapon of laughter.

A sense of humor is necessary on the spiritual path. Now I will end this blog here and take the rest of today off. I intend to head to the beach where I will enjoy wearing my new swimsuit. You never know what the future holds; maybe I'll meet somebody outrageous and knock his eyes out with the swimsuit!

If you read my book, you'll also know why I end here today with the word "Sayonara."

Sayonara.

In his “Sadhana of Mahamudra,” Chogyam Trungpa refers to people who are “afraid of external phenomena, which are their own projections.” It seems to me that includes just about everyone. We could also refer to people who are “in love with external phenomena, which are their own projections,”“hate external phenomena, which are their own projections,” “are jealous of external phenomena, which are their own projections,” “are contemptuous of external phenomena….,” “are awed by external phenomena…,” “pity external phenomena…,” “are charitable toward external phenomena…,” “are greedy about external phenomena….,” etc.

This is Mind: the appearances of an external world which are all karmic projections. That includes both the nice people and the mean people, both the saints and the bigots. They are all karmic projections,nothing more.

It is extremely beneficial to know that. When you are lying in your bed crying because of “them,” remember who “them” really is, or better yet, remember who “them” really isn’t.

When you are so enraged, you would like to file for divorce and move out and “away from him or her,” remember who “him” or “her” really is, or rather, who “him” or“her” really isn’t.

When you would like to quit your job “because your boss is so mean,” fire your worker“because your worker is so inefficient,” punish your child, reward your child’s teacher, take the principal to court and sue her, stop and remember what the reality is. There is no one there at all. None of it is real.

After that,you may still decide to take some of those actions. At least, whatever you do, it will be done with a little bit of insight instead of with blind passion, blind rage, blind jealousy, etc. When that little bit of insight infuses your actions, it will change your life for the better and it will also change the world.

How can I make such a statement? How do I know this for sure?

The answer is that I am writing this teaching instead of crying in my bed.

Blessings!

In order to explore a spiritual tradition, it sometimes helps not to have grown up in that tradition. Having not grown up in the tradition in question prevents you from taking anything about it for granted. It stops you from reciting the list of truisms by rote with your eyes half-closed, because you don't have the list memorized. Whatever isn't memorized has to be learned. Whatever has to be learned also has to be thought about. This is so for me in the case of Easter. Since I was not raised as a Christian nor do I consider myself one now, I cannot simply recite the words "He rose from the dead after three days," as if it were a normal, common idea that everyone in my circle of acquaintances knows about and accepts. None of the people in my cultural circle accept this idea, and when I hear the statement "He rose from the dead," I find it thoroughly shocking. It is an amazing and outrageous statement. I do not perceive anything at all about this assertion to be mundane.

How is it possible that anyone could transcend death? When I look around, it seems to me that everyone dies. No warrior, no matter how brave, is victorious over the grave. However, thinking about it logically, there might be one way it could be possible. The way would be to see life and death as one interwoven process. Then, if victory over life could be gained, victory over death might be gained as well.

What do I mean by victory over life? Jesus answered this with many of his spoken teachings. When your life is filled with people who batter you on one cheek, turn around and let them batter you on the other cheek too. Love your enemies instead of giving in to hate. Do not let the world turn you into an angry, bitter person. Do not let your life, no matter how painful it may sometimes be, cause you to become jaded and inflexible and mean.

Jesus also answered this question with the non-verbal teachings he provided by example. Know who and what you are and do not allow anyone to convince you that you are other than who you are, that you are less. The world is full of very depressed naysayers. They hate themselves, and they think they are not worth much, that there is nothing special about themselves. If you come along with a heart of magic, with a heart full of devotion and faith, you may make many of those naysayers very angry, and they will do their best to tear you down. If you say you are God, if you say you are Buddha, they will interpret it to mean that you are saying they are not those things because you are. Then they become incensed because of your so-called arrogance, even though you really may be the humblest person in the world, and even though, in declaring your own unconditional goodness, your own transcendence and holiness, your own spark of God or Buddha-nature, you are declaring theirs as well. They may stone you or crucify you or throw you out alone into the desert as punishment, rather than double their own efforts to find the unconditional goodness, the spark of God, the Buddha-nature within themselves. Jesus' teaching was not to give into them, no matter what, to not pretend to be less than you are because you have become intimidated. As Nelson Mandela, another great guru, taught "You do not do the world any favors by playing it small." In the Buddhist tradition, we would say that those naysayers are mirrors of our minds. They appear in our world because they exist in our minds, and they show us the work we still have to do. They are actually excellent teachers, who challenge us in just the ways we need to be challenged, so we should be thankful instead of becoming angry at them.

Jesus rose from the dead, showing us that he did have the heart of magic which he claimed to have and demonstrating for everyone that this world need not necessarily be a solid, sad, ugly prison at all. We can regard our lives in a positive way. Life as a human in this world need not be tantamount to serving a sentence on death row.

Cheer up, everyone (including this writer, who must constantly practice following her own advice!) I hope that all of my Christian readers have had a wonderful Easter holiday.