The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two by Chogyam Trungpa, Chögyam Trungpa

in at this point. Every one of us is in that situation.
    This me-ness is not painful in the sense of outright suffering, like what you get from eating a bottle of jalapeño chili peppers. But there’s something behind the whole thing that makes us very subtly nauseated, just a little bit. That nausea then becomes somewhat sweet, and we get hooked on that sweetness. Then if we lose our nausea, we also lose our sweet. That is the basic state of mind that everybody feels.
    When the first of the four noble truths talks about suffering, this is what it is talking about. There is that very subtle but at the same time very real and very personal thing going on, which sort of pulls us down. Of course there are various occasions when you might feel on top of the world. You have a fantastic vacation by the ocean or in the mountains. You fall in love or you celebrate a success in your career. You find something positive to hang on to. Nobody can deny that every one of us has experienced that kind of glory. But at the same time that we are experiencing that high point of glory, the other end of the canoe, so to speak, is pushed down into the water a bit. That big deal that we are trying to make into a small deal continues to happen. Sometimes when it comes up on the surface, we call it depression. We think, “I feel bad, I feel sick, I feel terrible, I feel upset,” and so forth. But at the same time, it is really something less than that. There is a basic, fundamental hangover, an all-pervasive hangover that is always taking place. Even though we may be feeling good about things, we have the sense of being stuck somewhere.
    Often people interpret that sense of being stuck in such a way that they can blame it on having to put up with their parents’ hang-ups, or on hang-ups resulting from some other part of their problematic case history. You had a bad experience, you say, therefore this hang-up exists. People come up with these very convenient case-historical interpretations, maybe even bringing in physical symptoms. These are the very convenient escapes that we have.
    But really there is something more than that involved, something that transcends one’s case history. We do feel something that goes beyond parents, beyond a bad childhood, a bad birth, a difficult cesarean—whatever. There is something beyond all that taking place, a basic fucked-upness that is all-pervasive. What Buddha calls it is ego, or neurosis.
    That is the first of the two aspects of the mind we mentioned. It’s something we carry with us all the time. I’m afraid it is rather depressing.
    The second aspect of mind, which comes out of this one, is what is popularly known as emotions. This includes emotions of all types, such as lust, hatred, jealousy, pride, fear—all kinds of things. However, the word emotion is questionable. By calling them emotions, we come to look at them as something special—“my emotions”—which brings a rather unhealthy way of looking at ourselves. We think, “If only I could get rid of my emotions, my outrageousness, then I could function peacefully and beautifully.” But somehow that never happens. Nobody has yet achieved a state without emotions and still had a functioning mind.
    From the Buddhist point of view, this second aspect of mind is not emotion as such; rather these eruptions that occasionally take place in our mind also are regarded as thoughts. They are part of the thinking process; they are a heavier instance of the thinking process, rather than a phenomenon of a different type, as though there were a special disease, like smallpox or something, called emotions. They are just a heavy-handed flu.
    The first aspect of mind is mainly occupied with duality, the basic split, the sense of being fundamentally alone. This second aspect goes beyond that; it is highly occupied, extremely active. It produces daydreams and dreams and memories and stores them in the “akashic records,” or whatever you would like to call