Transcription
It's three years since the fall of soggy rinpoche and a rigpa. Why do I call him soggy rinpoche? Simply because to me, that's his name. The honorific 'rinpoche,' not so much.
Why do I say 'the fall of soggy rinpoche and a rigpa'? Because when rigpa failed to act appropriately and compassionately to the revelations of abuse, they proved that they were untrustworthy and not worthy of the name of a spiritual organization.
What brought about the fall of soggy rinpoche? A letter from eight once-close students that revealed the incredible abuses and excesses of soviet. For many of us, this was a terrible shock. I realized now that for a lot of people, it wasn't a shock at all, because they knew. They'd known for a long time exactly what he was and how he behaved. Not only did they accept it, they covered it up.
People in the sangha had a choice. They could choose truth and using their own intelligence to decide what was appropriate action. That was one choice. The other choice was to either ignore, diminish, or completely deny the abuse. And a lot of people who did choose that were people who knew anyway. It wasn't news to them. They'd already incorporated the abuse into their belief system. They chose that because they were afraid of what would happen if they gave up on the path that they had dedicated their lives to. Terrible to have the purpose of your life suddenly gone.
So, I understand why people wouldn't want to face that, why they want to stay in a system that tells them what to do, because it's easy. But waking up is not closing your eyes. Waking up is opening your eyes to the truth. And the truth is what's here now, happening around us. And it became pretty obvious to me and many others that sergio rimbajay was not who he claimed to be. He was a narcissistic abuser.
Waking up to that had a lot of repercussions for us as individuals and for rigpa as a group. I chose to step outside of the dogma of tibetan buddhism, and it's not been easy, but it has been enlightening. It makes you face yourself. It takes away your security blanket. It takes away the ready answers that you had, the dogma that you parroted. Well, I don't know about you, my life was lived through a prism of dogma, and I didn't think that's what it was. I thought it was truth. But no, it's dogma.
And you realize that when you realize that the whole religion did not react appropriately to the abuse. No, the llamas just all supported each other and tried to tell us it was 'crazy wisdom' and wouldn't say anything terrible about him. And, you know, I don't want to go there again, but the result of that is basically incredible sense of betrayal and disappointment.
At this point in time, everybody that I know just wants to get on with their life. Those who were directly abused, moving on or not, the trauma returns. The memories are there. It happened. It's not something that's going to ever have not happened. So, every time you remember, there is a re-living to some degree of that trauma. And so, for those people, they will learn how to deal with the repercussions of the trauma, but that experience will remain with them.
For those of us who weren't directly abused ourselves, but who felt the incredible betrayal of our trust, not just from the teacher, but from the organization as well, that has effects as well. Now, of course, different people respond to these things differently, and I think that depends a lot on who you are and what baggage you're carrying with you from your childhood. Because, let's face it, for all the benefits of buddhism, it doesn't help you to deal with your baggage. It helps you to ignore it. It helps you to bypass it. But when the cracks appear in your belief system, in your blanket of security provided by your belief system—in this case, the tibetan buddhist belief system—when the cracks appear in that, when it shatters and falls away, all your baggage is staring you in the face.
And what I realized was that if I still believe in the path to enlightenment, if I still think there is some kind of enlightenment—I'm really not sure about that, or the meaning of that, or any of that—but one thing is for certain: you're never going to get there if you're carrying that baggage with you.
I still respond to the basic core of the buddha's teachings and to the zodjan teachings. But I'm very aware that even though you can cut the root of the mind now, in this instance, and gain wonderful clarity and openness of mind, which is an incredible relief from anxiety, depression, whatever, once that moment's gone, you're right back to the physical reality. And part of that reality is what you're carrying with you, and you're always going to snap back for so long you haven't got rid of that baggage.
In terms of the buddhist teachings, we have obscurations: emotional, conceptual, karmic, and habitual. Now, the teachings there say that until we get rid of those obscurations, we won't be enlightened. So, I'm talking about emotional obscurations here. I'm talking about emotional baggage. I'm talking about the decisions you made as a child about the world, based on the experience you had as a child. I saw you used to mock this kind of idea of looking at your past, and, you know, he thought it was blaming your past. But it's not blaming anything. It's just looking and seeing how what happened to you created a certain sense of yourself as a child, which, if you don't examine it, you carry with you as an adult.
So, for instance, for me, since I projected this sort of father figure onto soggy, his betrayal was cut very deep. It was like the betrayal of a father to a child. Now, other people wouldn't have that. How we were in our relationship with zory and rigpa is different for each of us. But I trusted them. I trusted that I was in a place of genuinely loving people who had my best interests at heart. And what I discovered was that that was not true. I was following a man concerned only for himself, his own aggrandizement, and his own luxury living. And he was supported by people who built up this kind of edifice, which basically gave them a living, and behaved in ways that were immoral, if not illegal in many instances, and justified it through dogma that said that anything your master does is fine, all good.
