"If we do not know the material with which we are working, then our study is
useless; speculations about the goal become mere fantasy. These speculations
may take the form of advanced ideas and descriptions of spiritual
experiences, but they only exploit the weaker aspects of human nature, our
expectations and desires to see and hear something colorful, something
extraordinary. If we begin our strudy with these dreams of extraordinary,
"enlightening" and dramatic experiences, then we build up our expectations
and preconceptions so that later, when we are actually working on the path,
our minds will be occupied largely with what *will be* rather than what
*is*."

Here Trungpa says something that magicians should pay close attention to.
Malkuth, the sephiroth of physicality, is the starting point of the
development of the magician.We must understand the material before we can
effectively manipulate it. It is where we begin. The failure to start at
the beginning is why so many hopeful young occultists are distracted into
sideshows like goetic evocation, claims of paranormal powers, love spells,
and the like. They want the extraordinary. They are fleeing from reality
as it is and trying desperately to replace it with exciting fantasies. They
hope that they can find some way to effectively manipulate something they
don't understand without trying to understand it at all.

The fantasy is that magick is a technology, a device that smart people
discovered and that stupid people can then use without understanding how it
works. But magick is not a technology. The real effects of magick come
from a deep understanding of reality. There are no substitutes for this
understanding, no short cuts.

In Trungpa's view, the understanding of the ego is the foundation of
Buddhism. In order to discover the awakened state, one must first
understand what we are and accept what we are.

"Therefore, in dealing with this subject, we are not condemning or
attempting to eliminate our ego-psychology; we are purely acknowledging it,
seeing it as it is."

Trungpa begins by describing what we are as the "basic ground". This is
what we feel before we think about it, before we represent it to ourselves
as anything meaningful. He says this is our fundamental state of mind and
it is open, free, and spacious. It is the process of interpreting what we
feel, adding to it things like names and categories, that gradually gives
rise to the ego.

The basic ground is consciousness, primordial intelligence, an open mind,
and empty space in which events occur. Over time, the events become
attached to memories of other events; we begin to sequentialize them, pair
them with bodily sensations and words we've learned and so forth. The event
becomes overlaid with significance. Like a pearl overlaid with nacre, our
thoughts grow within the space of the basic ground. Eventiually they become
too big for the space and a self-concept arises, another level of
abstraction that ties all these events and their accumulated associations
together, making some kind of sense to them. Now, instead of being simply a
space, it is a space in which "I" moves about. Trungpa compares it with a
dance hall (the basic ground) with an ever-growing dancer (our neurological
imaging system) inside it, who discovers that he's dancing in a hall by
growing too large for the dimensions of the hall.

The "I" is represented separately from the space in which it exists. There
is now a boundary between self and other, between "I" and space. Trungpa
calls this division of self and other "the birth of form".

Now, consider Trungpa's description of the next step in the light of the
qabalistic concept of the "Abyss" as the divine energy moves down through
the Supernals towards manifestation.

"Then a kind of blackout occurs, in the sense that we forget what we were
doing. There is a sudden halt, a pause; and we turn around and 'discover'
solid space, as though we had never before done anything at all, as though
we were not the creators of all that solidity. There is a gap. Having
already created solified space, then we are overwhelmed by it and begin to
become lost in it. There is a blackout and then, suddenly, an awakening."

With the arising of duality we see the first of five "Skandhas", a word
Trungpa translates as "heaps". The Skandhas are collections of tendencies
and events. They might be similar to what philosophers call "categories".

The first Skandha is called "Ignorance-Form". As consciousness evolves and
emerges from the "blackout" between the basic ground and the realization of
self-consciousness, we forget that we *are* the open space as much as we
*are* the dancer within the space. It is this forgetting that is called
"Ignorance".

In the Ignorance-Form Skandha, we forget in three ways. First, we forget
our own role in the creation of duality. Second, we forget that self did
not always exist. And third, we forget that the idea of the self is not the
self.

It is important not to confuse ignorance with stupidity. Trungpa says
ignorance is intelligent. What makes it ignorance is that it is the
ignoring of what we are, in favor of what we so cleverly and so
intelligently think we are.

"Actually, it seems that there is no such thing as the ego at all; there is
no such thing as 'I am'. It is an accumulation of a lot of stuff. It is a
'brilliant work of art', a product of the intellect, which says, 'Let's give
it a name, let's call it something, let's call it "I am",' which is very
clever. 'I' is the product of intellect, the label which unifies into one
whole the disorganized and scattered development of ego."

