Crazy Wisdom
Liberally extracted from Crazy Wisdom by: Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa
In the Tibetian tradition there is the external factual way, the internal psychological way and the higher, secret way, which is the approach called crazy wisdom. Crazy wisdom destroys fallacious notions connected with holiness, spirituality, goodness and so forth. What makes these fallacious is the belief in a self, in the ego in the first place. In crazy wisdom one is hit with compassion and with wisdom at the same time, without giving the mind a chance to analyze. There is no time to think. There is no time to work things out with the mind. If one is starving on projections of who one thinks ones is, crazy wisdom provides a direct experience of a landslide, a sudden jerk or shock. Anything else would be reinterpreted into the prior categories of the minds definitions.
Whatever your ego contraction demands, when you relate with a crazy wisdom person you get hit back with that. Quite simply, crazy wisdom presents you with a mirror reflection. Crazy wisdom knows no limitation and no logic regarding the form it takes. A mirror will not compromise with you if you are ugly. And there is no point in blaming the mirror or breaking it. In fact the more you try to judge or blame or break the mirror the more reflections of your face come about from further fracturing of the mirror. So the nature of crazy wisdom is that it knows no limitations and no compromise. It will not bow to the ego who wants enlightenment to be controllable, illumination to be comfortable!
When people talk about enlightenment, they usually think of someone old and wise from collected pieces of information, but from the point of view of crazy wisdom, enlightenment is entirely different from this. It doesn't have anything to do with being old and wise. It is more like being young and wise, because it has tremendous openness toward exploring all experiences equally. So there is a quality of fearlessness, not regarding the world as an enemy, not feeling that the world is going to attack us if we do not control and make ourselves safe. We just explore whatever comes before us because we are delighted like children playing. Although we have a tremendous yearning toward this kind of openness and freedom, we feel that we might not be safe, or we might get hurt if we explore too deeply. That is the contraction of fear. In crazy wisdom there is a sense of complete impartiality and openness to exploring anything, simply and directly without the expectations or past judgments that our fear would suggest. Crazy wisdom is not just getting wild and freaking out. It is shaped and directly related to your fear. To truly benefit from crazy wisdom you must be willing to go beyond the artificial limitations of your fear. Crazy wisdom explores fear because fear is intelligent. It has a wise message. It points to exactly where we are still contracted, where we are still trying to control with the mind, where we will have to let go and surrender more fully to Love.