Of course, there's a complete misunderstanding of the teachings on pure perception. And yet, there are so many sources of teachings that give the impression that that's the meaning. If I look at my hand purely, I can see that it is just emptiness. It's just a bunch of molecules dancing around. It's mostly space. I can see that it's a momentary thing. I can see its relationship within everything. But if I hit you with that hand, seeing that purely and seeing the hit purely doesn't mean it was right for me to hit you. So, there's like a major misunderstanding there of the meaning of pure perception. And pure perception is your understanding of emptiness.
Now, if you had a correct understanding of emptiness, there's no way you could have supported that kind of abuse. And yet, these people are still teaching. What are they teaching? It's clear by their actions that they were under the sway of dogma. They are acting in accordance with dogma, not in accordance with truth. It's like the difference between someone who has faith in the church and will follow the church and what the church directs, and the person who has faith in god and will follow what god directs.
It's always said that the highest teachings have the most danger of misunderstanding. Well, when you've got a bunch of people who supposedly understand these teachings, who can't even make an actual apology because they don't recognize what they did wrong, because they are so held by dogma, so obedient, so faithful to dogma rather than truth—when you have that, you have a major misunderstanding. And then if you go teach with that misunderstanding, it's not good, and you're not actually teaching true dharma.
So, that's rigpa three years on and into the future, because it's quite clear that they haven't examined their belief system. And I can see that it's impossible for them to do so, because they might just find, you know, with some true examination, that there's a few things there that are dodgy. And, oh gosh, once you discover it's dodgy, you have to do something about it. And, you know, the cracks start to appear. So, you know, I understand that for some people, it's much easier not to look. It's much easier just to carry on, you know, because it's your security blanket, you know. So, I get that. I do. But it's not a path I could have chosen, and it's not a path that a lot of my friends could choose either, because we were committed to truth, not dogba.
So, where has this path of following truth, not dogma, taken us to? Well, certainly, I don't think very many of us remain a tibetan buddhist. There are some, but they're doing it in a completely different way, if you like. They're not caught in the dogma anymore. They're taking from it what they need, what they want, and they're really analyzing it, you know. They're looking at it, and they're rejecting and accepting things based on their own analysis, not because somebody tells them.
Then there's a bunch of people who are still buddhists. They think of themselves still as buddhists. They might be reading some buddhism, whatever. They might be doing some meditation, but they've given up tibetan buddhism.
Then there's another bunch of people, and they're not doing anything. They can't even think of themselves as a buddhist. They don't want any religion at all, but they're still basically living their life through that understanding that they gained from their study of buddhism. And I think there's a lot of people like that.
And then there's people like me, who are definitely not an "east" of any kind. No more buddhism, no more religion, no more following anybody. A friend of mine said, "I have an allergy to religion." Yup, that pretty much sums it up for me too.
So, what do you do? How does your life go when the rug's taken completely away from underneath you in terms of your belief system, in terms of the way you live your life, your sense of yourself as a spiritual being, your daily life in terms of some kind of spiritual practice or awareness permeating your life? How do you do that when the structure that you had for a long time is gone? You don't want that structure anymore, because that structure that you had was all based around a llama, all based around a man that failed you, and an organization that revealed itself to care more about money than about people or even about truth. And waking up, they chose to keep their eyes closed. They chose to do the minimum amount to make it appear that they'd changed, but rigpa has not changed in its core, because it still holds to the views, values, and beliefs that enabled abuse and covered it up for decades.
So, that's all gone. You can't use that structure anymore, because it's too related in your mind to the betrayal. You have to throw it away, because keeping hold of it, it's like a constant reminder of its untruth, because you know and see how you were manipulated with it. So, I can't do it anymore. A lot of us can't do it anymore. We don't want to do it anymore, because it's rigpa, and it's soggy. Oh, and it's tainted, and it was all a lie.
Yes, of course, the buddhist teachings—not so much the tibetan buddhist teachings, which are so steeped in a feudal system and, you know, keeping the old llamas up on the throne and everything—but the core buddhist teachings, yes, there's definitely value there. And I still relate to the base zodjan teachings as well. There's value there. And I think after three years, that value, it's kind of in us, you know. It's like we recognize a level of understanding that we gained through the positive aspects of the teaching. But at the same time, when they're all tied up with such betrayal, it's not something you want to actually focus on. So, we just leave it. It's just gone. Just get on with our lives.
