Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Here is a nice dharma byte.  I was poking around looking for a gadget to add to the sidebar, like a weekly quote.  But this whole piece stuck out to me so I posted larger bits from chapter one.  It's been very applicable to my life lately as I work on bringing about effort in the mudane.  Today's post reads like the diary of a practitioner but often the personal is far more interesting!  In the  mundane I've been finding diamonds lately, and plenty of opportunity for practice.  Especially while I'm working on my quitting-smoking-project.  But I won't go on a wild tangent into that subject.  Suffice it to say, my goal is to improve my practice and my life all together with quitting smoking, and the subject of mundane and supramundane is of interest to me at this course in my life.


...The problem seems to be that people worry about a conflict between the religious and the profane.  They find it very difficult to reconcile so called "higher consciousness" with practical affairs.  But the categories of higher and ower, religious and profanen, do not really seem relevant to a basically sane approach to  life.

Q: There is a Zen Expression, "At first the mountains are mountains and streams are streams.  Then the mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams.  But in the end, mountains are mountains again and streams are streams again."  Well, aren't well all in the stage where mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams?  Yet you are emphasizing this "not ordinary period before we can really be ordinary?

A:  Marpa was very upset when his son was killed, and one of his disciples said, "You used to tell us that everything is illusion.  How about the death of your son?  Isn't it illusion?"  And Marpa replied, "True, but my son's death is a super-illusion."

When we first experience ordinariness, it is something very extraordinarily ordinary, so much so that we would say that mountains are not mountains any more or streams streams any more, because we see them as so ordinary, so precise, so "as they are."  This extraordinariness derives from the experience of discovery.  But eventually this super-ordinariness, this precision, becomes an everyday event, something we live with all the time, truly ordinary, and we are back where we started: the mountains are mountains and streams are streams.  Then we can relax.

From "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" by Chogyam Trungpa  
Page 48 and 49 from chapter 1.  

Copyright  1973.