Basic Goodness

Tami Simon: Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, has this phrase, “basic goodness,” to describe the nature of reality and that it informs everything. A lot of people have a lot of questions about that. How do we know that that is actually the nature of reality, that it is basically good? If you look around, it looks like it’s equally screwed up as it is good. This is your inner knowing?

Adyashanti: That’s right. This is what I found. This is my experience. A big part of what helped open this view up was at a certain point, I didn’t care what I would find. When I found what was ultimately true and ultimately real, I literally said to myself, “I don’t care if it winds up being wonderful and goodness and heavenly or absolutely terrible and dastardly, and that ultimately reality is actually a very dark and sinister thing.” I didn’t care; I just had to find out. It just happens that reality itself is not divided and that’s where that sense of inner goodness comes from. When you don’t feel divided, there’s a goodness that comes out of you, whether one is enlightened or not. Any time someone doesn’t feel divided, there’s a goodness that comes out. The more they feel divided, the more division is expressed. So ultimately, our ultimate nature does have a real sense of goodness to it. But the reasons that these teachings have come about is because our mind wants to impose or it’s afraid to let go of its conditioned ideas of morality. That has been very confining to a lot of people. They are so busy trying to be the good, right person that they feel very confined. So, certain teachings come along and blow all of that out of the water, and maybe they get a different view.

What I found really interesting as a teacher is that even when you come into the “Ultimate View,” it doesn’t mean that your mind won’t start making mistranslations to translate that view in distorted ways. Your mind, if you’re not very careful and quiet, your mind will start making assumptions about the view, because that’s what our minds do; they box everything and turn it into a story. It’s very easy when everything is so open. There’s nowhere to go; there’s no doer. In all those old teachings, it’s very easy for the mind to start making assumptions about a new story. All the new stories are usually stories that are going to help the ego out so the ego doesn’t have to feel bad about anything, so it can do what it wants. Does that make sense?

This is really quite surprising the more I started to teach and I saw people that came with this very real experience and radical shifts of consciousness. Even though that would happen, it wouldn’t mean that their mind wouldn’t almost immediately start creating new distortions and new ways where even the remnants of ego start to hide behind. That view is actually very threatening to the ego because there’s nothing in it for the ego.”

TS: You can’t take the position of your new discovery, even the position that you are position-less. There may be times when, as we were talking about, taking an ethical stance is exactly what our basic-nature goodness calls us to do in that moment, even though someone might say, “Wow, I thought you were some non-dualist practitioner. You look like you’re really taking a strong, hard line here.” It depends on what is happening on the inside.

AS: That’s it. And you know, in the tradition that I come from, Zen, they have koans, hundreds of classifications and different ones are trying to do different things. The interesting thing about the koans in Zen, some of them are meant to give you that first opening to reality, that first ah-ha of the ultimate. And then the more, as you go on, other koans are actually then trying to get you to operate within that view. And then other koans are trying to get you to see that you can’t always wisely operate and hold onto the very thing you realized. Some koans, you have to change your perception to respond adequately to it. When you develop the capacity to respond from one position, you get a question that requires you to respond from a totally different position. If it all goes right, the whole idea isn’t that you simply realize the Ultimate Reality; the idea is that your consciousness becomes so flexible and so lacking of self or ego that consciousness can move anywhere that is necessary. The situation dictates where consciousness moves and where action comes from, where the response to any moment comes from. In order to have that happen, every view and the grasp you have on it has to be let go. The view doesn’t have to be let go of but the grasp does.

Like the Buddha said, “What did you attain through supreme enlightenment?” He said, “I obtained absolutely nothing through unexcelled enlightenment,” which meant: There is nothing there for me to hold onto, even the Absolute view, even enlightenment I could not hold onto as a new, rarefied position. There was nothing that was attained when everything was let go of, the ego - that which would hold onto anything, even the Absolute- was let go of. Then there is something in us that just sort of moved very quickly to the appropriate response and it may be that there’s no right or wrong or a quick position that seems very much like right or wrong and everything in between. So everything becomes open to us. Everything. I think that’s the thing that is often missing in some of the non-dual experiences that people have from many different traditions . . . is what is often not spoken of, as it says in one of the Zen sutras: to realize that the Absolute is not in enlightenment.

When people realize the Absolute, just that last little bit of ego says, That’s it, now I’ve got it. This is what’s true. That sutra reminds you, No. That’s significant but don’t hold onto it. Otherwise, your realization of the Absolute just becomes another distortion. Then you’re kind of left very empty-handed. But not empty-handed in the sense that you become incapable of response or impotent to maneuver in life or even to take certain positions; you become empty-handed in you that there is no resistance in you to the reality moving the way it wants. It naturally will move.”