The Monkey

This is an excerpt from Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. This chapter addresses "The Six Realms" which is an analogy for samsara, the first noble truth about life's difficulty. This particular part resonated with me at the moment:

"How can the monkey get out of this seemingly endless, self-contained cycle of imprisonment? It is in the human realm that the possibility of breaking the karmic chain, or th circle of samsara arises. The intellect of the human realm and the possiblity of discriminating action allow room to question the whole process of struggle. There is a possibility for the monkey to question the obssession of rleating to something, of getting something, to question the solidity of the words that he experiences. To do this, the monkey needs to develop panoramic awareness and transcendental knowledge.

Panoramic awareness allows the monkey to see the space in which the struggle occurs so that he can begin to see its ironical and humorous quality. Instead of simply struggling, he begins to exprience the struggle and see its futility. He laughs through the hallucinations. He discovers that when he does not fight the walls, the are not repulsive and hard but are actually warm, soft, and penetrable. He finds thathe does not have to lseap from the five windows or break down the walls or even dwell upon them; he can step through them anywhere. That is why compassion, or karuna, is describes as "soft and noble heart." It is a communication process that is soft, open, and warm.

The clarify and precsion of transcendental knowledge allow the monkey to see the walls in a different way. He begins to realize that the world was never outside of himself, that is was his own dualistic attitude, the separation of 'I' and 'other,' that created the problem. He begins to understand that he himslef is making the walls soid, that he is imprisoning himself through his ambition. And so he begins to realize that to be free of his prison he must give up his ambition to escape and accept the walls as they are."