But there's this underlying sense of depression, hopelessness, anxiety, lack of trust for some people, because we had a life's purpose. We were all aiming for enlightenment. We knew our purpose in life, and we had a path that was supposed to lead us to that. But where did the path actually lead? If we had a look at the people that we looked up to in rigpa as people who had been studying for decades and supposedly knew the teachings, what do we see? People who can't even admit they made a mistake. Okay. And what do we see with the person teaching this path? Not enlightenment. No, we see a narcissist, someone with a mental health problem pretending to be a great master.
So, no, we don't have this clear path anymore. If you're still following the dogma, you still have the path. You still have that surety. Okay, fine. But for those of us who chose truth, the truth is there is no path other than life. Life is the path. We are stuck with birth, death, and the journey in between, and we make of it as we will. So, some of us follow a religion. Fine. But once you have thrown away your religion and you don't want any other religion, you're left with what? A great big, wonderful openness. [Laughter] Which is freedom. But it's also you feel unmoored, because you were once moored to something tangible.
So, how do we cope with this freedom/unmooredness? In the end, you just have to accept it. If you don't want to go grasping for some other system, some other set of beliefs, some other teacher—and a lot of us don't, we really don't want to do that anymore—then you're left with just what is. And really, what could be better?
And, you know, nobody said life was going to be pleasant, comfortable. Nobody said our journey was going to be one of love and light. And, you know, I look back and I see my naivety. I was so naive, because I thought I had found love and light. [Laughter] Real cult stuff, you know. It's like a cult follower. "Ah, love and light!" I wasn't really like that, but, you know, I did really think that I had a handle on truth, you know, on how things are. And truly, the zodjan teachings did give me a real sense of how things are. Didn't allow me to really tune into my reality.
My sense that people are essentially good has been shattered. I still think, you know, it's there underneath somewhere, but the obscurations are so solid, the self-centeredness and the servitude to belief systems is so strong that some people can truly live a life where they do evil. I'm not saying that a lack of trust is a bad thing necessarily. Certainly, when it comes to spiritual teachers, it's a very, very good thing. You should never trust a spiritual teacher with this cozy kind of belief system.
Paired away, if you're still paying attention to what's happening in you, I think you will find these things starting to come up. And for me, it's just like, "Oh, they're just screaming to be finally examined and, you know, and sorted out." So, I guess in the end, those of us who've chosen the path of truth are still on that path. It may be a formless path, but we're still on that path. We still chose reality and truth over dogma, and I think that's a really valid choice, and we should be congratulating ourselves for that.
And I think there's an underlying sense of grief that a lot of us feel. I certainly feel it. And it's not, it's not a grief necessarily for what we lost with rigpa. It's more this just grief over the loss of this sort of surety, you know, this surety in our path, the sense of, "Well, this is why we're here, and this is what we're aiming for, and this is the way we're going to get there." That's gone. We've lost surety, and there's a certain level of grief for that. But I think clinging to it, wanting it, wanting to find new surety is perhaps not such a good thing. And, you know, I'm basically just letting it be, trying to just live with it. And as I say, you know, examine whatever comes up.
But I do know that when I kind of sit down and go, "Okay," and just go back into a stated meditation, it's okay. But we have to deal with the that's holding us back from a true understanding of how that spiritual aspect fits in with our daily life. Whatever we're feeling, I think we need to at least come to terms with it, accept it, make friends with it. "This is how I feel. I have valid reason for feeling like this, and it's fine." Sure, it may be uncomfortable, but let's not reject it, push it away, wish it wasn't there. Because really, I think that's a hangover from our tibetan buddhist experience, because it's so very easy to go, "Meditation! Ah, yes, we just let it all go, and we won't feel those feelings. We won't deal with those feelings." I think our challenge is that we do feel and that we do really deal with them, because cutting the root of mind is all very well in a momentary situation, but it doesn't actually get rid of your baggage.
Of course, we can make a new structure for ourselves, and some people have, you know. They've made a routine that works for them to give themselves a kind of spiritual structure for their day. Just totally depends on who you are and what works for you. But I'm just carrying on, trying to live with a formless kind of existence where, like I said at the end of "fallout," life is my path, where I just respond to whatever life throws at me, and I try to live my life in as healthy and sane a way as I possibly can.
So, there we go. A summing up of how I find myself three years after the fall of sorry jay and rigpa. And all I can say is, I'm really, really glad to be out of it. And I owe a lot of gratitude to those eight people who wrote that letter, because they opened my eyes. They helped me to wake up to the truth, and that's really important to me. It's important. I won't always choose truth.
So, where do we go from here? I don't know. No idea. Isn't that exciting?