Then we come to the second Skandha, the next stage in the development of
ego, called "Feeling". Feeling is the Skandha in which ego develops its
defenses against intrusions of the not-self. We desire to capture the
qualities we sense in the other without actually *being* the other. We
desire the colors, the textures, the warmth and activity of "external"
reality, so we make those qualities into objects, mental images, which we
can possess and manipulate. These images become ours. They are not the
actual qualities we feel, but they are representations of them, something to
attach our remembered feelings to. We try to swallow the other so that the
other does not swallow us. We do not succeed, since what we are doing is
only representing those qualities, not actually taking them from the other,
but, by carefully ignoring the other after we have represented its
qualities, we can pretend that these qualities are ours.

Thus arises the third Skandha, Perception-Impulse. So wonderful are all
those representations of the qualities we have experienced that we become
fascinated with our own imagery. We start exploring it just as we explored
the external world and our impulse is to shift our attention from external
to internal depending on how we feel about what we are experiencing and what
we decide to do about it. Trungpa describes the operation this way:

"In order to explore efficiently, there must be a kind of switchboard
system, a controller of the feeling mechanism. Feeling transmits its
information to the central switchboard, which is the act of perception.
According to that information, we make judgments, we react. Whether we
should react for or against or indfiferently is automatically determined by
the bureaucracy of feeling and perception. If we feel the situaton and find
it threatening, then we will push it away from us. If we find it seductive,
then we will draw it to us. If we find it neutral, we will be indifferent.
These are the three types of impulse: hartred, desire, and stupidity. Thus
perception refers to receiving information from the outrside world and
impulse refers to our response to that information."

The fourth Skandha is Concept. Where Perception-Impulse is pretty much
automatic, Concept is deliberate. It is thought rather than reflex. In
order to comfortably keep on ignoring our basic ground, which is how we
maintain and guarantee the separation of self from not-self, we must develop
something that seems like not-self but is under our control. The universe
we speculate, that we assemble from spare parts we've accumulated from our
interaction with the world, is just such an imitation. It's the "astral
plane", so to speak. It's the ultimate product of our imagination, a whole
universe inside our head. If we let ourselves get confused enough, we can
easily come to regard that imaginary universe as the "real" universe, one
where we are safe. We are safe because we are in control of that universe.
However, since that universe is imaginary, so is the safety it provides. So
how do we get confused? Well, interaction with an imaginary universe
produces real feelings, which leads us to presume that the imaginary world
is as real as our basic ground.

"So the structure of ego is gradually becoming heavier and heavier, strnger
and stronger. Up to this point ego's development has been purely an action
and reaction process; but from now on ego gradually develops beyond ape
instinct and becomes more sophisticated. We begin to experience
intellectual specualtion, confirming or interpreting ourselves, putting
ourselves into certain logical, interpretive situations. The basic nature
of our intellect is quite logical. Obviously there will be the tendency to
work for a positive condition: to confirm our experience, to interpret
weakness into strength, to fabricate a logic of security, to confirm our
ignorance."

The fifth and final Skandha, the full development of the ego, is
Consciousness. All the operations of all the Skandhas are amalgamized into
one concept, "I am". And here we are.

Within the Skandha of Consciousness are the "Six Realms", which is the topic
of the next chapter.

Before we can properly review the Six Realms, however, Trungpa introduces us
to the monkey. Tibetan literature is replete with tales of the monkey as a
metaphor for the development of the ego and the discovery of the awakened
state. The problem the monkey faces in escaping from the various kinds of
traps and prisons is the problem we all face on our spiritual path. Monkey
is clever, grasping, inquisitive and acquisitive. He's enthusiastic,
hedonistic, opportunistic, and impulsive. He's clever but he's not wise.
He's a lot like us.

Monkey hallucinates the Six Realms as he struggles to escape from the
boredom of his situation. The hallucinations range from Heaven to Hell.
Serene and jealous gods, ordinary human beings, ghosts, and demons inhabit
the realms and Monkey must pass through them all. It's going to be quite an
exciting adventure, even for an hallucination.

"Q: What happens to the monkey when he takes a little LSD or peyote?
A: He has already taken it."